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not write. He felt that the commerce with his own "dark powers" was
both forbidden and essential to his writing. In a letter to Max Brod,
he wrote :
Writing is a sweet and wonderful reward, but for what? In the
night it became clear to me, as clear as a child's lesson book, that
it is the reward for serving the devil. This descent to the dark
powers, this unshackling of spirits bound by nature, these
dubious embraces and whatever else may take place in the
nether parts which the higher parts no longer know, when one
writes one's stories in the sunshine. Perhaps there are other
forms of writing, but I know only this kind; at night, when fear
keeps me from sleeping, I know only this kind. And the diabolic
element in it seems very clear to me .
The campaign to sanctify the writer of this passage, which
began with Brod and has continued ever since, might convince us
that he didn't really mean all this about dark powers, dubious em–
braces, and nether parts. Perhaps it was all ironic . But the cleverest
irony may be to say exactly what one means.
Heller, Canetti, and Brod are unanimous in their rejection of
psychoanalysis, doubtless sensing that it might alter the rather sen–
timental icon they have created. Canetti writes, "Kafka's sovereign
perspective on psychoanalysis ought to have helped critics detach
from its constricting domain his own person at least." As though a
sovereign perspective on the laws of gravity would permit one to
walk on air.
The attempt to misunderstand Kafka, to deny the subjective
and unconscious elements in his work, is nowhere clearer than in the
effort to transform the nightmarish horror and perverse sexuality of
"In the Penal Colony" entirely into the elements of a philosophical
conte. The story concerns an explorer who visits a penal colony
dominated by a torture machine, a monstrous contraption, invented
by
the former Commandant, that writes on his body with needles the
commandment broken by the victim, then after hours of torture
culminating in a moment of "enlightenment," pierces him through
and drops him into a waste pit. The officer who operates the
machine describes this process enthusiastically as he prepares the
machine to execute a prisoner. When the explorer expresses his op–
position to such methods, the officer lies down on the machine
himself and is executed . The explorer then leaves the colony.
Heller's comments on this story are worth quoting in part:
