But the scene of exhibition also positions Rachel and her fellow travelers as involuntary agents of the dominant powers to which Rachel typically feels subjected. Clearly accustomed to the European stare, the women are just one more stop on a well-trodden path. When Hirst sees deer bounding away from the riverbank as they approach the native village, he laments having left his Kodak behind, even though his camera would simply literalize the framing power the tourists already possess. Even Rachel's identification with the women implies a reassertion of her hierarchical advantage. Intuiting her affinities with them, Rachel has a vision of eternal stasis: "So it would go on for ever and ever, she said, those women sitting under the trees, the trees and the river" (VO, 271). As Rachel begins to see herself as a woman destined to have a child at her breast and a sewing kit on her lap, her married future is mapped onto the colonized, who become a kind of colonial-domestic hallucination.
As both resistant bodies and hallucinations, the native women occupy a curiously contradictory place in the logic of the narrative. The flicker of independent subjectivity in the unsettling force of their stare renders them semi-autonomous beings, subject to but not wholly dominated by the tourists who gaze at the human showcase. But as emblems of female abjection and the normalization of desire, they merge into the cycles of nature. Rachel thus becomes not only the colonized woman subject to the framing power of English patriarchy but also the colonizing woman with a monopoly on the power of articulation: while Rachel formulates them with a phrase, the "motionless inexpressive" women remain "removed from each other far far beyond the plunge of speech" (VO, 270). At once the photographer and the photographed, Rachel is implicated, even as she turns away, in a form of power she cannot escape.
Such unresolved tensions in The Voyage Out help to make visible comparable moments in colonial postcards. Woolf's interest in the interplay between the represented and the representer and between the representation and the spectator emerges distinctly in an earlier description of a photograph of Rachel's dead mother: "The need of sitting absolutely still before a Cockney photographer had given her lips a queer little pucker, and her eyes for the same reason looked as though she thought the whole situation ridiculous" (VO, 78). The women in colonial postcards can also seem to transgress the boundaries of the frame, particularly when the returned stare, "not without hostility," expresses a distinct sense of the model's dismay over her enforced pose (VO, 270). Consider again some of the postcards discussed earlier. In "The Toilet: Zulu Girls" (6 the apprehensive yet sullen stare of the woman made to stage her toilet for the camera radiates resentment toward the viewer peering in over the photographer's shoulder. Faced with such a look, one can understand the discomfort of Helen, who blames the Flushings "for having come on this expedition, for having ventured too far and exposed themselves" (VO, 271). Although Helen never explains the precise nature of this exposure, she evidently feels they have all become vulnerable simply by opening themselves to the stare of the women. In Melymbrosia, in contrast, the "eyes seemed to follow them without hostility" (M, 211; emphasis added). Viewed in this light, the Boran beauty photographed in Kenya (5 can be seen to challenge the postcard's aesthetic-ethnographic alibi: her braceleted wrists pressed together and her sad countenance begin to suggest a handcuffed captive trapped by the power relations that placed her before the camera. More militant, the "Bella India" of Peru (7 defies the scopic regime of colonialism with an accusatory stare that demands reciprocal exposure. 51
With the benefit of hindsight, one can read in the penetrating gaze returned in such cards signs of the resistance that would ultimately culminate in rebellious new nationalisms. This anticipatory reading accords with Woolf's fantasy of the end of empire at Wembley as she watches the rain whip through the exhibition grounds. In both cases, carefully arranged scenes of imperial superiority become self-subverting when elements refuse to remain neatly in the frame: the sky will not lie back "limp" and "acquiescent" at the fair grounds; the glimpse of independent subjectivity in the eyes of native women disrupts colonialism's aestheticizing of its own power. Insofar as the unstable relation between autonomous beings and hallucinatory projections places Woolf's novel and the postcards in a mutually illuminating relationship, this instability is critically productive: the postcards highlight the pressure of normalization within Woolf's representation of the native women even as their challenging stare breaks through the Orientalism of the postcards, now seen to anticipate a postcolonial desire to shatter the frame.
To return to the question with which I began: can an Englishwoman colonized under patriarchy avoid becoming a colonizer in her turn? The answer returned by The Voyage Out, unlike any other in Woolf, turns on the way Rachel's complex positioning within the novel's climactic scene of exhibition illuminates a critical hesitation in Woolf's understanding of race. It would be easy to criticize Woolf for a form of "white solipsism" that "passively colludes with a racist culture." 52 Certainly one would be hard pressed to find in her fiction any of the cross-racial masquerades that recent criticism has linked to the emergence of Anglo-American modernism. 53 Indeed, if the dubious image of Woolf in blackface during the Dreadnought hoax is any gauge, racial masquerade for her was simply a masquerade, a prank rather than a strategic racial repositioning in relation to dominant society. 54 But the singularity of Woolf's treatment of race in The Voyage Out--the way in which it strains against racial self-enclosure--emerges distinctly against the background of her later writing.  Clearly he is as improbable for Woolf as the Zulu Masher must have been for its intended audience (4. "What were his thoughts?" Woolf wonders. Her speculative response charts a racial gulf. Was he thinking, she muses, "of the degradation stamped on him, every time he raised his hand & saw it black as a monkeys outside, tinged with flesh colour within?" 55 Woolf's ability to imagine other minds in this entry clearly turns more on race than on gender, and the stark dichotomy between racial opacity and transparency throws into relief the relative complexity of The Voyage Out, which remains suspended between imperial objectification and intimations of an equivalent center of self. 56
The singularity of The Voyage Out can be further clarified in relation to a little-discussed moment in A Room of One's Own. Following her famous discussion of Shakespeare's martyred sister, Woolf turns to women's historical need to remain chaste, where chastity refers to the preservation of anonymity as a defense against a public life dominated by men. The idea of chastity already looks back to The Voyage Out, in which Rachel's death can be construed as an attempt to remain chaste, a point underlined by Woolf's use of Comus. But a racially-grounded connection between The Voyage Out and A Room of One's Own becomes more striking when Woolf explains how women differ from men: men have a need for publicity and ownership--of a passing woman, a dog, "a piece of land or a man with curly black hair. It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her." 57
However ironic the tone or humorous the intent (and the word "even" implies a familiar Bloomsbury archness), this last sentence clearly replays the key scene in Woolf's native village.  In A Room of One's Own the silent black body serves simultaneously to define the relative emancipation of white women while absolving them of the guilt of colonialism: men want to own the "negress" by assimilating her, women don't. Woolf returns to this blunt disavowal in Three Guinea's vision of an Outsider's Society of women who would shun "all such ceremonies as encourage the desire to impose 'our' civilization or 'our' dominion upon other people" (TG, 109). In The Voyage Out Rachel, like Woolf, discovers her identity as a woman by measuring herself against a racial other. One expects in imperial romance to find metropolitan subjects discovering images of their own desire at the boundaries of civilization. But in The Voyage Out Rachel finds an image of what others desire for her. Passing by, she discovers not her freedom but her constraint.
Killing Rachel off, Woolf responds to Rachel's resistance to becoming both subject and object of imperialism by removing her from a dichotomy that is fundamental to all forms of hierarchy. Woolf's later efforts to collapse subject-object relations, most explicitly in To the Lighthouse, remain on the plane of philosophy and aesthetic expression, perhaps because her first effort to work through the distinction in the context of race, patriarchy, and empire ends in a dispiriting reassertion of oppressive norms. Ironically, it is Helen, Rachel's would-be mentor, who sees most clearly into the cultural claustrophobia she unwittingly heightens: "It seemed to [Helen] that a moment's respite was allowed . . . and then again the profound and reasonless law asserted itself, moulding them all to its liking" (VO, 250; ellipsis added). In The Voyage Out Woolf proposes multiple candidates for the reasonless law: imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism, heteronormativity, and their tendency to reinforce one another. When Hirst settles back comfortably to watch "the pattern build itself up" after Rachel's death, "pattern" evokes an almost paranoid vision of cultural and political interconnection (VO, 354). Linking the Thames to the waters of the Amazon, the circulation of picture postcards operates as a metonymy for this dystopian consolidation, one in which the world is constituted, as Richard Dalloway would have it, as England's object.
It would be easy to dismiss Woolf's analogy between the bodies of European and third-world women in The Voyage Out, not to mention her suggestion that Helen's "profound and reasonless law" can sum up everything from globalization to the shaping power of sexual norms (VO, 250). Yet it is this vision of overdetermined global domestication that pushes Woolf toward her most provocative encounter with empire. For even as the rest of the novel discounts the possibility of stepping beyond one's own culture, Woolf struggles to find a way for Rachel to identify with the native women without finding herself complicit in their subjection. Although Woolf's use of race as a stage on which to understand gender partially reproduces colonial ideology by remaking the natives in Rachel's image, the faint acknowledgment of the native women's perspective in the momentary glimpse of the tourists as "tight-coated soldiers" keeps her from becoming a subtler version of Evelyn, who imagines herself a great captain "sent to colonise the world" (VO, 251-52). That trace of autonomous subjectivity also suggests Woolf's desire to grasp what she fails to imagine in her diary entry and her subsequent fiction: an acknowledgment of racial difference that remains untainted by hierarchy. It seems that what Woolf wants to effect in the native village but cannot is a suspension of imperial ideology in the act of representing it, or what Althusser called the internal distanciation of ideology. Instead, by populating the blank spots in her own private South America with postcard images, Woolf infects Rachel with a fatal strain of the cultural disease James Douglas saw spreading across the globe: Rachel can't help either stepping into a picture postcard or snapping one.
Mark Wollaeger, author of Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism (Stanford, 1990) and co-editor of Joyce and the Subject of History (Michigan, 1996), teaches modern British literature at Vanderbilt University. He is currently writing a book on new media and the emergence of British modernism.
1. I am grateful to Jay Clayton, Karin Westman, Jennifer Shelton, Kurt Koenigsberger, Jesse Matz, Caroly Dever, Susan Stanford Firedman, Ian Baucom, Thomas Anderson, Joshua Esty, and Richard Pearce for help in the course of writing this essay. See Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, eds. C. Ruth Miller and Lawrence Miller (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 7; hereafter referred to as VO.
2. By pleasing coincidence, up until the emergence of Daniel Day Lewis as a matinee idol, the best selling postcard for many years at the National Portrait Gallery in London featured what is probably the best known photograph of Virginia Woolf. See Charles Saumarez Smith, "A Question of Fame: Virginia Woolf and the National Portrait Gallery," Charleston Magazine 12 : 5-9.
3. For self-consciousness about the mediation of experience early in the century, see Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 29.
4. LuAnn McCracken, who focuses on the maternal in relation to the formation of Rachel's identity, notes that Rachel's experience in the native village has received surprisingly little attention; Laura Doyle, one of the few critics to take up McCracken's challenge, persuasively links Rachel's "substitution of a man for a mother" to a corresponding substitution of "racial difference for gender solidarity," but her excellent discussion focuses primarily on Melymbrosia, an earlier version of the novel, not on the much more developed scene in the published text of The Voyage Out. No one else, to my knowledge, has discussed the role of race. See LuAnn McCracken, "'The synthesis of my being': Autobiography and the Reproduction of Identity in Virginia Woolf," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 9:1 , 59-78, and Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: the Racial Mix of Modern Fiction and Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 148.
5. See, for instance, Kathy J. Phillips, Virginia Woolf against Empire (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 52-78. Phillips's otherwise strong economic and political reading of The Voyage Out does not include race as a significant analytic category and therefore fails to address the novel's entanglement in the values Woolf attacks.
6. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 75; hereafter referred to as TG.
7. Orlando may come closest, but while Orlando's identity is shaped in part through opposition to racial and ethnic difference, the novel remains much more interested in gender, sex, and class.
8. See Frank Staff, The Picture Postcard and its Origins (London: Lutterworth Press, 1966), 56; herafter cited within the text as PPO. The golden age of the picture postcard in England is usually thought to begin in 1899, when changes in British postal regulations permitted the standard-sized card to circulate freely, and to end with World War I in 1918, when postal rates doubled and the exuberantly colored cards of the belle époque gave way to the dull sepia tints of the bleak post-war years. See Anthony Byatt, Picture Postcards and their Publishers (Malvern, UK: Golden Age Postcard Books, 1978), 13-14. For a parallel history of the conjunction of posters and modern fiction early in the century, with particular attention to Joyce's appropriation of the material force of poster images, see Mark A. Wollaeger, "Posters, Modernism, Cosmopolitanism: Ulysses and World War I Recruiting Posters in Ireland," Yale Journal of Criticism 6:2 , 87-131.
9. All postcards described or reproduced here come from the Historical Postcard Collection or the African Postcard Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. Some cards can be dated precisely via postmarks; the approximate dates of others can be inferred from their resemblance to other cards and from their design. All the cards used in this essay date from the first decade of the century. I thank the Yale Library for their kind permission to reproduce cards from the collections and William Massa in particular for his assistance in sorting through these massive holdings.
10. Anthony Byatt, Picture Postcards and Their Publishers, 13.
11. Richard Carline, Pictures in the Post (Bedford, UK: Gordon Fraser, 1959), xv.
12. See, for instance, Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 66.
13. The Glasgow Evening News is quoted in Carline, Pictures in the Post xv; Illustrated London News,44 (no. 1171), 16 October 1906, 583.
14. Howard Woody, "International Postcards: Their History, Production, and Distribution (Circa 1895 to 1915)," in Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards, eds. Christaud M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 43. Henceforth referred to as Delivering Views.
15. Woolf, like subsequent historians of the postcard, attributed changes in epistolary style to widespread reliance on postcards. See The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew NcNellie, 6 vols. (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 2:182; hereafter cited as EOVW. See also Origins, 49.
16. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1984), 133-138.
17. See Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, eds. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 2:452 and 6:244; hereafter cited as LOVW.
18. Smith, "A Question of Fame," 5, reprints postcard's text.
19. Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960), 170. Henceforth referred to as JR. Roger Poole, picking up Paul Fussell's observation in The Great War and Modern Memory that the Field Service Post Card was the first wide-spread modern "form" (i.e., document requiring one to fill in the blanks), has suggested that the parentheses in the "Time Passes" section of To the Lighthouse performed the same cultural function by reducing personal experience to mere statements of public fact. See Roger Poole, "'We all put up with you Virginia': Irreceivable Wisdom about War," in Virginia Woolf and War, ed. Mark Hussey (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 84-5.
20. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), 60; hereafter cited as TW.
21. For the history of the White City, see F. A. Fletcher and A. D. Brooks, British and Foreign Exhibitions and their Postcards, Part 1 (1900-1914) (Holborn: Fleetways Press, 1978), 21. For the ideological dimension of exhibitions, see Tony Bennett, The Rise of the Museum (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 80-82, 169, 179; hereafter cited as ROM; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 56-61 and 207-31. In Fair Representations: World's Fairs and the Modern World, ed. Robert W. Rydell and Nancy Gwinn (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994), see Burton Benedict, "Rituals of Representation: Ethnic Stereotypes and Colonized Peoples at World's Fairs," 28-61, and Aram A. Yengoyan, "Culture, Ideology and World's Fairs: Colonizer and Colonized in Comparative Perspectives," 62-83. See also Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916, 2-8, 64-67, 160-3.
22. See Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The "Expositions Universelles," Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 82. Reconstructed native villages emerged as a new genre in international exhibitions at the 1878 Paris exhibition.
For earlier English displays of cultural and racial others, see Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978), 268-87. These traveling displays, affiliated with freak shows and cabinets of curiosities, typically lacked the totalizing impulse of the native villages that emerged from the exhibitionary complex in the second half of the nineteenth century.
23. Daily Programme: Imperial International Exhibition, London, 1909 (Derby and London: Bemrose and Sons, 1909), 50-51; hereafter cited as DP.
24. See Christopher Miller, "Hallucinations of France and Africa in the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 and Ousmane Socé's Mirage de Paris," Paragraph 18:1 (March 1995): 39--63; and Meg Armstrong, "'A Jumble of Foreignness': The Sublime Musayums of Nineteenth-Century Fairs and Expositions," Cultural Critique 21-23 (1992-93): 199-250. Miller, discussing the French Colonial Exhibition of 1931, uses the phrase "state-sponsored hallucination" to characterize colonial myth-making as an attempt to persuade the spectator that the "there" of colonial spaces are now the "here" (Miller, 44, 51; italics in original). Compare Armstrong: "Illusions of voyage, exotic objects displayed at exhibitions . . . encouraged the dreaming or hallucination of the exotic other and exotic places" (Armstrong, 241).
25. If Woolf visited London's Imperial International Exhibition 1909, her impressions of it are not extant. Yet in her account of the British Empire Exhibition, "Thunder at Wembley," Woolf notes that "At Earls Court and the White City, so far as memory serves, there was little trouble from [nature]" (EOVW, 3: 411; emphasis added). The White City was first built for the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition and then refurbished for the 1909 exhibition, the first international exhibition held in London since the Great Exhibitions of 1851 and 1861. Woolf also refers to the Earls Court Exhibition facilities in her letters and essays. See EOVW, 2:290; LOVW,3:95; and Virginia Woolf, Granite and Rainbow: Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), 214. Woolf's attention to London's history of exhibitions registers in Jacob's Room as Clara and Bowley wander into Hyde Park (JR, 167).
26. Woolf may have read about the myth of the Amazon warrior in Elizabethan travel narratives, but the Daily Programme's description of the Dahomey Village indicates how pervasive the myth was in popular culture: "It is a complete community, with its chief, warriors, and members of the tribe of Amazons, that band of women who guard their king in far-away Africa, and who are distinguished for their bravery in battle" (DP, 50).
27. A. W. Coysh notes, in The Dictionary of Picture Postcards in Britain, 1894-1939 (Woodridge, Suffolk, Baron Publishing, 1984), 90, that "Every exhibition resulted in a flood of postcards: souvenir cards, advertisers' cards and official cards." Robert W. Rydell adds that by the time "the 1900 Exposition Universelle closed its gates in Paris, picture postcards had become as deeply ingrained in the exposition experience as Ferris wheels, the Eiffel Tower, and ethnological villages" (Rydell, "Souvenirs of Imperialism," in Delivering Views, 52). For reproductions of such postcards, see Fletcher and Brooks, British and Foreign Exhibitions and their Postcards.
28. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 149; hereafter referred to as BA.
29. E. M. Forster, "The Birth of an Empire," Abinger House (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936), 47.
30. The Duke proclaimed that, "An immense number of children were being imbued with something of the Imperial spirit. Greater than trade or commerce was the Imperial idea which underlay the whole Exhibition" (quoted in EOVW, 3:413 n. 3).
31. Forster's account of the same muddy event in "The Birth of an Empire" is similarly informed by class distinctions. Often casting himself as a mildly dazed spectator, Forster is also poised to step back from imperial spectacle: paying customers exit an attraction "in little spouts, like steam from an exhaust," implying that they, unlike the mocking highbrow journalist, are simply fuel for what Forster considers the "true denizens of Wembley," the machines (Forster, 48, 47).
32. See Louise A. DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf's First Voyage (Totowa, N. J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 121, who makes the connection with Woolf's nickname and the goats, which are identified as Willoughby's cargo in earlier drafts.
33. Woolf's letters to Victoria Ocampo indulge her fantasies of South America as a land of pampas grass and butterflies. See LOVW, 5:348-9, 395-96, 439.
34. Woolf underscores the connection later when Helen thinks of Rachel as "an unformed human being" while simultaneously working at her embroidery and discussing Rachel with Terence's friend Hirst; moments later the narrator observes that Helen possesses "the sublimity of a woman's of the early world, spinning the thread of fate" (VO, 193).
35. See Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and the Transformations of the Novel: the Gothic, Scott and Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1-19. For Marlow's lament about the blank spots on the map see Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul O'Presy (London: Penguin, 1983), 33.
36. For the pressures that normative representational systems exert on the body, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 147-50.
37. My reading is indebted to Malek Alloula's pioneering study of Algerian postcards, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Gozich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). It is the only book to devote sustained critical attention to the representation of women in colonial postcards. For more on colonial postcards, see the essays in Geary and Webb, Delivering Views. Given the usual gender dynamics of colonial ration--male colonizer penetrates and masters the virgin territory--it is appropriate that apart from Delivering Views, the only other history of picture postcards to reproduce a series of colonial cards is William Ouellete's and Barbara Jones's Erotic Postcards (New York: Excalibur Books, 1977), 108-11.
38. See Felix Bryk, Dark Rapture: The Sex Life of the African Negro, trans. Arthur J. Norton (New York: Walden Publication, 1939). Bryk's effort to refute the stereotype in Dark Rapture suggests how deeply entrenched it was. The book is intended "to demonstrate that the Negress is naturally endowed with sexual desires and capabilities, and with erotic emotions and sensations, that are in no way different from . . . those of the white woman" (Bryk, 27, emphasis in original).
39. Originally brought to the New World by West African slaves, the banjo entered into white urban culture in the mid-nineteenth century via minstrel shows and enjoyed a craze in England and America from about 1890 to 1930. The popularity of minstrel shows evidently transformed the banjo into a signifier of blackness, for by the late nineteenth century, as the banjo began to be incorporated into light classical music, Joel Chandler Harris (author of the Uncle Remus tales) felt compelled to minimize the slave origins of the instrument in a controversial article in The Critic in 1883. See Jay Scot Odell, "Banjo," New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1980), 2:118-21.
40. Often it is impossible to tell whether a postcard was actually mailed or simply brought home as a souvenir; postmarks alone do not tell the story because some cards, particularly those featuring risqué pictures, were mailed in envelopes.
41. An inscription on the back of the West African card entitled "Motherhood" (10 testifies to a related anxiety: "Dear Kath, Isn't this friccan nice. If they only stayed like this. Love Auntie Bell." Possibly the West African woman prompted Auntie Bell to bemoan the exhausting and largely female labor of child rearing. But the remark also bespeaks an English need to assert imperial control over subject races, here expressed as the desire to make Africa truly be, as Hegel claimed it was, "the land of childhood . . . lying beyond the days of self-conscious history." See G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, quoted in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcrost, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 15. Nigeria would not be born for another sixty years, but already, with images of West African women and children flowing into England, boundaries between domestic and the colonial spaces were eroding, and the casual ugliness of Auntie Bell's remark discloses British anxieties about what it would mean to let these subject people reproduce, in freedom.
42. Mrs. Flushing's crassly cynical intuition that something has happened between the two comes closest to naming Rachel's inner turbulence as the rush of desire: "One reads a lot about love," Flushing observes, "But what happens in real life, eh? It ain't love!" (VO, 260).
43. Compare Susan Stanford Friedman, "Virginia Woolf's Pedagogical Scenes of Reading: The Voyage Out, The Common Reader, and her 'Common Readers,'" Modern Fiction Studies 38:1 : 1; and Christine Froula, "Out of the Chrysalis: Female Initiation and Female Authority in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5:1 (Spring 1986): 76. To Friedman's list of resonant allusions in the scene Gillian Beer adds Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle. See Gillian Beer, "Virginia Woolf and Pre-History," in Virginia Woolf: A Centenary Perspective, ed. Eric Warner (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984), 14-16.
44. For a detailed reading of the lesbian subtext in this frequently discussed scene, see Patricia Smith, "'The Things People Don't Say': Lesbian Panic in The Voyage Out," in Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, ed. Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 133-40.
45. See Virginia Woolf, Melymbrosia: An Early Version of The Voyage Out, ed. Louise A. DeSalvo (New York: New York Public Library, 1982), 208-10.
46. Sander Gilman's persuasive argument that nineteenth-century perceptions of racial otherness and inferiority were typically projected onto the image of the sexualized black woman provides a suggestive context for the telos of Rachel's journey. On one hand, the longstanding link between untrammeled sexuality and blacks underscores through antithesis the domestic binding of female sexuality in Woolf's native village. On the other hand, late nineteenth-century representations of the sexualized black female as "the source of corruption and disease" suggest a submerged symbolic linkage between Rachel's entry into the village and the fever that kills her. See Sander Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," in "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 230.
47. For the history of Woolf's multiple manuscripts and revisions, see DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf's First Voyage. The scene in Melymbrosia is much shorter and simpler (the description of the women is about a third as long) and focuses much more on the purchase of artifacts than on the tourist's elusive emotional response to the encounter; Rachel feels her happiness "dashed" after looking at the women, explaining to Terence that "it makes us seem so small," but the comparatively flat and undeveloped scene does not describe anyone else's reactions (M, 212). The amplification and increasing complication of the scene in revision carries considerable biographical resonance: Woolf rewrote the scene after she became engaged to Leonard Woolf and as she was reading the manuscript of his first novel, The Village in the Jungle (London: Eward Arnold, 1913), which recounts stories of mismatched couples, sadism, and doomed wives in the exotic jungles of Ceylon. Like The Voyage Out, The Village in the Jungle also features a great deal of hostile staring, in this instance directed toward two native sisters who were apparently modeled on Virginia and her sister Vanessa.
48. All references are much clearer in Melymbrosia: "The woman was sent to fetch biscuits drink and scented sweetmeats. She made a sign of reverence as she approached the strangers. Their hands felt strangely large and English as they took the food and their bodies well-nourished and formal, like soldiers in the midst of a crowd" (M, 211).
49. By comparing Rachel's playing to "an unfortunate old dog going round on its hind legs in the rain" (VO 277), Terence steps into the long line of canine denigration of women that Woolf, citing Nick Greene, Dr. Johnson, and her contemporary Cecil Gray, glances at in A Room of One's Own . See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), 56.
50. The parallel between Rachel and the native women is anticipated earlier in the novel by a complex allusion to Heart of Darkness in which a letter from Rachel's father, described in a Conradian turn of phrase as "robbing a whole continent of mystery" (VO, 182), echoes Marlow's encounter with an accountant who has forced native women to learn how to wash and starch his shirts and collars. Just as Woolf insistently links micro and macro politics, Conrad connects the imposition of domestic labor with large-scale colonial atrocities by linking the accountant to Kurtz.
51. In "Souvenirs of Imperialism" Rydell (see note 27) offers a related reading of exhibition postcards in which the smile suggests resistance to the dehumanizing frame of the reconstructed native village.
52. See Laura E. Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). Donaldson borrows the phrase "white solipsism" from Adrienne Rich to characterize a privileging of white perspectives in some first generation feminist criticism; she does not attach the phrase to Woolf (Donaldson, 1).
53. The full-blown emergence of racial treatments of modernism begins in 1994. See for instance Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994); the first two numbers of this journal, 1:1 (January 1994) and 1:2 (April 1994), a two-part special issue on race and modernism; and Doyle, Bordering on the Body .
54. Woolf played with racialized cross-dressing by touring the British battleship in blackface at the very time she was expanding in revision the scene in the indigenous settlement. Quentin Bell reproduces a picture of the costumed and blackened pranksters in Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), between pp. 140 and 141. Woolf critics almost invariably discuss the hoax only in terms of gender and sexuality and consequently emphasize its subversiveness. Jean E. Kennard, however, points out that the conjunction of class and race in the hoax--they dress as royalty after all--complicates Kathy Phillips's claim that the African costume betokens Woolf's identification with oppressed groups. See Jean E. Kennard, "Power and Sexual Ambiguity: The Dreadnought Hoax, The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando," Journal of Modern Literature 20:2 : 149-64, see esp. 152. See also Kathy J. Phillips, Virginia Woolf against Empire, 248.
55. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jonovanovich, 1980), 3:23.
56. The tension between granting the women independent subjectivity and transforming them into natural objects is more pronounced in Melymbrosia. On one hand, the texture and feel of the English hands that receive sweetmeats from the natives is rendered from the native perspective (see note 48). On the other hand, "Their faces were an oily brown, and this perhaps explained why they did not look like faces; they seemed neither old nor young, neither clever malicious women, or sweet sympathetic women; they seemed more like fruit hung high up in their own forest trees. She owned that she knew nothing about them" (M, 211-12).
57. Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 52.
How admiringly the officer in the penal colony surveys his instrument of execution. With what zeal he explains its mechanism. Curator that he is, he carefully avoids touching the surface of the Old Commandant's drawings. But how lovingly he traces their pattern in the air. The visiting researcher, the voyager, cannot read the script that the officer marks for him, but he understands the performance enough to return the compliment that the officer's gestures demand. He says "evasively," of the drawings and the script, "It's very artistic" (Es ist sehr kunstvoll). 1 "Yes," said the officer with a laugh, putting the folder away again, "it's no copy-book lettering [keine Schönschrift] for school children" ("IPC" 135 [159]). The officer's gestures establish a context for judging his beloved Commandant's apparatus: it should be viewed, or read, as a work of art. He wants this machine to be seen, however, not merely as one specific artwork but as the very form of art in general. He constantly insists on the transferability of what is "artistic" from one domain of technique to another. The component of the machine that writes on or, better, stabs into the condemned is like a farm implement, a harrow, but with a critical difference. This particular harrow, the officer claims, a piece of glass, performs with far greater artistry than does any ordinary farmer's tool; it is much more artful (viel kunstgemäßer) ("IPC" 129 [153]).
Many critics, including Stanley Corngold, have usefully explored how the penal apparatus represents the art of writing itself, but in the story the officer makes an even bigger claim than do the critics. 2 For him, the apparatus represents not merely writing, but "art." Central features of "art-making," he suggests, pertain to widely diverse technical practices: farming, writing, punishment, and drawing. The voyager notices the implication of the officer's views and asks of the Old Commandant, "Did he then combine everything in his own person? Was he soldier, judge, engineer, chemist, and cartoonist [Zeichner]?" ("IPC" 131 [155]). Indeed, he did. Above all, however, the Commandant was a technician; the officer, curator of his superior's works of art. Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" ruminates on punishment's status as an art, and therefore dwells also, through its insistence on the transferability of "artfulness" between media, on the dismal possibility that all arts contain an element of punishment.
The officer guides the voyager (or hopes to guide him) through an appreciation of the texts and visual signs of the apparatus. He wants him to learn to read the machine. But the officer also regularly and insistently leads the researcher through an experience of sounds, particularly the sound of silence. When the officer describes the sort of reading a condemned man is supposed to do--he is supposed to read his sentence in his body--the officer says that the condemned "purses his lips as if he were listening. You've seen that it isn't easy to decipher the script with one's eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds" (Es geschieht ja weiter nichts, der Mann fängt bloß an, die Schrift zu entziffern, er spitzt den Mund, als horche er) ("IPC" 137 [160]). His wounds seem to make some sound to the condemned and so reading becomes listening. But what sound is there in pain? In The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry has argued that pain itself is inherently aphasic because it is impossible to vocalize any precise or meaningful calculus of pain. 3
Momentarily I will analyze the sounds that the condemned hears but first it is crucial to consider how his wounding sounds to the onlookers. As the officer rhapsodizes the process of the execution in the days of the Old Commandant, the focus is as much on what can be heard as on what is seen:
Before hundreds of pairs of eyes--all the spectators standing on tiptoe right up to the top of the slopes--the condemned man was laid under the harrow by the commandant himself. . . . And then the execution began! No discordant note disturbed the working of the machine [Kein Mißton störte die Arbeit der Maschine]. Many [of the spectators from the penal colony] even ceased to watch and lay with their eyes closed in the sand; all of them knew: Now justice is taking its course [Jetzt geschieht Gerechtigkeit]." ["IPC" 140 ]
Justice takes its course quietly and, more importantly, as quiet. Punishment is, Kafka suggests, the art of sounding silence. In the old days, all of the spectators knew, as they lay with their eyes closed in the sand, that punishment's point lay also in its sounds. In this, the essential feature of the apparatus is not the bed, not the designer, not the harrow, but the felt stub (Filzstumpf), the revolting silencer. In the officer's first description of the felt, he says "it can be easily adjusted to push straight into the man's mouth," and its "object is to prevent screaming." The greatest artfulness in the apparatus lies in precisely its mechanisms for producing silence. And since "In the Penal Colony" insists on the transferability of "artfulness" from one domain of technique to another, Kafka's worries about silence, in this story, must extend to other arts as well.
To return to the officer who manipulates and aspires to produce silence, he too has worries about the silence that is his medium. He suspects that the silence surrounding his machine in the penal colony may no longer reflect acquiescence in, awe at, and fear of the forms of justice enacted by the machine but rather his, and the machine's, complete irrelevance. Indeed, Kafka uses the phrase, "in der Strafkolonie," in the first paragraph of the story in order to report that there is now, under the New Commandant, diminished interest in the inventions of the former regime ["Das Interesse für diese Exekution war wohl auch in der Strafkolonie nicht sehr groß"] ("IPC" 127 [151]). The officer is not only the sole member of the colony to defend the apparatus, but he is also, and more forcefully, solitary in his sustained interest in it.
The officer is not, however, completely convinced that the new kind of silence should be heard as disinterest. Just before he describes how the spectators formerly buried their eyes in the sand to listen to the machine--that is, in the first half of the same paragraph--he addresses this second type, the silence of disinterest, and claims that the people of the colony only pretend not to care. He claims that, "although no one will admit it, there are still plenty of supporters of the Old Commandant" ("IPC" 139).
If you went into the tea-house today, that's to say on an execution day, and listened to what people were saying you'd probably hear nothing but ambiguous remarks [Wenn Sie heute, also an einem Hinrichtungstag, ins Teehaus gehen und herumhorchen, werden Sie vielleicht nur zweideutige Äußerungen hören]. They'd all of them be supporters, but under the present commandant and given his present beliefs they're completely useless as far as I'm concerned. ["IPC" 139-40 ]
From silence in the valley to quiet doublemeanings in the tea room; how different these silences are. The artist-officer aspires to reproduce the silence of admiration, fear, and acquiescence, but faces instead the dismaying silence of irrelevance. "In the Penal Colony," then, turns on the equivocal (zweideutige) nature of silence, and on the tension between silences that acquiesce or say yes, and those that say no, or, what is the same, it doesn't matter.
Silence is relevant to "In the Penal Colony" in two modes: as yes and as no--the absolutely opposed sounds of silence. This equivocation in silence comes through most clearly in the story's climax, its moment of superlative punishment, when the officer subjects himself to his own justice. Then the machine begins to work on its own, like an apparatus of the divine, yes, a deus ex machina. After he strips and is strapped to the bed by the soldier and the condemned man, the officer cannot hit the machine's crank to start it, but it doesn't matter.
The bed vibrated, the needles danced over the skin, the harrow moved gently up and down. The voyager had been staring at it for some time before it occurred to him that a wheel in the designer should have been grating; and yet all was still, not even the faintest whirring could be heard. As a result of this silent working the machine positively escaped attention [Der Reisende hatte schon eine Weile hingestarrt, ehe er sich erinnerte, daß ein Rad im Zeichner hätte kreischen sollen; aber alles war still, nicht das geringste Surren war zu hören. Durch diese stille Arbeit entschwand die Maschine förmlich der Aufmerksamkeit]. ["IPC" 150 ]
Something about the officer's unspoken confession and his decision to punish himself achieves at least the formal perfection of the Commandant's penal regime: total silence. But to know what is perfect about this peculiar punishment, and whether or why Kafka frets about it, it is necessary to understand the judgment that precedes it, for there has indeed been a judgment.
Quite early in the story, the voyager intuits that he has been delegated by the New Commandant of the colony to judge his predecessor's penal apparatus. Nonetheless he worries that any criticism of the machine will provoke the colonists to respond, "You are a stranger, hold your peace." During their discussion at the scene of execution, the officer makes the voyager's status as judge explicit, and he also spells out more precisely the questions of voice and silence at issue in the trial of the machine. He desperately wants the voyager, not to hold his peace, but to call out an appeal on behalf of the officer in the court of public opinion. He wants this in order to prove that the silence around the machine is still definitive of its power, and not a mark of its impotence. It's therefore the machine's production of silence that must be judged by the voyager. He must determine whether the apparatus cranks out yes's or no's.
The officer imagines that the judgment of his machine might take one of two possible courses. The researcher might return to town after the execution and talk about the machine, or he might return and be silent. The officer expects the respective outcomes of speech and silence to be radically different. If the voyager should return to town and drop a chance remark such as "We only used torture in the Middle Ages," the officer expects to see the New Commandant, upon hearing this remark,
pushing his chair aside and rushing out on to the balcony, I can see his ladies streaming out after him, I can hear his voice--the ladies call it a voice of thunder [ich höre seine Stimme--die Damen nennen sie eine Donnerstimme]--and what he now says goes like this: "A famous researcher from the West . . . has just said that our own procedure . . . is inhumane. Given this verdict [Urteil] . . ., I naturally cannot tolerate this procedure any longer. With effect from today I therefore ordain--etc. [und so weiter]" ["IPC" 142 ]
Kafka need not divulge what he will ordain; the content of the Law doesn't matter, only its process, and so the sentence concludes with "and so on." Only the form of verdicts and pronouncements matters.
Should the commandant pronounce his new ordinance, his authoritative voice of power would be laid over the researcher's interpretative voice. About this, the officer says, "You will want to cry out [that you never gave such a verdict] but a lady's hand covers your mouth. . ." ("IPC" 143). In this first account of the course of justice, the voyager's failure to keep his silence about the machine paves the way for the voice of thunder, the sounds that smash (this is Jehovah's voice). The apparatus's brutal silencing power will be replaced by a lady's--also brutal as represented here--palm. In this scenario, the silence produced by the apparatus is one of irrelevance, weaker even than a woman's hand.
In his second scenario of the course of justice, the officer imagines that if the voyager should initially hold his peace, the reverse effects will obtain.
Unless you are asked directly, you should on no account express an opinion; but what you do say must be brief and non-committal; it should appear that you find it hard to discuss the matter, that you feel embittered, that if you were to speak openly you would almost start cursing and swearing. . . . [man soll merken, daß es Ihnen schwer wird, darüber zu sprechen, daß Sie verbittert sind, daß Sie, falls Sie offen reden sollten, geradezu in Verwünschungen ausbrechen müßten. . . .]. Your bitterness, which we want them to recognize, is of course amply justified, but not in the way the commandant imagines. He will naturally misunderstand it completely and interpret it to suit his own book. That's what my plan depends on [Er natürlich wird es vollständig mißverstehen und in seinem Sinne deuten. Darauf gründet sich mein Plan]. ["IPC" 144 ]
The officer's plan rests firmly on silence's shiftiness and equivocation, and on the interchangeability of yes and no. He expects that the New Commandant, taking silence for criticism, will invite the researcher to speak before the assembled public, not recognizing that his silence actually implies an affirmation of the machine. Once given the opportunity to speak, the voyager will, the officer hopes, make a passionate appeal for the machine; this defense of the apparatus will then be followed by the officer's own. The officer promises, "If my speech doesn't drive him out of the hall, it will force him to his knees, so that he has to confess: Old Commandant, to your power I bow" ("IPC" 145). Here the power of the officer's fantasies about voice, silence, and potency become clearer. The officer expects to use silence to prepare an appeal that will in turn silence others. He appeals for a spoken defense that will confirm the power of the silences produced by the machine. But his appeal for an appeal, his call for a voice to set against thunder, is rejected. When the officer asks, "That is my plan; are you willing to help me carry it out?" the voyager responds, simply, "No" ("IPC" 146). This verdict on silence defines the silence around the machine as that of irrelevance and thus convicts the officer, machine, and Old Commandant not of injustice, but of impotence. It is precisely because the story is interested in force--not in justice--that it is difficult to read it politically.
Now condemned, the officer has himself been silenced; his case is closed by a no that came in place of yes. What happens next in the story unfolds "as if" of necessity; silence is, of course, at the heart of it all. In response to the no, the officer is silent, and blinks several times with his eyes fixed on the voyager. The latter asks if the officer wants an explanation. "The officer nods silently" ("IPC" 146). The voyager provides an explanation and
The officer turn[s] towards the machine, grasp[s] one of the brass rods and then, leaning back a little, look[s] up at the designer as if to check that all was in order. . . . It didn't look as if the officer had been listening. "So the procedure hasn't convinced you?" he murmur[s], smiling as an old man smiles at the nonsense of a child. . . . "Then the time has come." ["IPC" 146]
At this point, the officer begins to prepare his own punishment.
Now, one could say that self-imposed punishment, that which is no imposition, is no penalty, and that instinct or intuition whittles the beginning of this scene of punishment to a single detail.
He only had to stretch out a hand towards the harrow for it to raise and lower itself several times, until it reached the right position to receive him; he merely gripped the edge of the bed and it began at once to vibrate; the felt stub came to meet his mouth, one could see that the officer did not actually want it, but his hesitation lasted only for a moment, he quickly submitted and accepted it. All was now ready, only the straps were still hanging down at the sides, but these were clearly unnecessary, the officer had no need to be fastened down. ["IPC" 150]
Only the felt stub is unwanted. Almost imperceptible is his hesitation before it. Almost imperceptible is the punishment it enforces. The art of the machine is in forcing the convict to take this felt. Remember that the first time the officer had described the felt, he remarked, "Its object is to prevent screaming and biting of the tongue. The man is bound to take the felt of course, since otherwise his neck would be broken by the neck strap" ("IPC" 130). The force of this transaction precedes what "counts" as the force of punishment, the actual inscription of the body. Through the felt, the machine manipulates psychology as well as physiology; it is not merely the body, as so many have argued, that feels the force of the apparatus' punishment; it is also the voice.
What Andreas Gailus calls the "somatization" of the ideologies inscribed by the machine, the transformation of ideologemes, like "honor thy superiors," into bodily matter also involves teaching the psyche, in the form of the voice, that it cannot escape the body. The second time the officer remarks on the felt stub, he says of it, "After two hours, the felt stub is removed, for the man no longer has the strength to scream" ("IPC" 136). This is the point at which the condemned begins listening to his wounds, which means "pursing his lips" as if he were listening. The opaque script is as good as silence, and the condemned comes to know voicelessness, the incapacity to contest meaning. The condemned knows he is beyond the realm of disagreement or acquiescence--here is his enlightenment (Verstand).
In focusing on the role of silence in punishment, Kafka has noticed something about the practice of punishment that even the master interpreter of its meaning-making functions missed. In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault famously elaborates the transition from the royal punishments, the spectacles of power and torture of the body of the eighteenth century, to the democratic penitentiary and the discipline of the soul of the liberal nineteenth century. 4 He frames the book's argument with two examples, an account of the 1757 execution of a regicide and a list of rules for young prisoners from 1837. Notable in both stories, although Foucault does not note it, is the amount of attention paid to voice.
The eyewitness to the eighteenth-century execution carefully records when screams, pleas, and curses were expected from the condemned, and when they in fact occurred. Near the end of his account, the witness reports this, "When the four limbs had been pulled away, the confessors came to speak to him; but his executioner told him that he was dead, though the truth was that I saw the man move, his lower jaw moving from side to side as if he were talking" (DP 5). The narrative of the execution is structured by a concern for what happens with the man's voice, not merely his body. Similarly, the list of rules for young prisoners begins with the requirement that "At first drum-roll, [they] rise and dress in silence," and concludes with the injunction that after the convicts go to bed at the end of the day, "the cell doors are closed and the supervisors go the rounds in the corridors, to ensure order and silence" (DP 6-7). Silence is as central to the punishment Foucault describes, whether royalist or democratic, as to Kafka's, but his own account misses the definitive element of punishment in a variety of Western cultures, though it is institutionalized differently in each.
Punishment seeks to control not merely the body in the one case and the soul in the other, but always the voice. The condemned are those and only those who have exhausted their appeals, their calling out, or, as in "In the Penal Colony," have been prevented from calling out at all. They are permitted no defense and are denied even the opportunity to cry out. Their conviction stands, and with it the regime's narrative of who and what they are. Only silence can secure the meaning of a punishment, which always at some level means "a final answer." Silence must therefore fall on a punishment if it is to succeed.
Of course, there are differences in the types of silence demanded by monarchic spectacle and by liberal discipline and observation. The monarchs Foucault describes want silence only after they have extracted particular kinds of sounds--notes of confession, tones of guilt, cries for pardon--but they do in the end wish to still the wagging jaw. Monarchic punishment wants the "quieting" to be seen so that royal force will be felt. Democratic punishment, in contrast, wants not a full performance of the death of voice, but, simply, silence. Since democratic punishments, in contrast to monarchic ones, rest on the fiction that the polity's laws and punishments reflect the perfect consent of the citizenry (rather than on force), silence is all the more imperative in a democracy. Silence after punishment signifies the end of contest; it seems to make sensible a general communal acquiescence in the methods of making meaning that (claim to) have brought closure to the case of a given criminal. Silence implies first acquiescence, then consent. The U.S. has recently introduced what are being called maxi-maxi prisons, where prisoners suffer solitary confinement in "administrative segregation" for violations of prison regulations committed while in other prisons. The most striking feature of these prisons is the noise that fills their hallways: a cacophony of shouts, groans, bellows, rattling of door handles, and banging of possessions against walls. No less striking to the observer is the silence that falls when the doors to the prison are closed and one stands outside its walls. 5 In monarchies, silence is proof of force; the democratic silence makes all citizens complicit in punishment. 6 Kafka is indubitably right to represent punishment by depicting silence. And thus music seems to be exactly the wrong genre for thinking about punishment.
Or does it? Perhaps it seems wrong only if one employs a limited idea of what silence is. The third time the officer describes the work done by the piece of felt, he refines his account of silence. Recall the scene where the officer contrasts the silence of his contemporaries' meaningless chitchat in the tearoom to the sort of silence the colonists used to experience at an execution:
And then the execution began! No jarring sound [discordant note] disturbed the working of the machine. Many even ceased to watch and lay with their eyes closed in the sand; all of them knew: Now justice is taking its course. In the silence, nothing could be heard but the moaning of the condemned man, half muffled by the felt. Nowadays the machine cannot wring from the man any groans that are too loud for the felt to stifle; but in those days a corrosive fluid that we are no longer permitted to use dripped from the inscribing needles. ["IPC" 140]
The harrow and the felt do not collaborate merely in order to silence; their art is more diabolical. They first provoke the condemned to voice, and then silence him. When the people in the penal colony lie down, closing their eyes in the sand, to listen, they are listening to the performance of silence, to groans stifled. Silence is surely not the absence of sound--aren't there always at least rattling leaves, scratching pens, and purring hard drives, or one's own heart--silence must more particularly be the absence of voices that summon our attention. The penal apparatus therefore orchestrates the force of voice, and its death, its final descent into silence. The colonists are listening to an opera. And so music is not, after all, the wrong art for representing punishment.
But where does this leave writing, for this is the art that most critics believe Kafka to be representing (along with his anxieties about it) in "In the Penal Colony." I do not mean to erase "writing" with the word "music," nor to suggest that one mode of performance can simply substitute for another. But the story does lead to the conclusion that the art of punishment and the art of music both express something frightful about art per se. The machine writes not just to inscribe, but to provoke the very groans that it silences. If writing is the subject of "In the Penal Colony," then it is specifically the kind that aspires to silence others and, perhaps, also its author.
Kafka's representation of the penal apparatus lays bare, naked and acquiescent, as the re of the officer, the aspiration of art to be definitive. Over and over we hear in the critical literature that the term "Kafkaesque" has come to define the modern, or even postmodern situation: "Kafka is in the air," says political theorist Jane Bennett in a 1994 article. 7 And as Corngold puts it, "the modern sensibility has become Kafkaesque." 8 The officer punished himself with the phrase, "Be Just." He may as well have punished himself with the phrase, "Be definitive," for this is where he has failed, as Kafka has not. Perhaps Kafka was anxious about the danger of art's success, about his own potential to silence--or to provide answers.
And yet, if the artist achieves silence in response to her work, is that good or bad? Is silence a mark of awe and acquiescence or of apathy? An aspiration to produce silence generates its own contradiction, since silence is also the artist's worst reward. The officer is one such victim of his decision to work in the medium of silence and to fall silent in the presence of beauty. The artistry of the machine has worked on him. It is beautiful to him, and therefore definitive and also just. He cannot bear the idea of dismantling the machine. Kafka's exploration of a problem with art compels a realization that beauty insists on retention. Or rather, when people decide that something is beautiful, they cannot bear the idea of its destruction. The beauty of the machine seems to the officer to answer a raft of questions--about monarchy, about justice, about use--that have never been asked.  Its beauty, definitive to his eyes, constitutes a distraction.
Kafka is famous for defamiliarizing the familiar. One wonders then whether this problem of beauty's distractions is itself meant, finally, to look ordinary. Is the apparatus in the penal colony meant to look like something recognizable in daily life? Is the penal colony meant to look like an ordinary place? Do problems of beauty and of being definitive in fact inhabit the everyday realm of punishment that we see all the time without seeing? I can think of no better illustration of the power of aesthetic force to distract us from ethical questions than the Chicago Metropolitan Correctional Center built by Harry Weese in 1975 at 71 W. Van Buren Street. Extraordinarily beautiful, the prison is triangular and wafer thin, the cream stone almost disappears from some perspectives, body become nothing in a ritual of reverse transubstantiation. Its windows are slits. This is what sets it apart from the rest of the sky-reaching, far-looking buildings of the Chicago Loop. In everything else it conforms to the aesthetic standards of downtown. It is, at the very least, nice for people in nearby buildings to look at.
The American Institute of Architects Guide to Chicago offers a description of the building that includes verbal oddities that are symptoms of the aesthetic distraction provoked by the building. The entry includes these remarks:
Above the tenth-floor mechanical room, identifiable by its angled air intakes, are five-inch-wide windows for the inmates' rooms. The long, thin windows are meant to symbolize an opening that people could not pass through. Not caring much about symbolism, some architecturally disrespectful inmates discovered a way around this design feature and escaped. Lights now wash the exterior, and bars have been added to the interiors of cells." 9
So strong is the artist's belief in the power of art to be definitive that the building project, as described here, involved a complete confusion of the work that symbols and bars are supposed to do. But symbols and aesthetic objects do do a great deal of work; they may not effectively confine bodies, but they do constrain attention. Their force shows in their ability to distract spectators from questions of ethics, judgment, and practice. Definitiveness is a power to distract. The question, then, that Kafka worries over in "In the Penal Colony" is: to what extremes can aesthetic distraction go? Or, how much power is working against our effort to judge? If silence is his worry, it is also his relief. The aesthetic object that falls into disregard, or grows stale, grants a furlough to spectators so that they may judge.
Kafka himself concludes his story with a further silence.
While the voyager was negotiating down below with a ferryman to take him out to the steamer, the pair of them [the soldier and the condemned man] came racing down the steps, in silence, for they did not dare to shout [rasten die zwei die Treppe hinab, schweigend, denn zu schreien wagten sie nicht]. But by the time they reached the foot of the steps the voyager was already in the boat and the ferry man was just casting off. They could still have managed to leap into the boat, but the voyager picked up a heavy knotted rope from the deck, threatened them with it and so held them at bay. ["IPC" 153 ]
Danielle Allen is Associate Professor in Classics, Political Science, and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She has written The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton, 2000) and is finishing Intricate Democracy: Rhetoric, Trust and Sacrifice.
1. Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Colony," in The Transformation ("Metamorphosis") and Other Stories , ed. and trans. M. Pasley (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 135; Franz Kafka, "In der Strafkolonie," in Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995), 159. The English translation will hereafter be abbreviated "IPC." When both English and German are cited simultaneously, the German citation will follow the English in brackets (or in parentheses after block quotations).
2. Stanley Corngold, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).
3. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3-11.
4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Lane (London: Penguin Books, 1991); hereafter abbreviated DP.
5. "ABC News Special Report," Nightline, 20 August 1998.
6. Danielle Allen, The World of Prometheus: the Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 223-4.
7. Jane Bennett, "Kafka, Genealogy, and the Spritualization of Politics," The Journal of Politics 56 : 650-70.
8.
In Franz Kafka Corngold contends that "Kafka helps create the
'description' of an experience of terror whose existence thereupon
confirms his work for its clairvoyance" (2 n.4). His corpus has "a
transparency" that is "the fortuitous result of the great horror of
modern history--the technical
application of political terror" .
9. American Institute of Architects Guide to Chicago, ed. A. Sinkevitch (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1993), 75.
For Rachel Magshamhrain
This essay has two mottoes, and both are riddles. The point of the first, from Hölderlin's drama Empedocles, is quickly felt: "Nichts ist schmerzlicher . . . denn Leiden zu enträtseln" (Nothing is more painful . . . than unriddling suffering). 1 The second, by Lionel Trilling, reads: "To comprehend unconditioned spirit is not so very hard. . . ." I am thinking of how easy readers make it for themselves when they grasp unthinkingly the moment of alleged enlightenment in the Old Commandant's penal process. "But," continues Trilling, "there is no knowledge rarer than the understanding of spirit as it exists in the inescapable conditions which the actual and the trivial make for it." 2 In writing about allotria and excreta in "In the Penal Colony," I shall be writing about certain nonsimple forms of the trivial (allotria) and the actual (excreta), two products of human activity whose ontological status is by no means evident. 3
Put the most radically serious quest for justification side by side with foolishness and nonsense: put the strongest, most intensely-felt life side by side with inattentiveness and giddy play. Allotria troubles the consciousness of every reader of "In the Penal Colony." There is a good deal of difference between how this story has come down to us, as a systematically pure and grave conceptual meditation on the one hand; and, on the other, how it actually reads. Then we will be struck by the emphasis on such matters as blood and vomit and sputum and muck and oil and the disposal system laid out to contain them; and we will be struck by the high jinks, horseplay, capers, antics (it turns out that there are a great many words for this neglected category) imbricated in this construction.
"Allotria" means what's irrelevant (das Nicht-Sachgemäße), what's nonsensical (Unfug)--clowning about, cutting up--exactly what the officer in "In the Penal Colony" calls "childish nonsense" (den Unsinn eines Kindes) when he is unable to convince the explorer of the value of the penal system he represents. I quote:
It did not look as if the officer had been listening. "So you did not find the procedure convincing," he said to himself and smiled, as an old man smiles at childish nonsense and yet pursues his own meditations behind the smile. 4
Not to find the procedure convincing--a serious matter, seriously argued--is, the officer concludes, senseless resistance. But to note this is to smile and "pursue [one's] own meditations behind the smile." Perhaps this is explicit instruction on how we are to read allotria in "In the Penal Colony," read the several pages in the story dramatizing such childish nonsense, for we are beset by them, and they are a hermeneutic puzzle. For example:
The explorer, down below, watched the [officer's] labor uninterruptedly, his neck grew stiff and his eyes smarted from the glare of sunshine over the sky. The soldier and the condemned man were now busy together. The man's shirt and trousers, which were already lying in the pit, were fished out by the point of the soldier's bayonet. The shirt was abominably dirty, and its owner washed it in the bucket of water. When he put on the shirt and trousers both he and the soldier could not help guffawing, for the garments were of course split up behind. Perhaps the condemned man felt it incumbent on him to amuse the soldier, he turned around and around in his slashed garments before the soldier, who squatted on the ground beating his knees with mirth. All the same, they presently controlled their mirth out of respect for the gentlemen. ["IPC" 162]
Or, again:
The soldier and the condemned man did not understand at first what was happening, at first they were not even looking on. The condemned man was gleeful at having got the handkerchiefs back, but he was not allowed to enjoy them for long, since the soldier snatched them with a sudden, unexpected grab. Now the condemned man in turn was trying to twitch them from under the belt where the soldier had tucked them, but the soldier was on his guard. So they were wrestling, half in jest. ["IPC" 163]
"Childish nonsense," "beating his knees with mirth," "gleeful," "half in jest," what is the meaning of such things? They occur at a moment of utter crisis. After all, the officer is about to lay himself on the machine!
One or two things further to this "allotria"--this other Otherness, other to allegory (allos: Greek for "other" [we shall see that allotria is other to pedantry]): it has a past. I did not say it's named as such in Kafka (it is in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: As a schoolboy, Adrian Leverkühn, the serious composer, would not be suspected of it). 5 But the thing is readily enough identified in Kafka's story--as "childish nonsense"--and the thing itself is found throughout Kafka's work: in Metamorphosis, for example, it is what Gregor Samsa practices en route to consolidating his identity as a vermin, playfully taking bits of food in his mouth and then spitting them out, aimlessly navigating the junk in his room. Allotria is the compulsory life content of the vermin--as long as he is not yet being tortured to death. It is also something that Kafka flashes out of the narrator's relation to his composition (the semiosis), as when Gregor is shown casting a bewildered glance upwards to the wall where the photograph hangs of Gregor Samsa, Army lieutenant, his hand on his short sword, ready to impale his dreadful Other. Or when Joseph K. stares wonderingly at the tourist who has come to arrest him in a safari suit replete with pockets, pleats, buttons, straps--the name of this captor is Franz! 6 And, most famously, now again at the level of the mimesis: the antics of the twin assistants in The Castle. It is the sort of thing that made Kafka's audiences laugh aloud at his readings, but they did not laugh when he read "In the Penal Colony" in Munich in 1916 (a woman is said to have fainted). "In the Penal Colony" is no laughing matter.
One historical use of the term "allotria" might help to conceptualize it. None other than John Wesley writes:
We have no right to dispose of anything we have, but according to His will, seeing we are not proprietors of any of these things; they are all, as our Lord speaks, allotria, belonging to another person; nor is anything properly our own, in the land of our pilgrimage. We shall not receive ta idia, our own things, till we come to our own country. 7
This allotria is the nontrivial inauthentic as such, and a good deal more significant than "time-wasting." It is lent us by God. The Wesley passage points up the odd dual nature of the thing: it is above and also below the civilized norm: it is divine and it is improper. More, if it is an essential quality of Gregor Samsa and all vermin (Ungeziefer) then it cannot be returned to God, as being (MHG. ungeziber, unziver) "unsuited for sacrifice," unacceptable to God. 8
Why does Kafka allow, indeed encourage, such displays of attotria? The answer is overdetermined--at least. For him it is bound to the theater; one crux is the story as theater. The operation of the torture machine is ein Spiel--a play. "And then the performance begins" (Und nun beginnt das Spiel), says the officer [106, "IPC" 147]); later we hear of the parliamentary assembly, too, as a "Schaustellung," a mise-en-scene or "public spectacle" (115, "IPC" 158). 9 The events of "In the Penal Colony" comprise a theatrical play, with the chief spectator in a cane chair in the orchestra, the whole a kind of amphitheater, with palisades, as you recall from the outset. And--to say this directly--allotria belongs on the principle that, if this is a scene, then any amount of stage business is permissible. Indeed, you will scarcely find a longer work of Kafka's without its complement of stage business. This is the legacy of his highly developed instinct for play and performance of the demotic kind: his heroes are almost never artists but they are artistes-- trapezists, cabaret singers (the mouse Josephine), hunger artists--circus performers, parts of the theater of alternative communication: staged, distantiated, fictional conveyances of feeling, everything opposite to the immediate conversational discourse which, as Kafka said, drained the life out of him.
Even the death-dealing machine itself clowns in a parody of the Taylor speedup system and the circus performance: it collapses as an extravagant excretion of its gears, as in the circus an endless quantity of persons are expelled from a small hidden space in a red volkswagen. Here we verge on a crossing of allotria and excreta, allotria itself being a sort of excrescence on the normal social essence. 10 But I delay discussion of this element--waste matter, dejecta--until after spelling out a further motive or two for Kafka's vaudeville. His vaudevillian practice, in principle admissible, marks his modernity as such--an impertinent mixing of genres and levels of communicated feeling, medial feeling (we may think of artistes themselves as yet odder types of medial communication). The point is that for all its impropriety and distastefulness, allotria works distractingly, and its plain function is the way it may work as relief from terror. I cite a sentence from The Picture of Dorian Grey, which may prove Wilde's usefulness to readings of Kafka. Dorian Grey, having heard a disturbing idea,
listened, open-eyed and wondering. . . . He watched it [a bee] with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield. 11
There is another motive. In his diary entry of 9 February 1915, Kafka complained of "In the Penal Colony." He had written the story in the late fall of 1914 in the course of writing or failing to write The Trial but had not sought to publish it, in good part because he thought he'd botched the ending. Further evidence of this assumption is the presence in the diary entries for August 1917 of a number of sketches of alternative endings, none of which Kafka used. In the course of this essay, however, I shall have recourse to refer to several of them.
I said he had botched the ending of "In the Penal Colony" and to his mind he had botched the whole of it too; on 4 September 1917, he wrote to Kurt Wolff: "Perhaps there is some misunderstanding concerning the 'Penal Colony.' I have never been entirely wholehearted in asking for it to be published.  12
If we rely on Kafka's evaluation, this worm alludes to a certain "element" which he saw--it appears--in the story he began writing in February 1915 that he calls the "dog story," which has not survived. (This is not, of course, the splendid "Investigations of a Dog," written in 1922). This "dog story," if this is indeed the story that Kafka is thinking of when he continues his diary entry with the words, "Just now read the beginning," is "in spite of all its truth wicked, pedantic, mechanical, a fish barely breathing on a sand bank [trotz aller Wahrheit böse, pedantisch, mechanisch, auf einer Sandbank ein noch knapp atmender Fisch]" (11:77). 13 "Mechanical," "sand bank," and "fish" might be clues that he is also or, indeed, directly thinking of "In the Penal Colony." For the words "mechanical" and "pedantic," we substitute "allegory" and "abstraction"--this is what the scholar Ingeborg Henel has done, as representing to excess one tendency of Kafka's art--as opposed to the liveliness that Kafka saw in abundance in "The Stoker," the first chapter of his "American novel" Der Verschollene (He who was never again heard from). 14 It is not hard to guess what Kafka might have meant by pedantry, allegory, or abstraction in the case of "In the Penal Colony": it is the machine and the law and the scenes of political wrangling conjured by the officer, none of which has its foot in lived experience or which could be said to arise from "the translation of an idea into an image, pure construction." 15 But we are not obliged to be satisfied with his own judgment; it is much too cursory, and it leaves out too much of what in the story is not of the order of allegory but rather of allotria. Portions of this work, a constellation, dance on the border of conceptual knowledge: mimetic allotria, bodily excreta, odd signs; randomly functioning allusions; plays on words that have been expelled from the circle of communication and made thing-like; and the bag of fragmentary, unincorporated endings.
Allotria is a key term, as that being beside the point, that going off topic, that is unrecoverable as allegory. Itself an insubstantial irrelevance, allotria both is and is attracted to elements that are extruded and expunged from healthy, directed life--its excreta. Children and madmen, who are drawn to excreta, whose play is so much excreta, cannot but seem foolish--or worse--in the eyes of adults. They are at best distractions from, at worst obstacles to, the rational conduct of life. So it will not come as a surprise that Kafka is guilty because "on his own admission he is depraved and takes pleasure in filth [Schmutz]." 16 I now come to some excremental oddities in "In The Penal Colony" (I use the word "excremental" in its various senses of "superfluous," "non-nutritive," and "of matter to be evacuated"), and am in this way looking askance at and away from the story's great themes of just sentencing, truthful writing, canonical law, torture, and illumination. But we will be making a return.
The excremental speaks for itself--or does it? In this story--and in the history of its versions--the process of excretion functions as a species of speech . . . uncannily: it is the body's mute howl of pain, its resistance to being evacuated of its substance. It is a marker of the body, of man's embodiedness, of the all-too-tender and recalcitrant flesh that will not submit to discipline. It expresses itself as a protest. What is then disgusting about such expressions, such excreta, may be their half-living character: they are remains of the body even as they leave the body, neither at first alive nor dead, an unwonted revelation (outside) of the body (an inside). Hence, they are forbidden objects of curiosity and an inducement, to the nonsqueamish, to play--allotria. 17
In the second half of this essay, I want to fill in a quadrilateral: the fact of allotria and excreta at the order of the mimesis; and allotria and excreta at the order of the semiosis--I mean, the relation of the author-cum-narrator to the act of composition or scription. There is allotria in "In the Penal Colony" at the order of the composition, at the order of the tropes, in Kafka's aberrant literalization of the metaphor "dog." This is a rhetorical play, and it connects to serious matters, belongs to an economy involving the political. Consider the metaphor of the prisoner as dog. We are, after all, here in the Tropen, the tropics--setting for a scene of political terror--and we are also among the tropes, turns of phrase. The apparent allotria of tropic play belongs to an economy of the political administration of torture.
Consider politics, further. Consider it as the decent (or indecent) application of power to persons, especially as this power is produced, stored and conveyed by institutions--viz. the "apparatus" or "machinery" of the law in "In the Penal Colony" and the apparatus or machinery of (the very story) "In the Penal Colony." This interinvolvement of the two sorts of power is plain in the first paragraph, which situates the apparatus of the torture machine and its spectators in its sandy amphitheater. The most graphically represented of the spectators and indeed participants is the prisoner, "a stupid-looking, wide-mouthed [wide-muzzled (breitmäuliger)] man with bewildered [abandoned by authority (verwahrlostem)] hair and face"--an animal-like creature, guarded ["led about" would be truer] by a soldier, "who held the heavy chain controlling the small chains locked on the prisoner's ankles, wrists, and neck, chains that were themselves attached to each other by communicating links" ("IPC" 140).  Kafka depicts this in the striking manner that is at once typical and still enigmatic, as we shall see. The text continues: "In any case [additionally (übrigens)--there is a world of significance in this harmless conjunctive phrase], the condemned man looked so like a submissive dog [so hündisch ergeben] that one might have thought he could be left to run free on the surrounding hills and would only need to be whistled for when the execution was due to begin" (ibid.). Doggishly submissive (hündisch ergeben) is a metaphor. But the intensifier so added on to hündisch ergeben literalizes that metaphor: the prisoner is now no different from a dog. There are two interinvolved processes here, one political and one rhetorical. The man is brutalized by a violent application of political power; and the metaphor, too, is submitted to a kind of violence in being robbed of its floating status as trope and more or less literalized.
I say "more or less" literalized, for as becomes evident after a moment's reflection on this process, every metaphor is an unsettled semantic force-field. This is a Kafkan awareness par excellence. To tamper with the relation between tenor and vehicle--thing compared and comparison--is to generate monsters (even independently of the literal meaning of the metaphor "dog"); so even more is at stake here than that a man has been turned into a dog. The aberrant literalizing of the metaphor suggests that he has been turned into a monstrous collage of dog features and man features outside of any ordinary scale of things--neither man nor dog, he is rendered more brutal than a man, more monstrous than a dog.
This literalizing moment was a crucial one for Kafka in the story. He hated, as I said, the ending of "In the Penal Colony"; and unlike the case of "The Metamorphosis," whose ending he also hated, he left behind several fragmentary versions of possible alternatives in his diaries. These are extraordinarily lurid. One reads:
"What?" said the explorer.
The explorer felt too tired to give [any further] commands or [indeed] to do anything. He merely took a handkerchief from his pocket, gestured as if he were dipping it in the distant bucket, pressed it to his brow and lay down beside the pit [this emphasizes the excrement-containing pit and bucket]. He was found in this position by the two men the Commandant had sent out to fetch him. He jumped up when they spoke to him as if revived. With his hand on his heart he said, "I am a cur [Hundsfott] if I allow that to happen." But then he took his own words literally [wörtlich] and began to run around on all fours. From time to time, however, he leaped erect, shook the fit off, so to speak [riß sich förmlich los], threw his arms around the neck of one of the men [and] tearfully exclaimed, "Why does all this happen to me!" and then hurried back to his post. [D 178; G 11:152]
This diary entry dates from 7 August 1917; he had written "In the Penal Colony" three years earlier, ca. 15 October 1914. Notice the administration of political authority and also the mad, foolish play with rative language (allotria of the signifier). This play returns, too, to the first paragraph of the story but here, as an unincorporated fragment, remains excreted.
I want to dwell on this relation of the play with rhetoric and the seriousness of the political administration of terror. In these examples from the beginning and end of the story, the will and the ability to tamper with the metaphor goes to the artist, who obtains thereby an extraordinary rhetorical power not without marginal political power (since this metaphorical labeling lends itself to political use). This monstrous literalization is the rhetorical equivalent of the political, where the political--in this our painful modernity--has come to mean the construction of types of men and women by the application of force and the constructive destruction of men and women as persons as good as dead: vermin, outlaws, rogues.
I do not claim that Kafka says that the political and the rhetorical are involved in one another, duplicate one another, or cause one another. Yet he does show this complication happening. Thus I claim, simply, that it takes place. The word-play that has a great deal to do with torture-play is not merely marginal to the text and its time. But the effort to say what this connection is in truth--whether, as Cultural Studies has it, the political play contains and comprehends the rhetorical play; or whether the rhetorical play, marginally outside politics, in turn provokes political acts and a subtle knowing representation of political acts (J. M. Coetzee writes of "the freedom of textuality, however meager and marginal that freedom may be")--Kafka's story cannot say this. 18
Addressing this rhetorical dimension of the story entails addressing one sort of play, one form of the marginal, that has the power to usurp center stage. We must now look at the disgusting, and then at three textual cruxes triggered once more by rhetorical details. All bear on the process of reading a work interrupted by allotria and excreta.
"'Read it,' said the officer. 'I can't,' said the explorer" ("IPC" 148). There is no information on how the victim's reading process is to take place; it requires a strenuous and ultimately frustrating effort of interpretation on our part. The writing is of two types--the first is called "the actual [real] script(ure) [die wirkliche Schrift]" and "the [authentic] script(ure) itself [die eigentliche Schrift]"; the second type of writing is ornamental, consisting of "embellishments [Verzierungen]" (107; "IPC" 149). One might be inclined to call the second type inauthentic, secondary, derivative, employing the semiotic model of the metaphor. The real, authentic meaning is borne along, as the tenor, by the trope--the metaphor as such--which then might pass away, its semantic work as vehicle having been done. But this cannot be right; this is not the function of the embellishment, since reading the ornament is essential to the work of justice, to "the kind of sentence we pass [the form of our judgment--die Form unseres Urteils]" (103, "IPC" 144). The form is not complete, the essence of the punishment does not happen until the ornament, too, has been deciphered. Nor is there any suggestion that the embellishments, rightly deciphered, amount to getting the message--the sentence as violated commandment is different from its embellishments--but not essentially different. 19 In the Tropen, in the tropics, all are tropes (Tropen): the designation of the real, the authentic sentence, is already gnawed on by this secondary and derivative function; and so we are inclined to ask, Of what are they the res, the fictive (after all not real or authentic) script? But we are unable to say more than that they are essential. This is artistic (kunstvoll), beautiful but nonsimply beautiful handwriting, "no calligraphy [keine Schönschrift] for schoolchildren" (107, "IPC" 149). He clearly signifies something within what the officer calls "das Gesamturteil [the general or broad-gauged judgment]" (109, "IPC" 151), but what?
Perhaps it signifies, in the sense of mirroring--or completing a structural parallel with--the function of the ostensibly trivial (allotria) and excremental in the story as such--the curlicues and embellishments being equivalent to the plethora of "useless" details. They are marginal and excremental, suspending any possible assertion of the precedence, as essential, of issues of justice over the other issues of art and aesthetics. Here we are returned to the historical dispute among modes of criticism and modes of literary classification, within Kafka studies, in respect to "In the Penal Colony." Is it, as a story of a punishment that raises substantial questions of law and justice and just sentencing, to be classified with those other stories of Kafka (as Kafka explicitly intended), with "The Metamorphosis" and "The Judgment"; or should it be classified with, par excellence, "A Hunger Artist," as a story of art and performance for which no audience any longer exists? 20 "Nor did the colony itself betray much interest in this execution": this citation immediately resonates with the opening of "A Hunger Artist" (100, "IPC" 140). But these are structural formalities. The matter of the embellishment poses the crucial question: if the epistemological status, as we say, of the ornamental script(ure) is undecidable, if the relation of trope to diegesis is unfathomable, what then is the status of the understanding that is given to the prisoner's faculty of reason (der Verstand) in the sixth hour?
This question has hardly ever seemed to be stated as a problem before. In the sixth hour the culprit grasps his sentence--so runs the conventional understanding--but does he? Surely not. First, because the process requires a twelve-hour deciphering; second, because what Kafka (unlike his English translator) has written is, the process requires a twelve-hour "deciphering [Entziffern]" . This phrase immediately calls attention to the signifier (Ziffer), but you would not think so, reading the Muirs's translation of "es geschieht ja nichts weiter, der Mann fängt bloß an, die Schrift zu entziffern" as, "Nothing more happens than that the man begins to understand the inscription [the script(ure)]" ("IPC" 150). What is wrong is a tendency that this translation betrays; this "to understand" recalls the rational enlightenment provoked in the sixth hour, when enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted (Verstand geht dem Blödesten auf), encouraging us to conclude that the event of understanding coming alive is equivalent to the truth of an ethical commandment being grasped by reason (ibid.). And that truth is? Whatever it is, it is not the truth of the verdict. One must consult the German! The moment of ecstasy is not that of understanding the script(ure); it is a moment of recognizing that here there is script to be deciphered. "Script(ure) [Die Schrift]," as the Prison Chaplain in The Trial informs Joseph K., this writing made deep, "is unchanging, invariant [ist unveränderlich]." 21 We deal then not with combustion of the script (à la Walter Benjamin) but with the ineradicability of a fact: here there is writing; here is the task of the translator. But if the prisoner deciphers the script with his wounds, and if at the end of things the prisoner is (virtually) nothing more than his wounds, then perfection of justice consists in the wounds deciphering the wounds or, equivalently, the script deciphering the script, leaving no margin free for rational enlightenment or any other manner of interpretation. "How the inscription takes form on the body [wie sich die Inschrift im Körper vollzieht]" is by no means equivalent to the "happening of justice" (daß Gerechtigkeit [geschieht])," if by the latter is meant the prisoner's understanding of his sentence (106, 111). He cannot understand his sentence until he is emptied out of his substance, until he has been excreted. 22
In this analysis I am associating the concepts of understanding and interpretation as they have traditionally been associated in a German hermeneutical tradition marked especially by Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher. The concept of "decoding," however, with its connotations of automaticity and of transformation only, or chiefly, along the axis of the material signifier constitutes a departure. Here, one could well think of Kafka's aphorism against interpretation, written in 1922: "It is enough that the arrows fit exactly in the wounds that they have made" (D 206; G 11:203).
We as readers of Kafka remain concerned with our access to an understanding of what genuinely, authentically, occurs within the Gesamturteil of the story as a whole. It is the question of whether it is possible for us to achieve any proper understanding of the prisoner's tormented reading process as such. And here I want to call attention to two minor, marginal, rather excremental cruxes at the order of scription--one parenthesis and one (following the authority of Max Brod) crossing-out. Excreted matter has an exact semiotic correlative in the parenthesis: it is excluded from the sentence while it still belongs to the economy of the sentence the way that excreta--noticed, half-organic, half-alive stuff--belongs to the economy of the body. The parenthesis is unique as a syntactical element in requiring no corresponding adjustment in the sentence as a whole in order to accommodate it, just as there is a provision in every body for excreted matter that does not disturb the economy of the whole and permits it to function as it normally and otherwise functions.
The parenthesis occurs at the close of the mutilation of the officer. The passage reads, as we carry over Kafka's parenthesis from the edition (and only the edition) of Paul Raabe: "And here, almost against his will, he had to look at the face of the corpse. It was as it had been in life; no sign was visible of the promised redemption; what the others had found in the machine the officer had not found; the lips were firmly pressed together, the eyes were open, with the same expression as in life, the look was calm and convinced, through the forehead went the point of the great iron spike." [121, "IPC" 166] Thereafter come the three asterisks and the unsatisfactory ending.
Who says--and on what authority--that the officer found no trace of the promised redemption? The officer remains convinced; he has not registered the shortfall in the promised redemption. But he is the only authority we have for the existence of any such redemption. I suggest that the uncertainty of the claim that "no sign was visible of the promised redemption" in the death of the officer is marked, emphasized by the parenthesis. Within it is contained the (incomplete) excremental at the order of rhetoric. This is an odd detail of a sort found to my knowledge in no other work of Kafka--a "detail" of utter importance. It is a paradoxical construction, implying, to begin with, a sort of tentativeness of utterance. For what is the meaning of the marker "parenthesis" except that of an addition, an "übrigens," a remainder, an only secondary reflection, whose retention in the body of an argument is a matter that cannot be allowed to disturb the writer, who has more serious, forward-looking concerns? The argument, as it is constituted without the parenthesis, takes precedence: the writer will not undertake to integrate the parenthetical matter; and yet, in this instance, regarding the question of whether the officer found meaning in his ordeal--No, not a trace of it was to be found!--is of crucial importance. It is the story's leading idea. How can one find the story's leading idea between parentheses?
It is as if what's contained in the parenthesis, a bracketing off--meaning non-pertinence, what's off the point, scarcely belonging--were itself provisory only, subject to revision, even to reversal. And yet--or, precisely--what is here at stake is nothing less than the meaning of the whole. Was there ever in truth such a procedure as the glorious operation of the machine? was there ever so worthy an alternative to the inefficient justice of liberal states? could a death ever be justified in the consciousness of the victim in this way? could the truth of one's derelict life ever be inscribed on the heart? 23 And could, incidentally, Nietzsche's account of the genealogy of morals be affirmed--was there ever a moment of dawning moral enlightenment powerful enough to irradiate and transre an entire people? Sane societies require a token of hope, the promise of a future. Accordingly, the punishment in the penal colony is such a token, because it promises a transration of an entire community before death.
These are some of the questions taken up in a parenthesis in "In the Penal Colony" as published--overwhelming questions to which Kafka's answers are belied by his parenthesis--questions reviewed and answered differently in the three or four fragmentary endings. I shall therefore address one more pertinent item from these diary manuscripts in the event of a moot crossing-out. The text of these endings in the latest Fischer, so-called manuscript edition, a printed transcription by and large faithful to the manuscripts, gives as the diary entry for 8 August 1917: "Und wenn auch alles unverändert war, der Stachel war doch da, krumm hervorragend aus der geborstenen Stirn" (G 11:353). In (my) English, this reads: "And even if everything was unchanged, the spike was still there, protruding crookedly from his shattered forehead." But if you read the standard English translation of the diaries, you get instead: "And even if everything remained unchanged, the spike was still there, crookedly protruding from his shattered forehead as if it bore witness to some truth" (D 178; emphasis added). The addition of this last phrase is explained in a footnote of Max Brod, Kafka's editor and literary executor: "The clause, 'as if it bore witness to some truth,' was struck out by Kafka in the manuscript" (D 322). So this footnotation "as if it bore witness to some truth," having, then, precisely parenthetical status, returns to a crossing out (leaving in the empirical state of affairs of the transmission of the manuscript the perplexing uncertainty about whether Kafka's intention in having crossed out the phrase "as if [his shattered forehead] bore witness to some truth" is to be respected). If respected, the sum of things is left intact and pure and no trace of the promised redemption was indeed to be seen. But it is equally compelling to preserve this velleity (it is not preserved in the manuscript edition)--to find in the officer's report the positive substance of justice--for it would convey a most important indecision and nostalgia and intense imaginative yearning in Kafka, he who had written (while still young) of his desire to write his being into the depths of the paper and to draw up that writing into him.
The words "as if it bore witness to some truth" are remarkable ones to cross out. Kafka's own reading confirms the reader's suspicions. This is not a story about true sentencing but about its disappearance, its traceable disappearance in the intricacies and hollow places of fiction. Throughout, the narration of (principally) the reception--on the part of the Explorer--of the narration produced by a fanatic of a ceremony who can no more than imply that a prisoner's (attempt at) deciphering the truth of his sentence is achieved with his death. The truth of this procedure is then nullified when it is empirically enacted by the same fanatic on himself. But what we have lost as an "acquist of true experience," we have gained as a tolerable experience of the trivial of allotria and the excremental. 24 What is tasteless in the actual and trivial is etiolated, bled of its loathsome horror, by this multiplication of narrative foci and foyers--a gesture which, by driving truth out of art, enlarges its scope. In this work the tastelessness of trifling allotria and the excremental (a kind of expressiveness) are symbols together of the distasteful that now has a place in art and can be borne. Its "meaning" is reflexive only. It points to the vast, unlimited--because truth-bled--order of the signifier in art. This is a conclusion perfectly consistent with Hegel's view of the end of art as the end of an art that would need to be validated by the truth it can now no longer represent.
Stanley Corngold is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is the author of The Fate of the Self; Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form; Complex Pleasure; and co-author of Borrowed Lives. He has edited the Norton edition of Kafka's Metamorphosis. His next work will be Franz Kafka: Lambent Traces.
1. Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke (Kohlhammer: Stuttgart, 1961), 4:21.
2. Lionel Trilling, "Introduction" to Anna Karenina, cited in Leon Wieseltier, "Get Smart: Lionel Trilling's Exhilarating Pursuit of Moral Realism," review of The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 11 June 2000, 4.
3. According to Malcolm Pasley and Klaus Wagenbach, Kafka composed "In the Penal Colony" between 4 and 18 October 1914. Sämtliche Erzählungen, ed. Paul Raabe (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1970), 398. Citations in German from this edition of "In the Penal Colony [In der Strafkolonie]" will be given in the text of this essay as page numbers in parentheses.
4. Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Colony," in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1971), 160; hereafter abbreviated "IPC".
5. "Kretzschmar hatte nichts dagegen und begünstigte es sogar, daß dieser von Gescheitheit vibrierende Jüngling auch musikalisch vorauseilte und sich mit Dingen zu schaffen machte, die ein pedantischer Mentor als Allotria verpönt haben würde [would have forbidden as time-wasting]." Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1991), 101. For an English language version, see Doctor Faustus, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Vintage, 1948), 73.
6. So much for Theodor W. Adorno's claim that Kafka's characters are all subaltern (all "Gestalten der Subalternität") in "Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka," in Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1955, 324. Cf. "Notes to Kafka," in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Spearman, 1967), 259.
7. John Wesley, The Good Steward, Sermon 51. Available from www.ccel.org/w/wesley/sermons/sermons-html/serm-051.html; INTERNET.
8. Kafka studied medieval German literature at the University of Prague in 1902. Klaus Wagenbach, Franz Kafka, Eine Biographie seiner Jugend (1883-1912) (Bern: Francke, 1958), 100. He assiduously consulted Grimm's etymological dictionary; cf. Max Brod, Über Franz Kafka (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1966), 110, 213.
9. This word is, incidentally, conspicuous in the opening scene of The Trial describing K.'s arrest. Franz Kafka, Der Proceß, Roman, in der Fassung der Handschrift, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1990), 15.
10. Allotria and excreta have this in common: they are distinctively nonexclusively human, being common to both human beings and animals, especially to children and childlike beings who have no natural dislike of what Kafka calls Schmutz--what adults term physically and morally filthy.
11. Oscar Wilde, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 65.
12. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977), 137; Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902-1904, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1958), 159.
13. The English quotation comes from The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914-1923, trans. Martin Greenberg (New York: Schocken, 1949), 114-5; hereafter abbreviated D. The German quotation comes from Franz Kafka, Tagebücher, Band 3, 1914-1923, Franz Kafka, Gesammelte Werke in zwölf bänden, Nach der Kritischen Ausgabe, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt a. M: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994, 11:77; hereafter abbreviated G.
14. Kafka Handbuch in zwei Bänden, ed. Hartmut Binder (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1979), 229.
15. Ibid.
16. Detlev Kremer, Kafka: Die Erotik des Schreibens (Frankfurt a. M.: Athenäum, 1989), 7.
17. This life-in-death connects to the peculiar life-in-death of the corpse of the officer at the close. The face of the corpse "was as it had been in life" ("IPC" 166). Mark Anderson has written most suggestively of this aspect of the piece, "the existential condition of being caught between death and life," in "The Ornaments of Writing: 'In the Penal Colony,'" in Kafka's Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 187-8.
18. Coetzee writes of history as "a society's collective self- interpretation of its own coming-into-being," against which "the freedom of textuality, however meager and marginal that freedom may be," might be asserted. J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 206.
19. Recall the phrase: "Jetzt geschieht Gerechtigkeit" . Also see Friedrich Kittler on Faust's feckless attempt to interpret the sign of the Earth Spirit. "For once, Faust does not just glimpse and gaze at signs. The first unperformable stage direction in European theatrical history declares that 'he seizes the book and mysteriously pronounces the sign of the spirit.' 'Mysteriously,' indeed. This event, speaking out loud, is possible for books composed of letters, but not for a collection of magic ideograms . . . ." Discourse Networks 1800/1900 ed. David E. Wellbery, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 6.
20. See Margot Norris, "Sadism and Masochism in Two Kafka Stories," Modern Language Notes 93 no. 3 , 430.
21. Franz Kafka, Der Proceß, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1990), 298.
22. The hunger artist nourishes himself on his own flesh; the flesh of the culprit in "In the Penal Colony" is scraped out of his body and excreted as so much useless blood and tissue.
23. "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts" (Jer. 31.33). Cited in Malcolm Pasley, "In the Penal Colony," in The Kafka Debate: New Perspectives for our Time (New York: Gordian, 1977), 302.
24. The phrase is Milton's, at the very close of Samson Agonistes; to Samson is attributed "new acquist / Of true experience," John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: The Oydssey Press, 1957), 593.
According to a great Rabbi, Walter Benjamin recalls in his essay on Kafka, the coming Messiah "will not wish to change the world by force but will merely make a slight adjustment in it." 1 A slight adjustment of the ordinary--this is indeed what happens everywhere in Kafka's texts in which daily objects, made all but invisible through familiarity, are transformed into enigmatic signs. The archetype of the enigmatic object-sign for Kafka is the door, and it is indeed doors that structure the parabolic and mythic space of his narratives. Opened and shut, locked and unlocked, peeped through and barricaded, they cease to be ordinary doors and become instead architectural elements in a theater of the unsayable. This is of course nowhere more true than with those doors that his heroes regularly confront in their search for truth: it happens to K. in The Castle, to Josef K. in The Trial, and, most famously of all, to the man from the country in the parable "Before the Law." If only they were able to pass through these enigmatic doors and come face to face with what lies behind them, these texts seem to suggest, they would finally be able to grasp the truth they have been seeking, discover the Law of their lives. Kafka's doors, in other words, hold out the promise of revelation.
Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" is a remarkably doorless story. Instead of the crowded attics of The Trial or the tenebrous landscape of The Castle, "In the Penal Colony" takes place in a barren desert valley, under a glare so intense as to prompt the explorer to shelter "his eyes from the sun with one hand." 2 It is more than sunlight, however, against which the explorer seeks protection. "With the strongest light," Kafka writes in an aphorism, "one can dissolve the world. Before weak eyes, it gains in solidity, before weaker ones it develops fists, before even weaker ones it becomes bashful and crushes him who dares to look at it." 3 The light of "In the Penal Colony" is precisely of this nature, yet it dissolves not the world but the image of revelation. Kafka's story takes us to the other side of the door. The irony of this move is that it erases the very topography on which the enigma of the door rests, the locus of the "beyond." For beyond the door lies not the territory of meaning but an institution that produces the illusion of a door that simultaneously defines and blocks access to this territory. "In the Penal Colony" is Kafka's attempt to traverse the fantasy of revelation by unveiling the mechanical nature of its production.
The passage through the door of revelation takes the form of an epic journey red as an ethnographic travelogue. The subject of this journey is a European explorer--a representative of Reason and Enlightenment--sent from the mainland of the Empire to a remote island penal colony. This spatial displacement is also a journey back in time. First, because the passage from center to periphery is red as a passage from civilization to a more primitive society; and second, because the colony itself comprises two disparate temporalities. The colony's present, embodied in the reign of the New Commandant, and its mythic past, associated with the rule of the Old Commandant, the inventor of the machine. The machine, then, is placed at a double remove, distanced from the center of the Empire by a topographical and a temporal frame. To this must be added a third frame, an explicitly narrative one: the description of the glorious working of the machine is given in an embedded narrative through the words of the officer, who was the Old Commandant's assistant in all penal matters, and who seeks to persuade the explorer to join him in his t against the New Commandant ("IPC" 198). The effect of this triple framing is to bracket the machine's historical character and foreground its fantasmatic nature. The operations of the machine, if not the machine itself, in other words, are part of an institutional fantasy. But whose fantasy is it? Most clearly the officer's, whose fixation on the Old Commandant reveals a resistance to the passing of time as such: that is, to history. From the perspective of his mythical world view, the machine embodies the very idea of justice. As for the explorer, to the extent that he stands outside this mythical framework, he is also unaffected by the officer's institutional fantasy. And in a way, this is indeed the case. The explorer approaches the machine in the manner of a critical historian, judging it, not as an idealized form of justice, but as a brutal and outdated instrument of power. But this historical perspective is itself fantasmatic in that it provides the explorer, under the cover of seemingly impartial observation, with the archaic foil for his own institutional fantasy of a modern, civilized, European legal system which has outgrown the brute violence of its archaic prehistory. Another way of putting this is to say that the fantasy of the explorer is the Enlightenment fantasy of an historical-scientific stance outside any fantasmatic frame, the stance of theoretical objectivity. Kafka's narrative throws into doubt precisely this presumed impartiality, along with the strict opposition between archaic and Enlightenment justice.
At the center of both fantasies stands a common conception of law and justice. According to it, justice depends on two fundamental conditions: first, the symmetry between crime and punishment; and second, the veridical subsumption of the particular case under the universal law. But while within the Enlightenment model these conditions--that is, of symmetry and of veridical subsumption--are regulative ideas that orient the legal system but can never be fully satisfied, the Old Commandant designed a machine that transforms these ideas into physical principles. The judiciary system of the penal settlement radicalizes the Enlightenment conception of justice to the point of crisis. Pushed to its extreme, the symmetry between crime and punishment gives way to identity, and the subsumption of the particular under the universal gives way to a sacrificial logic reducing the individual to a corporeal instantiation of the universal.
The operations of the machine induce a semantic collapse in which the meaning of the elements proper to the conception of justice are obliterated. Consider the officer's articulation of the a priori character of guilt. "My guiding principle is this," he declares, "Guilt is never to be doubted. Other courts cannot follow that principle , for they consist of several opinions and have higher courts to scrutinize them. This is not the case here. . . " ("IPC" 198). The officer's principle obscures the semantic difference between Anschuldigung (accusation) and Schuld (guilt): to be angeschuldigt is to be schuldig, to be accused is to be guilty. Consequently, there is no longer any need to prove the connection between crime and criminal. The penal colony's judiciary system does away with all procedures and language games--interrogation, litigation, deliberation, etc.--that characterize the trial as a process of truth-finding. In fact, the system undoes the temporal character of legal procedure, and in so doing erases the nature of the sentence as a logical judgment reached through a process of reasoning. Instead of the gradual subsumption of the particular under the general, we are confronted with the instantaneous identification of the accused individual and the Law. A similar semantic collapse affects the notion of symmetry between crime and punishment, which is pushed to the point where the difference between the two collapses. "Our sentence does not sound severe. Whatever commandment the prisoner has disobeyed is written upon his body by the Harrow. 'This prisoner, for instance,'--the officer indicated the man--'will have written on his body: HONOR THY SUPERIORS!'" ("IPC" 197). Where transgression and punishment stand in such exact and predetermined relation to each other, no human weighing need balance the scales of crime and punishment, and no subjective judgment interferes with the working of justice.
From this series of erasures and fusions emerges a Law devoid of any specific meaning. The machine embodies the fantasy of a symbolism without semantic mediation, of a supreme and transcendent language so pure as to be untranslatable into ordinary words. I want to approach the inner logic of this fantasy by way of a short detour through the work of another writer who, one hundred years before Kafka, had dreamed up a similar machine. In his short essay, "On the Marionette Theater," Heinrich von Kleist, one of Kafka's favorite authors, puts forth the rather surprising proposition that the most graceful movement can be achieved, not by a professional dancer, but by a marionette. 4 This is so, the character named C. explains, because in human movement there is an unavoidable split between the soul, as the principle of motion, and the body, as its organ. This split is brought about through human desire, which directs the soul toward an external object, thus displacing the body's point of gravity in a way that necessarily fractures the harmony of the body and soul and disrupts the gracefulness of movement. The marionette, on the other hand, due to its complete absence of desire and intentionality, knows no such internal fracture. Guided by a machinist or, in the most advanced form, by a machine that operates according to a set of mathematical rules, the marionette's dance is therefore capable of realizing a perfectly formalized--and in this sense, absolutely beautiful--movement. The dance of the marionette is the fullest expression of grace, the complete fusion, without remainder, of matter and form. But it is also the terrifying image of a pure motion of the soul without soul, and of a pure expression of the body without body.
Where Kleist's marionette-machine seeks the achievement of motion, Kafka's law-machine seeks the achievement of pure meaning. It is no accident that, in their drive towards realization, both systems of formalization encounter the same locus of resistance: the human organism, the life of the body. In Kleist, this threat to the body surfaces most clearly in a short anecdote concerning a mutilated Englishman who, after receiving an artificial leg, was able to achieve a gracefulness of movement vastly superior to his natural-legged countrymen. 5 As for Kafka, the machine is nothing other than a complex apparatus for the mechanical application of the sacred Law to the body of the accused. The machine does not merely apply the Law to, or inscribe it, onto the body. Rather, it passes the Law through the body by means of registering its letters directly on the prisoner's nervous system. For justice to be revealed, the Law must be deciphered through the pain of a body subjected to mechanical torture.
How exactly does this work? The machine consists of three parts: the Designer, which contains the piece of paper with the sentence, written according to the elaborately ornamental design of the Old Commandant; the Harrow, which engraves "the sentence on the skin of the guilty"; and the Bed, covered with cotton-wool, to which the accused is strapped and which turns slowly to expose his entire body to the writing needles.
Can you follow it? The Harrow is beginning to write; when it finishes the first draft of the inscription on the man's back, the layer of cotton wool begins to roll and slowly turns the body over, to give the Harrow fresh space for writing. Meanwhile the raw part that has been written on lies on the cotton wool, which is specially prepared to staunch the bleeding and so makes all ready for a new deepening of the script. Then these teeth at the edge of the Harrow, as the body turns further round, tear the cotton wool away from the wounds, throw it into the pit, and there is more work for the Harrow. So it keeps on writing deeper and deeper for the whole twelve hours. The first six hours the condemned man stays alive almost as before, he suffers only pain. After two hours, the felt gag is taken away, for he has no longer strength to scream. . . . But how quiet he grows at just about the sixth hour! Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates. A moment that might tempt one to get under the Harrow oneself. Nothing more happens than that the man begins to understand the inscription, he purses his mouth as if he were listening. You have seen how difficult it is to decipher the script with one's eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds. To be sure, that is a hard task; he needs six hours to accomplish it. By that time the harrow has pierced him quite through and casts him into the pit, where he pitches down upon the blood and water and the cotton wool. Then the judgment has been fulfilled, and we, the soldier and I, bury him. ["IPC" 203-4]
To approach the logic of this passage, recall Althusser's classic essay on interpellation. 6 The essay stages a little scene in which a man on a street, anonymously hailed by a police officer, responds to this official call by turning around. By responding to the officer's "Hey, you there," Althusser suggests, the man recognizes himself as the addressee of an institutional call: that is, he identifies his own being in terms defined by the authorities. Kafka's story describes a mechanism that is at once very similar and very different. As with Althusser, it stages a scene of ideological recognition: the moment of transration is the one when the prisoner deciphers, and recognizes himself in, the Law that is being inscribed onto his body. But whereas in Althusser the drama of interpellation takes place on the level of the psyche, this process now works directly on and through the body. Interpellation, in Kafka, occurs through the somatization of ideology; it is a mechanical operation through which the Symbolic is carved into the subject's body.
This is also why what in Althusser's allegorical narrative is a moment of instantaneous capture, in Kafka's story is a process that takes its time. For the Commandment is not just registered on the body, but against the body. Recall again the officer's description:
The Harrow is beginning to write; when it finishes the first draft of the inscription on the back, the layer of cotton-wool begins to roll and slowly turns the body over, to give the Harrow fresh space for writing. Meanwhile the raw part that has been written only lies on the cotton-wool, which is especially prepared to staunch the bleeding and so makes all ready for a new deepening of the script. ["IPC" 203]
A deepening of the script. The Law is inscribed through a process of repetitive writing that hollows out the body and evacuates its corporeality. The writing of the Law is therefore not, as the officer believes--and wants others to believe--a miraculous fusion of body and meaning. Rather, it is a mechanical operation for extracting the body's vital energies. Thus the radiating image of comprehension on the prisoner's face is the product of a terrifying exchange; it is the chiastic transfer of a meaning whose vitality is brought about through the extraction of life from the body.
The point of intersection between the Symbolic and the somatic, Law and body, is the prisoner's pain. Pain is, according to a long philosophical tradition, the locus of private particularity, the one thing that resists, according to Wittgenstein, verbalization and symbolization. 7 Initially, this is also the case in Kafka. The prisoner's pain marks the body's resistance to its material interpellation. But the operations of the machine slowly turn this locus of incommunicability into the site of revelation. For the prisoner learns his judgment through his wounds--that is, he deciphers the commandment not by means of a mental reading, but through its encryption onto the nervous system. This is the core of the institutional fantasy: a machine that short-circuits semantic mediation and directly inscribes the Symbolic into the Real of bare life. Ironically, it is precisely through this bypassing of meaning that the machine transforms the prisoner's body into the revelatory site of the master signifier, the pure meaning of Justice. The officer explains that, once the execution began,
No discordant noise spoilt the working of the machine. Many did not care to watch it but lay with closed eyes in the sand; they all knew: Now Justice is being done. . . . Well, and then came the sixth hour! It was impossible to grant all the requests to be allowed to watch it from near by. . . . How we all absorbed the look of transration on the face of the sufferer, how we bathed our cheeks in the radiance of that justice, achieved at last and fading so quickly! ["IPC" 209]