In the three months of Gregor’s life as an insect, his door is for him the emblem of the “borderland between solitude and community.” If Kafka abandoned that region “only in the rarest of cases,” Gregor manages to do so only once. Draped like Glaucus emerging from the sea, except with “bits of thread, hair, and leftover food on his back and sides” instead of algae, mosses, and shells, weakened by fasting and insomnia, still aching from the wound his father inflicted by hurling an apple at him, Gregor Samsa has “no qualms about inching across the immaculate dining room floor.” His gesture is heroic — and prefigures his mystical suicide. As a man, he was indifferent to music; only in his animal metamorphosis have sounds revealed to him “the path to longed-for and unknown nourishment.” For that nourishment, Gregor is prepared not only to die but to go on the attack. After having shown for weeks the most delicate modesty in hiding himself behind a sheet and under the sofa, Gregor dares to consider “taking advantage for the first time of his terrifying appearance” (much as Kafka did in writing “The Metamorphosis”) in order to reach the music’s source. Doing so will get him only as far as his sister and her violin, at which point he confides to her his plan to send her to the conservatory. Rising on his two hindmost legs, which are by now accustomed to such exertions, he pulls himself up to the level of her shoulders and “kiss[es] her neck,” exposed in its nakedness, “without ribbons or collars.” The cumbersome beetle kissing his sister’s neck is the most excruciating of all moments musicaux. And an unbearable erotic vision as well. It would have been able to revive the great wind that “blew in from the past,” from millions of years ago, to which the chimpanzee Rotpeter will one day refer in one of his academic talks. But that won’t be acceptable. That great wind, observes Rotpeter with supreme irony, can now be nothing more than a “breath tickling the heels of whoever walks this earth: the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike.” For this reason, Gregor’s reckless appearance on the dining room floor is followed, a few minutes later, by the sister’s judgment: “We must try to get rid of it.” The next morning the cry of the bony charwoman resounds: “Come look at this, it’s croaked!”
IX. Ladies’ Handkerchiefs
The apparatus — a “singular apparatus,” as the officer in charge of operating it observes with warm satisfaction — is embedded in the sandy ground, in a sunny little valley of the penal colony, where one breathes a “damned, malignant tropical air.” Four men stand around the apparatus: the officer; a condemned man in chains, who shows signs of animal-like devotion while waiting to be laid down into the machine; a soldier, whose task it is to supervise the condemned man; and a traveler (not a mere tourist, but an honored guest reputed to be a “great scholar”). Amid this stark masculine scene — military, correctional, colonial — a single feminine element: “two delicate ladies’ handkerchiefs” that the officer has tucked between his uniform collar and his sweaty, sunburned neck. It’s a heavy uniform for the tropical climate, the traveler remarks at the outset, thus eliciting from the officer a declaration of principle: of course the uniforms are heavy, “but they signify the homeland, and we don’t want to lose the homeland.” The delicate ladies’ handkerchiefs, then, serve to mitigate the hardships the officer must face in a climate that otherwise might cause him to “lose the homeland.”
Near the apparatus sits a “heap of bamboo chairs,” as from an abandoned café chantant. The traveler is offered one so that he may witness the execution in comfort. Meanwhile the officer continues implacably to explain, in French, the workings of the machine. The traveler has trouble hiding a certain indifference and at a certain point interjects a dim little remark meant to affirm the liveliness of his interest: “So, the man is lying there.” As the traveler says these words, he crosses his legs and leans back in his bamboo chair. He’s ready to watch now.
Through the officer’s words, the powerful figure of the “old commander” emerges. The machine’s conception was entirely his, as was its creation. The traveler wants to make sure: “So he was everything himself? He was soldier, judge, builder, chemist, draftsman?” “Of course,” replies the officer, proud. The old commander comes increasingly to resemble one of those titans who flourished in the nineteenth century, breaking down every barrier. They were professional geniuses, and they wanted to manipulate humanity as if it were a compliant keyboard. With his machine the old commander succeeded in realizing the most profound epistemological aspiration of his time, which Friedrich Hebbel once described in his Diaries: “On days like this, one feels as if the pen had been dipped, instead of into ink, directly into blood and brain.” The world was marching toward the same goal but without the “as if,” the final obstacle. All knowledge that was mediated — by the sound of language, by the ungraspable mind — was diminished, sapped. In order to reach a level of unquestionable truth, knowledge must be inscribed — in the sense of incised—on the body. Only in this way could one make sure that the word passed instantly into the blood. And the old commander had shown the way: the harrow took the pen’s place and wrote “directly” (Hebbel would have said) onto the body of the condemned. The result is the only absolute knowledge, which renders superfluous every other. For this reason, the condemned man wasn’t informed of his sentence. There was no need, as the officer explained: “he experiences it on his body.” Kafka wrote in his Diaries (in 1922, eight years after the draft and three years after the publication of “In the Penal Colony”) an observation that might corroborate the beliefs of the old commander (and his popularizer, the officer): “From a primitive point of view, the real, irrefutable truth, undisturbed by any outside element (martyrdom, sacrifice for a person), is only physical pain. Strange that the god of pain wasn’t the principal god of the earliest religions (became so only in the later ones, perhaps). Every sick man has his household god, the man with lung disease has the god of suffocation. How can one bear his approach if one hasn’t partaken of him even before the terrible union.” The old commander was a devotee of that original god who never existed, that god who chooses to become manifest in the one mode that brooks no misunderstandings: physical pain. It’s no longer a question, then, of symbols or metaphors or ceremonies — all belated, attenuated devices. At the same time, the old commander was a designer, an expert on gears and cogs. And hence quite advanced. In him the archaic in its pure state (so pure that perhaps it never existed) and the modern in its pure state were conjoined. Is there any wonder that so few were able to sustain such a level of tension?
The old commander therefore succeeded in surpassing the ancients (those still dominated by the god of physical pain) while still managing to preserve some of their key doctrines. For example, that of ornament. Why is the writing on the condemned body surrounded by those fine, dense, mazy whorls, reminiscent of certain kinds of tattoos or remote decorations? How could that horror vacui be explained? As a sign of a still-infantile mind, or evidence of a higher wisdom? One soon sees that the latter is the case. Only ornament allows us to resolve a crucial issue: the writing “mustn’t kill right away”; the condemned must be able to “spend a long time studying it.” Otherwise the god will fail to give his followers sufficient time to recognize and adore him. We must consider, further, that the condemned man cannot read with his eyes the writing incised into his body. He must read it “with his wounds.” So he needs a chance to adjust, to practice. That’s the last reason for the ornamentation: to ensure that the condemned man has the leisure to learn to read without his eyes. Or better, to read himself, since the text by now is part of his body. Only then can the harrow run him through and dump him into the pit. Its work is done.