Pan-egyric

I left work early on Friday and decided that rather than sitting down and watching the snooker all afternoon, I would seize the day and head into town. There were two things I needed to do. One was get my spring haircut. This went surprisingly well and left me strutting on my way to the second task: buy a book.
The book I was after was The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan. The first time I'd seen this story was as a manuscript in my then job as intern at an Edinburgh publishers.Of all the trash I read from their slush pile, this was the one that had shone. It was the most exciting and original thing I read the entire time I was there. Since leaving that job I've left unsolicited manuscripts behind and have been back to consuming the established classics. Yet The Panopticon still sticks out in my mind as one of the most interesting things I've read these past few years.
Strutting then, as I say, into Waterstone's I headed up the stairs to the fiction section and smiled like a lunatic to find that The Panopticon was standing bold as bold can be on a display at the top of the stairs showing the hot books of the year. I spent a good deal of time grinning at it before buying a copy and heading home.
In honour of Jenni's book then, I'm making today's post a panegyric to the Panopticon. Like all the best medieval poets, I think the best way to praise something is to really shower its very name in accolades. So let's have a look at a panoply of interesting words starting with the suffix pan- meaning all or every.

Panopticon was a word coined by ninteeth century Brit Jeremy Bentham to describe a wonderful new prison design he'd devised. -opticon comes from the Greek OPTIC meaning visible. The central idea of the prison Jeremy dreamt up was that a warden would be able to see all the inmates at once without them being able to see him. The cells would be arranged in a circle and face into the centre. Here the wardens would be stationed, but in a room with some sort of cunning window that made it impossible for the prisoners to know when the wardens were looking out at them from it. The wardens could therefore observe all the prisoners at once but would not actually have to be there all the time since the prisoners would have no idea if they were in or not. It would, Jeremy argued, save a lot on money.

In the twentieth century a Frenchman, Michel Foucault, came along and turned honest Jeremy's money saving scheme into a Pandora's box (literally meaning 'all-gifted') of social darkness. He went on and on in a pandect (treatise covering all aspects of a subject) on the Panopticon about how the prisoners became each other's jailors or something like that. Typical French pessimissm.

Poor old Jeremy was not a monstrous mind. He was guilty only of perhaps of being a touch panglossic (unfounded optimism, named after a character from Voltaire's Candide). Jeremy also did not name his prison idea very well if he wanted it to be seen in a positive light. John Milton had already used to pan- suffix in naming another imaginary structure, Pandemonium the capital of hell in Paradise Lost.

If Foucault is right and the panopticon is a model of modern society, then he himself could be one of its panjandrum's (over bearing, pompous officials). At least for the intelligensia who hang on his every word. For me, he usually brings about a prolonged bout of pandiculation (yawning). Yes, he might be one of best thinkers of Europe in the twentieth century, but the way he is lauded by some would make you think he was the biggest thing since Pangea (an ancient supercontinent that comprised all the current continents).