“In the Penal Colony” is a work of tremendous sparsity. Following only four characters -- the Officer, the Explorer, the Soldier, and the Prisoner -- and the penal apparatus -- the instrument by which punishment is delivered in the penal colony – the narrative is propelled forward primarily by the Explorer and the Officer who spend the story debating the morality of using the apparatus in the execution of the Prisoner. When no compromise can be reached between them, the Officer releases the Prisoner and inserts himself into the apparatus in the Prisoner’s stead. After the penal apparatus collapses during the Officer’s execution, the Explorer flees the penal colony, leaving behind the Prisoner and the Soldier. In a sense, “In the Penal Colony” represents a failed dialectic in which no synthesis can be reached between any warring parties. Because of this, along with the text’s inherent emphasis on penal discipline and power relations, this essay will attempt to pursue a poststructural, Foucauldian reading of the text, based on French theorist Michel Foucault’s essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” But before I can begin my analysis, it is imperative that we first address the various contexts that help to render “In the Penal Colony” as a work rife with ambiguity that necessarily requires critical inquiry to parse.  

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Much has already been written about the inherent strangeness of Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” from its theological and allegorical implications to its decided indecipherability. This confusion is to be expected when one considers the story’s tumultuous publication history. Originally written in 1914, “In der Strafkolonie” was not published until 1919, following a five-year hiatus Kafka took from the story. Kafka was famously displeased with the ending of the story, going as far as to call it “botched.” (Gray 216). It was not until 1917, after the repeated insistence of his publisher Kurt Wollf, that Kafka returned to the story. (Gray 216). However, during this period, Kafka found his life falling into disarray. In 1917, three years after the disintegration of their engagement, Kafka and his former fiancé Felice Bauer ended their relationship. To Kafka, the relationship’s failure stemmed from a polar incompatibility between the two of them. As Richard Gray describes it, “the principal problem was one of mediation between two incommensurable positions.” (Gray 234). Following the separation, Kafka exhausted himself attempting to revise the ending of “In the Penal Colony.” Ultimately, however, the original ending in which the Explorer flees from the island remains.

 

Up to this point, I have taken for granted the original German of “In the Penal Colony.” Because I am not fluent in German myself, my analysis indebts itself to Edwin and Willa Muir’s widely popular 1949 translation of “In the Penal Colony,” from the collection The Penal Colony, which compiles the short stories published during Kafka’s lifetime. (Robertson 639). Certainly “In the Penal Colony’s” translation history proves to be as important as its publication history, for the act of translation reveals the text’s aversion to conclusive interpretation. As Martin Blumenthal-Barby notes in “‘A Peculiar Apparatus’: Kafka’s Thanatopoetics,” the Muir translation of “In the Penal Colony” contains an immediate and intriguing translation error: “Willa and Edwin Muir’s mistranslation in the Schocken edition is “remarkable” in itself in that, though wrong, they got it just right. For ein eigentümlicher Apparat is, of course, not a “remarkable” but rather a “peculiar” or “singular” or “specific” or “idiosyncratic” apparatus.” (Blumenthal-Barby 57). To borrow from the Muirs’ translation, this mistranslation is ‘peculiar’ as it misrepresents (or, more accurately, reveals the truth of the apparatus through its misrepresentation) the penal apparatus, which constitutes the imagistic focal point of “In the Penal Colony.” Indeed, the Muir edition of “In the Penal Colony” is colored with these peculiarities -- words that intentionally confuse and resist definitive interpretation. For example, Blumenthal-Barby emphasizes how the overtly juridical vocabulary of “In the Penal Colony” retains a dual religious function: “[...] an array of religious references and insinuations are apparent, ranging from the ‘old’ (judicial/religious) law versus the ‘new’ (judicial/religious) law to notions of ‘guilt,’ ‘redemption’ (193), and the ‘scripture.’” (Blumenthal-Barby 67). From the multiplicity of Kafka’s vocabulary there exists a literary depth, in which language fails to signify one thing in particular. I use “depth” here, not to suggest something about the work’s literary complexity or its canonical importance, but to denote its inherent murkiness and indecipherability. Knowing both the publication and translation history of the text may not induce any immediate revelations about “In the Penal Colony,” but they do expose the text’s resistance to interpretation -- a necessary detail to know before one makes any attempts in deciphering the story.

 

Beyond the immediate material realms of “In the Penal Colony’s” history -- i.e., its publication and translation history -- it also becomes necessary to take into account the overt political changes that reshaped Kafka’s Europe at the time of the novel’s conception. When one considers “In the Penal Colony” and its political context, it should frankly come as a surprise that little criticism exists pertaining to the colonialist trends inherent to Kafka’s work given the novel’s focus on the imposed disciplinary practices of a foreign penal colony. At the time of the novel’s composition in 1916, liberal imperialism had become the dominating political force in Europe. Empires spread into fledgling countries, justifying their systemic domination of native peoples by claiming they were “bringing the benefits of rational government, fair taxation, and modern education to the oppressed masses overseas.” (Kohn).  Even if one were to disregard all evidence of Kafka’s personal interest in colonialism (of which there is plenty), it is still evident from historical context, and from in-text representations of European imperialism through the character of the Explorer, that the effects of colonialism necessarily influenced the writing of “In the Penal Colony.” Most evidently, a colonialist reading demonstrates how the colonialist setting, with its emphasis on the barbarism and foreignness of colonial power, provides a backdrop for the central political aims of the text. According to Margaret Kohn, “the colonial setting merely makes transparent the fundamental relationship between law and violence.” (Kohn). By revealing the penal colony as an exaggerated superstructure of punitive power, Kafka simultaneously indicts the barbarism of the Officer’s colonial practices, while implicating the Explorer and imperialism for their complacency. In doing so, “In the Penal Colony,” becomes a work of political theory, one that does not readily reveal its secrets, but instead, forces the reader to reflect on the complexities of its narrative to determine them. (Kohn).

 

Although I have spent a majority of this section addressing the various contexts of “In the Penal Colony” separately, I would now like to emphasize the importance in reading into them simultaneously. When critics speak of the allure of Kafka, or his aura, or even what defines a scene as ‘kafkaesque,’ they are speaking to the esotericism of Kafka -- what lies beyond what is written. They suggest that there is something inherent to the text that Kafka himself could not articulate. This may certainly be the case with “In the Penal Colony.” Here, context becomes relevant in achieving a comprehensive reading, for these contexts reveal the suggestive indecipherability of the text. “In the Penal Colony” proves so elusive because it alerts the reader to the existence of unwavering superstructural authorities while simultaneously obscuring their moral alignment. Critics are right to read into the allegorical implications of “In the Penal Colony,” but they must understand (and the reader, too), that this is an allegory which refuses to instruct. “In the Penal Colony” demands that the reader reflect on the moral and political conflicts of the story in spite of the incoherence of language. More generally, “In the Penal Colony” is a text that asserts literariness from out of its confusion.

 

By taking a broader, more contextual approach to “In the Penal Colony,” thereby revealing its hidden intricacies, indecipherabilities, and the requisite information necessary to understand the novel, I now feel permitted (if not encouraged) to approach “In the Penal Colony” from a more conceptual lens, bearing in mind the hidden power dynamics and manipulation of history at play. For the sake of organization and clarity, I will follow the format that Foucault outlines in his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” for “In the Penal Colony,” functions as an example of Foucault’s genealogy/effective history in action.

 

To begin with, we must first understand what Foucault refers to when he says “genealogy.” To Foucault, the task of genealogy is not to provide a comprehensive history of origins, of facts and convergences, or suprahistorical essences; these, he claims, are flawed in their approach, for they “attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities; because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession.” (Foucault 371). More simply, Foucault opposes the standard approach to history and genealogy because it attempts to create unwavering truth from out of the heterogeneous spectrum of past occurrences. Instead, Foucault asserts that the task of genealogy is to avoid finality, to define events that are absent from history, to examine where events and similarities recur, and to search for history in those places that have been neglected by the standard practices of genealogy. Turning towards the novel, we can see Foucault’s definition of a failed genealogy in practice during the Officer’s monologue about the history of the penal colony and apparatus: “‘This apparatus,’ he said, taking hold of a crank handle and leaning against it, ‘was invented by our former Commandant. I assisted at the very earliest experiments and had a share in all the work until its completion. But, the credit of inventing it belongs to him alone [...] the organization of the whole penal colony is his work.’” (Kafka 193). In opposition to Foucault, the Officer ascribes an almost transcendent origin to the apparatus, thereby canonizing the old Commandant and ignoring the past of the penal colony prior to the creation of the apparatus. 

 

The emphasis that the Officer places on the origin of the apparatus resembles what Nietzsche calls Ursprung (or wunderursprung in full), a “miraculous origin” which falsely assumes that the nature of a history rests solely in its origin. For example, Nietzsche considers the question of “if God must be held responsible for the origin of evil” Ursprung as it collapses history (the history of evil in this case) into a monolithic, insular occurrence. (Foucault 371). Similarly, the Officer traces the penal colony by the origin -- the Ursprung -- of the apparatus. (Foucault 370-371). The history of the penal colony that the Officer espouses is premised on a falsity, one that presupposes the linearity of history without acknowledging the instability of language, desires, and ideas. (Foucault 369). Perhaps more pointedly (and as I shall explicate in greater detail later), this is a history whose origins have been deified and manipulated in order to rewrite the very nature -- the essence -- of the penal colony. Therefore, it is up to the genealogist to “dispel the chimeras of the origin [... and] to recognize the events of history, its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats.” (Foucault 373). Truth, in this case, must then come to be understood as “the history of an error.” (Foucault 373).

 

After defining Ursprung, Foucault explores the intricacies of Nietzsche’s genealogical terminology further in efforts to conceive of a more effective genealogical practice. Foucault’s analysis focuses first on the disparities between the synonyms Herkunft and Entstehung. Foucault defines Herkunft as stock or descent; Herkunft “seeks the subtle, singular, and subindividual marks that might possibly intersect in them to form a network that is difficult to unravel.” (Foucault 373). Yes, Herkunft defines the composing traits of categorical designations like social type and race, but more accurately, it allows these traits to be pulled apart from one another, so that we may uncover and examine their incongruities. What Herkunft allows the genealogist to do, ultimately, is to break apart any semblance of a unified, “coherent identity” that would suppose the true soul or essence of a traced history. (Foucault 374). It is at this point that Foucault’s essay moves away from a general indictment of ineffective genealogy to the delineation of a more nuanced and skeptical exploration of the origins of history; it is also at this point that I feel comfortable to move away from merely identifying the ways in which the characters of “In the Penal Colony” bolster this false definition of genealogy, to a more comprehensive exploration of how Kafka’s text -- through its narrative conceits, deceptions, and very materiality -- functions as an example of Foucault’s effective genealogy. In addition to revealing the divergent forces at play in the origin of histories, Herkunft also makes history manifest on the body of those that it aims to recount-- that is to say, “the body -- and everything that touches it: diet, climate, and soil -- is the domain of Herkunft.” (Foucault 375). We need only to venture past the first few pages of the novel to see the narrative’s central conceit in full body -- the penal apparatus -- and how Kafka treats this device as a transparent inscripting tool for his genealogy of the penal colony. Examine the Officer’s description of the operations of the apparatus: “‘As soon as the man is strapped down, the Bed is set in motion [...] And the Harrow is the instrument for the actual execution of the sentence.’” (Kafka 196). During the “execution of the sentence,” the punishment is delivered in the form of an ultrafine set of needled teeth that, for the following twelve hours, inscribes the punishment of the condemned person onto their body as a reminder of their crime -- e.g., “HONOR THY SUPERIORS.” (Kafka 197). In this process, the apparatus quite literally imposes history upon the condemned body, reshaping and resignifying the body into the ideological perfect image of the dominant regime. The body, bearing the marks of concentrated ideology, forms the corpus of history -- it “manifests the stigmata of past experience.” (Foucault 375).

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Furthermore, the physiological inscription that the body endures functions as a performative act that sets out to fabricate and affirm knowledge. Besides being resignified by the penal apparatus, the condemned body is essentially made into a piece of parchment upon which history is documented. The penal apparatus transforms the body -- and every body condemned to it -- into an insular historical text, producing a narrative aligned to the perspectives of the apparatus’s designer. The apparatus was designed not only to fortify power, but also to create a false narrative from out of history that justifies the primacy of the established hegemony. Bearing this in mind, it becomes worthwhile to acknowledge the spatial context in which this documentation occurs. Readers will be quick to note the relative sparsity of the text’s cast and setting; we are given only the Explorer, the Officer, the Soldier, the Prisoner, the desert island where the plot plays out, and most pointedly, the penal apparatus. We are drawn to the apparatus and the act of inscription because it is the only thing we can look upon; it is the spectacle of violence, as in the days of the old regime, that Kafka directs us to. Considering once more Margaret Kohn’s reading, we find that the story “presents an extreme illustration of the way that the desire for certainty is easily transformed into an approach that achieves certainty by systematically excluding any contradictory evidence.” (Kohn). Just as the mechanical inscription of the penal apparatus onto the condemned produces an ideologically-consistent linearity of crime and punishment -- manifested as a guilt that is “never to be doubted” -- and a fixed narrative of hegemonic supremacy, the sparsity in Kafka’s setting and detail forces the reader to gaze solely upon the incongruities inherent to the Officer’s history of the penal colony, revealing all at once that the production of knowledge is inexorably tied to the reaffirment of power. (Kafka 198).

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By analyzing the ways in which Foucault conceives Herkunkft (as if in active commentary with it), we begin to arrive at his thesis, and, indeed, the central aims of genealogy:

Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body (Foucault 376).

Here, we see the ways in which ideology pierces the material realm; the body, the self, the class, etc., is constantly disfigured by the physical manifestations of ideological force. In a basic Marxist sense, Herkunft is the base -- it is those things which inscribe and fabricate. The hospital, the academy, the bunker, the prison, and the penal colony are all institutions which catalog the condemned for the purposes of reconstruction. Through regimentation and acts of inscription (uniforms, punishment for disobeying orders, isolation, documentation) the body defines itself in relation to the ideology imprinted upon it; the base is a productive force. Once reshaped, the body becomes useful for the consolidation of hegemony and further production of capital. These institutions do not act alone and are not without a purpose, however; if institutions and institutional practices can be understood to constitute the material fabric by which a body is shaped, then ideology is the needle that binds it to the flesh. Naturally then, if Herkunft constitutes the base in this system, then Entstehung must be the superstructure. But before I explore the ways in which Foucault defines Entstehung, I would like to close this section by explaining some of the reasons why I find it useful to relate the relationship between Herkunft and Entstehung to that of a Marxist analysis of base-superstructure. Perhaps the most salient connection between these two sets of relationships is their reciprocity; just as the base shapes the superstructure and the superstructure legitimizes the base, Herkunft traces the inscription and dispersion of ideological forces while Entstehung marks the emergence and confluence of these forces. The two (Herkunft and Entstehung and base and superstructure) are in constant conversation, critiquing, reshaping, and consolidating one another at all times. Ultimately, it proves necessary to acknowledge the ways in which these synonyms correspond and diverge, for their dynamism complicates the origins of history that the Foucauldian genealogist must attempt to unravel. 

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Having addressed the need to define these synonyms as constituting a reciprocal relationship with one another, I can now expand upon the definition of Entstehung that I had explored briefly above. Foucault defines Entstehung, quite simply, as “emergence, the moment of arising.” (Foucault 376). It is the point at which the study of descent becomes possible -- the emergence of an eventual history. But just as Foucault warns that we cannot assume a historical continuity from the descent of an object, he also suggests that “we should avoid accounting for emergence by appeal to its final term.” (Foucault 376). Though histories may converge in surprising coincidences that give the impression of linearity (the example that Foucault provides is “the eye was not always intended for contemplation, and punishment has had other purposes than setting an example”) it is impossible to determine the nature of an object’s emergence -- why it emerged, that is -- from its most contemporaneous reading. (Foucault 376). In “In the Penal Colony,” we see the various ways in which the essential function of the penal apparatus changes with history: in its design and creation, the penal apparatus was a device of inscrutable justice that defined guilt and morality through its powers of inscription; when the Officer describes the fanfare of executions in the alleged ‘golden age’ of the penal colony -- e.g., “Before hundreds of spectators -- all of them standing on tiptoe as far as the heights there -- the condemned man was laid under the Harrow by the Commandant himself” -- the apparatus and the procedure of execution act as an icon of ideological power, a double-image that simultaneously reaffirms power and imposes it upon the audience through the spectacle of institutional violence; and lastly, as the Officer explains and prepares the apparatus before the Explorer, the apparatus comes to represent an idol of some foregone or waning power. (Kafka 209). When we examine the malleability of the penal apparatus as an institutional tool, it becomes evident that conclusions are not to be trusted, and the imposition of meaning upon history always foretells “the hazardous play of dominations.” (Foucault 376).

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Beyond the emergence of a body whose history can then be traced, Foucault further designates Entstehung as the “entry of forces”; after the initial consolidation of power that marks the emergence of a body -- e.g., the conquering of the will to survive -- “individual differences emerge in another state of the relationship of forces.” (Foucault 377). More simply, this “relationship of forces” is the conflict of ideological forces in the consolidation of hegemonic power. However, this is never a ‘true’ conflict in any sense of the word; the clash between ideologies takes place on a purely non-corporeal stage, restaging again and again performative battles that belie progress and liberation:

In a sense, only a single drama is ever staged in this ‘nonplace,’ the endlessly repeated play of dominations. The domination of certain men over others leads to the differentiation of values; class domination generates the idea of liberty; and the forceful appropriation of things necessary to survival and the imposition of a duration not intrinsic to them account for the origin of logic (Foucault 377).

Not only does this false confrontation avoid resolution thereby engendering perpetual fluctuations in the supremacy of ideological power (hence the term “relationship of forces” to imply a constant dialogue), this confrontation also reifies the myth of liberty within the groups it subjects. Though regimes can collapse and the peoples they subject may achieve brief flashes of freedom, in truth the subjected are merely experiencing the specter of liberty, caught in an obligatory armistice before the inevitable reassertion of power. Power can never be destroyed; it is only ever transferred endlessly between a multiplicity of forces engaged in skirmishes of ideology. Shifting our gaze from the penal apparatus to the characters themselves, we can begin to unearth the hidden ideological conflicts that dominate “In the Penal Colony” and come to understand how they contribute to the reification of liberty. Continuing the post-colonial reading I began in my exploration of the contexts necessary to render “In the Penal Colony” interpretable, when we examine solely the characters and the dynamism of the relationships they compose, it becomes evident that the text’s central characters -- the Explorer and the Officer -- are the competitors in this false-confrontation of ideology, and by extension, are complicit in the subjugation that results from the assertion of the will to power. When the Officer and the Explorer converse, no matter the subject, they are both markedly polite and deferring to one another, often appealing to each other’s respective positions of authority. Even when the Explorer rejects the Officer’s final defense in favor of the penal apparatus, the most the Explorer can muster is an effete apology masked by a compliment: “I do not approve of your procedere [...] your sincere conviction has touched me, even though it cannot influence my judgements.” (Kafka 217). Though judgment is certainly being cast in this scene, the ‘conflict’ that the Explorer and the Officer wage amounts to nothing more than a series of aquiescences. And it is this continual non-staging of ideological conflicts that tricks the inhabitants of the penal colony into believing that they are free or have the ability to achieve liberty.

 

After failing to convince the Explorer to speak in favor of the penal apparatus to the new Commandant, the Officer releases the prisoner and begins to insert himself into the apparatus, either to punish the Explorer for his resistance or to try and persuade him one final time. As the Officer strips and prepares the apparatus for himself, the Prisoner reacts to his new freedom with disbelief and glee, laughing with the Soldier over the state of his garments, which had been “slit up behind” in preparation for the execution. (Kafka 219). The Prisoner (and likely the Soldier to some extent) revels in this sudden reversal of roles because it symbolically signals the death of the regime that the Officer came to represent. The Prisoner is ‘free’ for a moment -- but for a moment only. Though the Officer and the old regime have been dispensed with, prior to his death the Officer hinted that a new regime represented by a new Commandant had already begun to consolidate power. Even if this new regime proves to be less cruel than the one that preceded it, the condemned are nevertheless delivered back into a state of subjugation. And though the Explorer never directly contributes to the rise in power of the new regime, it is his indecisiveness -- to either condemn or defend the penal colony -- that allows for this non-conflict to be waged. But perhaps most alarming of all, however, is not the ways in which power reaffirms itself, but rather the arbitrariness of the laws and punishment employed to consolidate this power. If we recognize that the law can be nothing more than a myth created to enforce power, it should then come as little surprise that the penal apparatus begins to fully collapse during the Officer’s self-execution. In doing so, Kafka reveals that the apparatus is merely the fabrication of ideology, a performance in violence that continually restages and reasserts the power of the dominant regime. As Foucault notes, “the law is the calculated pleasure of relentlessness. It is the promised blood, which permits the perpetual instigation of new denominations and the staging of meticulously repeated scenes of violence.” (Foucault 378). Despite the disintegration of the old regime and the Explorer’s departure, ultimately, we are left in the same position at the end of the novel as we are in the beginning: the penal colony still exists, and because of this, power is given a stage upon which to replay its fantasies of violence and subjugation. However, upon completion of the work, we are left with the realization that the pursuit of power amounts to a frenzied nebula of relationships, whose reversals and triumphs are entirely contingent on the arbitrariness of the laws they impose. If we are to draw any conclusions from “In the Penal Colony,” this, perhaps, is the most salient takeaway. 

 

Foucault closes his essay by providing an all-encompassing, three-point summation of the uses of history in the creation of an effective genealogy:  

The first is parodic, directed against reality, and opposes the theme of history as reminiscence or recognition; the second is dissociative, directed against identity, and opposes history given as continuity or representative of a tradition; the third is sacrificial, directed against truth, and opposes history as knowledge [connaissance] (Foucault 385).

When we graft this method onto “In the Penal Colony” we see once and for all that Kafka’s text -- beneath all its indeciperabilities, false conclusions, and elusive vocabulary -- fundamentally operates as a piece of political theory. In the early scenes involving the Explorer and the Officer, the text clearly displays its parodic elements as the Explorer grows increasingly bored hearing the Officer’s curated history of the penal apparatus and old Commandant; the text dissociates any identity or narrative that the Officer imposed upon the penal colony during his suicide; and during the final scene when the Explorer flees from the island stranding the Soldier and the Prisoner, he does so because he realizes that “all knowledge rests upon injustice [...] and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious [...]” (Foucault 387). I want to explore this last point briefly, because while I do generally agree with Margaret Kohn’s original assertion that “In the Penal Colony” is a work of political theory, I believe this conclusion to be somewhat limiting. “In the Penal Colony” is not just a work of political theory, but rather a work that, through its incorporation of narrative incongruity and its explicit exploration of power dynamics, simultaneously functions as theory and praxis. My claim rests solely on the contents of the final scene and the ambiguity behind the narrator’s actions; upon arriving at the cafe where the old Commandant is buried, the Explorer flees and boards the nearest ship after reading the inscription on the Commandant’s grave: “‘Here rests the old Commandant [...] There is a prophecy that after a certain number of years the Commandant will rise again and lead his adherents from this house to recover the colony. Have faith and wait!’” (Kafka 226). More than a simple revelation on the Explorer’s part, this scene strikes me as the apogee of the story, the moment in which the structural friction between the greater narrative of the text and the narrative of the penal colony resists coalescence. When the diners in the cafe mock the grave’s warning, the Explorer suddenly becomes conscious of the penal colony’s continual manipulation of history, and realizes that the condemned can never liberate themselves because, like those in power, they too ascribe an identity to history to reflect the ideologies they want it to reflect. Rather than admit that the grave makes a salient point about the perpetuity of power, the diners instead consider it ludicrous, thereby committing the same injustices upon history that the Officer and old regime are guilty of. Not only, then, is “In the Penal Colony” a work of political theory that proposes a method of genealogy to combat the ideological manipulation of history (thereby preceding Foucault’s model), but it is also an ingenious creative work that puts this theoretical model into practice, producing an effective genealogy of the text from out of the vast divergences, incongruities, and power reversals inscribed upon the body of its fictional history.