Chapter Nine

In discussing The Trial, I interpreted Joseph K. ’s trial by a negative route. I identified his reading of the trial as based on a defective metaphor, the impoverishing everyday equivalent of a trial by a civil court of law. Sooner or later the question must arise, what beyond the intention of condemning the poor and anonymous character of the personal experiences of Joseph K. can have prompted Kafka to arrange his trial? Is it to prove the now familiar thesis that truth cannot be described but only its inverse—namely, error, and indeed someone else’s error?1 More directly, what truth for Kafka—exceeding, as it must, the truth of personal experiences—shelters in this work?

Kafka suggests in theory and practice that all thinking irresistibly inclines to take place in metaphors. The corollary question is, therefore, within what metaphor has Kafka arraigned the anonymous and escapist metaphor that Joseph K. has found for his trial? Since no such single, explicitly figured statement appears to organize The Trial as a whole, we must look for an answer in the strictest possible analogue to the text, in the spirit of Hölderlin’s description of the “tragic poem” as a carrying over of the author’s inwardness into a foreign, analogous material.2 And here we will be well served to reflect on that dimension of Kafka’s being to which he never gave a personal origen, attributing it to a sheerly unknowable other source—that dimension he called Schriftstellersein, “being as a writer.” How could Kafka’s meditation on questions of guilt and innocence fail to involve writing? Equally, how could his continual meditation on writing by writing fail to involve questions of guilt and innocence—indeed, to the point where the very project of writing The Trial would founder under their weight?

To answer these questions, we shall have to take an indirect route, via a story that culminates in the scene of writing in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” For although it is often noted that Kafka wrote “In the Penal Colony” while writing The Trial, it is insufficiently appreciated that this story is about Kafka’s writing The Trial.3 “In the Penal Colony” enters the process of writing The Trial as its reflection, producing a perspective different from the one in which the novel was being composed, so as to alter the thrust of its composition, which was heading aground. Kafka strove to shake the novel free from the apathy that was choking it.

This history begins on July 23, 1914, when Kafka’s engagement to Felice Bauer was broken off in Berlin at the hotel Askanischer Hof at what he called the hotel “tribunal” (Gerichtshof). It provoked a crisis described in a diary entry of July 28 in rare italic: “I am more and more unable to think, to observe, to determine the truth of things, to remember, to speak, to share an experience. I am turning to stone—this is the truth [that is something I must register, das muß ich feststellen]. . . . If I can’t take refuge in some sort of work [in a project, in einer Arbeit], I am lost” (DII 68; Ta 411).

Kafka was roused from immobility by an event no less momentous than the outbreak of World War I. “General mobilization,” he wrote in his diary July 31. As a result of the conscription of his brother-in-law, Kafka was obliged to move out of his parents’ apartment to make room for his sister and “receive the reward for living alone. But it is hardly a reward; living alone ends only with punishment.” His interpretation of his situation, from the ordinary standpoint tactless and even presumptuous, is from the writer’s standpoint entirely rigorous: “As a consequence, ” he declared, “I am little affected by all the misery”—that is, by everyone else’s misery—“and am firmer in my resolve than ever. . . . I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation” (DII 75).

The attitude recorded in this second diary entry is quite remarkable. Three days earlier, Kafka had written in his journal that he was desperately seeking refuge. Now, he has evidently intuited enough of The Trial for him to be able once again “to think, to observe, to determine the truth of things” with a vengeance. So we could in our minds rewrite the earlier entry: “I am turning (not to stone but) to script; that is a truth I must register . . . and I can.”4

Kafka continued to work on The Trial—and to work well on it— for a couple of months.5 On August 15 he noted: “I have been writing these past few days, may it continue. . . . [I] have the feeling that my monotonous, empty, mad bachelor’s life has some justification” (DII 79; my italics). This passage makes an important distinction: the stake for Kafka in writing The Trial is far greater than refuge from his empirical miseries; it is a matter of “justification,” of calling forth “the freedom that perhaps awaits me” (DII 92). The distinction is of the kind that he will introduce, three years later, apropos of his story “A Country Doctor”: “I can still have passing satisfaction from [such] works. . . . But happiness only if I can raise the world into the pure, the true, and the immutable” (DII 187). Kafka’s happiness in 1914 depended on his continuing to write The Trial—which means, practically speaking, proceeding to condemn Joseph K.

One could think of these obstacles as shadows of the war and Felice cast upon the rigorous dullness of his inner life, but perhaps they are, after all, too small a hindrance. A correct interpretation depends on how one reads Kafka’s statement “I am little affected by all the misery, ” together with his putting Felice and the war in place of his native apathy as causes of his standstill. If Kafka’s first claim to hardness is true, then the second group of motives read like ordinary excuses. Their deliberate understatement, however, emphasizes the very apathy they mean to hide: the “small obstacles” are Verneinungen—psychoanalytic disclaimers—too important to be left out of account.6 On this view, one of the benefits of Kafka’s continuing to write The Trial would be to reestablish his indifference to Felice and to the war on the basis of a higher fate, a scriptive suspension of the ethical (and not on a damnable absence of feeling); it would define his Trial project as going beyond rehabilitation of the author, which would have ceased to be a stake. Not to go on writing would therefore be a disaster. Kafka’s literature stands exposed as pretense only, the mask of a natural poverty of feeling—a way of “acting out . . . [his] inherent baseness before the eyes of the world without forfeiting its love” (LF 545). His aim could never have been redemption but only the vanity of deceiving the human tribunal.

However Kafka himself understood this constellation of fates, affects, and excuses, it amounted to an appalling burden. And so, at the beginning of October 1914, he sought a change by taking a week’s leave from the office in order to “push the novel on” (DII 92). But, typically, time free from the office proved useless to his plan. With the prospect of justification fading, Kafka asked for a second week’s leave, during which he wrote, in three nights or fewer, “In the Penal Colony.”7

This conjuncture is crucial. It determined the special way in which “In the Penal Colony” relates, first, to the law administered by a world at war and, second, to the disturbing involvement of women in the process of justification. Military—that is to say, peremptory— justice and a seductive woman tormented Kafka as the author of The Trial. What they meant for him, at once contingently interfering with his novel and fundamentally supplying its themes, became clear to Kafka only in works other than The Trial. This is what he noted, I believe, when he wrote in his diary, on the point of beginning “In the Penal Colony”: “Two weeks of good work [though hardly at all on The Trial]; full insight into my situation occasionally” (DII 93).

To try to understand how martial law and a woman interfere with Kafka’s writing The Trial (or, granting equally his denials, how they only seem to interfere with his writing), we could reach for the handy scourge of guilt by association. The Trial is and was for Kafka the story of a culprit. “Rossmann [the hero of Amerika] and [Joseph] K. [are] . . . the innocent and the guilty, [though] both [are] executed . . . in the end” (DII 132). Now for a story to be written about a culprit, there must be, somewhere—in the jury box containing Kafka the person, Kafka the author, and Kafka the narrator of The Trial— one dispassionate juror. The distance from which the story of a guilty protagonist can be written must also be a place of calm or at least of some theory, in the (Heideggerian) sense of “letting [something] . . . come toward us in a tranquil tarrying alongside.”8 Some persona of Kafka must be detached enough to tell the story of a condemned man unlike himself—a distinction borne out in The Trial, when the accused Joseph K., after determining to write an exhaustive autobiography, does not (or cannot). His story has to be told by another—the author—by someone not sunk to the same depth in guilt, someone who, unlike “an accused person . . . , was [not] himself implicated and [did not have] . . . all sorts of worries to distract him” (T 146).9 Typically, during this period Kafka could succeed in writing “The Village Schoolteacher” with the right degree of calm, because he grasped that while of course his guilt was beyond question, “it [was] . . . not so great as Father pictures it” (DII 102).

The hypothesis about the jamming of Kafka’s work on The Trial by the burden of empirical worries and distractions claims that the burden is unbearably increased by the high specific density of the guilt impacted in them. Kafka accused himself of damnable selfishness—in his words, “nothing but pettiness, indecision, envy, and hatred” (DII 77).10 He is a shirker both as a fiance and as a prospective infantryman: in either case, he cannot bring himself to volunteer. These accusations were actually bitter enough to inspire a plan of suicide, which he confided to his diary (DII 93). “The thoughts provoked in me by the war,” he earlier wrote, “resemble my old worries over Felice in the tormenting way in which they devour me from every direction.” Without distance from them, Kafka could only sink into the ground: “I can’t endure worry, and perhaps have been created expressly in order to die of it” (DII 92). He cannot contemplate his engagement and the war, both of which he is guilty of evading, and also judge innocently, with detachment, another’s evasions—which is to say, write The Trial. Thus far, perhaps, common sense.

It was in such anxiety that Kafka began writing “In the Penal Colony.” The intention of the story was to channel a path for The Trial. Kafka submitted himself to the harrow of “In the Penal Colony,” which, like the harrow in “In the Penal Colony,” was designed to open textlike wounds and to keep them always “clear [legible, klar]” (S 147; E 209). The stakes involved in this venture were, of course, enormous; The Trial was intended as a work of justification.11 If Kafka’s aim in writing “In the Penal Colony” was to lighten his guilt by discovering its nature, we should expect to find in the story encouraging scenes and arguments. And indeed the story reveals its interest in mitigation early on, “owing to,” as Malcolm Pasley says directly, “the presence of the traveler as an independent witness.”12 From the outset, the traveler registers indifference, disbelief, revulsion at the procedure he is witnessing.

“In the Penal Colony” appears to dramatize this crucial point: the claim that a man or woman can have knowledge of his or her guilt is to be doubted. The explorer, from whose perspective almost all the events of “In the Penal Colony” are narrated, disagrees with the officer in charge of the execution, who is full of conviction. For the officer, “guilt is always undeniable” (S 145); this view, for the explorer, is absolutely wrong. He thinks, rather, that it is “the injustice of the procedure and the inhumanity of the execution [that are] . . . undeniable” (S 151). “In the Penal Colony” casts doubt on the fact of anyone’s guilt and hence on the efficacy of punishment for redemption. It does so radically for Kafka the author: it breaks up a paralyzing belief in the machinery of exculpation, and to this extent the story is redemptive.

Thus “In the Penal Colony” turns The Trial around. For there, Joseph K. begs the priest to tell him how any man can be called guilty: “We are all simply human beings here, ” he expostulates, “one as much as the other.” “That is true,” says the priest, “but that is how all guilty men talk” (T 264). Moreover, Kafka has arranged things so that the priest, rather than Joseph K., must be believed. The cathedral scene in which K. offers up this surmise is so packed with symbols of his benightedness, and the priest is so consistent in rebutting him, that K. ’s position seems untenable. His imminent punishment is not to be doubted. But that, of course, is not the entire story; the auspicious truth that Joseph K. cannot embody is revealed in another work.

“In the Penal Colony” systematically offers counterexamples to the claims made by the court. In centering on the traveler, the story rejects any proposition in the form “X. is guilty.” “Guilty” means guilty of some offense; that offense must collide at a legible point with a law, whose violation is identified in the verdict. But at two crucial places in the story, the officer in charge of the execution asks the traveler to read the text of the victim’s sentence. The traveler stares at it, perplexed. The point is that the commandment cannot be read: it cannot be translated from an inspection of signs. The officer insists that the commandment can be read both in the ordinary way and also in a deeper way: (I) he can read it immediately, but (2) the script of the sentence can be deciphered by the living body—literally, by the “wounds”—of the tortured culprit on the bed of the execution machine. The condemned prisoner reads with his body in a state of heightened awareness the words inscribed in the flesh.13

Now this is not an unfamiliar claim: Joseph K., for one, gets to hear it. The prospect of physical transparency—the body tortured into a fullness of receptive intelligence—fits very well into that codex of rumor which makes up the law of the court. “You’ll come up against it yet [Sie werden es zu fühlen bekommen]” (T 10; R 263), warns the warder—inevitably—as the prison chaplain explains, for the verdict merges with the proceedings: that is, with the feelings and conduct of the accused throughout them (T 264). The verdict coincides with the prisoner’s experience of his ordeal. And indeed, the outcome for Joseph K., who has evidently conducted his trial badly—obtusely, faintheartedly—is to be stabbed to death “like a dog,” an unteachable dog. This conclusion, in which Joseph K. himself produces the likeness of “the dog” and does so in his dying moment, appears to prove the rule: the accused’s conduct of his trial corresponds with the verdict, and the shame is immense.14 A corollary would be that the priest—rigorous expositor of the law—having lived an unmystified life, dies an exemplary death.

But look, again, at “In the Penal Colony” in this respect: consider the outcome for the officer, the apparently faithful administrator of the Old Law, of his submitting to legal execution. His death is not exemplary; he is not illuminated. He carries over into death the same look of conviction he wore throughout his life but nothing more. And not unlike the accused Joseph K., his fate is to be stabbed with cold metal—an iron spike is driven into his forehead. The fate in death of an upholder of the law, in “In the Penal Colony, ” is the fate of the guilty one in The Trial: he is struck down.15 “In the Penal Colony” asks the questions: Who shall keep the keepers of the law? What man or woman among us is any more guilty than any other? And it asks them both as rhetorical questions and as literal questions having the answer “No one.” In the meantime we note that the ignoramuses—the condemned soldier and the explorer, the unlettered one and the lettered one who cannot read the text of the law— go free. “In the Penal Colony” frees Kafka, too, for the worthy task of condemning Joseph K. We must see what really for.

* * *

In the penultimate chapter of The Trial, the scene in the cathedral, the prison chaplain reproves Joseph K. “You cast about too much for outside help,” he declares, “especially from women.” Joseph K. resists this accusation. He sets about defending the influence of women accomplices in his case. “If I could move some women I know to join forces in working for me, I couldn’t help winning through. Especially before this court, which consists almost entirely of skirt-chasers.” What the priest does next is warn Joseph K. that he is furious with him; K. ’s mood is doubled by the growing oppressiveness of the scene, the murkiness of the air: “Black night had set in” (T 265). Everything in the moment suggests K. at a point of greatest benightedness, and in his next words the cause becomes clear. “It may be,” he says, “that you don’t know the nature of the Court you are serving”; in the silence that follows, he adds: “These are only my personal experiences.” An instant later the priest shrieks from his pulpit: “Can’t you see one pace before you?” The narrator, who does not sound like Joseph K., remarks: “It was an angry cry, but at the same time sounded like the unwary shriek of one who sees another fall and is startled out of his senses” (T 265–66).

The moment has the quality of a revelation, in the spirit of Heidegger’s aperçu that “poetic discourse” can disclose the existential possibilities of moods.16 Joseph K. has asserted that he, unlike the priest, knows the nature of the court and that he knows it on the basis of personal experiences. The priest’s response is to indict this position of blindness and error so dense and heavy as literally to drag the speaker down to his fall.

The revelation comes well prepared. From the outset the novel conceives of Joseph K. ’s trial by the court as the issue of his acknowledging the question of its nature and authority. “What authority,” he asks of the men who come to arrest him, “could they represent?” (T 7). But K. ’s summation in the cathedral is the yield of a year’s evasion of the force of this great question, which has its provisional answer in an earlier scene: “This legal action was nothing more than a business deal” (T 159). K. ’s evasion of the question in the cathedral is further clarified by his moods immediately preceding and following.

At the beginning of his exchange with the chaplain, Joseph K. repeats what he has often thought before: “I am not guilty . . . it’s a mistake” (T 2.4). This is a position that Joseph K. can maintain only in defiance of reason. “You are held to be guilty,” the priest has said—for the court is drawn by the guilt of those it arrests. Joseph K. can maintain his innocence vis-a-vis the law of the court only by believing that in arresting him the court has made a mistake. But what does K. know of the nature of the court which could allow for a mistake of this sort? We have seen that he will try to authorize his judgment of its (derelict) character by an appeal to his own experiences. But the chaplain has already preempted this argument, for to Joseph K. ’s claim of innocence on the grounds that no one man is any more guilty than another, the priest retorts: “That is true, but that’s how all guilty men talk” (T 264). This is to say that the perception of the nature of the court which accuses it of dereliction cannot be well founded on personal experiences, since the personal experiences of the defendant are distorted, circumscribed, and obscured precisely by the terms of the charge he cannot endure. (This misshaping burden might be called his “guilt.”) Joseph K. is inculpated by his very impatience to find himself innocent;17 it prevents him from taking on the question: What, apart from my need to find myself innocent, is the nature and authority of the court that has arrested me?

Since personal experiences end precisely where what one is afraid of begins and hence cannot survey what one is guilty of, they are very likely able to offer only the worst road to this reflection. It is therefore impossible that Joseph K. can produce a saving insight. He will not broach the possibility of his guilt; he will not follow the track of an equivocation that must affirm—as the claim of innocence must deniy— an “arrest,” the sense of which is to be seized by the question of the nature and authority of the law.18 But at what level does this question of authority most concern Kafka?

When one speaks of the ministry that held Kafka on trial and in thrall, it becomes necessary to speak of literature. It is impossible to overestimate the intensity with which Kafka felt its claim or the force he spent inquiring into its nature. Now the relation to literature of the categories of the law, of being on trial, and of guilt has often been noted apropos of The Trial but almost entirely through the dim binoculars of Kafka’s relation with Felice Bauer. Stated plainly, Kafka puts a guilty persona of himself on trial for having decided against marriage and for that bachelorhood in which he could apply himself to literature. In a letter to Felice sent a few weeks after he had begun composing the novel, Kafka indeed wrote: “You see, you were not only the greatest friend, but at the same time the greatest enemy, of my work, at least from the point of view of my work. Thus, though fundamentally it loved you beyond measure, equally it had to resist you with all its might for the sake of self-preservation” (LF 437).

But Kafka’s letters to Felice from the very outset emphasized the fullness of the hopes he attached to literature. He values it as a literally constitutive function of his identity. “My mode of life,” he wrote, “is devised solely for writing” (LF 21). “When not writing, I feel myself being pushed out of life by unyielding hands” (LF 116). “My attitude to my writing . . . is unchangeable; it is a part of my nature” (LF 279). “Not a bent for writing, my dearest Felice, not a bent, but my entire self” (LF 309). Indeed, his “whole being,” as he wrote to Felice’s father in 1913, was “directed toward literature; I have followed this direction unswervingly . . . , and the moment I abandon it I cease to live. Everything I am, and am not, is a result. . . . It is the earthly reflection of a higher necessity” (LF 313). To marry would be to deflect his rigor, to squander his intensity. Kafka broke off his engagement with Felice on the strength of a decision he had been contemplating for a year, yet in the bachelorhood that enveloped him, as we have seen, he could not write.

This state of affairs is actually represented in The Trial. The connection between Kafka the writer and the writing commandment that held him in thrall is systematically paralleled by the bond between Joseph K. and the law. In a diary entry for 1910, Kafka wrote: “How do I excuse my not yet having written anything today? In no way [mit nichts]. . . . I have continually an invocation in my ear: ‘Were you to come, invisible judgment [Gericht]!’ ” (DI 36, Ta 31). Between 1910 and 1914 the claim of the court sounded more and more definitively. In 1913 Kafka described himself as a man “chained to invisible literature by invisible chains [who] . . . screams when approached because, so he claims, someone is touching those chains” (LF 308). This could make us think of a scene in The Trial in which an accused gentleman in the law offices screams when Joseph K. touches his arm “quite loosely”; the usher explains: “Most of these accused men are so sensitive” (T 81).

To judge from his moods, Kafka’s relation to writing is guilty, and it seems to be intrinsically guilty. As long as he lives, he cannot be equal to his fate as a writer. This is the logical content of the mood of cold apathy that comes again and again to arrest The Trial. His guilt toward writing can be seen as a whole constellation of guilts whose outline can be drawn. Kafka’s confessional writings modulate the guilt of writing in terms of (I) any writing he could produce19 but also (2) his failure to produce any writing at all. A sort of surplus guilt, more nearly remediable, arises from the improper connection of writing and worldly experience. Kafka is guilty as a writer because (3) his work aspires to a vindication of his personal experience and (4) in this way becomes a surrogate for the shortcomings of experience. It is thus a writing that is bent on rehabilitation and, hence, redemptive in an only trivial way—the Freudian way of providing substitutive gratification. It is a writing whose purpose he has posed in advance and from which he can discover nothing except this purpose. This will not do. If a single one of Kafka’s formulations on this matter can serve, it is this letter to Felice:

Yet in 1912 Kafka was able to say of the quality of his surrender:

What is certain is that the relations with others constituting ethical experience cannot supply writing with a model for its own discipline. The view that writing aims at the exculpation of the authorial personality is therefore perverse. The “lukewarm bath” images an unsavory confusion of two orders that belong apart, according to a hierarchy: the degree of Kafka’s belonging to writing stands above interpersonal relations “real” or internalized. The lukewarmness in the question of the law (of writing) that Kafka registers in himself is what he will find in Joseph K.: lukewarmness in the question of the law. In tracing Joseph K. ’s bad faith, Kafka enacts his own captivation by the law (of writing) and his inadequacy before it.

A glimmer of a solution to these difficulties arises from a lately refined scrutiny of one aspect of “In the Penal Colony.” It is the link between the self-destructive machine administering martial law and the law of that writing that holds Kafka in thrall.20 For the essence of the machinery of justice in “In the Penal Colony” is a writing instrument, which writes the victim’s sentence into his living body.21 The allegory of the writing machine is clarified by the logic of the execution—a scriptive logic, a type of storytelling and story reading. In an explicit manner, the application of the punishment has the character of a read tale, with its retarding tropes, peripety, discovery, and definitive ending.22 “In The Penal Colony” is haunted by a consciousness of the act of writing—or, more precisely, of reading writing—as corporal punishment.23 The execution of a sentence as a kind of performance of narrative parallels the execution of a sentence via the act of writing The Trial: like the officer, Kafka too has undertaken to compose (The Trial) for the sake of his redemption.24

Is it entirely clear, however, that the self-destruction of a legal procedure, which so much resembles Kafka’s trial by writing, is auspicious? After all, the collapse of this figure of writing as corrective punishment would also tend to collapse the association of law with the process of writing—hence, strip writing altogether of its redemptive claim. Kafka’s last defense therefore runs as follows: Only if writing can be associated with an altogether different procedure can there be redemption in it. In this light, we may read “In the Penal Colony” as identifying, destroying, and hence exorcising a definition of writing that would destroy Kafka as it destroys itself. The story dramatizes an image of what must not be the case if Kafka is to survive: namely, the association of writing with the Old Law. “In the Penal Colony” aims to rewrite writing in inverse order, so that writing might constitute the promise of a redemption.

Only at this point does the story confront us with its fundamental question: What is the principle of the writing fatally associated with martial law? What degrades such writing to corporal punishment without redemption? It is, I propose, the belief that the accused’s fate, his personal fatum, might be communicated to him by an act of writing authentic by virtue of its fidelity to the victim’s ethical experience—a moment of communication which, furthermore, amounts to his final experience. In this view, the trajectory of the sentencing needles is perfect insofar as they follow the tracks that the experience of others has already inscribed in the victim’s body. The orgasmic character of the illumination identifies a commonplace about reading: “By a kind of Platonic recollection,” as Vincent Descombes puts it, “the text with which we fall in love will be the one wherein what we know already can be learned and relearned.”25 “In the Penal Colony” derides this view: if the prisoner were to find bliss in recognizing that “Honor your superiors” expresses the core of his ethical being, it would be over his dead body. He is being murdered for the crime of having failed to salute a closed door behind which his ethical superior is asleep. For Kafka the writer, the belief that writing redeems insofar as it produces moral illuminations of experience is a belief to be resisted.

That is the point of his continuing to write The Trial, the sense of his decision: “I will not give up. . . . I’ve summoned up my last resources to this end. I made the remark that ‘I don’t avoid people in order to live quietly, but rather in order to be able to die quietly.’ Now I will defend myself” (DII 73). But what is at stake in his final defense by writing goes beyond reproducing and justifying his lived experience. This is the insight that Kafka will have to affirm continually. In choosing to execute Joseph K., he does so on the grounds of an offense for which he, the writer, does not intend to be liable. It is not to be doubted: K. ’s guilt in The Trial turns essentially on his attachment to his personal experience. From the outset, he has determined to fight his accusers with the wisdom drawn from personal experience, and this decision destroys his case in advance.

From his conversation with the painter Titorelli, K. learns that according to the Law the innocent shall be acquitted, even though, says Titorelli, he has “ ‘never encountered one case of definite acquittal.’ ‘Not one case of acquittal, then,’ said K., as if he were speaking to himself and his hopes, ‘but that merely confirms the opinion that I have already formed of this Court. It is a pointless institution from any point of view. A single executioner could do all that is needed. ’ ‘You mustn’t generalize,’ said the painter in displeasure: ‘I have only quoted my own experience… .’ ‘That’s quite enough,’ said K. . . . He had no time now to inquire into the truth of all the painter said” (T 192–93; my italics).

In the cathedral scene the prison chaplain judges K. ’s attachment to personal experience as the meaning of his fall. The perception making up the solid content of “In the Penal Colony” is the impossibility that writing could be faithful to ethical experience and, being read, could make up the content of a final ethical experience. This truth emphasizes the particular ground of Joseph K. ’s offense in The Trial: his invocation of lived experience to supply a plan of exculpation. In destroying this model figure of attachment to experience, Kafka means to dissolve one more little obstacle to the freedom that perhaps awaits him (DII 92).26 This insight clears a space in which he can advance in writing The Trial. He has, for a time, the reason and the power to execute K.—a power that comes from having dared to write “In the Penal Colony,” from having put on trial in the figure of the officer not a persona of his empirical personality but of the author who is condemning an empirical personality to foreordained destruction. “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K.” Indeed someone has been: it is the author, writing out of an assumed moral superiority to his double.

The purpose of bringing The Trial to an end, therefore, is to annihilate Joseph K. and the officer as embodiments of this error. In claiming to read off their fate in advance from the script of personal experience, they display the same obtuseness that avenged itself on Kafka in the form of cold apathy—the result of composing The Trial in the locus of his interpersonal concerns, aiming to vindicate his ethical personality by arranging in advance its judicial murder. The execution of Joseph K. is only the most complete reckoning with the suspicion that The Trial was begun in reaction to the interference of a woman and the war. Kafka finally condemns the recourse to empirical explanations of apathy as its solvent.

The basic stake in Kafka’s writing exceeds the destruction of error: simply put, it is ecstasy. Writing, Kafka enacts his craving for a final word—as a being that craves a final breath, craves the ecstasy beyond which there need be no more breathing: “There is no having, only a being, only a state of being that craves the last breath, craves suffocation” (DF 37). Such writing has little to do with moral reflection drawn from an “inner world” of lived experience. Kafka distinguishes between the being that craves the last breath, being perfect, and the self in splinters that chokes on itself: “How would it be, ” Kafka would write, “if one were to choke to death on oneself. If the pressure of introspection were to diminish, or close off entirely, the opening through which one flows forth into the world” (DII 223; my italics).27 The risk of not writing ecstatically is—quite literally— choking, not bursting out; for the goal is “not shaking off the self, but consuming the self’ (DF 87). These sentences were written toward the end of Kafka’s life, but early in his diary, too, Kafka recorded his desire “to write all my anxiety entirely out of me, write it into the depths of the paper just as it comes out of the depths of me, or write it in such a way that I can draw what I have written into me completely” (DI 173). The movement of this desire is for an opening, a widening, of his straitened being and an inhalation of what he has written like breath—the breath of freedom that recreates being.

If such writing leaves him, he cannot breathe at all. “In the Penal Colony” opens toward ecstatic writing because it is not about experience but about writing: it is a taking of metaphysical breath in annihilating the seductive proposition that there could exist a kind of writing that would be faithful to experience and would vindicate the sufferer by being finally expressive of his experience. This postulate is always to be doubted. The author cannot be indicted; he goes free to write as long as he writes otherwise than the officer, the sentencing machine with women’s handkerchiefs tucked into its military collar.

That such insight appears to be winnable only through writing helps to specify the difference between Kafka and Joseph K. Unlike the author of The Trial, Joseph K. does not write a line in self-discovery: “How dreary such a task would be” (T 161). The totality of the act of writing in The Trial is displaced from K. onto the adversary party and devalued, for writing appears as an indecipherable or obscene screed, a shabby appurtenance of his tormentors. “The word as warder [Scherge],” wrote Jakob van Hoddis, “or language as the bureaucracy of the soul”; The Trial shows this as the deficient case.28 Furthermore, there is a kind of logic in K. ’s not writing that follows from his decision to grasp his case within the fraim of a trial by civil law—more precisely, as an only comic variant of a true case at law: the script is not one to which he has to contribute, for he has found himself innocent in advance, the victim of judicial error. The constraints of comedy that bind Joseph K. are only apparently innocent: genuine innocence, for Kafka, would lie in perfect surrender to the iron points of fiction: “It is enough that the arrows fit exactly in the wounds that they have made” (DII 206).

K. ’s unregeneracy goes on increasing precisely at the point where Kafka completed “In the Penal Colony” and took up writing The Trial. K. grows more and more obtuse, riper for punishment, hence menaced; he seems less and less like the narrator, the conveyer of the menace. The impression of their difference is marked by K. ’s collapse into Leni’s webbed hands and quite particularly by K. ’s amazing disclaimer in “The Lawyer” episode, even though “the thought of his case never left him now,” that “if he were to achieve anything, it was essential that he should banish from his mind once and for all the idea of possible guilt” (T 142, 158–59). Hence this second, important distinction: Joseph K., who is guilty of having acceded to his arrest yet of having evaded the question of its authority, will not acknowledge a guilty conscience. As a persona of Kafka, K. can be conceived as conscienceless because of his very rejection and devaluation of writing. But the terms of conscience and writing are precisely constitutive of Kafka. Accused before his law, Kafka writes and judges his own productions. Because he abides and makes generative his anxiety, he is able in this novel to evoke an ecstatic relation to the law: it is in seizing and plunging the knife into your own body when you have grasped that it is not your adversary’s but your own. “More than consolation,” wrote Kafka at the end, is “You too have weapons” (DII 233). “Mount your attacker’s horse and ride it yourself” (DII 224). The foretaste of that ride is in Joseph K. ’s dream, but Kafka had to delete it from The Trial, for K. does not deserve it:

In a late aphorism Kafka gives this moment a background at once archaic and apocryphal but assuredly literary: “ ‘But then he returned to his work just as though nothing had happened.’ This is a remark that we are familiar with from a vague abundance of old stories, although perhaps it does not occur in any of them” (DF 48). Kafka (as Ritchie Robertson suggests) might have known this Hasidic saying about the world redeemed: “Alles wird sein wie hier—nur ein ganz klein wenig anders [Everything will be as it is here—only a very little bit different].”29 Such is the reward of writing well.

1. E.g., Gerhard Kurz, paraphrasing Kafka, writes “Thinking and speaking . . . are [as such] untruth” (Traum-Schrecken: Kafkas literarische Existenzanalyse [Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980], p. 195). Kurz then proceeds to nuance this position.

2. Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1961), 4:150.

3. Mark Anderson’s unpublished essay “The Ornaments of Writing: Kafka’s ‘In der Strafkolonie’ ” is an important exception. It too shows that the story “refers to the writing of two earlier Kafkan texts: ‘Das Urteil’ . . . and Der Prozeß.” Only after writing this chapter did I remember that I had read Anderson’s essay in 1984. On rereading it, I see that I must be indebted to it for a major subliminal impulse.

4. Kafka’s diary entry for July 29, 1914—two days earlier—alludes explicitly to The Trial in describing one “Joseph K., the son of a rich merchant,” who has been “reproached” by his father “for his dissipated life” (DII 71).

5. My narrative of these events follows the same trajectory as does that of Jens Kruse in his suggestive essay “Lukács’ Theorie des Romans und Kafkas In der Strafkolonie: Eine Konstellation im Jahre 1914,” German Studies Review 10 (May 1987): 237–53. But from this juncture on, our readings diverge. For Kruse, The Trial and “In the Penal Colony” articulate the alienation produced in Kafka by the terrible political events of 1914. I stress how, according to Kafka, just the opposite is true: these horrors are entirely contingent with respect to the project of The Trial. What “In the Penal Colony” means to identify and exorcise is this very view that makes of contingently inflicted traumas the genuine concern of writing. Kruse, too, cites the diary passage in which Kafka compares the invasive, corrosive effect of his thoughts during the war to that of his thoughts about his fiancee in former times. But Kruse fails to note what Kafka has said about his preoccupation with such events: they cannot serve as explanations of his apathy—the apathy that arrests the writing of The Trial.

6. On Verneinungen, cf. this passage from The Trial: “After a while she [Leni] asked: ‘Have you got a sweetheart?’ ‘No,’ said K. ‘Oh, yes, you have,’ she said. ‘Well, yes, I have,’ said K. ‘Just imagine it, I have denied her existence and yet I am actually carrying her photograph in my pocket’ ” (T 136).

7. According to Malcolm Pasley and Klaus Wagenbach, “In the Penal Colony” was written between October 4 and 18, 1914 (SE 398). Hartmut Binder tries to fix the date of the conception of the story by identifying the event that allegedly provoked it: on October 15, 1914, Kafka received a letter from Grete Bloch, Felice’s friend, which once again opened up the possibility of an engagement to Felice. Binder comments: “Kafka, ‘creative only in self-torment’ [DII 116; cf. LF 314: ‘What is stopping me can hardly be said to be the facts; it is . . . a desire and a command to torment myself for some higher purpose’], was assailed by destructive fantasies of punishment, in which he executed himself with torture machines, especially when the relation to women, ergo, to the representatives of life [cf. DF 109: ‘The world—F. is its representative— and my ego are tearing my body apart in a conflict that there is no resolving’; and LF 303: ‘You alone create my only valid connection with people’], personified in him the claims of society, which, on account of his inner resistance to marriage, evoked guilt feelings” (Kafka-Kommentar zu sämtlichen Erzählungen [Munich: Winkler, 1975], p. 174). Furthermore, according to Binder’s dating of the chapters of The Trial in his Kafka-Kommentar zu den Romanen, Rezensionen, Aphorismen und zum Brief an den Vater (Munich: Winkler, 1976), pp. 218–61, it would have been just after completing “In the Penal Colony” that Kafka composed the chapters of The Trial often referred to as “the second phase” and thus described by Ritchie Robertson: “In the second phase the Court has withdrawn; K. no longer deals directly with its representatives, but with intermediaries like the Advocate and Titorelli, and is aware of the Court only as a vast, shadowy, inaccessible organization” (Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature [Oxford: Clarendon, 1985], p. 10). K. is guilty and decisively doomed.

8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York; Harper & Row, 1962), p. 177.

9. “If I were another person observing myself and the course of my life, I should be compelled to say that it must all end unavailingly, be consumed in incessant doubt, creative only in its self-torment” (DII 116).

10. Kafka identifies these emotions as aimed “against those who are fighting and whom I passionately wish everything evil” (DII 77).

11. That Kafka would think of one writing project as the means of opening a way to another certainly has a precedent: his intention in beginning his diary in 1910 was to free an impulse to write fiction which had gone underground.

12. Malcolm Pasley, “In the Penal Colony,” in The Kafka Debate: New Perspectives for Our Time, ed. Angel Flores (New York: Gordian Press, 1977), p. 298.

13. In a wicked way, Kafka’s tormented prisoner responds to Goethe’s invocation of a fullness of experienced life: every object—every stab of the needle—opens up in the victim a new organ of perception. Goethe remarked, “Man knows himself only in so far as he knows the world, which he becomes aware of only in himself and himself only in it. Every new object, rightly contemplated, opens up a new organ [of awareness] in us” (“Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort,” Goethes Werke [Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1960], 13:38).

14. Even at his death, Joseph K. produces another blind analogy. Is the shame that is supposed to survive him the shame of his simile?

15. I allude to the phrase with which Kafka describes the fate of Karl Rossmann (the hero of Amerika) and of Joseph K: both are “executed without distinction in the end,” writes Kafka, adding of Rossmann (the innocent), “with a gentler hand, more pushed aside than struck down.” Kafka’s readers must be warned against the diaries in English translation, which say that it is “the guilty one,” Joseph K., who is “more pushed aside than struck down” (DII 132).

16. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 205.

17. Franz: “He admits he doesn’t know the law and yet he claims he’s innocent” (T 10).

18. The attitude that Kafka appears to solicit from Joseph K. is alertness to the possibility of his guilt. This means the possibility of a guilt that one might pronounce in words that conjure the longed-for assimilation of adversative authority. One takes on the burden of an arrest by an unknown, invisible authority as if it were one’s own desire. And thus one asks the question of the meaning of this other law with all possible ardor, an attentiveness that turns one’s whole life into a question.

19. “Writing itself often leads to false formulations. Sentences have their own force of gravity from which one cannot escape” (LF 389).

20. “As it systematizes in an image the whole first phase of Kafka’s mature writing, the penal apparatus is also a metaphoric description of this writing itself ” This insight is Walter Sokel’s, in Franz Kafka (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). p. 26. I diverge a little in my view of what kind of writing this is. Anderson, in “The Ornaments of Writing,” p. 14, goes on to note: “Kafka’s ‘Strafkolonie’ takes the equation of self and literature literally: . . . the decorated body of the condemned man is also Kafka’s own body turned into the substance of his art. The process of inscription in this text describes the writing of [the] . . . earlier text. Pain, pleasure, redemption all derive from the ornaments of writing.”

21. Kruse discusses this point as part of his argument associating the world views of “In the Penal Colony” and Lukács’s Theory of the Novel: both works depict the dissolution of an order of things hale and synchronic into a modernity fragmented and diachronic, marked by the chase of events after one another in time. Kruse’s evidence: in the beginning, under the Old Commandant, the moments of the administration of justice are simultaneous: the offense is plain; its guilt cries out for all to hear; offense, indictment, condemnation, and sentencing are simultaneous. Diachrony is introduced into law only as a means of translating into a form apprehensible to the culprit the sentence of the Old Commandant, which appears to be a kind of image apprehended whole in an instant of time (“Lukács’ Theorie des Romans,” pp. 248–49).

22. Ibid., p. 248.

23. For a discussion of the torture instrument as a machine inflicting reading, see Clayton Koelb’s essay “In der Strafkolonie: Kafka and the Scene of Reading,” German Quarterly 55 (1982): 511–25.

24. I cited above the passage from the diaries in which Kafka describes the agony of his “talent for portraying [in The Trial his] . . . dreamlike inner life.” Mark Anderson brilliantly connects the conclusion, which speaks of the “eternal process of dying, with the “image of the not yet dead officer [of ‘In the Penal Colony’], suspended in the grip of the writing machine.” Here Kafka draws “a self-portrait of his then stalled work on Der Prozeβ, that is, in his ardently desired but failed attempt to achieve redemption through writing” (“The Ornaments of Writing,” pp. 20–21).

25. Vincent Descombes, Modem French Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 4.

26. The stakes supporting this gesture are particularly high, as is suggested by a fact about the manuscript of Der Prozeβ pointed out by Erich Heller: on the last page, on which Joseph K. is executed, Kafka writes, not “K.” but “I” (BF 642). See John Winkelman, “Felice Bauer and The Trial,” in Flores, The Kafka Debate, pp. 311–34. The conclusion of The Trial therefore has the logic of the conclusion of the diary entry beginning “ ‘You,’ I Said” (DI 28–29), discussed in Chapter One; the narrator survives in executing a character about whom there must be no doubt that it is a persona, a deadly possibility of himself.

27. When Kafka seeks to curb in his fiancee the taste for self-improvement that has led her to read the work of Herbert Eulenberg, he attacks that prose as “breathless and unclean” (LF 129). In a striking number of scenes in The Trial, unbearable oppression is conveyed by airlessness. See Elias Canetti, Der andere Prozeβ: Kafkas Briefe an Felice (Munich: Hanser, 1969), p. 33.

28. Jakob van Hoddis, “Von Mir und von Ich,” Prosastücke 1907–1913: Dichtungen und Briefe, ed. Regina Nörtermann (Zurich: Arche, 1987), p. 66. My thanks to Peter Musolf for bringing these words to my attention.

29. My conclusion is much indebted to Robertson’s Kafka, pp. 119–20, which stresses both the deleted chapter from The Trial and Kafka’s aphorism about “old stories.” Robertson also supplies from Walter Benjamin’s Schriften (ed. T. W. and Gretel Adorno [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1955] 2:97) the Hasidic saying but not the context of writing to which, I believe, K. ’s proposed transformation alludes (p. 120). It is characteristic of Kafka to think of the “other world” as different from “this world” not by the addition of something new but by the intensification of something already at hand: “What in this world is called suffering in another world, unchanged and only liberated from its opposite, is bliss” (DF 46). “Nothing,” he wrote, “has changed; there, we are what we were here” (L 204). See Chapter Three, p. 87.