K.

IX. Ladies’ Handkerchiefs

The apparatus — a “singular apparatus,” as the officer in charge of operating it observes with warm satisfaction — is embedded in the sandy ground, in a sunny little valley of the penal colony, where one breathes a “damned, malignant tropical air.” Four men stand around the apparatus: the officer; a condemned man in chains, who shows signs of animal-like devotion while waiting to be laid down into the machine; a soldier, whose task it is to supervise the condemned man; and a traveler (not a mere tourist, but an honored guest reputed to be a “great scholar”). Amid this stark masculine scene — military, correctional, colonial — a single feminine element: “two delicate ladies’ handkerchiefs” that the officer has tucked between his uniform collar and his sweaty, sunburned neck. It’s a heavy uniform for the tropical climate, the traveler remarks at the outset, thus eliciting from the officer a declaration of principle: of course the uniforms are heavy, “but they signify the homeland, and we don’t want to lose the homeland.” The delicate ladies’ handkerchiefs, then, serve to mitigate the hardships the officer must face in a climate that otherwise might cause him to “lose the homeland.”

Near the apparatus sits a “heap of bamboo chairs,” as from an abandoned café chantant. The traveler is offered one so that he may witness the execution in comfort. Meanwhile the officer continues implacably to explain, in French, the workings of the machine. The traveler has trouble hiding a certain indifference and at a certain point interjects a dim little remark meant to affirm the liveliness of his interest: “So, the man is lying there.” As the traveler says these words, he crosses his legs and leans back in his bamboo chair. He’s ready to watch now.

Through the officer’s words, the powerful figure of the “old commander” emerges. The machine’s conception was entirely his, as was its creation. The traveler wants to make sure: “So he was everything himself? He was soldier, judge, builder, chemist, draftsman?” “Of course,” replies the officer, proud. The old commander comes increasingly to resemble one of those titans who flourished in the nineteenth century, breaking down every barrier. They were professional geniuses, and they wanted to manipulate humanity as if it were a compliant keyboard. With his machine the old commander succeeded in realizing the most profound epistemological aspiration of his time, which Friedrich Hebbel once described in his Diaries: “On days like this, one feels as if the pen had been dipped, instead of into ink, directly into blood and brain.” The world was marching toward the same goal but without the “as if,” the final obstacle. All knowledge that was mediated — by the sound of language, by the ungraspable mind — was diminished, sapped. In order to reach a level of unquestionable truth, knowledge must be inscribed — in the sense of incised—on the body. Only in this way could one make sure that the word passed instantly into the blood. And the old commander had shown the way: the harrow took the pen’s place and wrote “directly” (Hebbel would have said) onto the body of the condemned. The result is the only absolute knowledge, which renders superfluous every other. For this reason, the condemned man wasn’t informed of his sentence. There was no need, as the officer explained: “he experiences it on his body.” Kafka wrote in his Diaries (in 1922, eight years after the draft and three years after the publication of “In the Penal Colony”) an observation that might corroborate the beliefs of the old commander (and his popularizer, the officer): “From a primitive point of view, the real, irrefutable truth, undisturbed by any outside element (martyrdom, sacrifice for a person), is only physical pain. Strange that the god of pain wasn’t the principal god of the earliest religions (became so only in the later ones, perhaps). Every sick man has his household god, the man with lung disease has the god of suffocation. How can one bear his approach if one hasn’t partaken of him even before the terrible union.” The old commander was a devotee of that original god who never existed, that god who chooses to become manifest in the one mode that brooks no misunderstandings: physical pain. It’s no longer a question, then, of symbols or metaphors or ceremonies — all belated, attenuated devices. At the same time, the old commander was a designer, an expert on gears and cogs. And hence quite advanced. In him the archaic in its pure state (so pure that perhaps it never existed) and the modern in its pure state were conjoined. Is there any wonder that so few were able to sustain such a level of tension?

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.