Roberto Calasso - K.

The old commander therefore succeeded in surpassing the ancients (those still dominated by the god of physical pain) while still managing to preserve some of their key doctrines. For example, that of ornament. Why is the writing on the condemned body surrounded by those fine, dense, mazy whorls, reminiscent of certain kinds of tattoos or remote decorations? How could that horror vacui be explained? As a sign of a still-infantile mind, or evidence of a higher wisdom? One soon sees that the latter is the case. Only ornament allows us to resolve a crucial issue: the writing “mustn’t kill right away”; the condemned must be able to “spend a long time studying it.” Otherwise the god will fail to give his followers sufficient time to recognize and adore him. We must consider, further, that the condemned man cannot read with his eyes the writing incised into his body. He must read it “with his wounds.” So he needs a chance to adjust, to practice. That’s the last reason for the ornamentation: to ensure that the condemned man has the leisure to learn to read without his eyes. Or better, to read himself, since the text by now is part of his body. Only then can the harrow run him through and dump him into the pit. Its work is done.

Meanwhile, the officer’s words are also illuminating the figure of the new commander, who is first of all a reformer. Cautious but decisive, he seeks to move in a “new, gentler direction.” Questions of guilt and punishment matter to him not in themselves but rather because of his fear that the colony’s institutions might scandalize foreigners. For the rest, he concerns himself primarily with construction. “Harbor construction, always harbor construction!”: that’s what they talk about in meetings. His attitude toward foreigners is clearly that of a subordinate. He flatters the traveler, hailing him pompously as a “great scholar of the West,” and though he knows that the traveler “traveled only with the intent of observing and not of course changing foreign legal institutions,” he hopes the traveler will appeal to him to change the colony’s current methods. As if he, with his “thunderous voice,” lacks the power to act alone. Which he does not. And then there are those ladies who surround him like a swarm of Praetorians — or overage schoolgirls. Ubiquitous, capable even of latching onto the traveler’s hands and “playing with his fingers.” The officer’s words are uttered with mournful contempt. To speak of the new commander is like speaking about modern times and their shortcomings. But the officer knows he is the only one who talks like this. The last followers of the old commander keep silent in the shadows, like some secretive sect.

This speech is the officer’s pathetically resolute, last-ditch attempt to inspire in the traveler a proper, convinced admiration for the machine, but it is a hopeless task. The world has already chosen a less pure, less rigorous path, that of the new commander and his swarm of women. The truth is frightening, the officer thinks. Everyone hypocritically claims to yearn for certainty, but no one can bear to live in the world of certainty, where “guilt is always unquestionable” and the corresponding punishment is incised upon their bodies. Perfect equilibrium, unblemished transparency. It isn’t by chance that one of their “technical difficulties” was devising a way to build the harrow out of glass. That is the only way to guarantee transparency. And they “spared no effort” to achieve that end. The god of physical pain can therefore finally wrap himself, as in a sash, in the perfect limpidity of the word.

And what about those ladies’ handkerchiefs — the ones that protect the neck of the sweat-soaked officer? Should one conclude that even he needs to attenuate something, at least the hard rule of the uniform? And where have they come from, those handkerchiefs? That will become clear by the end. The officer has made up his mind. “The moment has come then,” he says. Since the traveler hasn’t yet been convinced by the machine, the officer feels obliged to take the condemned man’s place in order to have these words incised on his own back: “Be just.” Then his body will be pierced by numerous needles, and the machine will fall apart, gear by gear. A world will end. Before he lays himself down into the machine, the officer tosses the two handkerchiefs to the condemned man, whose liberty he has just restored. He says: “Here are your handkerchiefs.” And then, turning to the traveler: “Gifts from the women.” The new commander and his damned women again. So they are the ones who gave the condemned man those gauzy handkerchiefs. To mitigate his suffering, of course. Just as they stuffed him with sweets, which of course he immediately vomited up as soon as the machine began its work. And the officer in turn took the handkerchiefs away from him. Why did he do so? Out of profound meanness? Or perhaps simply because those handkerchiefs compromised the purity of the proceedings? In the end, he used them himself. Was that a failing? And now, as soon as the condemned man regains possession of his handkerchiefs, the soldier snatches them away again. The handkerchiefs just won’t disappear. The blood runs, the sun beats down, the gears groan. And the handkerchiefs continue to circulate. Between the god of pain and the collapse of his machine, the whole course of history has passed. The only remaining witnesses are those two rank handkerchiefs. And a mass of rubble.

It happens in Kafka that an archaic element, with respect to which every known archaism is merely a late derivation, commingles with a contemporary element that hadn’t yet had any way of manifesting itself. The result is a potent chemical compound no one knows how to handle. It surfaced once, like a coral reef, in “In the Penal Colony”—then hastily submerged itself again. It didn’t let itself be looked at for long, but its presence remained noticeable beneath the water’s surface.

One November evening, “with complete indifference,” Kafka read his “dirty story” (“In the Penal Colony”) in a Munich gallery, in front of fifty or so people and some paintings by Van Dongen and Vlaminck that hung on the wall. He felt as cold as “the empty mouth of a stove.” As he read, the graphologist Max Pulver had the impression that “a faint odor of blood was spreading” through the room. At a certain point a dull thud was heard. A woman had fainted and was immediately carried outside. Others left before the end. Others complained that the reading had gone on too long.

Karl Rossmann is the little fairy-tale hero who gets thrown into the world. Serious, tenacious, ready for anything, curious, sturdy. He encounters ogres and ogresses, other boys and girls, policemen and vagabonds, to all and each he speaks as an adult, with gravity and propriety. The sentence that precedes him, which has driven him from his homeland and his family, doesn’t in his eyes compromise or cloud the world, which in America appears above all enlarged and multiplied. “How tall it is,” thinks Karl of the Statue of Liberty, as his ship passes slowly by. He’s not surprised when he sees the statue brandishing a sword instead of a torch. Karl observes, takes note. And this will be his approach throughout: to measure the world, its increasing quantities, its doors, its drawers, its compartments, its steps, its floors, its ever-growing number of vehicles. Nothing could be more natural for a boy who has always “been terribly interested in technology.” No doubt he would have become an engineer if they hadn’t sent him off to America. Karl immediately perceives whatever comes along as an element in a series. And this seriality of the perceived alters first and foremost the eye of the perceiver. He’ll come to see himself as substitutable, like one of the many dotlike figures that, seen from above, move through the streets and quickly vanish. Or else the same figures are simply reappearing again and again. The effect would be the same. Repetition of the identical looks the same as endless substitution.