You've Got to Read This (58 page)

for a moment longer, irresolutely, and then, shy of intruding on her grief, let it fall gently and walked quietly to the window.

She was fast asleep.

Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.

Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt's supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merrymaking when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow.

Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing
Arrayed for the Bridal.
Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died.

He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impal-318 • THE DEAD

pable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

In t h e Penal C o l o n y

by Franz Kafka

Introduced by Joyce Carol Oates

THIS GREAT, VEXING, HEARTRENDING PARABLE OF A STORY: ONCE READ, never forgotten. Especially if read in late adolescence, when you are a university undergraduate of the 1950s for whom the world of outsized, unname-able, oceanic passions is a world illuminated sheerly by books. A world of books.
An ax,
as Franz Kafka said,
to break the frozen sea within.

In a diary entry for 25 September 1917, Franz Kafka noted that happiness for him consisted in raising the world "into the pure, the true, and the immutable."

When you are eighteen years old, you know this is true. It must be true!

Yet how is such a transformation of the self, very like a levitation of the soul, to be accomplished?

Then again, Kafka has made it obvious: the cruel wisdom of "In the Penal Colony"
is
happiness.

Guilt is never to be doubted.

Kafka's mysticism consists in taking the side of the other: the worst news you can imagine, as it slips into your life, and
is,
from that hour onward,
you.

There is a wisdom of adults you understand, as you hover on the very threshold of adulthood, that must be true precisely because it is so pitiless, cruel, and funny. Because it seems to illuminate a condition of the world and of humankind's place in it that "your" religion—in my case, a mildly emotional, thoroughly unexamined, and utterly unintellectual Roman Catholicism—has not suggested.

It's a remarkable piece of apparatus.

"In the Penal Colony"—the parable as autobiography, as prophecy, as memory. "In the Penal Colony"—written in 1914, decades before Auschwitz, Dachau, Belsen, Treblinka (in which, indeed, relatives of Franz Kafka, including his sisters, would die). "In the Penal Colony"—called by its melancholy, self-mocking author nothing more than "personal proofs of my weakness . . . evidence of solitude."

This most matter-of-fact and logical of nightmares. Each moment yielding readily to the next, and to the next—fluid, inevitable. We are the unnamed explorer-witness to the catastrophe, yet at the same time we are the unnamed officer whose passion "In the Penal Colony" records. His pointless martyrdom! (Is all "martyrdom" pointless?) We witness, in the collapse of the
remarkable piece of apparatus,
the end of a human epoch.

What had once been
sacred,
Kafka predicts, will now be
secular.

What had once been
God-directed
will now be
human-directed;
which is to say,
humane.

INTRODUCTION BY JOYCE CAROL OATES • 321

No more torture. No more idiotic superstition. But—no more transcendence?

But how quiet [the condemned man] grows at just about the sixth hour!

Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates. A moment that might tempt one to get under the Harrow oneself. Nothing more happens than that the man begins to understand the inscription, he purses his mouth as if he were listening. You have seen how difficult it is to decipher the script with one's eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds. To be sure, that is a hard task; he needs six hours to accomplish it. . . . Then the judgment has been fulfilled, and we, the soldier and I, bury him.

Except, unfortunately, at this point in the history of the Penal Colony, the old machine of salvation is breaking down. We learn that the old Commandant is dead, his very grave neglected, defiled—in a teahouse! The new Commandant is hostile to the machine and its sacred scripture. With what elegant deadpan silent-film looniness the
remarkable piece of apparatus
self-destructs, there before the explorer's amazed eyes. And the officer's fate, his promised salvation? We, the explorer, look anxiously into the face of a corpse.

It was as it had been in life; no sign was visible of the promised redemption; what the others had found in the machine the officer had not found; the lips were pressed firmly together, the eyes were open, with the same expression as in life, the look was calm and convinced, through the forehead went the point of the great iron spike.

Can one outgrow Kafka, our great poet of solitude, of tragedy comprehended as farce? I think so, yes. In the impatient, zestful still-youthful adulthood of one's life. When at last one
takes control
of one's life. Or believes one can, or has. Franz Kafka's melancholy passivity, his celebration of the absurd, his parables of
bad luck
may baffle the ear, like words in a foreign tongue. Or they may strike the ear as too shrill. Or like faint, failing screams.

Echoes of outgrown nightmares.

You outgrow Kafka. But then one day, abruptly, you return to Kafka. As the brash arc of youthful adulthood begins to wan. It's like discovering yourself in a corridor you would have sworn you'd never been in before—yet you know it. This staircase, this door to be opened, this room.
It's all there.

Always has been there. Unchanged. Waiting for you.

In the Penal Colony

F r a n z Kafka

Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

"It's a remarkable piece of apparatus," said the officer to the explorer and surveyed with a certain air of admiration the apparatus which was after all quite familiar to him. The explorer seemed to have accepted merely out of politeness the Commandant's invitation to witness the execution of a soldier condemned to death for disobedience and insulting behavior to a superior. Nor did the colony itself betray much interest in this execution. At least, in the small sandy valley, a deep hollow surrounded on all sides by naked crags, there was no one present save the officer, the explorer, the condemned man, who was a stupid-looking, wide-mouthed creature with bewildered hair and face, and the soldier who held the heavy chain controlling the small chains locked on the prisoner's ankles, wrists, and neck, chains that were themselves attached to each other by communicating links.

In any case, the condemned man looked so like a submissive dog that one might have thought he could be left to run free on the surrounding hills and would only need to be whistled for when the execution was due to begin.

The explorer did not much care about the apparatus and walked up and down behind the prisoner with almost visible indifference while the officer made the last adjustments, now creeping beneath the structure, which was bedded deep in the earth, now climbing a ladder to inspect its upper parts.

These were tasks that might well have been left to a mechanic, but the officer performed them with great zeal, whether because he was a devoted admirer of the apparatus or because of other reasons the work could be entrusted to no one else. "Ready now!" he called at last and climbed down from the ladder. He looked uncommonly limp, breathed with his mouth wide open, and had tucked two fine ladies' handkerchiefs under the collar of his uniform. "These uniforms are too heavy for the tropics, surely," said the explorer, instead of making some inquiry about the apparatus, as the officer had expected. "Of course," said the officer, washing his oily and greasy hands in a bucket of water that stood ready, "but they mean home to us; we don't want to forget about home. Now just have a look at this machine," he added at once, simultaneously drying his hands on a towel and indicating the apparatus. "Up till now a few things still had to be set by hand, but from this moment it works all by itself." The explorer nodded and followed him. The officer, anxious to secure himself against all contingen-322

FRANZ KAFKA • 323

cies, said: "Things sometimes go wrong, of course; I hope that nothing goes wrong today, but we have to allow for the possibility. The machinery should go on working continuously for twelve hours. But if anything does go wrong it will only be some small matter that can be set right at once.

"Won't you take a seat?" he asked finally, drawing a cane chair out from among a heap of them and offering it to the explorer, who could not refuse it. He was now sitting at the edge of a pit, into which he glanced for a fleeting moment. It was not very deep. On one side of the pit the excavated soil had been piled up in a rampart, on the other side of it stood the apparatus. "I don't know," said the officer, "if the Commandant has already explained this apparatus to you." The .explorer waved one hand vaguely; the officer asked for nothing better, since now he could explain the apparatus himself. "This apparatus," he said, taking hold of a crank handle and leaning against it,

"was invented by our former Commandant. I assisted at the very earliest experiments and had a share in all the work until its completion. But the credit of inventing it belongs to him alone. Have you ever heard of our former Commandant? No? Well, it isn't saying too much if I tell you that the organization of the whole penal colony is his work. We who were his friends knew even before he died that the organization of the colony was so perfect that his successor, even with a thousand new schemes in his head, would find it impossible to alter anything, at least for many years to come.

And our prophecy has come true; the new Commandant has had to acknowledge its truth. A pity you never met the old Commandant!—But,"

the officer interrupted himself, "I am rambling on, and here stands his apparatus before us. It consists, as you see, of three parts. In the course of time each of these parts has acquired a kind of popular nickname. The lower one is called the 'Bed,' the upper one the 'Designer,' and this one here in the middle that moves up and down is called the 'Harrow.'" "The Harrow?"

asked the explorer. He had not been listening very attentively, the glare of the sun in the shadeless valley was altogether too strong, it was difficult to collect one's thoughts. All the more did he admire the officer, who in spite of his tight-fitting full-dress uniform coat, amply befrogged and weighed down by epaulettes, was pursuing his subject with such enthusiasm and, besides talking, was still tightening a screw here and there with a spanner.

As for the soldier, he seemed to be in much the same condition as the explorer. He had wound the prisoner's chain around both his wrists, propped himself on his rifle, let his head hang, and was paying no attention to anything. That did not surprise the explorer, for the officer was speaking French, and certainly neither the soldier nor the prisoner understood a word of French. It was all the more remarkable, therefore, that the prisoner was nonetheless making an effort to follow the officer's explanations. With a kind of drowsy persistence he directed his gaze wherever the officer pointed a finger, and at the interruption of the explorer's question he, too, as well as the officer, looked around.