“Ceci n’est pas une écriture…”

Motto - a hyperdialog:
“The word made flesh" (John 1:1-14)
<"It's very artistic," said the explorer evasively, "but I can't decipher it. > (Penal Colony, p. 7)

Kafka, In the Penal Collony

In the penal colony takes a simple but difficult story and creates an intricate system of interrelating at all levels. I chose to call these relationships dialogs, simply because they are both the ingenious bridges between different categories and the very vehicles by which an elegant net of fading echoes are channeled. These hyperdialogs mediate through the subject matter and the naratological form, characters - narrator - narratee, and of course, between structure and texture. They are, in short, the nervous system of the whole ontology that the text signifies; they never qualify this fiction capsule, but highlight its main or underground freeways. To employ a graphical tool, I would say that they reveal a descendant pattern of a spiral. Why descendant?
1.Miscellanios conversation about hybrids
Because, as I will try to demonstrate, this paradigm is by far neither simple, nor absurd. It undergoes a genuine “organic process” of gradual fledging, which naturally ends in its entropy. The denouement (be it readerly, allegorical or poetological) is a phenomenological extension of one and the same leitmotif: degradability and failure. But there is no track of any explicit pathos related by the author or narrator to this generalized passing away in different directions - and that’s the real beauty and atrocity of it: aesthetically speaking, we are in the very middle of the sublime, even if it intimately flirts with the grotesque of it. Because only neutral hermeneutical tools are given to us by the text, all judgments remain relative. The point of view has the possibility of being omniscient, but it lucidly chooses a heterodiegetic position, with very rare variations into using a reflector. But only for a little while. This fiction entity is insurmountable: the author doesn’t make the word into flesh, thus - we read conventions of ink and get cheated in our resurrection-addicted clichés, the prophecy turns out to be a black parody of “naïve” utopias, the machine is a dissolving demiurge, the officer dies unenlightened, the explorer never really explores… No one and nothing completes their dialectics; existentially speaking, all these nameless entities (qualified according to their function: explorer, officer, soldier, the condemned etc.) are denied transgression. Even the most extreme of actions remains futile. It feels dubious. Just like the guiding inner logic of this world is nothing but a funny auctorial sense of sarcasm…
To poorly exemplify this, I will prove how different dialogs fail to work, concluding that what Kafka (usually) depicted was the functions, sensations and memories (not feelings or thoughts) of a moribund hybrid. A hybrid world is that of the diegesis: the converging point of more incompatible energies. This is why not the climax of the story (that would be the First Commander’s era) is the most interesting, but its ending: an overall blockage of channels and eventually its succumbing.
In this sense, I could qualify this text both as a potentially open text, due to the liveliness of its circuits and the intermingling of such aberrant meetings, or a closed text (Umberto Eco), because it lucidly dismisses itself by self-consuming. An example for the first paradigm is that the explorer/reader manages to escape/surpass the plot/discourse. While, at the same time, according to the second paradigm, this is a charlatan escape because it’s a counterfeit entering. According to the same code of superficial and limited access, he/we had never been granted real presence into that world: were just pretexts for it to reveal its malignancy and accelerate its logical vanishing.
I’m more inclined to believe that this piece of literature is an eschatological text guided by a never-ending irony instead of a prophecy, a general apoplexy where no tomorrow lives. A bill of transience and extinction.
A little notification: I’m using the term “dialogue” not only in its meaning of exchanging opinions with somebody, but in its larger sense, that of an attempt to connect at an common level two frequencies. The latter requires a minimum of some reciprocal will to acknowledge the Other.
Not accidentally, Hegel’s complex dialectics of recognizing the Other through the Self meets here, in Kafka’s short story, its negative equivalent.
2. Dialogs of complaisance: blowing in the wind…
…however, they are the equivalent of the multiple strategies games. For example, inside the diegesis, they are useless. No bridge. But, metatextually, they are golden links thrown over the autarchy of various dimensions. They are the cognitive nuclei of what Barthes has called the cultural codes: “numerous codes of knowledge or wisdom to which the text continuously refers […]”1
The polite dialogs have something of masked retardation: "These uniforms are surely too heavy for the tropics," said the explorer, instead of inquiring about the machine, as the officer had expected. (p.1)”. Common sense - as I know it - would imply exactly the opposite: when confronted with a construction such as the machine, even at first sight, the explorer (!) should elaborate on something else than “the weather”: “The explorer had little taste for the machine and walked back and forth behind the condemned man with an almost visible lack of concern, while the officer saw to the final preparations” (p.1)
3. Dialog with the narratees: be they intradiegetic (explorer) or extradiegetic (implied reader)?
How much of that world is being shared with us? Is there a direct communicational pattern towards the narratee?
Not hazardously, the only times that the narrator resorts to a “personal narrative” and a reflector’s point of view is when he needs to highlight these discrepancies of cultural codes. But never gets deeper.
“The information about the judicial procedure had left him unsatisfied. All the same, he had to tell himself that this was, after all, a penal colony, that special regulations were required here, and that a military code had to be followed, even to extreme limits.” (p.5) The free indirect discourse limits itself to these patterns, and this restraint in sinking into some character’s thoughts proves that this is all to know, really.
While we get at least some insight to the explorer’s mind, the two other characters: the soldier and the condemned man remain absolutely obscure, we can only see-with perplexity-how they react. They appear as autistic entities. Between them and the explorer stands the officer about whose inner mechanisms only speculations are being made. The formula “as if he were…” constantly appears when referring to him. " the officer […] smiled at the explorer, as if he were still expecting a few more peculiar utterances from him.”(p.4)
Why? Because maybe, as he still shares some cultural codes with the explorer, like the language and some general representations, he’s still relatively comprehensible for the explorer.

After all, even the witches die when they’re forgotten, as they say, let alone this magic torture! To adapt Breton’s famous saying, in the Penal Colony we have the nonrandom meeting on a vivisection table between a dead god and an ink-jet printer.
The very manifest of paradoxically communicative art, or as Magritte would have said:

“Ceci n’est pas une écriture…”



References:

Barthes, Roland: S/Z. An essay. New York 1974.
Frow, John: “In the Penal Colony”. IHR (April 1999). (visited December 6, 2003)

Genette, Gerard: Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Ithaka, New York 1983.
Kafka, Franz: The Complete stories. Schocken Books, New York 1955. (foreword by John Updike)