ELIZABETH DALTON
407
cotton wool" that staunches the bleeding. The fact that women bleed
from the genital, with its disturbing suggestion of the vagina as a
wound, arouses the fear of castration during intercourse . All of these
disgusting and frightening ideas surrounding sex culminate in the
"enlightenment," an image of orgasm as annihilation : the victim's
entire body is "pierced quite through" by the Harrow, with a spike
driven through his head .
This is a spectacular example of what Freud calls the
sadomasochistic primal scene , the child's misunderstanding of inter–
course as a struggle in which the father injures the mother. In this
conception, sexual excitement becomes dominated by ideas of
cruelty and violence. But the scene in the penal colony has taken still
another turn . The masochistic victim here is not a woman but a
man . The fantasy has a plainly homosexual character: the man is
laid face down on the Bed , bound and gagged, his body penetrated
from behind over a period of hours until the orgastic moment of
enlightenment and death.
The apparatus that carries out this homosexual rape unites the
grandeur of the paternal phallus with patriarchal moral severity.
Hatred for the father - whether a real human father or a mythic
figure - is often taken to be at the core of Kafka's work. This is a bit
too simple. In this story we see the other, "negative" half of what
Freud calls the "complete Oedipus complex ." That is, the son has
erotic as well as hostile feelings for the father , and feminine as well as
masculine identifications . This homosexual component is embodied
in "In the Penal Colony" with spectacular intensity. But there is con–
siderable resistance against seeing it. (Canetti, for instance, writes,
"His struggle with his father was essentially never anything but a
struggle against superior power.") The saintly opponent of violence
and paternal tyranny is a more acceptable figure than the creator of
a darkly perverse fiction in which paternal violence is erotically ex–
citing.
Why should the Oedipus complex have taken this particular
form? Part of the answer is contained in the fantasy itself. In the
"positive" Oedipal resolution, the son both identifies and competes
with his father. But it might seem impossible to do either with the
brutal father of the sadistic primal scene. From a figure such as the
Old Commandant, with his terrifying machine for punishing in–
subordination, the Oedipal threat of castration becomes all too real.
It seems preferable to retreat from the competition and instead to
submit, to play the passive "feminine" role. The result is a sort of
