Kafkaâs Penal Colony: A Vibrating Human Machine for the Production of Fear

Anat Danziger

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Kafkaâs Penal Colony: A Vibrating Human Machine for the Production of Fear

In: Fear within Melting Boundaries

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Anat Danziger

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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 1â12

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848880535_002

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Kafkaâs story âIn the Penal Colonyâ, as typical to his oeuvre, is extremely effective in creating horror and fear. However, this text lacks two dominant characteristics of the Kafkaesque prose: a) the multiplicity and variety of corridors, chambers, bureaucratic labyrinths and b) the Baroque quality of darkness, dim light and gloomy settings. What, then, evokes so powerfully the feeling of terror in the text? Many readings have followed Brodâs path in identifying fear of the law as awe towards the divine. Norris, a later Kafka scholar, argues in contrast that allegorical tendencies have caused critics to overlook elements of sadism and masochism in the story. I offer a third way to understand the production of fear in Kafkaâs colony. The horrifying nature of the text, in view of its alternating perspectives, cannot be based solely on the readerâs identification with the condemned and his suffering. Compassion, pain and pathos might be elements in a complex literary machine for the manufacture of fear:

a. The labyrinth of corridors and chambers is internalised, dislocated inside the body or on it. A multiplicity of rhizomes: chains, decorated script and a web of activity created by the symmetric pantomime of the four actors.

b. Harmony and closure as opposed to discontinuity and disruption. Due to the shifting perspective, both harmony and disharmony generate an uncanny atmosphere.

c. Endless potentiality: detailed explanations of and hectic preparations for a procedure that never happens. This potentiality calls to mind not only the apparent tension between writing and acting, but also the less visible gap between writing and meaning.

d. Excess: the light that represents knowledge and enlightenment also stands for blindness and confusion. The same paradox characterizes the interpretive effort: an endless variety of possible allegorical paths, with no sign for conventional allegorical replacement.

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Fear within Melting Boundaries

E-Book ISBN:: 9781848880535

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 08 May 2011

Subjects
- Literature and Cultural Studies
  - Comparative Studies & World Literature
- Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies

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Kafkaâs Penal Colony: A Vibrating Human Machine for the Production of Fear

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