will like an essay on “In the Penal Colony” and “The Lottery”. tradition in both, first draft and last draft.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI:10.1163/9789004376175_007

chapter 5

The Legibility of Legislation in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”

Siebe Bluijs

Abstract

This chapter investigates the readability of the law through an analysis of Franz Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony” [orig.  1919]. In the story, a writing machine inscribes the verdict into the condemned person’s body until death ensues. Bluijs argues that the readability of the law is dependent on its ability to function as a form of writing as it has been theorized by Derrida:  the law needs to be able to break away from its origins in order to be productive. Look- ing at various instances where the law is read by the story’s characters (and their failure to do so because of the law’s intrinsic illegibility), Bluijs explores how different acts of reading expose the law’s dependency on the presence of its representatives.

In Franz Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony” (original title “In der Strafkolonie,” written in 1914 and published in German in 1919), a European traveler visits a penal colony.1 He is invited by an officer of the colony to witness the execution of a soldier, by way of which the former will illustrate the colony’s legal sys- tem. The soldier is condemned because he has dishonored his superiors. The condemned man has not been able to defend himself and does not even know on what grounds he has been convicted. According to the executing officer, it is unnecessary to explain the verdict to the soldier: “After all, he is going to learn it on his own body” (Kafka 40). The officer explains to the traveler that the condemned man will be subjected to a machine that will inscribe the ver- dict into the soldier’s body until death ensues, a procedure that will take about twelve hours in total. The officer explains that the content of the verdict be- comes known to the soldier as it is carried out: the condemned man will slowly

1 I would like to thank Isabel Capeloa Gil, Yra van Dijk, Yasco Horsman, Astrid van Weyenberg and Tessa de Zeeuw for their productive comments on earlier drafts and versions of this chapter.

84 Bluijs

decipher the verdict through his wounds. The verdict and the execution thus coincide in the procedure of the machine. The sentence consists of a script of intersecting lines written on sheets that are then inserted into the machine. The sheets and the machine were designed by the officer’s mentor, the old commandant, who is no longer in power when the traveler arrives. The officer is the safe keeper of the old commandant’s legacy:  he holds on to the sheets and maintains the machine. His main concern throughout the story, however, is to convince the traveler that the colony’s legal system does not need the offi- cer’s presence in order to function.

Kafka’s story has attracted an extensive amount of (scholarly) interpre- tations.2 Poststructuralist readings have particularly understood the writ- ing machine in “In the Penal Colony” as a literal manifestation of discur- sive mechanisms in society. Judith Butler, for example, has read the story in analo gy to Foucauldian biopolitics, where the body is a “blank page” on which “history” is being written (1989), whereas Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have interpreted the colony’s machine as illustrative for their no- tion that power and the body form an assemblage (1986). This chapter wish- es to take up the connection between power structures and language at play in the story, by focusing on the function of the story’s law and its “Schrift” (meaning: “writing” or “inscription”). Kafka’s story concerns questions about the readability of the law. In what sense must the law be readable in order for it to function as a law? Who is able to be a reader with regards to the law? Is a legal system that is unreadable a just system? As I will aim to show, the readability of the law is dependent on its ability to function as a form of writing as it has been theorized by Derrida: the colony’s legal system needs to be able to break away from its origin in order to be productive. Any law, Derrida claims in “Before the Law,” that is not productive outside its own context, will inevitably fail to be meaningful. From this follows that if the law’s ability to function as a law is ultimately dependent on the position of the subject that reads the law (inside or outside the law’s context), the law stops functioning. Kafka’s story, I will show, provides an example of two positions that pertain to the readability of the law. The first is exemplified by the colony’s officer: as the representative of the colony’s legal system, he is part of the context of the law. The second position is actualized by the traveler. Coming from outside the context of the juridical order, his position is counterposed to that of the officer. By looking at different acts of reading

2 Apart from autobiographical and psychoanalytical readings, the story has been read from a theological framework (e.g. Steinberg 1976) and it has been understood as a reflection on the act of writing (e.g. Allen 2001).

The Legibility of Legislation in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony ” 85

and legibility in the story (of the sheets, the machine’s workings, the faces of the condemned), I will show that the two reading positions presented in the story are mutually exclusive.

Writing Machines

In Kafka’s story, the colony’s legal system is examined in its various materi- al manifestations by the story’s characters, who function as different kinds of readers at the various stages of the colony’s procedure. The condemned man is a reader of the law’s workings (at least according to the officer), as he deciphers the verdict through his wounds. The officer extends this ability to read the law to all the people that fall under the colony’s jurisdiction. The colony’s inhabi- tants are able, according to the officer, to read the verdict from the faces of the condemned persons. He reminiscences about older times when the colony’s people gathered round the machine to see the moment of comprehension of the verdict on the condemned person’s face: “How we all took in the expression of transfiguration from his martyred face, how we bathed our cheeks in the ra- diance of this justice finally achieved and already vanishing!” (48).3 Naturally, the officer functions as a reader as well; he is even able – without the use of the machine – to read the lines on the sheets with the verdicts written on them. In addition, he has a perfect understanding of the machine’s workings and, there- fore, has a more fundamental understanding of how the writing procedure is executed than others in the colony. Finally, the traveler is invited by the officer to act as a reader as well, but only on a basic level.

The officer’s appeal to read the procedure is intended as proof of the pro- cedure’s intrinsic readability. The execution of the soldier is part of a legal or- der that is on the brink of extinction in the penal colony. In place of the old commandant, who installed the juridical order, is a new commandant who is not in favor of it. The officer and the machine are the last remnants of the old order, as the officer explains:  “This procedure and this execution, which you now have the opportunity to admire, have no open advocates in our colony any longer. I  am their only defender and at the same time the only one who defends the old commandant’s legacy” (47). Since the representatives of the procedure are dying out, the officer asks the traveler to acknowledge the fact that the legal procedures are at least principally legible for an outsider: “I have

3 As the footnote in the Norton Critical Edition of Kafka’s stories to this sentence points out, the word “radiance” is Schein in the German original, which could also mean “semblance,” “suggesting that this moment of alleged illumination is also a mere illusion” (48).

86 Bluijs

a plan that can’t help but succeed. … I am not going to ask you to lie, not at all; you should just answer briefly, for example ‘Yes, I  saw the execution,’ or ‘Yes, I’ve heard all the explanations’ ” (51). The officer invites the traveler to read the procedure along with him by going through its workings one by one. He shows him the sheets and explains the components of the machine. Thus, the officer provides context that should make the principle of the law understandable to the traveler. All the traveler is asked to do is to endorse the assumption that this context exists, whether he agrees with the legal procedure or not.

In fact, we learn at the beginning of the story that the traveler has objections to the procedure. His urge to interfere does not arise from an idea of human- ism: “the condemned man was a stranger to him, he was not a compatriot, and he certainly did not arouse pity” (46). Still, the traveler contemplates whether he has the power to stop the execution, going against what his function dic- tates, since “he was a traveler with the sole purpose of observing and by no means altering other people’s legal institutions. Here, however, the situation was very tempting” (46). In the end, he decides to carry out his role as an ob- server and does not actively interfere. Therefore, it seems that he is willing to act according to the officer’s wish and be an obedient reader of the colony’s legal system.

In the colony, the officer explains, there are many opposing voices to the continuation of the old commandant’s rule. For the officer, such counter- discourses do not jeopardize the all- encompassing logic of the system. This becomes clear from the following passage in which he states:

I’m not saying too much when I tell you that the organization of the en- tire penal colony is [the old commandant’s] work. We, his friends, already knew at the time of his death that the organization of the colony was so self- contained that his successor, even if he had a thousand new plans in his head, would not be able to alter a thing in the old order. (37)

The officer believes in the endurance of the self- contained organization of the colony because, according to him, the legacy of the old commandant is con- tinued by the machine. He tries to convince the traveler that he is merely an advocate of the old commandant’s legacy and claims that the machine keeps the organization in effect, independently of any subjects vouching for its un- derlying principles: “In any case, the machine still works and is effective in its own way. It is effective even when it stands by itself in this valley” (49). For the officer, the old commandant has created a machine that functions on its own.

In order to explain the relevance of this observation, I find it useful to turn to Derrida, who in his essay “Signature Event Context,” defines writing as

The Legibility of Legislation in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony ” 87

such: “To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a kind of machine that is in turn productive” (316). According to the officer, the old commandant has produced something – not coincidentally a writing machine – that functions as writing in the Derridean sense, “to the extent to which, governed by a code …, it is constituted in its identity as a mark, by its iterability in the absence of who- ever, and therefore ultimately in the absence of every empirically determin- able ‘subject’ ” (Derrida 1982: 315). In the officer’s view, even when there will no longer be anyone familiar with the machine’s origin, the machine will still be able to run by itself: it will be able to read the sheets and write the verdicts unto people’s bodies in the future, because it is governed by the “code” of the law. The machine, therefore, ensures the continuation of the colony’s legal system beyond the old commander’s or his representatives’ presence.

The arrival of the foreign traveler puts the officer’s notion of the legal sys- tem’s durability to the test. A law can only be productive – it can only function as a law – , Derrida reasons, if its content has the ability to function in different contexts. As he writes:  “All writing … must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in general. And this ab- sence is not a continuous modification of presence; it is a break in presence” (1982: 315– 16). It follows that, if a law is to function beyond one particular con- text, it should be able to function in the absence of someone who vouches for its meaning. The officer functions as a guarantee of presence of the old commandant’s legacy by substituting for his reign. The visitor, however, intro- duces the possibility of a true break in presence and invokes the questions of whether it is possible to convey the colony’s legal system’s rule of law to an outsider and of whether the legal system is or can be meaningful beyond its original context.

Context and White Spaces

The officer preserves the old commandant’s original designs of the executions. He tells the traveler:  “unfortunately I  cannot let you hold them; they are the most valuable things I own” (43). The sheets are valuable because they are an integral part of the colony’s legal system. But for the officer, they are also valu- able because they offer a historical and material link to the creator of the legal order: the old commandant. As I will show, this link to the historical creator of the law is a condition for the law to stay in effect.

Derrida’s reading in “Before the Law” (1992) of the Kafka story with the same title (contained in The Trial) about “a man from the country” who wants to gain access to the law makes clear that a law that is dependent on stories of its

88 Bluijs

origin cannot function as a law.4 In the story, the man’s entrance to the law is indefinitely delayed by an infinite number of gatekeepers. Derrida disputes the idea of the law’s origin when he states that:

It seems that the law as such should never give rise to any story. To be invested with its categorical authority, the law must be without history, genesis, or any possible derivation. That would be the law of the law. … And when one tells stories on this subject, they can concern only circum- stances, events external to the law and, at best, the modes of its revela- tion. (1992: 191, emphasis in text)

According to Derrida, stories that circumvent the law’s origin cannot give ac- cess to that which fundamentally organizes the law. It follows that the read- ability of such stories or myths obscures the law’s origin even further, leading Derrida to write that, perhaps,

being able to read makes the law less accessible still. Reading a text might indeed reveal that it is untouchable, literally intangible, precisely because it is readable, and for the same reason unreadable to the extent to which the presence within it of a clear and graspable sense remains as hidden as its origin. Unreadability thus no longer opposes itself to readability. Perhaps man is the man from the country as long as he cannot read; or, if knowing how to read, he is still bound up in unreadability within that very thing which appears to yield itself to be read. He wants to see or touch the law, he wants to approach and “enter” it, because perhaps he does not know that the law is not to be seen or touched but deciphered. (1992: 197, emphasis in text)

In “In the Penal Colony,” the officer tries to underline the law’s workings by providing stories of the law’s origin and by giving information about its con- text. Derrida’s reasoning explains why this information does not add to the readability of what the officer wants the traveler to be able to read in the first place, which is the law itself. In fact, these stories make the law less readable, since the emphasis on the law’s material manifestations (the sheets that can be seen and touched) obscures the true meaning of the law. The law is an

4 Derrida reads Kafka’s story as meta- literature: when he refers to the law, he is specifically re- ferring to the laws that govern literature. In my use of Derrida here, I take up the more literal, judicial meaning of the word “law.”

The Legibility of Legislation in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony ” 89

immaterial idea, and therefore it cannot be entered; instead, it is supposed to be deciphered.

The difference between the two reading positions with regard to the law becomes clear when we look at the specific instances when the officer and the traveler try to read the contents of the sheets. The officer is able to read the sheets of the old commander; to the traveler, however, they are completely illegible:

[H] e saw only labyrinthine lines intersecting at various points, covering the paper so thickly that it was an effort to detect the white spaces be- tween them. “Read it,” said the officer. “I can’t,” said the traveler. “But it’s clear,” said the officer. “It is very artistic,” said the traveler evasively, “but I cannot decipher it.” “Yes,” said the officer, laughed, and stuck the sheet back into the folder, “it’s not a primer of beautiful lettering for schoolchil- dren.” (Kafka 43)

The marks on the paper do not compose a system of signs that is comprehensi- ble to the traveler. He interprets the verdict as an autonomous artwork – in the sense of a singular entity that needs to be interpreted as a whole, rather than as a sign system in which the various elements that make up the whole can be interpreted separately. The officer’s mocking remark that the sheet is not a primer for lettering is telling: the sheet and the verdict it represents cannot be regarded as something from which a general code can be distilled.

The traveler is unable to make out where one mark begins and the other ends due to the lack of white spaces. This is significant because, according to Derrida, one of the minimal determinations of the classical philosophical concept of writing is the predicate that a “written sign carries with it a force of breaking with its context, that is, the set of presences which organize the moment of its inscription” (1982:  317). Derrida thus defines writing by its use of distinguishable elements that can be taken from the series of elements that make up the whole. The identification of these elements is made possible by the spaces between the elements:

This force of rupture is due to the spacing which constitutes the written sign: the spacing which separates it from other elements of the internal contextual chain (the always open possibility of its extraction and graft- ing), but also from all the forms of a present referent (past or to come in the modified form of the present past or to come) that is objective or subjective. This spacing is not the simple negativity of a lack, but the emergence of the mark. (Derrida 1982: 317)

90 Bluijs

Because the verdict in Kafka’s story lacks distinguishable elements that can be separated from the internal contextual chain, the emergence of the mark does not take place. The verdict also lacks “spacing” in the sense of a break from a present referent in time and space. According to Derrida, white space is not a negativity or a lack because it introduces difference within the internal contextual chain.

With regard to the colony, the internal contextual chain of the law consists of the elements of the old commandant’s legacy: the sheets, the machine and its representative, the officer. The separation between these elements, howev- er, is made impossible by the architecture of the colony’s legal system. The offi- cer does not allow for the open possibility of the law, as he leaves no space for alternative narratives. The negation of a different context outside the internal contextual chain of the colony’s legal system is already present in the officer’s explanation of the totalizing terms of his judgment:

I took down [the captain’s] statement and immediately added the judg- ment. Then I had the man put in chains. That was all very simple. If I had first summoned the man and interrogated him, it would only have led to confusion. He would have lied; if I had succeeded in refuting these lies, he would have substituted new lies for them, and so forth. (Kafka 41)

If the captain had been able to defend himself, the officer would be confront- ed with the openness of a context that would undermine his legal procedure. The officer does not allow anyone besides himself to question or change the meaning of the verdict. This means that the verdict needs the presence of the officer to be readable, because its meaning cannot be conveyed by the verdict itself.

When the officer shows the sheet to the traveler, he tries to cover up the structural lack of the law’s openness. He explains that the lack of white space on the sheet is due to the sheet’s composition. According to the officer, the sheet with the verdict is illegible for the initiated observer because ornaments have replaced white spaces: “The genuine script has to be surrounded by many, many ornaments; the real script encircles the body only in a narrow belt; the rest of the body is meant for adornments” (43). In principle, non- referential ornaments could take the place of white space in order to make referential graphemes (“the genuine script”) legible. For instance, one can imagine a text composed of the letters of the Latin alphabet in which all the spaces between words and lines are replaced by dots, drawings or non- Latin letters that is still completely legible for someone familiar with the Latin script. Likewise, the officer claims the condemned are able to distinguish between the ornaments

The Legibility of Legislation in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony ” 91

and the “genuine” script as they are both being inscribed onto their bodies. However, based on the composition of the sheet alone, it is impossible to de- termine whether this is the case. As he shows the sheets to the traveler, the authority to decide between referential signs and adornments resides with the officer.

Later in the story, the officer shows another sheet to the traveler. He tries to convince him that the sheet contains referential signs (the “letters” of the verdict):

It was impossible. Now the officer began to spell out the inscription let- ter for letter and then read it again in context. “It says, ‘Be just!’ ” he said once more; “now you can surely read it.” The traveler bent so low over the paper that the officer moved it farther away, fearing that it would be touched; the traveler said nothing more, true, but it was clear that he still had not been able to read it. “It says, ‘Be just!’ ” the officer repeated. “May- be,” said the traveler, “I believe that that’s what it says.” (54)

Because the sentence “Be just!” only carries meaning within the context pro- vided and embodied by the officer, the repetition does not change or add sig- nificance. It lacks the capacity to be repeatable in different contexts. Therefore, it is an act of repetition, but not of “iterability.” Derrida shows that this concept of productive repetition is fundamental for a sign to function:

Every sign, … can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This citationality, duplication, or du- plicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or an anomaly, but is that (normal/ abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so- called “normal” functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way? (1982, 320– 21)

The officer points out the law’s legibility  – he tries to convince the traveler that the verdict is governed by some code consisting of productive marks – by spelling out the letters and reading it again “in context.” This context, however, is decided and provided only by the officer. The sentence can therefore not break with its given context. The officer’s insistence on the legibility of the verdict is a final attempt to save what is dearest to him:  the belief that the legal procedure functions as a form of writing – the principle idea that the law is iterable.

92 Bluijs

The Machine Escapes Notice

The traveler’s inability to confirm that the system is readable for someone out- side the context of the legal system confronts the officer with the notion that the legal system is not durable. The traveler’s arrival indicates that the sheets and the workings of the machine are meaningless without someone who is connected to the system’s origin assigning meaning to them. The officer has been a proponent of a system that he believed existed beyond him and outside of his presence. Until the traveler visited the colony, the officer had believed he represented a just order. The traveler’s inability to function as a reader has lain bare that this is not the case. The officer therefore takes matters to their logical conclusion and carries out his own verdict. He takes a sheet with the verdict “Be just!” and asks the traveler to insert it into the machine as he straps himself to it, thus realizing his own death. The traveler understands why the officer subjects himself to the machine:

He knew what would happen, true, but he had no right to stop the officer in any way. If the legal procedure to which the officer was devoted was really so near to being eliminated – possibly as a consequence of the trav- eler’s intervention, to which the latter, for his part, felt committed – then the officer was now acting quite correctly; the traveler would not have acted any differently in his place. (55)

The traveler feels he has no right to stop the officer. Whereas he had initially decided not to interfere in the colony’s practices, he now realizes his presence has instigated a process that was already inscribed into the colony’s legal order. The order was only able to function within its own confined context. The trav- eler’s “intervention” laid bare his inability to become part of this context. As a consequence of his arrival, the legal system’s context is confronted with an out- side element that leads to its destruction since no such outside is allowed for.5 The traveler becomes aware of the logic of the juridical procedure when the consequences of his arrival on the island are taken to their logical conclusions. Paradoxically, the juridical order is only transparent for the traveler the mo- ment it comes into effect for the representative who guarantees its meaning.

5 The story’s narrative framework mirrors the traveler’s inability to enter the law. The under- stated and detached extradiegetic narrator does not provide access to the officer’s inner world (but the reader does gain access to the traveler’s considerations). Therefore, the reader remains, like the traveler, an outsider to the law in (and of ) the story, opening it up to endless possible interpretations.

The Legibility of Legislation in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony ” 93

That is to say, the machine carries out the juridical order in a readable way for the traveler when the officer merges with the machine. This moment of legi- bility is underlined when the machine initially runs perfectly: “The traveler … remembered that one of the scriber’s wheels was supposed to be squeaking; but everything was still, not the softest humming could be heard. As a result of this quiet operation, the machine literally escaped notice” (56). Here, a differ- ent, more practical notion of readability is introduced that relates to the act of reading in a more commonplace sense.

To illuminate this passage, I find it useful to turn to the field of typography, where, especially since the age of typographic modernism, the concept of leg- ibility concerns the rejection of attention to the text’s form or its medium in favor of attention to the work’s content. Beatrice Ward’s influential 1955 pam- phlet from this tradition uses the metaphor of the crystal goblet to illustrate that it is typography’s aim “to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain” (1). Likewise, in 1928, the German typographer and type designer Jan Tschichold defined typography as a functional art in the service of readability of the text’s content (116). As these two examples illus- trate, legibility in this common conception favors immediacy over hypermedi- acy, to put it in the terms of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin: “If the logic of immediacy leads one either to erase or to render automatic the act of represen- tation, the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of representa- tion and makes them visible” (86).6 This notion of immediacy is fundamental to understanding the concept of readability as it is commonly used with regard to the design of a text. When one, for instance, reads the words on a page, one “looks through” the letter characters to gain access to the meaning “behind” the words. The moment the reader focuses her attention on the form of the letters, she stops reading and starts looking. In the act of reading, the reader feels she has immediate access to the text’s content.

This ideal of immediate access to the work’s content betrays an underlying assumption that the “essence” of the text (its content or meaning) exists prior to, above or beyond its material manifestation(s). Continuing the works of Der- rida, N. Katherine Hayles brings forth a critique of the failure of the Western philosophical tradition to understand itself in relation to the material qual- ities of writing. Philosophy in the West has generally understood itself as an activity of the mind, Hayles contends, neglecting its material dimension and

6 Bolter and Grusin make clear that immediacy and hypermediacy form a false dichotomy. They propose the term “remediation” to show how both terms are sides of the same coin. For the particular point in this chapter, however, the distinction between immediacy and hypermediacy is relevant.

94 Bluijs

disregarding notions of the medium in which acts of writing are essentially caught up. Hayles claims that the separation between form and content, which she links to the Cartesian split between the immaterial mind and the material body, has predominated Western discourse about text. In her essay “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep:  The Importance of Media- Specific Analysis” (2004), she states:

In retrospect, we can see the view that the text is an immaterial verbal construction as an ideology that inflicts the Cartesian split between mind and body upon the textual corpus, separating into two fictional entities what is in actuality a dynamically interacting whole. (Hayles 86)

Hayles argues that a text’s or a work’s content cannot exist outside or before its material embodiment, but that it is the result of, or emerges from, a dynamic interaction of which the work’s materiality and its medium are fundamental aspects.

In Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” the distinction between an immaterial idea (the legal system  – a machine of sorts) and its material manifestations (the machine – as in: the device) is problematized. The representation of the legal order is erased when the officer’s verdict is carried out and he merges with the machine. The logic of the legal order and the subsequent ordeal of the officer are rendered automatic: for the traveler, it is entirely clear why the officer con- victs himself. In this moment of transparency of the law’s logic, the machine escapes notice; as a medium, it becomes immediate (it effaces its mediacy and mediation). In doing so, it arrives at the supreme ideal of legibility expressed by typographic modernists. As the traveler “looks through” the machine and its workings, he gains direct access to that which the machine represents; he fully understands the logic of the colony’s legal system when its representative coincides with the machine. However, at the very moment this highest level of readability is achieved, the contextual link of the legal system – consisting of the machine, the sheets and the officer – is destroyed. Recalling Derrida’s con- sideration of the readability of the law, when one gains a “clear and graspable sense” of the law’s essence and is able to “enter” the law, it stops functioning (1992: 197).

Therefore, even though the machine seems to escape attention in the mo- ment the officer’s own verdict is carried out, its immediacy does not provide access to a truth that lies beyond it. Since Hayles makes clear that every imma- terial ideal needs a physical manifestation in order to function, the machine and the officer are themselves integral parts of the colony’s legal system. The self- condemnation of the officer is a unique instance of the legibility of the

The Legibility of Legislation in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony ” 95

legal procedure, but it does not function as writing in the Derridean sense be- cause this moment is not iterable. The machine is useless without a subject vouching for its meaning in the present. What it produces is meaningless: “The harrow was not writing, it was merely stabbing” (Kafka 57). The traveler is un- able to read the verdict from the officer’s face after the machine has carried out the verdict onto the officer’s body: “he saw, almost against his will, the face of the corpse. It was as it had been in life; no sign of the promised deliverance could be detected; what all the others had found in the machine the officer did not find” (58).

The traveler’s inability to read the verdict from the face of the officer (even though he knows what it is that he is supposed to be reading) signifies the inability of the legal order to function beyond its own context. This ending makes clear that the officer read the authority of the verdict not from but into the reactions of the condemned. That an outsider to the colony would be un- able to read the law was already “inscribed” into the colony’s legal order; the traveler’s reading of the officer’s face is “as it had been in life,” that is, without a sign. Thus, Kafka’s story brings home the point that a law becomes meaning- less in the absence of its original context when its meaning fully coincides with the origin of its documentation. The machine is useless without the presence of the officer; therefore, as the only person guaranteeing the context for signifi- cation of the verdict is destroyed, the machine falls apart. It disintegrates into the different elements (cogwheels, springs, etc.) that make up its totality. The machine, as it functioned in the mind of the officer before the traveler’s arrival, cannot be reconstructed from these elements, for the link to the law’s original conception is irreversibly destroyed. As the immaterial idea of the colony’s law vanishes, its material manifestation (the machine) breaks down as well.

In the appendix to Kafka’s story, the dependency of the law on its original creator is expressed in terms of religious faith. After the officer is executed and the machine has fallen apart, the traveler visits the grave of the old comman- dant, which bears “an inscription in very small letters”:

Here lies the old commandant. His followers, who must now be nameless, dug this grave for him and laid the stone. A prophecy exists that after a certain number of years the commandant will rise again and lead his fol- lowers from this house to reconquer the colony. Have faith and wait! (59)

A few of the colony’s inhabitants observe the traveler, standing behind him “as if they had read the inscription along with him” (59). From the looks on their faces, the traveler concludes that these people find the prophecy “ridiculous, and were inviting him to share their opinion” (59). Although they do not seem

96 Bluijs

to believe in the religious foundation of the colony’s law, these people have been subjected to the will of an unlawful dictator and his followers. They had been inscribed into the contextual chain of the colony’s legal system that cer- tified its principles. The traveler understands their facial expressions as an in- vitation to regard the prophecy as meaningless. As a consequence of the law’s own logic, he has already acknowledged this invitation.

Works Cited

Allen, Danielle. “Sounding Silence.” Modernism/ Modernity 8.2 (2001): 325– 334. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation:  Understanding New Media.

Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 2000. Butler, Judith. “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions.” The Journal of Philosophy,

86.11 (1989): 601– 607. Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. 1975. Trans, Dana

Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Trans. Alan Bass. Margins of Philosophy.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 307– 30. Derrida, Jacques. “Before the Law.” Trans. Avital Ronell and Christine Roulston. Acts of

Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. 181– 220. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep:  The Importance of Media- Specific

Analysis.” Poetics Today 25.1 (2004): 67– 90. Kafka, Franz. “In the Penal Colony.” 1919. Trans. Stanley Corngold. Kafka’s Selected

Stories:  A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Stanley Corngold. London:  W.W. Norton, 2007. 35– 59.

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. 1925. Trans. Breon Mitchell. New York: Schocken Books, 1998. Steinberg, Erwin R. “The Judgment in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony” Journal of Modern

Literature, 5.3 (1976): 492– 514. Tschichold, Jan. The New Typography:  A Handbook for Modern Designers. 1928. Trans.

Ruari McLean. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Warde, Beatrice. The Crystal Goblet:  Sixteen Essays on Typography. London:  Sylvan

Press, 1955.

Copyright of Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex & Race is the property of Editions Rodopi BV and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.