Allotria and Excreta in "In the Penal Colony" For Rachel Magshamhrain

For Rachel Magshamhrain

This essay has two mottoes, and both are riddles. The point of the first, from Hölderlin's drama Empedocles, is quickly felt: "Nichts ist schmerzlicher . . . denn Leiden zu enträtseln" (Nothing is more painful . . . than unriddling suffering). ¹ The second, by Lionel Trilling, reads: "To comprehend unconditioned spirit is not so very hard. . . ." I am thinking of how easy readers make it for themselves when they grasp unthinkingly the moment of alleged enlightenment in the Old Commandant's penal process. "But," continues Trilling, "there is no knowledge rarer than the understanding of spirit as it exists in the inescapable conditions which the actual and the trivial make for it." ² In writing about allotria and excreta in "In the Penal Colony," I shall be writing about certain nonsimple forms of the trivial (allotria) and the actual (excreta), two products of human activity whose ontological status is by no means evident. ³

Put the most radically serious quest for justification side by side with foolishness and nonsense: put the strongest, most intensely-felt life side by side with inattentiveness and giddy play. Allotria troubles the consciousness of every reader of "In the Penal Colony." There is a good deal of difference between how this story has come down to us, as a systematically pure and grave conceptual meditation on the one hand; and, on the other, how it actually reads. Then we will be struck by the emphasis on such matters as blood and vomit and sputum and muck and oil and the disposal system laid out to contain them; and we will be struck by the high jinks, horseplay, capers, antics (it turns out that there are a great many words for this neglected category) imbricated in this construction.

"Allotria" means what's irrelevant (das Nicht-Sachgemäße), what's nonsensical (Unfug)--clowning about, cutting up--exactly what the officer in "In the Penal Colony" calls "childish nonsense" (den Unsinn eines Kindes) when he is unable to convince the explorer of the value of the penal system he represents. I quote:

It did not look as if the officer had been listening. "So you did not find the procedure convincing," he said to himself and smiled, as an old man smiles at childish nonsense and yet pursues his own meditations behind the smile. ⁴

Not to find the procedure convincing--a serious matter, seriously argued--is, the officer concludes, senseless resistance. But to note this is to smile and "pursue [one's] own meditations behind the smile." Perhaps this is explicit instruction on how we are to read allotria in "In the Penal Colony," read the several pages in the story dramatizing such childish nonsense, for we are beset by them, and they are a hermeneutic puzzle. For example:

The explorer, down below, watched the [officer's] labor uninterruptedly, his neck grew stiff and his eyes smarted from the glare of sunshine over the sky. The soldier and the condemned man were now busy together. The man's shirt and trousers, which were already lying in the pit, were fished out by the point of the soldier's bayonet. The shirt was abominably dirty, and its owner washed it in the bucket of water. When he put on the shirt and trousers both he and the soldier could not help guffawing, for the garments were of course split up behind. Perhaps the condemned man felt it incumbent on him to amuse the soldier, he turned around and around in his slashed garments before the soldier, who squatted on the ground beating his knees with mirth. All the same, they presently controlled their mirth out of respect for the gentlemen. ["IPC" 162]

Or, again:

The soldier and the condemned man did not understand at first what was happening, at first they were not even looking on. The condemned man was gleeful at having got the handkerchiefs back, but he was not allowed to enjoy them...