Sounding Silence

How admiringly the officer in the penal colony surveys his instrument of execution. With what zeal he explains its mechanism. Curator that he is, he carefully avoids touching the surface of the Old Commandant's drawings. But how lovingly he traces their pattern in the air. The visiting researcher, the voyager, cannot read the script that the officer marks for him, but he understands the performance enough to return the compliment that the officer's gestures demand. He says "evasively," of the drawings and the script, "It's very artistic" (Es ist sehr kunstvoll). ¹ "Yes," said the officer with a laugh, putting the folder away again, "it's no copy-book lettering [keine Schönschrift] for school children" ("IPC" 135 [159]). The officer's gestures establish a context for judging his beloved Commandant's apparatus: it should be viewed, or read, as a work of art. He wants this machine to be seen, however, not merely as one specific artwork but as the very form of art in general. He constantly insists on the transferability of what is "artistic" from one domain of technique to another. The component of the machine that writes on or, better, stabs into the condemned is like a farm implement, a harrow, but with a critical difference. This particular harrow, the officer claims, a piece of glass, performs with far greater artistry than does any ordinary farmer's tool; it is much more artful (viel kunstgemäßer) ("IPC" 129 [153]).

Many critics, including Stanley Corngold, have usefully explored how the penal apparatus represents the art of writing itself, but in the story the officer makes an even bigger claim than do the critics. ² For him, the apparatus represents not merely writing, but "art." Central features of "art-making," he suggests, pertain to widely diverse technical practices: farming, writing, punishment, and drawing. The voyager notices the implication of the officer's views and asks of the Old Commandant, "Did he then combine everything in his own person? Was he soldier, judge, engineer, chemist, and cartoonist [Zeichner]?" ("IPC" 131 [155]). Indeed, he did. Above all, however, the Commandant was a technician; the officer, curator of his superior's works of art. Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" ruminates on punishment's status as an art, and therefore dwells also, through its insistence on the transferability of "artfulness" between media, on the dismal possibility that all arts contain an element of punishment.

The officer guides the voyager (or hopes to guide him) through an appreciation of the texts and visual signs of the apparatus. He wants him to learn to read the machine. But the officer also regularly and insistently leads the researcher through an experience of sounds, particularly the sound of silence. When the officer describes the sort of reading a condemned man is supposed to do--he is supposed to read his sentence in his body--the officer says that the condemned "purses his lips as if he were listening. You've seen that it isn't easy to decipher the script with one's eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds" (Es geschieht ja weiter nichts, der Mann fängt bloß an, die Schrift zu entziffern, er spitzt den Mund, als horche er) ("IPC" 137 [160]). His wounds seem to make some sound to the condemned and so reading becomes listening. But what sound is there in pain? In The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry has argued that pain itself is inherently aphasic because it is impossible to vocalize any precise or meaningful calculus of pain. ³

Momentarily I will analyze the sounds that the condemned hears but first it is crucial to consider how his wounding sounds to the onlookers. As the officer rhapsodizes the process of the execution in the days of the Old Commandant, the focus is as much on what can be heard as on what is seen:

Before hundreds of pairs of eyes--all the spectators standing on tiptoe right up to the top of the slopes--the condemned...