400
PARTISAN REVIEW
... there often appears in Kafka's works the reflection of a
transcendent light on the faces of those about to be freed from
their guilty individual state. While Schopenhauer is fond of thus
interpreting the peace that shows in the features of the dead, with
Kafka it sometimes seems that the lifting of the curse of in–
dividuation is welcomed ecstatically, that the victim himself re–
joices in the fulfillment of the Law exacting the supreme penalty
for the sin against the original all-oneness. It is as if many a terri–
ble dying described by Kafka were perverse love-deaths, partak–
ing of the rapture of a final reunion after the sorrows of a long
deprivation . ... It might have been once again upon the in–
struction of Schopenhauer himself that the face of the officer who
eventually does "get under the Harrow" himself ... shows no
sign of the "promised redemption ." . .. Upon the instruction of
Schopenhauer: for the philosopher abhorred suicide as a means
of overcoming individual existence, seeing it not as self-conquest
but . . . as a desperate, hysterical, and perverse self-asser–
tion - the precise characterization of the officer's self-execution.
This account of the story obscures as much as it illuminates. A
philosophical skeleton is exposed, but in the process the story is
eviscerated. Why must the curse of individuation be lifted so
sadistically, with hours of agonizing torture described in minute
detail? Wouldn't a thunderbolt do as well? What is distinctively
Kafkaesque in this situation, what it
feels
like to wish for annihila–
tion, is left out. And so is the response evoked by the story. Why
does the reader experience a queasy excitement at the working out of
this philosophical parable, a painful mixture of curiosity and disgust
not unlike the sensations that attended childhod research into certain
forbidden subjects? Kafka's own comment on "In the Penal Colony"
is quite succinct: in a letter he referred to it as "my filthy story."
"In the Penal Colony" has received rather less critical attention
than "The Metamorphosis" and "The Judgment," perhaps because of
its unusual gruesomeness. Another problem also presents itself,
leading to a tempting but anachronistic misreading in terms of his–
tory. The penal colony seems a grimly ironic forecast of the concen–
tration camps, where Ottla and Kafka's two other sisters died and
where his own life probably would have ended had he not died
earlier. But "In the Penal Colony" is not about a concentration
camp; it is about the place where concentration camps were in–
vented.
The penal colony is a place in the mind, that part of the mind
