Marxism and Neo-Marxism in Kafka’s "In the Penal Colony"
=========================================================
Wolran Kim
April 2014
In the Penal Colony is a short story written by the European existentialist Franz Kafka (1883-1924) in 1914. Kafka was one of the major German language fiction writers and the most influential in Western literature in the 20th century. Kafka’s novels often criticize reality infinitely from unrealistic fables. His literary works, a blend of the absurd and mundane, gave rise to the adjective “Kafkaesque.” In the Penal Colony also shows a grotesque stage in the story of how duality and contradiction of the law and distorted human attachment drive into catastrophe.
The topic of this short fiction communicates with Marxism that the lower material structures decide the upper structures of culture and morale. The capitalist exploitation could be drawn out from the relation between master and servant in the Penal Colony. Furthermore, the devices of the composition and characters in the plot show Neo-Marxism, such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory about literary language from diverse social sources. This essay illustrates these connections with examples based on the theories of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakhtin.
The plot of In the Penal Colony briefly begins with the Traveler’s visit to the tropical island, the Penal Colony. The Officer in the Penal Colony wants to show the apparatus, which is his pride, and the execution of the Condemned Man to the Traveler. He is a judge as well as an executor, and he wants to show off his authority through the highly efficient apparatus. The apparatus is designed to carve crimes by a needle on the prisoner’s body and wipe the blood. The prisoner will be tortured to death slowly in twelve hours.
Thus, the apparatus plays an important role as judge and executor instead of a human, and the Officer maintains his power and position using this machine. The Condemned Man’s charge is no apology for his sleeping while on duty. The Officer insists that all crimes are enough to be certain of not dealing with investigation or interrogation. The Officer tries to persuade the Traveler to help from his good recommendation about the apparatus, and the Traveler refuses. The Officer releases the Condemned Man and lies down under the apparatus to convince the Traveler.
The apparatus carves, “Be just!” (Kafka 21) on the Officer’s body, and the Officer is killed by a breakdown of the apparatus. His dead face never shows a sign of salvation, unlikely from his previous explanation. The Traveler leaves the Penal Colony shaking off the hope of the Condemned Man and the Soldier, who want to leave with him.
The flow of In the Penal Colony seems illogical and deformed. The main character is the apparatus. The story that unfolds centers around a machine, not a human, and is reminiscent of Marx’s Fetishism. Marx says about Fetishism, “[F]rom the moment that men in any way for one another, their labor assumes a social form” (Marx 667). The apparatus must have been made from the lower class’ labor in the Penal Colony, and this machine took on the role of a ruler over them. The apparatus is granted inherent value and owns power as an object.
On that account, the apparatus’ role is in accord with Fetishism that a man-made object has power over humans. All the characters, the Officer, the Traveler, the Condemned Man, and the Soldier are connected by the apparatus; The Officer tries to keep his authority through the apparatus, the Traveler sees the irrationality of the Penal Colony through the apparatus, the Soldier experiences law and order of his community through the apparatus, and the Condemned Man is judged by the apparatus. The apparatus is the main tool of the law and values system in the Penal Colony, and this connection is related to Fetishism. Capitalism thinks all concepts of idea and knowledge are based on materials to maintain objectivity. Material objects exist independently from human consciousness, and it is the standard of objectivity and legitimacy.
Marx says in Capital, “A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties, satisfies human wants of some sort or another” (665). Humans make commodities for needs but a commodity has its own property without correlations to the human who made it. Thus, the reason why humans made a commodity disappears and the only result, the commodity, exists outside of the human independently. The apparatus can be seen as a commodity. The apparatus of the Penal Colony is in first place, and it carves a charge on the prisoner’s body.
The faith and praise of the Officer toward the apparatus seem like religious fanaticism. All of the Officer’s discourse is about the apparatus. The apparatus was made by human labor, but now, humans are under this machine, and this represents the power and the law. The relationship between the apparatus and humans is the same as the alienation of human labor in the industrial age in Marxism.
The fate of the Officer is placed under the apparatus’ maintenance or abolition. This overturned relation between the Officer and the apparatus refer to Marx’s words, “The relations connecting the labor of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things” (Marx 668). Here, the labor is isolated from the human and the materials while the commodity is exchanged between individuals. The apparatus is placed between the Officer and society as in Marx’s theory.
The Officer also says his uniform is a symbol of his home when the Traveler points out that his uniform is too heavy and hot; “But they mean home, and we don’t want to lose our homeland” (Kafka 3), The uniform is made of fabric, but it becomes a device to represent power and organization. “The utility of a thing makes it a use-value” (Marx 665); The Officer wears his uniform in hot tropical weather to show his social class, and eagerly explains about the apparatus to maintain his position. He chooses death in the end because he knows that his authority would be lost without the apparatus. The apparatus seems alive when the Officer is killed. A lifeless machine exists instead of a human.
Kafka’s apparatus shows an overturning between the principal and auxiliary, the role of humans and machines. The apparatus mass-produces human death, as a machine mass-produces the same products repeatedly. Thus, even death goes numb, and the machine takes humanism away instead of giving convenience to humans. The apparatus judges humans and executes their criminals. The apparatus is made as a tool, but it exists as a god who realizes the Penal Colony of justice. This killing machine seems to be a live controller who carves, “Be just!” (Kafka 21) on sinners’ bodies.
The Traveler asks the Officer, who explains about the diagrams made by his old Commandant; “Then was he in his own person a combination of everything? Was he soldier, judge, engineer, chemist, and draftsman?” (Kafka 6). The Officer’s diagram is a bizarre and complex picture of the apparatus, and the Traveler never understands it as well as the apparatus. Here, the apparatus exists as the old Commandant, and this killing machine is granted all the same characters that are mentioned by the Traveler, soldier, judge, engineer, chemist, and draftsman. The apparatus is almost as almighty of a god to the Officer, and this also is a good example of Marx’s Fetishism.
Needles of the apparatus which carve a charge on the body suggest the sewing industry in the early industrial society. “[T]wo sorts of needles in a multiple arrangement. Each long needle has a short one next to it. The long one inscribes, and the short one squirts water out to wash away the blood and keep the in scription always clear” (Kafka 9). The needles of the apparatus seem as the needles of sewing machines in factories. Needle workers in many developing countries were the symbol of sacrifice in the early capitalistic era. The textile industry was eventually reaching to a close, leaving behind just the sacrifice of cheap labor. The collapse of the apparatus in the Penal Colony warns of dysfunction of the industrial society, and suggests the downfall of material civilization as Marx’s theory of capitalism.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “polyglossia” may also be useful in a Marxist reading of In the Penal Colony. In his essay Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin sees that language is an interactive coexistent state and a collection of various professions, classes, races, generations, and individual languages. According to his opinion, this coexistent state is the concrete reality that is the place of conflict and struggle between each social group; “Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia [raznoreicie] can enter the novel” (Bakhtin, 674).
Thus, language reproduces and shows reality and the speaker’s world view directly. The story and the characters in In the Penal Colony may be read as metaphors and a parody of reality. From this standpoint, the title, In the Penal Colony, might be seen as the formula, the Penal Colony = hell = human society. Human society is an absurd and irrational place, the same as the Penal Colony. Also, the four characters, the Officer, the Traveler, the Soldier, and the Condemned Man, represent their classes and senses of values through their language.
Firstly for the Officer, he says, “I was not informed about it. It’s not my fault. In any case, I am certainly the person best able to explain our style of sentencing, for here I am carrying” (Kafka 6). The Officer, here, evades his responsibility of reasoning with no order from the commander when the Traveler asks about the process of the sentencing. The Officer’s discourse shows that his status has only duty and obedience without any decisive power and self-confidence.
However, he has only pride about the apparatus, and this pride came from the apparatus’ production power of mass execution. Bakhtin’s term of polyglossia is seen through the Officer’s language, that shows his social class and his world view in the military organization.“I am its only defender, just as I am the single advocate for the legacy of the Old Commandant” (Kafka 14); The Officer is a person who is obsessed with the glory of the past, and has blind faith in the power of the age of machinery.
Secondly, Bakhtin’s polyglossia is also seen through the Traveler’s words and deeds. The name, “The Traveler,” gives the image of leaving anytime and to anywhere as a bystander. As expected, the Traveler is an indecisive character, who came from outside and keeps a neutral position in front of the absurd reality. A traveler is a passing person, just as a spectator, and never has a fixed position socially. “The information about the judicial procedures had not satisfied him.
However, he had to tell himself that here it was a matter of a penal colony, that in this place special regulations were necessary, and that one had to give precedence to military measures right down to the last detail” (Kafka 8). The Traveler is never deeply involved in the Penal Colony, despite not understanding the injustice of the process and the inhumanity of the execution. He rationalizes his position concerning the particular situation of the Penal Colony. “For the purpose of his traveling was merely to observe and not to alter other people’s judicial systems in any way” (13).
As his excuse, he has no responsibility about this strange place and the innocent Condemned Man. The character of the Traveler is also referred to the figure of the intellectuals who has no willingness to reform an unreasonable society. The relationship between the Traveler and the Officer could be seen as a conflict state between the European way of thinking and the way of the Constructive social organization in military fashion.
Thirdly, the character, the Condemned Man, as described by the narrator; “The Condemned Man had an expression of such dog-like resignation that it looked as if one could set him free to roam around the slopes and would only have to whistle at the start of the execution for him to return” (Kafka 3). This quotation describes a servile spirit, docility, helplessness, and powerlessness of the Condemned Man interestingly.
A dog is often used as a symbol of an inferior and superficial animal compared to humans. As if the dog was never a competitor to humans, the Condemned Man is depicted as a person who is ready to die at any time as ordered without any will of mutiny or thinking faculty. The Condemned Man is the underprivileged, alienated social class who is judged by the law of power. He could be seen as a victim in the industrial society of Marxism. As the Officer expresses, “The basic principle I use for my decisions is this: Guilt is always beyond a doubt” (7), the crime of the Condemned Man is the way to maintain the dominators’ power. Thus, the existence of crime and the legitimacy of guilt do not matter to the rulers, and the Condemned Man never has a chance to know about his own sentence, to resist. The Condemned Man seems servile and obedient, domesticated by an unrelenting social hierarchy.
Fourthly, the Soldier is of the same underprivileged social class as the Condemned Man and the Officer. “The Traveler was not surprised at that, for the Officer spoke French, and clearly neither the Soldier nor the Condemned Man understood the language” (Kafka 5). This language barrier in the relationship between master and servant is a ridiculous device of setting, because the Soldier needs to understand in order to obey the Officer’s order.
Moreover, the Condemned Man never knows about any of the process of his own sentencing or even of his execution. There is nothing but only obedience. The characters, the Soldier and the Condemned Man, seem the same as the public in the modern age. The language barrier is a kind of black comedy that does not mingle with a horrible executionary situation. There is no interpreter in Kafka’s Penal Colony. As in Bakhtin’s theory, readers can see the characters’ class, status, personality, value system, and conflict through their discourse in the novel.
Every scene in the novel is a reflection and specific circumstances of reality. Generally, the apparatus is an analogy of a wrong institution, the Officer is a man of power and the perpetrator, and the Traveler is an outsider or a bystander. The Soldier and the Condemned Man are scapegoats of an irrational system, and it is hard to see the absurdity of their own system under such strict power. In many cases, a person’s point of view is domesticated and brainwashed easy inside the system. And this is the same as that man cannot see his face without the mirror. On the contrary, the Traveler can easily see the injustice and inhumanity of the Penal Colony from the eyes of the outsider.
Generally, Kafka’s In the Penal Colony shows an extreme distortion of justice from an inhuman power system. Hegemony and victims of exploitation in the Penal Colony are compared to the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in Marxism. The power of the Officer could be seen as a result of an unreasonable social class, and the judgment from the power controls society through the material device, the apparatus. The collapse of the Officer and the apparatus refers to the failure of the capitalists due to a circle of exploitation and destruction in Marxism. Additionally, various devices in In the Penal Colony are connected with Neo Marxism that is expanded to the areas of culture, language, politics, and social studies.
=========================================================
Wolran Kim
April 2014
In the Penal Colony is a short story written by the European existentialist Franz Kafka (1883-1924) in 1914. Kafka was one of the major German language fiction writers and the most influential in Western literature in the 20th century. Kafka’s novels often criticize reality infinitely from unrealistic fables. His literary works, a blend of the absurd and mundane, gave rise to the adjective “Kafkaesque.” In the Penal Colony also shows a grotesque stage in the story of how duality and contradiction of the law and distorted human attachment drive into catastrophe.
The topic of this short fiction communicates with Marxism that the lower material structures decide the upper structures of culture and morale. The capitalist exploitation could be drawn out from the relation between master and servant in the Penal Colony. Furthermore, the devices of the composition and characters in the plot show Neo-Marxism, such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory about literary language from diverse social sources. This essay illustrates these connections with examples based on the theories of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakhtin.
The plot of In the Penal Colony briefly begins with the Traveler’s visit to the tropical island, the Penal Colony. The Officer in the Penal Colony wants to show the apparatus, which is his pride, and the execution of the Condemned Man to the Traveler. He is a judge as well as an executor, and he wants to show off his authority through the highly efficient apparatus. The apparatus is designed to carve crimes by a needle on the prisoner’s body and wipe the blood. The prisoner will be tortured to death slowly in twelve hours.
Thus, the apparatus plays an important role as judge and executor instead of a human, and the Officer maintains his power and position using this machine. The Condemned Man’s charge is no apology for his sleeping while on duty. The Officer insists that all crimes are enough to be certain of not dealing with investigation or interrogation. The Officer tries to persuade the Traveler to help from his good recommendation about the apparatus, and the Traveler refuses. The Officer releases the Condemned Man and lies down under the apparatus to convince the Traveler.
The apparatus carves, “Be just!” (Kafka 21) on the Officer’s body, and the Officer is killed by a breakdown of the apparatus. His dead face never shows a sign of salvation, unlikely from his previous explanation. The Traveler leaves the Penal Colony shaking off the hope of the Condemned Man and the Soldier, who want to leave with him.
The flow of In the Penal Colony seems illogical and deformed. The main character is the apparatus. The story that unfolds centers around a machine, not a human, and is reminiscent of Marx’s Fetishism. Marx says about Fetishism, “[F]rom the moment that men in any way for one another, their labor assumes a social form” (Marx 667). The apparatus must have been made from the lower class’ labor in the Penal Colony, and this machine took on the role of a ruler over them. The apparatus is granted inherent value and owns power as an object.
On that account, the apparatus’ role is in accord with Fetishism that a man-made object has power over humans. All the characters, the Officer, the Traveler, the Condemned Man, and the Soldier are connected by the apparatus; The Officer tries to keep his authority through the apparatus, the Traveler sees the irrationality of the Penal Colony through the apparatus, the Soldier experiences law and order of his community through the apparatus, and the Condemned Man is judged by the apparatus. The apparatus is the main tool of the law and values system in the Penal Colony, and this connection is related to Fetishism. Capitalism thinks all concepts of idea and knowledge are based on materials to maintain objectivity. Material objects exist independently from human consciousness, and it is the standard of objectivity and legitimacy.
Marx says in Capital, “A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties, satisfies human wants of some sort or another” (665). Humans make commodities for needs but a commodity has its own property without correlations to the human who made it. Thus, the reason why humans made a commodity disappears and the only result, the commodity, exists outside of the human independently. The apparatus can be seen as a commodity. The apparatus of the Penal Colony is in first place, and it carves a charge on the prisoner’s body.
The faith and praise of the Officer toward the apparatus seem like religious fanaticism. All of the Officer’s discourse is about the apparatus. The apparatus was made by human labor, but now, humans are under this machine, and this represents the power and the law. The relationship between the apparatus and humans is the same as the alienation of human labor in the industrial age in Marxism.
The fate of the Officer is placed under the apparatus’ maintenance or abolition. This overturned relation between the Officer and the apparatus refer to Marx’s words, “The relations connecting the labor of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things” (Marx 668). Here, the labor is isolated from the human and the materials while the commodity is exchanged between individuals. The apparatus is placed between the Officer and society as in Marx’s theory.
The Officer also says his uniform is a symbol of his home when the Traveler points out that his uniform is too heavy and hot; “But they mean home, and we don’t want to lose our homeland” (Kafka 3), The uniform is made of fabric, but it becomes a device to represent power and organization. “The utility of a thing makes it a use-value” (Marx 665); The Officer wears his uniform in hot tropical weather to show his social class, and eagerly explains about the apparatus to maintain his position. He chooses death in the end because he knows that his authority would be lost without the apparatus. The apparatus seems alive when the Officer is killed. A lifeless machine exists instead of a human.
Kafka’s apparatus shows an overturning between the principal and auxiliary, the role of humans and machines. The apparatus mass-produces human death, as a machine mass-produces the same products repeatedly. Thus, even death goes numb, and the machine takes humanism away instead of giving convenience to humans. The apparatus judges humans and executes their criminals. The apparatus is made as a tool, but it exists as a god who realizes the Penal Colony of justice. This killing machine seems to be a live controller who carves, “Be just!” (Kafka 21) on sinners’ bodies.
The Traveler asks the Officer, who explains about the diagrams made by his old Commandant; “Then was he in his own person a combination of everything? Was he soldier, judge, engineer, chemist, and draftsman?” (Kafka 6). The Officer’s diagram is a bizarre and complex picture of the apparatus, and the Traveler never understands it as well as the apparatus. Here, the apparatus exists as the old Commandant, and this killing machine is granted all the same characters that are mentioned by the Traveler, soldier, judge, engineer, chemist, and draftsman. The apparatus is almost as almighty of a god to the Officer, and this also is a good example of Marx’s Fetishism.
Needles of the apparatus which carve a charge on the body suggest the sewing industry in the early industrial society. “[T]wo sorts of needles in a multiple arrangement. Each long needle has a short one next to it. The long one inscribes, and the short one squirts water out to wash away the blood and keep the in scription always clear” (Kafka 9). The needles of the apparatus seem as the needles of sewing machines in factories. Needle workers in many developing countries were the symbol of sacrifice in the early capitalistic era. The textile industry was eventually reaching to a close, leaving behind just the sacrifice of cheap labor. The collapse of the apparatus in the Penal Colony warns of dysfunction of the industrial society, and suggests the downfall of material civilization as Marx’s theory of capitalism.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “polyglossia” may also be useful in a Marxist reading of In the Penal Colony. In his essay Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin sees that language is an interactive coexistent state and a collection of various professions, classes, races, generations, and individual languages. According to his opinion, this coexistent state is the concrete reality that is the place of conflict and struggle between each social group; “Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia [raznoreicie] can enter the novel” (Bakhtin, 674).
Thus, language reproduces and shows reality and the speaker’s world view directly. The story and the characters in In the Penal Colony may be read as metaphors and a parody of reality. From this standpoint, the title, In the Penal Colony, might be seen as the formula, the Penal Colony = hell = human society. Human society is an absurd and irrational place, the same as the Penal Colony. Also, the four characters, the Officer, the Traveler, the Soldier, and the Condemned Man, represent their classes and senses of values through their language.
Firstly for the Officer, he says, “I was not informed about it. It’s not my fault. In any case, I am certainly the person best able to explain our style of sentencing, for here I am carrying” (Kafka 6). The Officer, here, evades his responsibility of reasoning with no order from the commander when the Traveler asks about the process of the sentencing. The Officer’s discourse shows that his status has only duty and obedience without any decisive power and self-confidence.
However, he has only pride about the apparatus, and this pride came from the apparatus’ production power of mass execution. Bakhtin’s term of polyglossia is seen through the Officer’s language, that shows his social class and his world view in the military organization.“I am its only defender, just as I am the single advocate for the legacy of the Old Commandant” (Kafka 14); The Officer is a person who is obsessed with the glory of the past, and has blind faith in the power of the age of machinery.
Secondly, Bakhtin’s polyglossia is also seen through the Traveler’s words and deeds. The name, “The Traveler,” gives the image of leaving anytime and to anywhere as a bystander. As expected, the Traveler is an indecisive character, who came from outside and keeps a neutral position in front of the absurd reality. A traveler is a passing person, just as a spectator, and never has a fixed position socially. “The information about the judicial procedures had not satisfied him.
However, he had to tell himself that here it was a matter of a penal colony, that in this place special regulations were necessary, and that one had to give precedence to military measures right down to the last detail” (Kafka 8). The Traveler is never deeply involved in the Penal Colony, despite not understanding the injustice of the process and the inhumanity of the execution. He rationalizes his position concerning the particular situation of the Penal Colony. “For the purpose of his traveling was merely to observe and not to alter other people’s judicial systems in any way” (13).
As his excuse, he has no responsibility about this strange place and the innocent Condemned Man. The character of the Traveler is also referred to the figure of the intellectuals who has no willingness to reform an unreasonable society. The relationship between the Traveler and the Officer could be seen as a conflict state between the European way of thinking and the way of the Constructive social organization in military fashion.
Thirdly, the character, the Condemned Man, as described by the narrator; “The Condemned Man had an expression of such dog-like resignation that it looked as if one could set him free to roam around the slopes and would only have to whistle at the start of the execution for him to return” (Kafka 3). This quotation describes a servile spirit, docility, helplessness, and powerlessness of the Condemned Man interestingly.
A dog is often used as a symbol of an inferior and superficial animal compared to humans. As if the dog was never a competitor to humans, the Condemned Man is depicted as a person who is ready to die at any time as ordered without any will of mutiny or thinking faculty. The Condemned Man is the underprivileged, alienated social class who is judged by the law of power. He could be seen as a victim in the industrial society of Marxism. As the Officer expresses, “The basic principle I use for my decisions is this: Guilt is always beyond a doubt” (7), the crime of the Condemned Man is the way to maintain the dominators’ power. Thus, the existence of crime and the legitimacy of guilt do not matter to the rulers, and the Condemned Man never has a chance to know about his own sentence, to resist. The Condemned Man seems servile and obedient, domesticated by an unrelenting social hierarchy.
Fourthly, the Soldier is of the same underprivileged social class as the Condemned Man and the Officer. “The Traveler was not surprised at that, for the Officer spoke French, and clearly neither the Soldier nor the Condemned Man understood the language” (Kafka 5). This language barrier in the relationship between master and servant is a ridiculous device of setting, because the Soldier needs to understand in order to obey the Officer’s order.
Moreover, the Condemned Man never knows about any of the process of his own sentencing or even of his execution. There is nothing but only obedience. The characters, the Soldier and the Condemned Man, seem the same as the public in the modern age. The language barrier is a kind of black comedy that does not mingle with a horrible executionary situation. There is no interpreter in Kafka’s Penal Colony. As in Bakhtin’s theory, readers can see the characters’ class, status, personality, value system, and conflict through their discourse in the novel.
Every scene in the novel is a reflection and specific circumstances of reality. Generally, the apparatus is an analogy of a wrong institution, the Officer is a man of power and the perpetrator, and the Traveler is an outsider or a bystander. The Soldier and the Condemned Man are scapegoats of an irrational system, and it is hard to see the absurdity of their own system under such strict power. In many cases, a person’s point of view is domesticated and brainwashed easy inside the system. And this is the same as that man cannot see his face without the mirror. On the contrary, the Traveler can easily see the injustice and inhumanity of the Penal Colony from the eyes of the outsider.
Generally, Kafka’s In the Penal Colony shows an extreme distortion of justice from an inhuman power system. Hegemony and victims of exploitation in the Penal Colony are compared to the relation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in Marxism. The power of the Officer could be seen as a result of an unreasonable social class, and the judgment from the power controls society through the material device, the apparatus. The collapse of the Officer and the apparatus refers to the failure of the capitalists due to a circle of exploitation and destruction in Marxism. Additionally, various devices in In the Penal Colony are connected with Neo Marxism that is expanded to the areas of culture, language, politics, and social studies.