Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence

5

The Fate of the Human Animal in Kafka’s Fiction

Although Kafka’s mature literary output includes four fully developed animal narrations (“A Report to an Academy,” “Researches of a Dog,” “The Burrow,” “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk”) that explore increasingly feral ontologies and attempt to produce a virtually “species-specific” fiction, it is two nonanimal stories, “In the Penal Colony” and “A Hunger Artist,” that develop most fully the philosophical (or, perhaps, antiphilosophical) implications of cultural violence. In spite of their human victims, these too are animal stories, demonstrations of the oppression and suppression of all that is creatural in the human—the body, feeling, pain, libido—in the ostensible interest of the twin demigods of human culture, rationalism and idealism. Kafka’s critical tool in unmasking the hypocrisies and absurdities of cultural violence is pornology, because pornology functions as a parody, a travesty, a reductio ad absurdum of cherished intellectual and spiritual habits, and celebrates, in the libidinization of thought, the ultimate anthropocentric triumph over the vanquished beast. I will present Kafka as a pornologist implicated in obsessional fantasies of cultural cruelty, yet shrewd enough to unmask their affinities to traditional cultural virtues (for example, scientific procedure, political order, spiritual ambition) and to unmask our enthrallment to them as libidinal perversion. I will therefore break my thematic sequence slightly at this point to explore the victimization of the human animal, in its body, its feelings, and its instincts, in the interest of cultural values.

Because of their puzzling nature, and because they fall into chronological clusters, Kafka’s fictions are usually read in thematic or allegorical groups. According to this method, “In the Penal Colony” belongs with the law and punishment works of Kafka’s earlier period (“The Judgment,” The Trial, “The Stoker”1), while “A Hunger Artist” belongs with the art and asceticism theme of his later works (“Investigations of a Dog,” “Josefine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk”). Whatever the merits of this method, it obscures the striking structural symmetry of these two stories: in each, a fanatical believer in meaningful suffering reenacts a spectacle that in an earlier age drew huge, festive crowds but now results only in sordid death and burial. Allegorical readings mask this symmetry by giving the stories different ideational contexts derived from the idea that governs the suffering in the work: the Law in “In the Penal Colony,” and the Ideal in “A Hunger Artist.” Reading the stories as companion pieces, however, suggests a new way of assessing the pain, one that renders the ideational contexts of the works wholly ironic. If suffering is seen as a means whose end is not the Law or the Ideal but pleasure, then Law and Ideal become mere pretexts, fraudulent rationales in a pornological fantasy.

On the status of pain in his writings, its transcendence or lack of it, hinges the question of whether Kafka is a religious or a pornological writer. He never depicted himself as spiritually as Max Brod depicts him. Not only did Brod’s own religious zeal color his perceptions of Kafka’s imagination, but his evident discomfort with “das Peinliche” (the pornological elements in Kafka’s work, both painful and embarrassing) led him to find in religion a handy means of cloaking them. “This humor, an essential ingredient in Kafka’s poetics (and his life style), indicates a higher essence beyond the weave of reality,”2 Brod writes of “the most gruesome episodes” in “In the Penal Colony” and “The Whipper” chapter in The Trial. In his later years, Kafka became decreasingly abashed about his knowledge of pornological writing and his appreciation of its importance. “The Marquis de Sade, whose biography you lent me, is the actual patron of our time,”3 he reportedly told Gustav Janouch. To Milena Jesenská he admitted, “Yes, torture is extremely important to me, I’m preoccupied with nothing but being tortured and torturing.”4 As evidence of his obsession he sent her sketches of hideous execution devices invented in his imagination. As Klaus Wagenbach demonstrates, Kafka need scarcely have resorted to his imagination, since gruesome material for his stories abounded: New Caledonia and Devil’s Island, penal colonies for the Paris Communards and Dreyfus respectively; the “Rotatory Machine” of J.M. Cox, using torture to cure insanity; the documents of industrial mutilation Kafka himself compiled for the Workers Accident Insurance Company; and Octave Mirbeau’s translated Garten der Foltern.5

Viewing Kafka as writing in a modern void of faith, most commentators eschew Brod’s frankly religious interpretation of Kafka’s works: “Since the biblical Book of Job, God has not been so wildly quarreled with as in Kafka’s Trial, and Castle, or in his In the Penal Colony.”6 Walter Sokel, for example, finds in Kafka the “negative transcendence” of unpleasure that Lionel Trilling describes in Beyond Culture:7 pain as an antidote to bourgeois torpor, a willingness (in “Penal Colony”) to suffer “Schrecken und Grauen” rather than “seelisch zu versumpfen” in frivolity and utilitarianism.8 J.M.S. Pasley finds in “In the Penal Colony” a nostalgia for “what Nietzsche called ‘the ascetic ideals’: deprivation and abstinence, punishment and suffering, discipline and self-discipline, as paths to purity and salvation.”9 Yet if Kafka derived his philosophy of punishment and asceticism from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, as Bridgwater demonstrates,10 then he derived it with Nietzsche’s irony intact and, like Nietzsche, exposes the fraudulent modern teleologies of suffering. Nietzsche writes, “It is today impossible to say with certainty why there is punishment” (3, GM, 266) and goes on to give a list of “uncertain,” “secondary,” and “accidental” “meanings” of punishment. “What then do ascetic ideals mean?” he asks. “In the case of the artist, we now realize, nothing at all” (3, GM, 289).

Kafka’s process in his stories, like Nietzsche’s in The Genealogy of Morals, entails not only a historical reconstruction but also its simultaneous critique. Critics too often see in Kafka’s evocation of a golden age of penal severity and hunger art a nostalgia for apotheosized pain. Rather, his “history,” like Nietzsche’s ironic genealogy, exposes the falsehoods and deceptions that constitute the civilizing process. Officer and hunger artist are robbed of a transcendence that was always fraudulent, and their carcasses are therefore disposed of with the unceremonious dispatch of animal burial, tossed into a ditch with dirty rags and batting, buried in a hole with the filthy straw of the cage. Nietzsche also uses the “education” of the animal as a mocking illustration of the civilizing process with its spurious “ascetic” rationalization of pain. “ ‘I suffer: someone must be to blame for that’; thus thinks every sickly sheep. But its shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to it, ‘Quite right, my sheep! Someone must be to blame: but this someone is you yourself.…’ That’s quite daring, and quite false” (3, GM, 315). Bridgwater attributes to both Kafka and Nietzsche an asceticism rooted in the desire to destroy the animal in man, since “obviously man has no particular significance as an animal, unless it be as the most vicious and unprincipled predator of all.”11 But Kafka’s tortured Tiermenschen are often already domesticated, like the “submissive dog” of a condemned man in the penal colony, so docile “it seemed as though one could let him run free on the neighboring slopes and then only whistle, to make him return for the beginning of the execution” (PC, 100). Kafka wishes to recover pain—untranscended, mute, “animal” pain, stripped of alatheia and telos —from its cultural falsifications. “Seen from a primitive point of view, the only real, incontestable truth, undistorted by external factors (martyrdom, sacrifice for another human being), is corporal pain.”12 This is also Nietzsche’s enterprise. “Apart from the ascetic ideal,” he begins the last section of the Genealogy, “man, the animal man, had until now no meaning.” It is Nietzsche’s task to de-moralize suffering as an ascetic ideal, to explain its function, but without acceding to its pretensions. “But any meaning being better than no meaning, the ascetic ideal was in every sense the best ‘lesser evil’ that ever existed” (3, GM, 345).

What makes Kafka’s two “histories” pornological while Nietzsche’s “genealogy” is not, is a narrative and dramatic form that manifests the particular structural and expressive elements found in other pornological writings. The researches of Gilles Deleuze demonstrate that the symptoms of the psychological conditions known as sadism and masochism are literary rather than behavioral, and that their study requires a textual analysis. As Deleuze proceeds to discover in the works of Sade and Masoch a new language, invented to give expression to inarticulate drives and needs, the works of Kafka provided him with a modern perspective elaborated in his collaborative study with Felix Guattari.13

According to Deleuze, sadism and masochism always have a conscious and an unconscious component, philosophical and psychoanalytical, an understanding and manipulation of the effects and an ignorance of the causes of that compulsion to construct certain fantasies and write pornological texts. He is able, thereby, to shed new light on the ideational contexts in Kafka’s works, to show, for instance, that tyranny is not merely a symbolic expression of the paternal role, the superego function, in sadism but that the sadist uses tyranny subversively to expose the absurdity of the Law, by enacting an extreme application of “the letter of the law,” for example, as in “In the Penal Colony.”

Deleuze argues that sadism and masochism are not subject to transformations into the Freudian complex, and that there is therefore no such thing as sadomasochism. He then distinguishes the two perversions according to a system of philosophical and formal oppositions that include their philosophical antecedents (respectively, Spinoza / Kant), political structures (institutions / contracts), intellectual operations (demonstrative / dialectical), expressive modes (mathematical / aesthetic), temporal structure (cumulative repetition / suspense) and formal models (perpetual motion machine / frozen tableau). These distinctions help to elucidate the symmetry of Kafka’s two stories “In the Penal Colony” and “The Hunger Artist.” Besides de-moralizing pain and suffering, like Nietzsche’s Genealogy, Deleuze’s symptomatological model also provides a philosophical rationale for the “doubled” language in the stories, the language of hypocrisy and delusion, ulterior motives and deceptions. The irony in Kafka’s stories emerges from the discrepancy between the “rational” and obsessional aspects of the discourse and is aimed like a blow at reason itself, specifically, the “rationalization” of suffering. By examining the ideational contexts of the two stories, “punishment” and “asceticism” as deceptive valorizations of pain consistent with the enterprise of sadism and masochism, their true subversive thrust can be salvaged from the critical tendency to make of Kafka one of the great religious writers of the century.

In both “In the Penal Colony” and “The Hunger Artist,” execution and fast are doubled so that they occur twice, in past and present time, history and act, idealized and vulgarized form. But this “doubling” is not mere repetition, but repetition with a turn or a twist like a Moebius strip, to reverse our normal response to torture and thereby subvert the pretensions of justice and art that govern the event. Deleuze describes the “perversion” implicit in our attitude toward “perversion.”

Nietzsche stated the essentially religious problem of the meaning of pain and gave it the only fitting answer: if pain and suffering have any meaning, it must be that they are enjoyable to someone. From this viewpoint there are only three possibilities: the first, which is the “normal” one, is of a moral and sublime character; it states that pain is pleasing to the gods who contemplate and watch over man; the other two are perverse and state that pain is enjoyable either to the one who inflicts it or to the one who suffers it. It should be clear that the normal answer is the most fantastic, the most psychotic of the three. (Deleuze, 103)

The theatricality of the public spectacle in older times guarantees the community’s assent to a Law and an Ideal that require public torture as proof (“Now Justice is being done”[PC, 111], the crowd thinks, as the execution begins.). The society colludes with enthusiasm, filling the valley of the penal colony a day early to secure good seats, subscribing to season tickets at performances of hunger art, and offering (in both stories) front-row seats to the children, in the penal colony by order of the old Commandant himself. The children’s participation stamps public torture as an edifying, educational experience and enshrines the Law and the Ideal that require it. In fact, in both stories, unpleasant scenes of torture are narrated as though through the eyes of children, clasped in the officer’s arms at the execution (PC, 111), or standing, “open-mouthed,” before the cage of the hunger artist, “holding each other’s hands for greater security” (HA, 164). The officer, who has a passion for theater (like the Marquis de Sade),14 runs the execution like a one-man theater company, tending the props, giving stage directions, badgering a prospective patron to support a failing show, and eventually serving as an understudy for the lead.

Theater translates the abstraction into an action (justice = execution), and it is the incommensurate relationship between the two that reveals the irrationality of the proceeding. This discrepancy is not one of degree but one of specificity, as Deleuze points out (Deleuze, 75). For a Law or an Ideal that is never named and appears to have no content, a suffering is extracted that is obsessively specified as to duration (twelve hours for the execution, forty days for the fast), equipment (machine, cage), setting (hollow, dais) and quantity (the suffering of the criminal measured by precise observation of its physiological effects, the policing of the hunger artist to ensure his freedom from “cheating”). The Ideal of the hunger artist is as indeterminate as “justifiably to amaze the world” (HA, 169). The Law in the penal colony is also indeterminate, replaced by flimsy pretexts contrived to create an almost certain occasion for punishment (saluting a door every hour during the night).

The machine and the fast are not arbitrary means of inflicting or enduring pain. Because the actual nature of the violence in sadism and masochism is not physical but intellectual (“What happens in a novel by Sade is strictly fabulous,” writes Roland Barthes15), the forms of the perverse fantasies are designed to serve subversive ends: specifically, to disavow the violence, make it impersonal and abstract, subordinated to a higher purpose, as though the sadist and the masochist had no hand in it.

The apparatus in “In the Penal Colony” is therefore metaphorically related to another machine designed by the old Commandant’s mathematical diagrams. The apparatus, he tells the explorer, “works by itself even if it stands alone in this valley” (PC, 112), and he describes the old Commandant’s political organization as so perfect “that his successor, even with a thousand new plans in his head, cannot change anything of the old way, at least for many years” (PC, 101). The use of machines and mathematical diagrams in torture serves to render the violence completely impersonal and thereby signifies a commitment to the “Idea of pure reason” (Deleuze, 19). Both Deleuze and Barthes stress that the subordination of personal lusts and passions to a sham rational system, the phenomenon of “reasoned crime”16 is the violence behind the violence in sadism.

The forms of masochism (art, suspense, contract), like those of sadism (machine, perpetual motion, institutions), serve to have suffering executed in the interest of an Idea (Law or Ideal), as though without the intervention of human desire and will. Fasting becomes hunger art when the point of view shifts from sufferer to spectator (since spectators can only see pain, not feel it) and thereby assumes an aesthetic form whose essence is stasis, like painting or sculpture. In other words, the torture of the hunger artist takes the form of waiting and suspense (how long can he fast?) until he becomes a frozen tableau vivant, a human being who never eats and therefore virtually never moves. His aesthetic effect is heightened by means of theatrical lighting, such as the illumination of torches at night. Appropriately, the impresario displays photographs (still shots) of the hunger artist to the crowd. The masochist disavows his own need and will to suffer by turning the execution of his suffering over to someone else by means of a contract. “The masochist appears to be held by real chains,” writes Deleuze, “but in fact he is bound by his word alone” (Deleuze, 66). Since the contract still implies his consent, the masochist attempts to undermine the volitional element by signing a “blank paper”17 (Deleuze, 23), like the hunger artist, who, upon joining the circus, avoided looking at the conditions of his contract (HA, 168).

The idealized historical accounts of executions and fasting in the two Kafka stories are the product of a rhetorical intention to persuade or educate someone about the desirability of such spectacles. The tacit assumption behind this rhetorical effort is that torture in its meaningless (unvalorized) state is unacceptable to the rational mind unless it is justified by an Idea. Consequently, persuasion and education become exercises in hypocrisy, discourses fraught with ulterior motives and devious intentions that constitute a form of intellectual violence—the use of “reason” to assault reason.

Instead of convincing the explorer that Law requires punishment in the form of torture, the officer’s discourse betrays the hidden “rationale,” namely, that torture requires Law to “justify” it (make it just) as punishment. The most concrete of human experiences, physical pain, is put in the service of the most abstract of principles, mathematical precision and engineering efficiency. This tribute paid to “mind,” the mathematical and mechanical mind, fails to convince the explorer or the reader. Deleuze writes of the “demonstration” in sadism, “But the intention to convince is merely apparent, for nothing is in fact more alien to the sadist than the wish to convince, to persuade, in short to educate. He is interested in something quite different, namely to demonstrate that reasoning itself is a form of violence, and that he is on the side of violence, however calm and logical he may be”(Deleuze, 18).

The officer’s demonstration of the machine is itself a deliberate act of apathy toward the condemned man. The officer explains the prisoner’s crime only at the insistence of the explorer, and then only as an irritable and reluctant digression from his demonstration of the machine. “But time is passing; the execution should be started and I am not yet finished explaining the apparatus” (PC, 105). The prisoner’s status in the demonstration is mere machine fodder. He is rendered depersonalized, arbitrary, interchangeable (as we see when the officer takes his place) and his pain is of less interest than the workings of the machine (during the officer’s execution the explorer’s interest is captured entirely by the self-destructing mechanism). Apathy is part of the intellectual violence of sadism because it totally negates the pain extracted from the victim.

Apathy in “In the Penal Colony” also takes the form of a rigid complementary distribution of language whose function is to render the officer as total subject and the prisoner as total object. Barthes writes, “The master is he who speaks, who disposes of the entirety of language; the object is he who is silent, who remains separate, by a mutilation more absolute than any erotic torture, from any access to discourse, because he does not even have any right to receive the master’s word.”18 The prisoner’s crime, the verbal threat that appropriates language, and thereby dominance, from his superior, is scheduled to be redressed by a total linguistic exclusion, from the discourse of his judicial process (charge, defense, sentence), the demonstration of the apparatus (conducted in French), and the message that will transform him into a human text, until the moment of his transcendence, when he will decipher the script on his body, and, presumably, reenter the universe of discourse. The officer, on the other hand, uses language demonstratively and speculatively, to construct entire scenes complete with imaginary dialogue, which he projects as models for the explorer’s meeting with the new Commandant.

The officer’s verbal demonstration of the apparatus is related to the actual execution that is supposed to follow as mimesis to praxis, to borrow the terms Barthes applies to the procedure at the Château de Silling: “The story being told [by the enthroned storyteller] becomes the program for an action [by the libertines].” In the same vein, the officer tells the explorer, “I will first describe the apparatus and then demonstrate the procedure itself. This way you will follow it much better” (PC, 102). The officer’s own execution is itself only a narration for the reader, however, and we find in Kafka’s story the same “reversion of texts” that Barthes finds in the writings of Sade: “The image appears to originate a program, the program a text, and the text a practice; however, this practice is itself written, it returns (for the reader) to program, to text, to fantasy.”19 The sequence of program, text, and practice obtains in the penal colony, where the old Commandant’s program is literally committed to the mathematical text of his drawings (“I am still using the sketches of the former Commandant” [PC, 107]), which in turn is translated onto the (precomputer) program of the apparatus, to be translated once more into the living text on the condemned man’s body. In this way, “the reasoned crime” of the penal colony emerges from the reversion of texts, the final version being Kafka’s story itself.

As the Law is fraudulently invoked in the penal officer’s “persuasion” (which is ultimately autotelic and functions as a form of intellectual violence) so the hunger artist uses “education,” ostensibly in the service of the Ideal, but in fact in order to usurp the impresario’s role and become the architect of his own suffering. Deleuze writes, “The masochistic contract implies not only the necessity of the victim’s consent, but his ability to persuade, and his pedagogical and judicial efforts to train his torturer” (Deleuze, 66). The hunger artist strains mightily, but with little success, to “train” his torturers in their role of policing his fast, ostensibly to render the achievement of the ascetic Ideal perfect. He sings when they refuse to watch him, tells them jokes and anecdotes to keep them awake during their vigil, feeds them at his own expense and before his eyes, and himself dictates a toast (“ostensibly whispered by the hunger artist to the impresario” [HA, 167]) drunk to the public, not to himself. The stasis of his art dooms the control of the fast to failure. “Of course, no one was capable of passing every day and night uninterruptedly guarding the hunger artist; therefore no one could know from personal witness whether this was really continuous, flawless fasting; only the hunger artist himself could be sure, only he could therefore simultaneously function as the sole convinced spectator to his own fast” (HA, 165).

Deleuze writes, “While Sade is spinozistic and employs demonstrative reason, Masoch is platonic and proceeds by dialectical imagination” (Deleuze, 21). The hunger artist’s ostensible ideal is asceticism, the triumph of spirit over flesh, of human over an animal nature ruled by Freud’s “pleasure principle,” and therefore organized to avoid pain. But the hunger artist’s asceticism is beset by a masochistic paradox that reveals its fraudulence: the hunger artist, like the masochist, desires pain and finds the fast easy to endure: “It was the easiest thing in the world” (HA, 165). The unnatural is natural to him, and the hunger artist, troubled by his hypocrisy, launches a two-pronged strategy to maintain the validity of his ideal: he confesses that his fast costs him no effort of will (HA, 165), and he transforms his ideal from a qualitative to a quantitative goal, the achievement of a world record that can be measured in temporal form, with clocks (“the only piece of furniture in the cage” [HA, 164]), calendars (“the little board with the numbers of the completed fast days, which in earlier times were conscientiously changed every day” [HA, 170]), and vigils. By abolishing the forty-day fast limit (which had only catered to the public’s short attention span rather than to his welfare anyway), his ideal can be rendered absolute by an achievement of never eating again. The hunger artist’s dying confession is therefore not a punch line, a surprise ending, but merely the fulfillment of his lifelong ambition, the completion of an absolute fast and its simultaneous disavowal: “You really shouldn’t admire it.… Because I must fast, I can do nothing else” (HA, 171).

The hunger artist’s ideal, like the masochist’s, is frustrated by his dependence on the collusion of others. In accordance with his strategy, this collusion takes dual forms: he needs the public to measure his fast in order to believe its authenticity and simultaneously to believe his disavowal of effort. In other words, he requires recognition of both his physical and his moral achievement, a recognition that his public withholds. They police him carelessly, then accuse him of charlatanism. They disbelieve such desperate proofs of his rigor as his singing (“They then only wondered at his cleverness in being able to eat even while singing” [HA, 164]), and reject his confession, holding him “for a publicity seeker or perhaps even a swindler, for whom fasting was, in fact, easy because he knew how to make it easy for himself, and then even had the gall to half-admit it” (HA, 165). These conflicts result in a series of dialectical reversals that continually shift the hunger artist’s suffering from site to site, from physical endurance to mental anguish, from positive asceticism to negative frustration. The public functions like an analogue to Kafka’s own personal spiritual “Negative,” a power that neutralizes every achievement, “Then, as soon as I have climbed even the smallest step … I lie down and wait for the Negative, not to overtake me but to pull me off the little step.”20

Both penal officer and hunger artist fail to convince the public of the value and meaning of suffering. The significance of their common failure is obscured by allegorical interpretations that deride the penal officer as a tyrant and exalt the hunger artist as a saint, that congratulate the explorer on his enlightenment and condemn the hunger artist’s public for its secularism and philistinism. Such readings prejudge the issue by invoking accepted teleologies of suffering that generate a whole vocabulary to express mediated pain, pain subordinated to a higher (abstract) value: punishment, atonement, sacrifice, martyrdom, discipline, immolation, and so on. The failure of Kafka’s protagonists in “In the Penal Colony” and “The Hunger Artist” to win adherents to Law and Ideal reflects a philosophical dismantling rather than nostalgia—a reversal of the processes of valorization (giving values), rationalization (making rational), justification (making just) and mythification (creating a system of belief)—that make pain acceptable to the human mind. Kafka restores physical, “animal” pain to its real and incontestable “truth”21 by de-moralizing, demythifying, and de-signifying it.

Kafka’s two stories, like sadism and masochism, have a conscious and an unconscious level, philosophical and psychoanalytic purposes. In other words, sadists and masochists know that they construct mythologies to justify their enjoyment of pain, although they may not know why they do so. Although the causes ascribed to Kafka are most often religious and moral, Kafka himself, it seems, delved into the psychological realm for an explanation of mastering pain that rather approximates Freud’s explanation of the repetition-compulsion of children in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.22 “Don’t you feel the desire to exaggerate painful things as much as possible?” Kafka wrote to Grete Bloch. “It often seems to me the only way people with weak instincts can exorcise pain; one cauterizes the wound, as medicine, otherwise bereft of all good instincts, does. Of course, nothing final is accomplished in this, but the moment itself … is almost experienced pleasurably.”23

Deleuze, however, offers a psychoanalytic explanation that would account for the erotic element in “In the Penal Colony,” and would allow us at least to speculate about the hidden fears and tensions that control “The Hunger Artist.” According to Deleuze, the erotic pleasure in sadism and masochism depends on a dialectical process of desexualization and resexualization that begins with the fusion of ego functions and the role of the parents. “Sadism is in every sense an active negation of the mother and an exaltation of the father who is beyond all laws” (Deleuze, 52). The old Commandant’s inflation as an autocrat, as well as his overdetermination (“Did he combine everything in himself, then? Was he soldier, judge, builder, chemist, draughtsman?” [PC, 103]), are manifestations of his superego function. This superego serves to desexualize the subject by suppressing all feeling. However, once desexualization is complete, the libidinal energy that is unbound from feeling is cathected onto reason and the mind. “At the culmination of desexualization a total resexualization takes place, which now bears on the neutral energy or pure thought” (Deleuze, 109). In other words, although one is tempted to suppose that the torture itself (naked man, “bed”, harrow as symbolic rape) is the eroticized element, the contrary is true: it is the intellectual processes, the “rational” discourse, the officer’s demonstration of the machine and his defense of the autocratic system that are eroticized. “The essential operation of sadism is the sexualization of thought and of the speculative process as such, in so far as these are the product of the superego” (Deleuze, 109).

The problem that remains is finding an explanation for the ending of the stories. In each of the two Kafka stories, the lament for a lost golden age of apotheosized suffering is followed by a tarnished reenactment of the torture (machine befouled and broken, cage uncleaned, signs unpainted, calendar unmarked), robbed of its glory. This transition, which was earlier described as a movement from story to action, from demonstration to praxis, is also a movement from theorizing or fantasy to “reality,” a disillusionment that Deleuze calls “disphantasization” in describing the ending of Masoch’s novels (Deleuze, 56–57). In other words, the idea or fantasy is never entirely convincing to the sadist or masochist, who, in any event, “knows” their fraudulence: the disavowals, disguises, and displacements that constitute them. The discrepancy between fantasy and “reality” becomes in Kafka’s fiction a temporal gap, the unhappy transition from a glorious, severe past to a squalid and lax present.

In “In the Penal Colony,” the disillusionment of the officer results from the universal rejection of the superego function as new Commandant and explorer refuse to support the old regime, and the officer takes upon himself an overdetermined role as executioner and victim. If old and new Commandant here represent a “symbolic” and “real” father, particularly a “real” father who refuses to assume symbolic superego functions, then their relationship provides a bridge to the biographical situation of Herrmann and Franz Kafka. In Kafka’s Letter to His Father, we find both processes in evidence: Kafka inflating his father to global and autocratic proportions, then (imaginatively) letting his father decline the honor by insisting, in his defense, that Franz has hypocritically foisted the superego function onto him. “For example: when you recently wanted to marry, you wanted … simultaneously not to marry, but wanted, in order not to have to exert yourself, that I help you with this not-marrying, by forbidding this marriage.”24 Kafka here recognizes the difference between the “symbolic” father in his fiction, the man who shies apples at his son or condemns his son to death by drowning, and the “real” father, the baffled Prague merchant who never understood the superego functions he was made to bear by his writer-son: “You asked me once, not long ago, why I maintain that I fear you.”25

The disillusionment in “In the Penal Colony” expresses this recognition, and the officer’s autoexecution is an appropriate ending, as the explorer himself notes. But Kafka discovered this solution only after much experimentation. In unused versions of the story in Kafka’s diary, the characters shift in their principal roles as executioner, condemned man, and witness, roles first occupied by the officer, prisoner, and explorer respectively. The shift occurs when the explorer discovers that the executed man is not the prisoner but the officer himself, who (spike through forehead) accuses the explorer of murder: “I am executed, as you command.”26 This shifting of executioner, victim, and witness resembles the “modification of the utterance” that brings to light “the grammar of the fantasy” in Freud’s 1919 essay, “A Child is Being Beaten.”27 In other words, Kafka’s indecision and experimentation with the subject / object category ([SOMEONE] executes [SOMEONE]) may betray similar repressions, projections, and evasions with respect to the sadistic fantasy.

Perhaps the most intriguing clue to “the grammar of the fantasy” is the snake, “the great Madame” who appears to enter the penal colony as a potentate of sorts, according to a fragment in the diary.

“Move!” called our ever cheerful Commandant, “Move, you snake-bait!” Thereupon we lifted our hammers and for miles about commenced the most industrious pounding.… The arrival of our snake was already announced for this evening, by then everything must be pounded to dust, for our snake cannot tolerate even the tiniest pebble. Where else could one find such a sensitive snake? There is simply only this single snake, who is incomparably pampered by our labor, and thereby also incomparably denatured.28

“The great Madame” is clearly a figure from a different fantasy, the severe, cruel woman of the masochistic fantasy, Masoch’s Wanda or Kafka’s pampered, tyrannical Brunelda in Amerika, and her appearance in the sadistic fantasy is anomalous. One complicated explanation might account for her, namely Jacques Lacan’s principle that something abolished on the “symbolic plane resurges in ‘the real’ in a hallucinatory form” (Deleuze, 56–57).29 In other words, the mother, banished in the sadistic fantasy of the penal colony (the only women, the new Commandant’s ladies, subvert and threaten the autocratic order of the inflated father) here reappears (literally, since the fragment tells only of her expected approach down the road) in the hallucinatory form of the snake.

“The great Madame” was omitted from the final version of “In the Penal Colony,” and, according to Deleuze’s formulation of the psychoanalytic configuration in masochism (a model based on Masoch’s work), the oral mother is missing in “A Hunger Artist” as well, if that work is to be considered a masochistic fantasy. Yet at the risk of raising phantoms or filling gaps that don’t exist, I would like to speculate that the oral mother lurks invisibly behind the starving artist and that a hidden dialectic of oral fantasies (Who eats whom?) governs “The Hunger Artist” as surely as the superego fantasy (Who executes whom?) governs “In the Penal Colony.”

If we return for a moment to the patterns of misunderstanding in “The Hunger Artist,” we find that the Christian elements in the work belong among them. Deleuze explains Christology as providing a mystical justification for the masochist: man is “reborn” through pain inflicted by the oral mother, for example, the crucifixions in Masoch’s work (Deleuze, 84–85). In “The Hunger Artist”, Kafka alludes to Christ’s asceticism, his forty days of fasting in the wilderness, an asceticism plagued by temptations including, presumably, the temptation to turn stones into loaves of bread and eat them. The hunger artist’s tempters are the ladies, “seemingly so friendly but in reality so cruel” (HA, 166), who lead him to the unwelcome food out of misplaced sympathy and concern. The threat that women pose to a necessary and desired asceticism has numerous analogues in Kafka’s own life, with the same result: an everpresent torment intensified by misunderstanding. In the running dispute with her son over his vegetarian diet, Kafka’s mother once tried to enlist Felice Bauer’s aid in bringing Franz to more robust fare. “Franz’s mother loves him very much, but she hasn’t the faintest inkling who her son is and what he needs,” Max Brod subsequently advised Felice. “Frau Kafka and I have had several confrontations over this. All the love in the world is inadequate if one has so little understanding.… After years of experimentation, Franz finally discovered the only effective diet for himself—the vegetarian. For years he suffered from stomach complaints; now he is as fit and healthy as he has ever been since I’ve known him. So, of course, his parents come along with their banal love and try to force him to return to meat and to his malady.”30 If Kafka intended Christ’s fasting and temptation to serve as an analogue to his own dietary abstentions and ensuing family squabbles, then he clearly seems to aim at a humorous deflation of the saintly pretensions of his own “magnificent, inborn ascetic capacities.”31 At the same time, his parents’ confusion about the sources of his suffering, blaming Kafka’s vegetarianism and “literature” rather than his frustration at being unable to eat and write as he wished, to structure and control his own deprivations and sufferings, conforms to the same dialectical conflicts depicted in “The Hunger Artist.” “This perversion of the truth, however familiar to the artist, always unnerved him anew and was too much for him. The consequence of the premature ending of his fast was represented as the cause of it!” (HA, 168).

If Kafka’s mother is a nurturing, oral mother, urging unwanted food on her son, then we find in a small detail in “The Hunger Artist” an allusion to her monstrous opposite, the cannibalistic mother. The hunger artist “stretching an arm through the bars of the cage to let people feel his emaciation” (HA, 164) unmistakably recalls Hänsel in the Grimms’ fairy tale (also caged, but to be fattened rather than to hunger), extending a chicken bone through the bars of his cage to convince the wicked witch that he is too thin to be eaten. If “The Hunger Artist” is in any sense an “anti-Märchen”32 of “Hänsel and Gretel,” then the meaning of the fasting becomes clear: fasting is a defense against being eaten.33 If this seems far-fetched, one should remember the frightful fantasies of forced feeding and butchering that dot Kafka’s personal writings. For Milena he conjures up a sanitarium that won’t allow a vegetarian diet. “What shall I do there? Have the head doctor put me between his knees, and gag on the meat clumps he stuffs into my mouth with his carbolic fingers and then presses along my gullet?”34 In his diary he writes, “Always the fantasy of a broad butcher knife that rapidly and with mechanical regularity drives into me from the side and cuts very thin diagonal slices that fly off in curled strips because of the rapid action.”35 Images of monstrous devouring occur throughout Kafka’s fiction as well, in “An Old Manuscript” and “Jackals and Arabs,” to name only two. Nor is the guise of the oral mother as a devouring monster incompatible with the masochistic fantasy, since in Masoch’s works the women hunt the animals and the men,36 thereby posing a similar danger.

Kafka’s two stories, “In the Penal Colony” and “The Hunger Artist” are complements, then, pornologically and philosophically (sadism and masochism, Law and Ideal) as well as psychoanalytically (the son’s relationship to the father and the mother respectively). Reading them in this way reveals in Kafka a subversive tendency that little supports pious notions of his own atonement and asceticism. Rather, he offers us a bestial gesture in the form of anatomizing an antibestial gesture: he unmasks the twin demigods of culture, rationalism and idealism, by exposing to us their double cruelty (simultaneous sanction and apathy toward the infliction of pain), their double violence (the simultaneous practice and denial of cruelty), and their double perversity (libidinous pleasure derived from the abolition of libido).