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Chapter 2 Scribal Fictions: Franz Kafka and S. Y Agnon The issue of the relationship of Franz Kafka to s. Y. Agnon has prompted lively critical debates.1 Questions of influence aside, however , these two twentieth-century writers can be read usefully, one against the other, for their concern with writing and textuality. In the short fiction of Kafka and Agnon, the center of energy shifts from a represented world to problems of perception and interpretation that are shared by reader and characters. Kafka and Agnon situate representations of writing and inscription so as to allow the reader to experience and trace significant variations on a spectrum of possible relations to writing. I turn now to two stories, both originally published in 1919, that start from attention to representations of writing and dramas of inscription. As exotic as they may seem, "In the Penal Colony" and "Tale of the Scribe" are two stories of reading and writing , although, as we shall see, "reading" and "writing" are scarcely innocent processes. I begin with a story about inscription and, from there, go on to a story about a scribe. "In the Penal Colony": the Writing Machine Consider Kafka's Traveler in "In the Penal Colony" ("In der Strafkolonie").2 As the first character we meet and the one through whom the story is focalized, the Traveler mediates the reader's introduction to the harsh landscape of the penal colony. (The translation refers to the "explorer," but the original is der Reisende or "traveler ," rather than der Forscher or "explorer," a term that would carry with it more of a sense ofgoal-directedness.) The reader moves easily into an identification with the Traveler, who offers a comforting familiarity, in contrast to the harsh, alien setting ofthe penal colony. As we take note of the Traveler's concern for due process and the rights ofthe accused, we are all the more likely to associate ourselves 23 24 Between Exile and Return with this apparent representative of enlightened western views of justice. Our efforts to decipher the elements ofthe story conform roughly to the Traveler's efforts at understanding the penal colony, as he is introduced to the old Commandant's system ofjustice by the Officer who is its chief proponent. The central precept in the old Commandant 's system-"Guilt is never to be doubted"--may strengthen the reader's identification with the Traveler; he and we can share a reaction of distaste for an apparently primitive system that is alien to both of us. Nevertheless, the Traveler's illusion of neutrality, as well as his sense of his own advancement relative to the primitive penal colony, are jarred through his reaction to the Officer, the regime ofthe old Commandant and, most prominently, to the machine. The process ofthe story involves a shift in the Traveler's perspective from his declared distance, to an unacknowledged yet tangible sympathy for the Officer. This shift causes the Traveler ultimately to protect the Officer's right to place himself on the machine, although that sympathy is denied in his parting gesture of threat to the condemned man who wishes to accompany him. These shifts in the Traveler's position are more often recorded, rather than commented on in the narrative, so that the reader may experience an unease that reflects the dislocation of an identification that the story elicits so smoothly at the outset. In effect, the text manipulates the reader, moving him/her through a variety of subject positions in relation to the archaic that acquires representation through the machine. In this respect, the voyage that has brought the Traveler to the penal colony, remote from his presumably European homeland, carries with it a psychological weight not unlike that attached to the map ofAfrica in Conrad's Heart ofDarkness. These two great texts of modernism utilize a geography that is traceable not only on the map of European colonialism, but also on the map of psychic structure that Freud, contemporary and kin of the modernists, was charting. For Conrad, for Kafka, and, I think, for Agnon as well, the text moves in two directions at once; it retains its mimetic relationship to the social world, while offering the reader graphic suggestions of unconscious operations. The reader traces a writing in "In the Penal Colony" that does not so much permit an analysis ofcharacter from the outside, as it draws the reader into a drama of inscription that undoes the distance between reader and text and elicits...

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