Did you know that Kafka's In the Penal Colony has actually been adapted and produced by renowned composer Philip Glass? I Google-ed it and was surprised to find that Glass has adapted it into a chamber opera libretto! Wow. It's a fairly recent composition - written in 2000. I think it would certainly be interesting to get my hands on a copy of it. :)
Ok, point of interest aside, let me elaborate on my thoughts on In the Penal Colony.
I was pondering over the fact that the machine ultimately fails. What does it imply? It is first described as working fine except for a noisy creaking sound; however in the final execution, with its most ardent 'devotee' under its subjection, the machine breaks down. As the explorer remarked, "the machine was obviously going to pieces; its silent working was a delusion". (Pg 165) The machine steadily breaks down - the cogwheels fall off, the Harrow does not write but jab repeatedly, the Bed does not turn the body over, the water jets fail to function, and the usual torture process is speeded up: "But at that moment the Harrow rose with the body spitted on it and moved to the side, as it usually did only when the twelfth hour had come." Finally the body does not, in the officer's own words, "fall...into the pit with an incomprehensibly gentle wafting motion" (Pg 154), but remains hanging over the pit, streaming with blood.
I think that Kafka may be trying to demonstrate how the ultimate failure of the machine, which is an "agency" (to borrow Scarry's terminology) of torture and implied power, ironises the high rhetoric and devotion of the officer to his cruel torture apparatus. Similarly, the undecipherable inscriptions which are 'written' on the prisoner's body can be viewed as parallel to, or even symbolic of the dubious means by which the torture is justified, as well as the dubious or questionable culpability of the condemned man. Kafka is thus, heavily ironic. Moreover the inscription, as claimed by the officer, is meant to read "Be Just" - while this problematises and questions, on one hand, the fairness of the justice and judgement levied on the condemned man, I also see a further irony: the problematising of what many readers and the explorer feel is only "just" for the officer to do - his ultimate suicide.
"If the judicial procedure which the officer cherished were really so near its end...then the officer was doing the right thing; in his place the explorer would not have acted otherwise." (Pg 163)
However, in the final moments, the explorer feels a degree of sympathy and compassion for the officer - "he had a feeling that he must now stand by the officer, since the officer was no longer able to look after himself." (Pg 165) He is also the one who gets the condemned man and the soldier to assist him in pushing the corpse into the pit. Was this what the officer deserved? Throughout the story, we as readers are horrified and even filled with disgust at the coolness of tone which the officer adopts, his clinicality and pride in such cruel and morbid torture. However, at the end, Kafka seems to push our hardened hearts towards a certain degree of sympathy for the officer. The description of his suffered and maimed body moves us:
"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; ... through the forehead went the point of the great iron spike."
Perhaps Kafka may be trying to convey the idea that no torture can ever "be just".
posted by sarah @ 10:10 PM
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