In the Penal Colony

The test is subtractive, and at the scale of a story it finds almost nothing to take from the first four movements. The officer’s long exposition is the action: every part of the apparatus he explains is one the story later needs, from the Designer’s cogwheels to the felt gag in the mouth, and the condemned man’s dumb curiosity and the soldier’s boredom are timed against it. The reversal is prepared by the officer’s own principle, “Die Schuld ist immer zweifellos”, guilt is always beyond doubt, which he applies at last to himself. The teahouse grave, with its prophecy that the Commandant will return, is required, since it places the officer’s faith in a line of believers. What holds the axis is the last scene, the traveller warding the soldier and the condemned man off from the boat with a knotted rope, which repeats his refusal in action but is looser than all that precedes it.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: an order of justice that has lost its god keeps its machinery, and the machinery outlives the faith. The officer is the last believer in a law whose founder is dead, a law in which guilt comes before any trial and the condemned learns his sentence only as it is written on his body. “Verstand geht dem Blödesten auf”, understanding dawns even on the dullest, is the promise that suffering yields knowledge; the officer’s death, with no sign of the transfiguration, shows that the promise was the machine’s and not the truth’s. The second disclosure is the observer’s. The enlightened European disapproves, declines and leaves, and his liberal refusal is shown to be also a flight from responsibility. Held below the top because the story discloses by parable, its condition stated in a diagram rather than in a society, and part of its force lies in what its readers have brought to it since.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The elevation is cold, and it is dread. The officer’s rapt account of the sixth hour, when, as he tells it, the face of the man on the bed begins to show understanding about the eyes; his memory of the crowds of the old days and the children brought forward to see; and above all the machine’s self-destruction, the Designer’s cogwheels rising out of the box and rolling across the sand while the Harrow no longer writes but stabs. The last sight of the officer’s face, with no sign of the promised redemption and the iron spike through the forehead, is among the most terrible images in the short fiction of its century. Frequency is the limit: the story rises three or four times, and its procedural register, which is its method, keeps much of it deliberately level. The height is near the top; the level is the method, but it is level.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth built, not evoked. The structure is a theology in a machine: the Old Commandant as founder and god, buried under a teahouse table beneath an inscription that his followers will see him rise again; the officer as priest of a superseded law who offers himself as the last sacrifice; the New Commandant, never seen, as the new dispensation that has no use for the rite; the sentence written into the flesh as the law written on the heart, Jeremiah’s figure turned to iron. The traveller is the outsider who visits the sacred site and will not believe. None of this is laid over a plot: the plot is the passing of a cult, and every particular, the ladies’ handkerchiefs at the officer’s collar, the rice pap at the head of the bed, the soiled felt, stays particular and absurd while it bears the pattern. Held below the summit because the persons are functions without names, and the myth is schematic in them.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The inheritance is the colonial tale and the decadent fantasy of torture, with the travel narrative’s European visitor as the frame. The turn is in the register: the most extreme matter told in the cool, exact prose of an engineering report and a legal brief, with no narrator’s horror and no moral, and with the apparatus explained at length as if its functioning were the point. That was a real departure from both the sensational and the symbolist modes the story drew on. The stake was paid: Kafka held the story back for five years after he wrote it, read it aloud in public in Munich in November 1916, and published it only in 1919. Held below the top because Kafka had already made the swerve, in Das Urteil and in Die Verwandlung (1912), and this story extends it more than it makes it.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Change the form and the story loses what it knows. Its knowledge lies in the gap between the officer’s lucid, technical, loving exposition and what is being exposed; a narrator who judged would close that gap. The point of view held near a traveller who understands the mechanism and refuses its meaning is the second instrument: the reader is placed where the liberal observer stands and made to feel how little his disapproval does. The third is the story’s central object, a machine for writing, which inscribes a sentence in a script so ornamented the traveller cannot decipher it, so that the form of the tale, exposition first and then the body as the page, turns on writing itself. Vantage, voice and object carry one knowledge. Held off the top by the close, where the form loosens into a scene of flight whose rhythm is not the rest’s.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Evidence, over a century, and it is wide. The story has been read as a prophecy of the century’s torture and camps; as an allegory of the passage from the Old Law to the New; as a story of colonial violence; as a parable of writing and of Kafka’s own body, beside the diaries’ language of writing as a wound; as a dramatisation of Nietzsche’s account of pain as the memory of morality; and as a study of the observer’s complicity. Each holds a part and none closes it. The questions are the story’s own and stay open: whether the officer’s death refutes his machine or is its last truth; why the condemned man and the soldier laugh; what the inscription on the grave means in an ending where the traveller flees. The surface yields on return too, where a technical clause turns grotesque. Held below the top because the parable’s scheme, once seen, governs the readings more than a novel’s density would.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The field is German-language prose fiction of the 1910s and the European short story. The intrinsic force is a model fixed for the century: the modern parable of power, an apparatus described from inside its own logic in a flat procedural voice, which reorganised what fiction about state violence could do. The discount is twofold. The reach is shared with Kafka’s whole work and is hard to separate from that of Der Process and Die Verwandlung; and it was delayed, coming largely after 1945. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the story is among Kafka’s most anthologised and most taught; Philip Glass made an opera of it (2000); and it stands behind a line of fiction on torture and empire. The figure rests on the force of the procedural parable and on reach that belongs to this story, and it stands below the disclosure and the myth for the reach it shares.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The span is a hundred and seven years since publication and a hundred and twelve since writing. The form survives whole, in the book Kafka himself published in 1919, with no editorial reconstruction of the kind the posthumous novels required; nothing of the form is lost. The presence is continuous since Kafka’s reception after the war: translated into most written languages, taught in schools and universities, staged and set to music. The surface is not fixed to its moment, since the colony has no place and no date, and its machinery has, if anything, become more legible. It stands at the second step a century can show, its presence wide but behind that of Die Verwandlung, and a century does not outscore the survivals of millennia.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Kafka’s German as the sentences known with certainty and the translations of Pasley and the Muirs carry it; the sound of the German beyond those sentences is neither credited nor charged. The command is of exactness. The apparatus is described so clearly that a reader could draw it; the officer’s syntax runs with an enthusiast’s rapid technical clarity; the narration never raises its voice. The first words set the whole register, the officer’s admiring “Es ist ein eigentümlicher Apparat”, it is a peculiar apparatus. The comedy is timed with great control: the officer’s two ladies’ handkerchiefs, the condemned man’s dog-like submissiveness, the soldier and the prisoner playing together while the officer dies, the traveller’s polite discomfort. Charged on the last pages, which are looser in execution than the rest, and on a few passages of the officer’s speech that go on past their work.

Score: 8.9 / 10

One law governs the whole: the logic of the apparatus, which is the logic of a faith become a procedure, applied without exception, first to the condemned man and then to the officer, whose sentence, “Sei gerecht!”, be just, is the same law turned on its servant. Take the two most distant elements: the officer’s rapturous recollection of the old days, with the Commandant present and the crowds come to watch, and the soldier and the prisoner laughing as the machine falls apart. They obey the same law: the rite no longer has a congregation, and what was transfiguration in memory is farce in the present. The tonal range, from technical exposition to horror to slapstick, is wide and held. Charged a little for the coda at the harbour, which obeys the law, but slackly.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Weighed as a story, which is not punished for being short beyond what it holds. It holds a good deal for thirty pages, in one structure. The state and its law, in a colony with two commandants and a judicial system of one judge. The sacred, as a cult and its passing. History, as the change from an old order to a new. The body, as the page of the law. Technology, as an apparatus that acts on its own. And Europe’s observer of all of it. They are joined, not listed, by the single apparatus. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the count and the vantage: no family, no labour beyond the soldier’s guard, no love, no natural order beyond the heat of a sandy valley, and every order given as diagram rather than as a world. A low mark on a small form describes the form.

Score: 7.6 / 10