Kafka Symposium: Introduction

When the Court Theatre in Chicago announced that during its 2000-2001 season it would be staging a new chamber opera by Philip Glass based on Franz Kafka's story, "In the Penal Colony," we decided to use the occasion to try to open a new discussion of Kafka's remarkable text, the relevance of which, given contemporary debates about the death penalty, human rights, and the legacies of colonialism, was beyond doubt. In order to stimulate new thinking we invited a group of scholars from a variety of disciplines, most of whom would never ordinarily consider themselves Kafka experts, to address the text without engaging the vast secondary literature on Kafka. (The one exception to this "rule" was the inclusion of Stanley Corngold, the noted Kafka scholar who has produced much of this literature). We were not, in other words, interested in producing new Kafka "scholarship" in any traditional sense of the term. We invited our speakers, instead, to think out loud about the issues raised in Kafka's text from the perspective of their own work and orientation. In this sense, we sought an academic correlative to the theatrical gambit: like the Court Theatre, we were interested in revisiting Kafka's text, asking how it might resonate anew some eighty years after its initial publication. The papers were given on 1 and 2 December 2000, at the Theatre on the campus of the University of Chicago.

As is well known, Kafka himself had mixed feelings about "In the Penal Colony." The story was written in the autumn of 1914 and though Kafka considered grouping it together with "The Metamorphosis" and "The Judgment" in a collection called "Punishments," it was only at the urging of his friend and publisher, Kurt Wolff, that he, in 1919, finally allowed the story to appear in print. At some level he could not fully understand Wolff's admiration for the text and Wolff himself had to admit that his own profound love for the story was mixed with a certain horror and disgust with respect to the "dreadful intensity of the frightful material" (die schreckhafte Intensität des furchtbaren Stoffes). ¹ One of our goals at the symposium was to explore this amalgam of attraction and repulsion that surely characterizes every reader's relation to this strange work of fiction. At the core of this amalgam is no doubt the very thing that invites compositional, dramaturgical, and performative engagement with the work. We are thinking, of course, of the numerous references and allusions in the story to a certain theatricality informing the institutions of law and punishment, to the spectacle of human pain in its function as real and imaginary support of social and political bonds. There is something at the very heart of "In the Penal Colony" that would seem to open it to the universe of opera, a medium in which tormented bodies so often issue in songs of supplication that are met--or unmet--by responses of mercy and grace on the part of sovereigns and lovers.

One of the central issues that preoccupied our contributors is the depth and omnipresence of ambiguity in the text. Generally thought to be one of Kafka's most straightforward texts, one whose plot most people can easily follow and recall, "In the Penal Colony" proves, under closer scrutiny, to be riddled with disorienting shifts of perspective and tone. One of the crucial passages in the text, for example, the description of the apparatus by the officer, includes a remarkable claim as to the spiritual efficacy of the punishment-machine on its victim:

But how quiet he grows at just about the sixth hour! Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted [Verstand geht dem Blödesten auf]. 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 (die Schrift zu entziffern), he purses his mouth as...