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PARTISAN REVIEW
double bind or logical impasse: the threat of castration is avoided by
becoming castrated . Incised and spiked , the body on the H arrow
must be not only castrated but pulverized .
In reading the story, the related meanings of the machine are
taken in simultaneously . The "harrowing" of guilt is experienced in
the form of a masochistic fantasy arousing fear , disgust, and excite–
ment. The fantasy suggests why the person who always feels guilty
cannot stop torturing himself: the torture gives him a strange kind of
erotic pleasure . The extremity of this fantasy of castration, rape , and
death would seem incompatible with pleasure , even of the most
obscurely unconscious kind . However, Freud writes that "castration,
although it is later disavowed, enters into the content of masochistic
phantasies as a precipitate of the phallic stage"; and finally , "even the
subject's destruction of himself cannot take place without libidinal
satisfaction. "
Although the Old Commandant, his machine, and his officer
still dominate the colony, they no longer have it all their own way.
There is a new Commandant who has "a thousand new schemes in
his head ." This conflict between old and new regimes suggests an in–
ternal conflict between a primitive superego and the more humane
conscience of the mature personality.
It
has also suggested to some
critics the difference between Old and New Testaments and the
harsh justice of the god of the Jews as opposed to the Christian idea
of a god of mercy. The story does evoke religious and philosophical
ideas. But the specific connection of the Old Commandant with
Jehovah and the new Commandant with the Christian God does not
seem quite right. The lingering and minutely described ordeal on
the machine does not suggest Old Testament justice, which is swift
and massive; flood, plague, the destruction of flocks or first-born .
And the victim whose body is pierced to fulfill the designs of an om–
nipotent father seems closer to Christ in his long ordeal on the cross
than to, say, Job . Religious associations are present but in a general
and evocative way, as part of a complex of ideas and speculations on
the meaning of guilt and the redemptive power of suffering.
The new Commandant is remarkable in this all-male story for
associating with ladies . The officer takes a dim view of this and
blames the influence of the ladies for the new man's hostility toward
the machine. "'Because of this Commandant and the women who in–
fluence him, is such a piece of work, the work of a lifetime, to
perish?'" Is the elaborate structure of a lifetime of guilt and perverse
