ELIZABETH DALTON
"Here rests the Old Commandant. His adherents , who must
now be nameless , have dug this grave and set up this stone.
There is a prophecy that after a certain number of years the
Commandant will rise again and lead his adherents from this
house to recover the colony . Have faith and wait!"
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There is an atmosphere of foreboding in the teahouse . Perhaps the
Old Commandant really will return from the dead. He has secret
adherents , brawny dockworkers with an aura of rough trade about
them.
A suggestion of continued conflict remains in the ambiguous
last image. The condemned man and the soldier try to jump into the
explorer's boat but he prevents them by threatening them with a
knotted rope. The break with the penal colony is less than total;
something remains behind, left to an uncertain fate if the Old Com–
mandant should somehow return . It is not easy to bury the father or
to alter the structure of personality . Once the sadistic superego is
established, perhaps it can never be changed . Perhaps the whole
story will begin over again one day .
"In the Penal Colony" goes further in the direction of horror
than almost any other serious work of literature one can think of; for
this reason, some readers find it literally impossible to finish . Many
who read to the end do so with the feeling of having somehow been
exposed, trapped into some terrible confession about themselves .
Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of the story is not the penal
colony, nor the officer, nor even the structure of the torture
machine. Rather it is the details of the machine's mode of operation
and the quality of the attention devoted to them. That attention is
avid, finicky, sensual. The process of the victim's agony is described
with the fascination of a connoisseur, the rapt concentration of a
masturbator.
The most striking of these details is the gag, "'this little gag of
felt, which can be easily regulated to go straight into his mouth. It is
meant to keep him from screaming and biting his tongue.'" The of–
ficer's fussy solicitude for the victim's tongue is in the interest of
preserving his body for the full ordeal on the machine. Every detail
must be just right for the achievement of the desired effect - as for a
masturbatory fantasy to work. The filthy object stuck in the con–
demned man's mouth to stifle his screams adds to the horror of tor–
ture the excitement and humiliation of an oral rape . "'Of course the
man is forced to take the felt into his mouth, for otherwise his neck
