In the Penal Colony” and The Lottery”Find a passage from eac

“In the Penal Colony” and “The Lottery”
Find a passage from each story that comments on tradition,
explain each and then explain the relationship between them.
“The Lottery” Quote
__Write it out as it appears in the story:
__Explain the quote in terms of what it says about tradition:
“In the Penal Colony” Quote
__Write it our as it appears in the story:
__Explain the quote in terms of what it says about tradition:
__Respond to one of your peers thoughtfully in one paragraph.
Page 23 From Textbook
2.1 OVERVIEW
Projects exist and operate in environments that may have an
influence on them. These influences can have a favorable or
unfavorable impact on the project. Two major categories of
influences are enterprise environmental factors (EEFs) and
organizational process assets (OPAs).
EEFs originate from the environment outside of the project and
often outside of the enterprise. EEFs may have an impact at the
organizational, portfolio, program, or project level. See Section

2.2 for additional information on EEFs.
OPAs are internal to the organization. These may arise from the
organization itself, a portfolio, a program, another project, or a
combination of these. Figure 2-1 shows the breakdown of
project influences into EEFs and OPAs. See Section 2.3 for
additional information on OPAs.
In addition to EEFs and OPAs, organizational systems play a
significant role in the life cycle of the project. System factors
that impact the power, influence, interests, competencies, and
political capabilities of the people to act within the
organizational system are discussed further in the section on
organizational systems (see Section 2.4).
2.2 ENTERPRISE ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
Enterprise environmental factors (EEFs) refer to conditions, not
under the control of the project team, that influence, constrain,
or direct the project. These conditions can be internal and/or
external to the organization. EEFs are considered as inputs to
many project management processes, specifically for most
planning processes. These factors may enhance or constrain
project management options. In addition, these factors may have
a positive or negative influence on the outcome.
EEFs vary widely in type or nature. These factors need to be
considered if the project is to be effective. EEFs include but are
not limited to the factors described in Sections 2.2.1 and 2.2.2.
2.2.1 EEFS INTERNAL TO THE ORGANIZATION
The following EEFs are internal to the organization:
Organizational culture, structure, and governance. Examples
include vision, mission, values, beliefs, cultural norms,
leadership style, hierarchy and authority relationships,
organizational style, ethics, and code of conduct.
Geographic distribution of facilities and resources. Examples
include factory locations, virtual teams, shared systems, and

cloud computing.
Infrastructure. Examples include existing facilities, equipment,
organizational telecommunications channels, information
technology hardware, availability, and capacity.
Information technology software. Examples include scheduling
software tools, configuration management systems, web
interfaces to other online automated systems, and work
authorization systems.
Resource availability. Examples include contracting and
purchasing constraints, approved providers and subcontractors,
and collaboration agreements.
Employee capability. Examples include existing human
resources expertise, skills, competencies, and specialized
knowledge.
2.2.2 EEFS EXTERNAL TO THE ORGANIZATION
The following EEFs are external to the organization.
Marketplace conditions. Examples include competitors, market
share brand recognition, and trademarks.
Social and cultural influences and issues. Examples include
political climate, codes of conduct, ethics, and perceptions.
Legal restrictions. Examples include country or local laws and
regulations related to security, data protection, business
conduct, employment, and procurement.
Commercial databases. Examples include benchmarking results,
standardized cost estimating data, industry risk study
information, and risk databases.
Academic research. Examples include industry studies,
publications, and benchmarking results.
Government or industry standards. Examples include regulatory
agency regulations and standards related to products,
production, environment, quality, and workmanship.
Financial considerations. Examples include currency exchange
rates, interest rates, inflation rates, tariffs, and geographic
location.
Physical environmental elements. Examples include working

conditions, weather, and constraints.
2.3 ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESS ASSETS
Organizational process assets (OPAs) are the plans, processes,
policies, procedures, and knowledge bases specific to and used
by the performing organization. These assets influence the
management of the project.
OPAs include any artifact, practice, or knowledge from any or
all of the performing organizations involved in the project that
can be used to execute or govern the project. The OPAs also
include the organization's lessons learned from previous
projects and historical information. OPAs may include
completed schedules, risk data, and earned value data. OPAs are
inputs to many project management processes. Since OPAs are
internal to the organization, the project team members may be
able to update and add to the organizational process assets as
necessary throughout the project. They may be grouped into two
categories:
Processes, policies, and procedures; and
Organizational knowledge bases.
Generally, the assets in the first category are not updated as part
of the project work. Processes, policies, and procedures are
usually established by the project management office (PMO) or
another function outside of the project. These can be updated
only by following the appropriate organizational policies
associated with updating processes, policies, or procedures.
Some organizations encourage the team to tailor templates, life
cycles, and checklists for the project. In these instances, the
project management team should tailor those assets to meet the
needs of the project.
The assets in the second category are updated throughout the
project with project information. For example, information on
financial performance, lessons learned, performance metrics and
issues, and defects are continually updated throughout the
project.
2.3.1 PROCESSES, POLICIES, AND PROCEDURES

The organization's processes and procedures for conducting
project work include but are not limited to:
Initiating and Planning:
Guidelines and criteria for tailoring the organization's set of
standard processes and procedures to satisfy the specific needs
of the project;
Specific organizational standards such as policies (e.g., human
resources policies, health and safety policies, security and
confidentiality policies, quality policies, procurement policies,
and environmental policies);
Product and project life cycles, and methods and procedures
(e.g., project management methods, estimation metrics, process
audits, improvement targets, checklists, and standardized
process definitions for use in the organization);
Templates (e.g., project management plans, project documents,
project registers, report formats, contract templates, risk
categories, risk statement templates, probability and impact
definitions, probability and impact matrices, and stakeholder
register templates); and
Preapproved supplier lists and various types of contractual
agreements (e.g., fixed-price, cost-reimbursable, and time and
material contracts).
Executing, Monitoring, and Controlling:
Change control procedures, including the steps by which
performing organization standards, policies, plans, and
procedures or any project documents will be modified, and how
any changes will be approved and validated;
Traceability matrices;
Financial controls procedures (e.g., time reporting, required
expenditure and disbursement reviews, accounting codes, and
standard contract provisions);
Issue and defect management procedures (e.g., defining issue
and defect controls, identifying and resolving issues and
defects, and tracking action items);
Resource availability control and assignment management;

Organizational communication requirements (e.g., specific
communication technology available, authorized communication
media, record retention policies, videoconferencing,
collaborative tools, and security requirements);
Procedures for prioritizing, approving, and issuing work
authorizations;
Templates (e.g., risk register, issue log, and change log);
Standardized guidelines, work instructions, proposal evaluation
criteria, and performance measurement criteria; and
Product, service, or result verification and validation
procedures.
Closing. Project closure guidelines or requirements (e.g., final
project audits, project evaluations, deliverable acceptance,
contract closure, resource reassignment, and knowledge transfer
to production and/or operations).
Unit II Proposal
In Unit II, you have learned about the organizational structures
and cultures that projects must operate in. To prepare for this
assignment, review Table 2.1 on page 23 of the textbook.
Your first task is to choose one of the three major
organizational structures to associate with Lucky Me Animal
Rescue. The structure you choose to associate with the rescue is
up to you, but keep in mind that it will continue to be the
environment for your project as you complete the additional
assignments in this course.
Next, you will write a proposal you can deliver to the rescue’s
leadership and stakeholders to help them understand how the
adoption event will be managed within the identified
organizational structure. The goal is to help them understand
how their organizational structure will affect the project.
Your proposal should start with a very brief identification and
description of Lucky Me Animal Rescue’s organizational
structure.
You must then address how that structure will affect project
characteristics. Refer to Table 2.1 in the textbook for a list of

specific characteristics.
Finally, at a minimum, your proposal must also:
examine the project manager’s role in the structure,
explore how project communication will be conducted within
the structure, and
assess how project personnel and resources are affected by the
organizational structure and how this can impact project
progress and completion.
Your proposal must be a minimum of two pages in length, not
counting the title and reference pages. You must use at least
two sources to support your proposal, one of which may be the
textbook. All sources used must be peer-reviewed or academic
in nature.
Adhere to APA Style when constructing this assignment,
including the title page and in-text citations and references for
all sources that are used. Please note that no abstract is needed.
1
The Lottery
by Shirley Jackson
The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh
warmth of a full-summer day; the
flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly
green. The people of the village
began to gather in the square, between the post office and the
bank, around ten o'clock; in some
towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days
and had to be started on June
26th. but in this village, where there were only about three
hundred people, the whole lottery

took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the
morning and still be through in
time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.
The children assembled first, of course. School was recently
over for the summer, and the feeling
of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather
together quietly for a while before
they broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of the
classroom and the teacher, of books
and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets
full of stones, and the other boys
soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and
roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones
and Dickie Delacroix-- the villagers pronounced this name
"Dellacroy"--eventually made a great
pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against
the raids of the other boys. The
girls stood aside, talking among themselves, looking over their
shoulders at the boys, and the
very small children rolled in the dust or clung to the hands of
their older brothers or sisters.
Soon the men began to gather, surveying their own children,
speaking of planting and rain,
tractors and taxes. They stood together, away from the pile of
stones in the corner, and their
jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed. The
women, wearing faded house dresses
and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk. They greeted
one another and exchanged bits of
gossip as they went to join their husbands. Soon the women,
standing by their husbands, began
to call to their children, and the children came reluctantly,
having to be called four or five times.
Bobby Martin ducked under his mother's grasping hand and ran,

laughing, back to the pile of
stones. His father spoke up sharply, and Bobby came quickly
and took his place between his
father and his oldest brother.
The lottery was conducted--as were the square dances, the teen
club, the Halloween program--by
Mr. Summers, who had time and energy to devote to civic
activities. He was a round-faced,
jovial man and he ran the coal business, and people were sorry
for him because he had no
children and his wife was a scold. When he arrived in the
square, carrying the black wooden box,
there was a murmur of conversation among the villagers, and he
waved and called, "Little late
today, folks." The postmaster, Mr. Graves, followed him,
carrying a three- legged stool, and the
stool was put in the center of the square and Mr. Summers set
the black box down on it. The
villagers kept their distance, leaving a space between
themselves and the stool, and when Mr.
Summers said, "Some of you fellows want to give me a hand?"
there was a hesitation before two
men, Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, came forward to
hold the box steady on the stool
while Mr. Summers stirred up the papers inside it.
2
The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long
ago, and the black box now resting
on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner,
the oldest man in town, was
born. Mr.

Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new
box, but no one liked to upset
even as much tradition as was represented by the black box.
There was a story that the present
box had been made with some pieces of the box that had
preceded it, the one that had been
constructed when the first people settled down to make a village
here. Every year, after the
lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box, but
every year the subject was
allowed to fade off without anything being done. The black box
grew shabbier each year: by now
it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along
one side to show the original wood
color, and in some places faded or stained.
Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, held the black box
securely on the stool until Mr.
Summers had stirred the papers thoroughly with his hand.
Because so much of the ritual had
been forgotten or discarded, Mr. Summers had been successful
in having slips of paper
substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for
generations. Chips of wood, Mr.
Summers had argued, had been all very well when the village
was tiny, but now that the
population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on
growing, it was necessary to use
something that would fit more easily into the black box. The
night before the lottery, Mr.
Summers and Mr. Graves made up the slips of paper and put
them in the box, and it was then
taken to the safe of Mr. Summers' coal company and locked up
until Mr. Summers was ready to
take it to the square next morning. The rest of the year, the box

was put way, sometimes one
place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves's
barn and another year underfoot
in the post office, and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the
Martin grocery and left there.
There was a great deal of fussing to be done before Mr.
Summers declared the lottery open.
There were the lists to make up--of heads of families, heads of
households in each family,
members of each household in each family. There was the
proper swearing-in of Mr. Summers
by the postmaster, as the official of the lottery; at one time,
some people remembered, there had
been a recital of some sort, performed by the official of the
lottery, a perfunctory, tuneless chant
that had been rattled off duly each year; some people believed
that the official of the lottery used
to stand just so when he said or sang it, others believed that he
was supposed to walk among the
people, but years and years ago this part of the ritual had been
allowed to lapse. There had been,
also, a ritual salute, which the official of the lottery had had to
use in addressing each person who
came up to draw from the box, but this also had changed with
time, until now it was felt
necessary only for the official to speak to each person
approaching. Mr. Summers was very good
at all this; in his clean white shirt and blue jeans, with one hand
resting carelessly on the black
box, he seemed very proper and important as he talked
interminably to Mr. Graves and the
Martins.
Just as Mr. Summers finally left off talking and turned to the
assembled villagers, Mrs.

Hutchinson came hurriedly along the path to the square, her
sweater thrown over her shoulders,
and slid into place in the back of the crowd. "Clean forgot what
day it was," she said to Mrs.
Delacroix, who stood next to her, and they both laughed softly.
"Thought my old man was out
back stacking wood," Mrs. Hutchinson went on. "and then I
looked out the window and the kids
3
was gone, and then I remembered it was the twenty- seventh and
came a-running." She dried her
hands on her apron, and Mrs. Delacroix said, "You're in time,
though. They're still talking away
up there."
Mrs. Hutchinson craned her neck to see through the crowd and
found her husband and children
standing near the front. She tapped Mrs. Delacroix on the arm
as a farewell and began to make
her way through the crowd. The people separated good-
humoredly to let her through: two or
three people said, in voices just loud enough to be heard across
the crowd, "Here comes your,
Missus, Hutchinson," and "Bill, she made it after all." Mrs.
Hutchinson reached her husband, and
Mr. Summers, who had been waiting, said cheerfully, "Thought
we were going to have to get on
without you, Tessie." Mrs. Hutchinson said, grinning, "Wouldn't
have me leave m'dishes in the
sink, now, would you. Joe?," and soft laughter ran through the
crowd as the people stirred back
into position after Mrs. Hutchinson's arrival.

"Well, now." Mr. Summers said soberly, "guess we better get
started, get this over with, so's we
can go back to work. Anybody ain't here?"
"Dunbar." several people said. "Dunbar. Dunbar."
Mr. Summers consulted his list. "Clyde Dunbar." he said.
"That's right. He's broke his leg, hasn't
he? Who's drawing for him?"
"Me, I guess," a woman said, and Mr. Summers turned to look
at her. "Wife draws for her
husband." Mr. Summers said. "Don't you have a grown boy to
do it for you, Janey?" Although
Mr. Summers and everyone else in the village knew the answer
perfectly well, it was the
business of the official of the lottery to ask such questions
formally. Mr. Summers waited with
an expression of polite interest while Mrs. Dunbar answered.
"Horace's not but sixteen yet." Mrs. Dunbar said regretfully.
"Guess I gotta fill in for the old man
this year."
"Right," Mr. Summers said. He made a note on the list he was
holding. Then he asked, "Watson
boy drawing this year?"
A tall boy in the crowd raised his hand. "Here," he said. "I m
drawing for my mother and me."
He blinked his eyes nervously and ducked his head as several
voices in the crowd said things
like, "Good fellow, lad," and "Glad to see your mother's got a
man to do it."

"Well," Mr. Summers said, "guess that's everyone. Old Man
Warner make it?" "Here," a voice
said, and Mr. Summers nodded.
A sudden hush fell on the crowd as Mr. Summers cleared his
throat and looked at the list. "All
ready?" he called. "Now, I'll read the names--heads of families
first--and the men come up and
take a paper out of the box. Keep the paper folded in your hand
without looking at it until
everyone has had a turn. Everything clear?"
4
The people had done it so many times that they only half
listened to the directions: most of them
were quiet, wetting their lips, not looking around. Then Mr.
Summers raised one hand high and
said,
"Adams." A man disengaged himself from the crowd and came
forward. "Hi, Steve," Mr.
Summers said. and Mr. Adams said, "Hi, Joe." They grinned at
one another humorlessly and
nervously. Then Mr. Adams reached into the black box and took
out a folded paper. He held it
firmly by one corner as he turned and went hastily back to his
place in the crowd, where he stood
a little apart from his family, not looking down at his hand.
"Allen," Mr. Summers said. "Anderson.... Bentham."
"Seems like there's no time at all between lotteries any more,"
Mrs. Delacroix said to Mrs.

Graves in the back row.
"Seems like we got through with the last one only last week."
"Time sure goes fast," Mrs. Graves said.
"Clark.... Delacroix"
"There goes my old man," Mrs. Delacroix said. She held her
breath while her husband went
forward.
"Dunbar," Mr. Summers said, and Mrs. Dunbar went steadily to
the box while one of the women
said, "Go on, Janey," and another said, "There she goes."
"We're next," Mrs. Graves said. She watched while Mr. Graves
came around from the side of the
box, greeted Mr. Summers gravely and selected a slip of paper
from the box. By now, all through
the crowd, there were men holding the small folded papers in
their large hand, turning them over
and over nervously. Mrs. Dunbar and her two sons stood
together, Mrs. Dunbar holding the slip
of paper.
"Harburt.... Hutchinson."
"Get up there, Bill," Mrs. Hutchinson said, and the people near
her laughed.
"Jones."
"They do say," Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood
next to him, "that over in the
north village they're talking of giving up the lottery."

Old Man Warner snorted. "Pack of crazy fools," he said.
"Listening to the young folks, nothing's
good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting
to go back to living in caves,
nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a
saying about 'Lottery in June,
corn be heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be eating
stewed chickweed and acorns.
5
There's always been a lottery," he added petulantl y. "Bad
enough to see young Joe Summers up
there joking with everybody."
"Some places have already quit lotteries," Mrs. Adams said.
"Nothing but trouble in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly.
"Pack of young fools." "Martin."
And Bobby Martin watched his father go forward. "Overdyke....
Percy."
"I wish they'd hurry," Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son. "I wish
they'd hurry." "They're almost
through," her son said.
"You get ready to run-tell Dad," Mrs. Dunbar said.
Mr. Summers called his own name and then stepped forward
precisely and selected a slip from
the box. Then he called, "Warner."
"Seventy-seventh year I been in the lottery," Old Man Warner
said as he went through the crowd.
"Seventy-seventh time."

"Watson." The tall boy came awkwardly through the crowd.
Someone said, "Don't be nervous,
Jack," and Mr. Summers said, "Take your time, son."
"Zanini."
After that, there was a long pause, a breathless pause, until Mr.
Summers, holding his slip of
paper in the air, said, "All right, fellows." For a minute, no one
moved, and then all the slips of
paper were opened. Suddenly, all the women began to speak at
once, saying, "Who is it?,"
"Who's got it?," "Is it the Dunbars?," "Is it the Watsons?" Then
the voices began to say, "It's
Hutchinson. It's Bill," "Bill Hutchinson's got it."
"Go tell your father," Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son.
People began to look around to see the Hutchinsons. Bill
Hutchinson was standing quietly,
staring down at the paper in his hand. Suddenly, Tessie
Hutchinson shouted to Mr. Summers,
"You didn't give him time enough to take any paper he wanted.
I saw you. It wasn't fair!"
"Be a good sport, Tessie," Mrs. Delacroix called, and Mrs.
Graves said, "All of us took the same
chance." "Shut up, Tessie," Bill Hutchinson said.
"Well, everyone," Mr. Summers said, "that was done pretty fast,
and now we've got to be
hurrying a little more to get done in time." He consulted his
next list. "Bill," he said, "you draw
for the Hutchinson family. You got any other households in the
Hutchinsons?"

"There's Don and Eva," Mrs. Hutchinson yelled. "Make them
take their chance!"
"Daughters draw with their husbands' families, Tessie," Mr.
Summers said gently. "You know
that as well as anyone else."
6
"It wasn't fair," Tessie said.
"I guess not, Joe," Bill Hutchinson said regretfully. "My
daughter draws with her husband's
family; that's only fair. And I've got no other family except the
kids."
"Then, as far as drawing for families is concerned, it's you," Mr.
Summers said in explanation,
"and as far as drawing for households is concerned, that's you,
too, right?"
"Right," Bill Hutchinson said.
"How many kids, Bill?" Mr. Summers asked formally.
"Three," Bill Hutchinson said.
"There's Bill, Jr., and Nancy, and little Dave. And Tessie and
me."
"All right, then," Mr. Summers said. "Harry, you got their
tickets back?"
Mr. Graves nodded and held up the slips of paper. "Put them in

the box, then," Mr. Summers
directed. "Take Bill's and put it in."
"I think we ought to start over," Mrs. Hutchinson said, as
quietly as she could. "I tell you it
wasn't fair. You didn't give him time enough to choose.
Everybody saw that."
Mr. Graves had selected the five slips and put them in the box.
and he dropped all the papers but
those onto the ground, where the breeze caught them and lifted
them off.
"Listen, everybody," Mrs. Hutchinson was saying to the people
around her.
"Ready, Bill?" Mr. Summers asked, and Bill Hutchinson, with
one quick glance around at his
wife and children, nodded.
"Remember," Mr. Summers said, "take the slips and keep them
folded until each person has
taken one. Harry, you help little Dave." Mr. Graves took the
hand of the little boy, who came
willingly with him up to the box. "Take a paper out of the box,
Davy," Mr. Summers said. Davy
put his hand into the box and laughed. "Take just one paper,"
Mr. Summers said. "Harry, you
hold it for him." Mr. Graves took the child's hand and removed
the folded paper from the tight
fist and held it while little Dave stood next to him and looked
up at him wonderingly.
"Nancy next," Mr. Summers said. Nancy was twelve, and her
school friends breathed heavily as
she went forward switching her skirt and took a slip daintily

from the box. "Bill, Jr.," Mr.
Summers said, and Billy, his face red and his feet overlarge,
near knocked the box over as he got
a paper out. "Tessie," Mr. Summers said. She hesitated for a
minute, looking around defiantly,
and then set her lips and went up to the box. She snatched a
paper out and held it behind her.
7
"Bill," Mr. Summers said, and Bill Hutchinson reached into the
box and felt around, bringing his
hand out at last with the slip of paper in it.
The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, "I hope it's not Nancy,"
and the sound of the whisper
reached the edges of the crowd.
"It's not the way it used to be," Old Man Warner said clearly.
"People ain't the way they used to
be."
"All right," Mr. Summers said. "Open the papers. Harry, you
open little Dave's."
Mr. Graves opened the slip of paper, and there was a general
sigh through the crowd as he held it
up and everyone could see that it was blank. Nancy and Bill, Jr.,
opened theirs at the same time
and both beamed and laughed, turning around to the crowd and
holding their slips of paper above
their heads.
"Tessie," Mr. Summers said. There was a pause, and then Mr.

Summers looked at Bill
Hutchinson, and Bill unfolded his paper and showed it. It was
blank.
"It's Tessie," Mr. Summers said, and his voice was hushed.
"Show us her paper, Bill."
Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of
paper out of her hand. It had a black
spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night
before with the heavy pencil in the
coal company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a
stir in the crowd.
"All right, folks." Mr. Summers said. "Let's finish quickly."
Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the
original black box, they still
remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made
earlier was ready; there were
stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had
come out of the box. Delacroix
selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands
and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. "Come
on," she said. "Hurry up."
Mr. Dunbar had large stones in both hands, and she said,
gasping for breath. "I can't run at all.
You'll have to go ahead, and I'll catch up with you."
The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy
Hutchinson few pebbles.
Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now,
and she held her hands out
desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she

said. A stone hit her on the side of
the head. Old Man Warner was saying, "Come on, come on,
everyone." Steve Adams was in the
front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.
"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then
they were upon her.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 |
DOI:10.1163/9789004376175_007
chapter 5
The Legibility of Legislation in Kafka’s
“In the Penal Colony”
Siebe Bluijs
Abstract
This chapter investigates the readability of the law through an
analysis of
Franz Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony” [orig. 1919]. In the
story, a writing
machine inscribes the verdict into the condemned person’s body
until death
ensues. Bluijs argues that the readability of the law is
dependent on its ability
to function as a form of writing as it has been theorized by
Derrida: the law
needs to be able to break away from its origins in order to be

productive. Look-
ing at various instances where the law is read by the story’s
characters (and
their failure to do so because of the law’s intrinsic illegibility),
Bluijs explores
how different acts of reading expose the law’s dependency on
the presence of
its representatives.
In Franz Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony” (original title “In
der Strafkolonie,”
written in 1914 and published in German in 1919), a European
traveler visits a
penal colony.1 He is invited by an officer of the colony to
witness the execution
of a soldier, by way of which the former will illustrate the
colony’s legal sys-
tem. The soldier is condemned because he has dishonored his
superiors. The
condemned man has not been able to defend himself and does
not even know
on what grounds he has been convicted. According to the
executing officer,
it is unnecessary to explain the verdict to the soldier: “After all,
he is going to
learn it on his own body” (Kafka 40). The officer explains to
the traveler that
the condemned man will be subjected to a machine that will
inscribe the ver-
dict into the soldier’s body until death ensues, a procedure that
will take about
twelve hours in total. The officer explains that the content of
the verdict be-
comes known to the soldier as it is carried out: the condemned
man will slowly

1 I would like to thank Isabel Capeloa Gil, Yra van Dijk, Yasco
Horsman, Astrid van Weyenberg
and Tessa de Zeeuw for their productive comments on earlier
drafts and versions of this
chapter.
84 Bluijs
decipher the verdict through his wounds. The verdict and the
execution thus
coincide in the procedure of the machine. The sentence consists
of a script of
intersecting lines written on sheets that are then inserted into
the machine.
The sheets and the machine were designed by the officer’s
mentor, the old
commandant, who is no longer in power when the traveler
arrives. The officer
is the safe keeper of the old commandant’s legacy: he holds on
to the sheets
and maintains the machine. His main concern throughout the
story, however,
is to convince the traveler that the colony’s legal system does
not need the offi-
cer’s presence in order to function.
Kafka’s story has attracted an extensive amount of (scholarly)
interpre-
tations.2 Poststructuralist readings have particularly understood
the writ-
ing machine in “In the Penal Colony” as a literal manifestation
of discur-
sive mechanisms in society. Judith Butler, for example, has read
the story

in analo gy to Foucauldian biopolitics, where the body is a
“blank page” on
which “history” is being written (1989), whereas Gilles Deleuze
and Félix
Guattari have interpreted the colony’s machine as illustrative
for their no-
tion that power and the body form an assemblage (1986). This
chapter wish-
es to take up the connection between power structures and
language at play
in the story, by focusing on the function of the story’s law and
its “Schrift”
(meaning: “writing” or “inscription”). Kafka’s story concerns
questions about
the readability of the law. In what sense must the law be
readable in order
for it to function as a law? Who is able to be a reader with
regards to the law?
Is a legal system that is unreadable a just system? As I will aim
to show, the
readability of the law is dependent on its ability to function as a
form of
writing as it has been theorized by Derrida: the colony’s legal
system needs
to be able to break away from its origin in order to be
productive. Any law,
Derrida claims in “Before the Law,” that is not productive
outside its own
context, will inevitably fail to be meaningful. From this follows
that if the
law’s ability to function as a law is ultimately dependent on the
position
of the subject that reads the law (inside or outside the law’s
context), the
law stops functioning. Kafka’s story, I will show, provides an
example of two

positions that pertain to the readability of the law. The first is
exemplified
by the colony’s officer: as the representative of the colony’s
legal system, he
is part of the context of the law. The second position is
actualized by the
traveler. Coming from outside the context of the juridical order,
his position
is counterposed to that of the officer. By looking at different
acts of reading
2 Apart from autobiographical and psychoanalytical readings,
the story has been read from a
theological framework (e.g. Steinberg 1976) and it has been
understood as a reflection on the
act of writing (e.g. Allen 2001).
The Legibility of Legislation in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony ”
85
and legibility in the story (of the sheets, the machine’s
workings, the faces of
the condemned), I will show that the two reading positions
presented in the
story are mutually exclusive.
Writing Machines
In Kafka’s story, the colony’s legal system is examined in its
various materi-
al manifestations by the story’s characters, who function as
different kinds of
readers at the various stages of the colony’s procedure. The
condemned man is

a reader of the law’s workings (at least according to the
officer), as he deciphers
the verdict through his wounds. The officer extends this ability
to read the law
to all the people that fall under the colony’s jurisdiction. The
colony’s inhabi-
tants are able, according to the officer, to read the verdict from
the faces of the
condemned persons. He reminiscences about older times when
the colony’s
people gathered round the machine to see the moment of
comprehension of
the verdict on the condemned person’s face: “How we all took
in the expression
of transfiguration from his martyred face, how we bathed our
cheeks in the ra-
diance of this justice finally achieved and already vanishing!”
(48).3 Naturally,
the officer functions as a reader as well; he is even able –
without the use of the
machine – to read the lines on the sheets with the verdicts
written on them. In
addition, he has a perfect understanding of the machine’s
workings and, there-
fore, has a more fundamental understanding of how the writing
procedure is
executed than others in the colony. Finally, the traveler is
invited by the officer
to act as a reader as well, but only on a basic level.
The officer’s appeal to read the procedure is intended as pr oof
of the pro-
cedure’s intrinsic readability. The execution of the soldier is
part of a legal or-
der that is on the brink of extinction in the penal colony. In
place of the old

commandant, who installed the juridical order, is a new
commandant who is
not in favor of it. The officer and the machine are the last
remnants of the old
order, as the officer explains: “This procedure and this
execution, which you
now have the opportunity to admire, have no open advocates in
our colony
any longer. I am their only defender and at the same time the
only one who
defends the old commandant’s legacy” (47). Since the
representatives of the
procedure are dying out, the officer asks the traveler to
acknowledge the fact
that the legal procedures are at least principally legible for an
outsider: “I have
3 As the footnote in the Norton Critical Edition of Kafka’s
stories to this sentence points out,
the word “radiance” is Schein in the German original, which
could also mean “semblance,”
“suggesting that this moment of alleged illumination is also a
mere illusion” (48).
86 Bluijs
a plan that can’t help but succeed. … I am not going to ask you
to lie, not at all;
you should just answer briefly, for example ‘Yes, I saw the
execution,’ or ‘Yes,
I’ve heard all the explanations’ ” (51). The officer invites the
traveler to read the
procedure along with him by going through its workings one by
one. He shows

him the sheets and explains the components of the machine.
Thus, the officer
provides context that should make the principle of the law
understandable to
the traveler. All the traveler is asked to do is to endorse the
assumption that this
context exists, whether he agrees with the legal procedure
or not.
In fact, we learn at the beginning of the story that the traveler
has objections
to the procedure. His urge to interfere does not arise from an
idea of human-
ism: “the condemned man was a stranger to him, he was not a
compatriot, and
he certainly did not arouse pity” (46). Still, the traveler
contemplates whether
he has the power to stop the execution, going against what his
function dic-
tates, since “he was a traveler with the sole purpose of
observing and by no
means altering other people’s legal institutions. Here, however,
the situation
was very tempting” (46). In the end, he decides to carry out his
role as an ob-
server and does not actively interfere. Therefore, it seems that
he is willing to
act according to the officer’s wish and be an obedient reader of
the colony’s
legal system.
In the colony, the officer explains, there are many opposing
voices to the
continuation of the old commandant’s rule. For the officer, such
counter-
discourses do not jeopardize the all- encompassing logic of the

system. This
becomes clear from the following passage in which he states:
I’m not saying too much when I tell you that the organization of
the en-
tire penal colony is [the old commandant’s] work. We, his
friends, already
knew at the time of his death that the organization of the colony
was so
self- contained that his successor, even if he had a thousand
new plans in
his head, would not be able to alter a thing in the old order. (37)
The officer believes in the endurance of the self- contained
organization of the
colony because, according to him, the legacy of the old
commandant is con-
tinued by the machine. He tries to convince the traveler that he
is merely an
advocate of the old commandant’s legacy and claims that the
machine keeps
the organization in effect, independently of any subjects
vouching for its un-
derlying principles: “In any case, the machine still works and is
effective in its
own way. It is effective even when it stands by itself in this
valley” (49). For the
officer, the old commandant has created a machine that
functions on its own.
In order to explain the relevance of this observation, I find it
useful to turn
to Derrida, who in his essay “Signature Event Context,” defines
writing as

87
such: “To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a kind
of machine that
is in turn productive” (316). According to the officer, the old
commandant has
produced something – not coincidentally a writing machine –
that functions as
writing in the Derridean sense, “to the extent to which,
governed by a code …,
it is constituted in its identity as a mark, by its iterability in the
absence of who-
ever, and therefore ultimately in the absence of every
empirically determin-
able ‘subject’ ” (Derrida 1982: 315). In the officer’s view, even
when there will no
longer be anyone familiar with the machine’s origin, the
machine will still be
able to run by itself: it will be able to read the sheets and write
the verdicts unto
people’s bodies in the future, because it is governed by the
“code” of the law.
The machine, therefore, ensures the continuation of the colony’s
legal system
beyond the old commander’s or his representatives’ presence.
The arrival of the foreign traveler puts the officer’s notion of
the legal sys-
tem’s durability to the test. A law can only be productive – it
can only function
as a law – , Derrida reasons, if its content has the ability to
function in different
contexts. As he writes: “All writing … must be able to function
in the radical

absence of every empirically determined addressee in general.
And this ab-
sence is not a continuous modification of presence; it is a break
in presence”
(1982: 315– 16). It follows that, if a law is to function beyond
one particular con-
text, it should be able to function in the absence of someone
who vouches
for its meaning. The officer functions as a guarantee of presence
of the old
commandant’s legacy by substituting for his reign. The visitor,
however, intro-
duces the possibility of a true break in presence and invokes the
questions of
whether it is possible to convey the colony’s legal system’s rule
of law to an
outsider and of whether the legal system is or can be meaningful
beyond its
original context.
Context and White Spaces
The officer preserves the old commandant’s original designs of
the executions.
He tells the traveler: “unfortunately I cannot let you hold
them; they are the
most valuable things I own” (43). The sheets are valuable
because they are an
integral part of the colony’s legal system. But for the officer,
they are also valu-
able because they offer a historical and material link to the
creator of the legal
order: the old commandant. As I will show, this link to the
historical creator of
the law is a condition for the law to stay in effect.

Derrida’s reading in “Before the Law” (1992) of the Kafka story
with the same
title (contained in The Trial) about “a man from the country”
who wants to
gain access to the law makes clear that a law that is dependent
on stories of its
88 Bluijs
origin cannot function as a law.4 In the story, the man’s
entrance to the law is
indefinitely delayed by an infinite number of gatekeepers.
Derrida disputes the
idea of the law’s origin when he states that:
It seems that the law as such should never give rise to any story.
To be
invested with its categorical authority, the law must be without
history,
genesis, or any possible derivation. That would be the law of
the law. …
And when one tells stories on this subject, they can concern
only circum-
stances, events external to the law and, at best, the modes of its
revela-
tion. (1992: 191, emphasis in text)
According to Derrida, stories that circumvent the law’s origin
cannot give ac-
cess to that which fundamentally organizes the law. It follows
that the read-
ability of such stories or myths obscures the law’s origin even
further, leading
Derrida to write that, perhaps,

being able to read makes the law less accessible still. Reading a
text might
indeed reveal that it is untouchable, literally intangible,
precisely because
it is readable, and for the same reason unreadable to the extent
to which
the presence within it of a clear and graspable sense remains as
hidden
as its origin. Unreadability thus no longer opposes itself to
readability.
Perhaps man is the man from the country as long as he cannot
read; or,
if knowing how to read, he is still bound up in unreadability
within that
very thing which appears to yield itself to be read. He wants to
see or
touch the law, he wants to approach and “enter” it, because
perhaps he
does not know that the law is not to be seen or touched but
deciphered.
(1992: 197, emphasis in text)
In “In the Penal Colony,” the officer tries to underline the law’s
workings by
providing stories of the law’s origin and by giving information
about its con-
text. Derrida’s reasoning explains why this information does not
add to the
readability of what the officer wants the traveler to be able to
read in the first
place, which is the law itself. In fact, these stories make the law
less readable,
since the emphasis on the law’s material manifestations (the
sheets that can
be seen and touched) obscures the true meaning of the law. The

law is an
4 Derrida reads Kafka’s story as meta- literature: when he
refers to the law, he is specifically re-
ferring to the laws that govern literature. In my use of Derrida
here, I take up the more literal,
judicial meaning of the word “law.”
89
immaterial idea, and therefore it cannot be entered; instead, it is
supposed to
be deciphered.
The difference between the two reading positions with regard to
the law
becomes clear when we look at the specific instances when the
officer and
the traveler try to read the contents of the sheets. The officer is
able to read
the sheets of the old commander; to the traveler, however, they
are completely
illegible:
[H] e saw only labyrinthine lines intersecting at various points,
covering
the paper so thickly that it was an effort to detect the white
spaces be-
tween them. “Read it,” said the officer. “I can’t,” said the
traveler. “But it’s
clear,” said the officer. “It is very artistic,” said the traveler
evasively, “but
I cannot decipher it.” “Yes,” said the officer, laughed, and stuck

the sheet
back into the folder, “it’s not a primer of beautiful lettering for
schoolchil-
dren.” (Kafka 43)
The marks on the paper do not compose a system of signs that is
comprehensi-
ble to the traveler. He interprets the verdict as an autonomous
artwork – in the
sense of a singular entity that needs to be interpreted as a
whole, rather than
as a sign system in which the various elements that make up the
whole can
be interpreted separately. The officer’s mocking remark that the
sheet is not a
primer for lettering is telling: the sheet and the verdict it
represents cannot be
regarded as something from which a general code can be
distilled.
The traveler is unable to make out where one mark begins and
the other
ends due to the lack of white spaces. This is significant
because, according
to Derrida, one of the minimal determinations of the classical
philosophical
concept of writing is the predicate that a “written sign carries
with it a force
of breaking with its context, that is, the set of presences which
organize the
moment of its inscription” (1982: 317). Derrida thus defines
writing by its use
of distinguishable elements that can be taken from the series of
elements that
make up the whole. The identification of these elements is made
possible by

the spaces between the elements:
This force of rupture is due to the spacing which constitutes the
written
sign: the spacing which separates it from other elements of the
internal
contextual chain (the always open possibility of its extraction
and graft-
ing), but also from all the forms of a present referent (past or to
come
in the modified form of the present past or to come) that is
objective
or subjective. This spacing is not the simple negativity of a
lack, but the
emergence of the mark. (Derrida 1982: 317)
90 Bluijs
Because the verdict in Kafka’s story lacks distinguishable
elements that can
be separated from the internal contextual chain, the emergence
of the mark
does not take place. The verdict also lacks “spacing” in the
sense of a break
from a present referent in time and space. According to Derrida,
white space is
not a negativity or a lack because it introduces difference within
the internal
contextual chain.
With regard to the colony, the internal contextual chain of the
law consists
of the elements of the old commandant’s legacy: the sheets, the
machine and

its representative, the officer. The separation between these
elements, howev-
er, is made impossible by the architecture of the colony’s legal
system. The offi-
cer does not allow for the open possibility of the law, as he
leaves no space for
alternative narratives. The negation of a different context
outside the internal
contextual chain of the colony’s legal system is already present
in the officer’s
explanation of the totalizing terms of his judgment:
I took down [the captain’s] statement and immediately added
the judg-
ment. Then I had the man put in chains. That was all very
simple. If I had
first summoned the man and interrogated him, it would only
have led to
confusion. He would have lied; if I had succeeded in refuting
these lies, he
would have substituted new lies for them, and so forth.
(Kafka 41)
If the captain had been able to defend himself, the officer would
be confront-
ed with the openness of a context that would undermine his
legal procedure.
The officer does not allow anyone besides himself to question
or change the
meaning of the verdict. This means that the verdict needs the
presence of
the officer to be readable, because its meaning cannot be
conveyed by the
verdict itself.
When the officer shows the sheet to the traveler, he tries to

cover up the
structural lack of the law’s openness. He explains that the lack
of white space
on the sheet is due to the sheet’s composition. According to the
officer, the
sheet with the verdict is illegible for the initiated observer
because ornaments
have replaced white spaces: “The genuine script has to be
surrounded by many,
many ornaments; the real script encircles the body only in a
narrow belt; the
rest of the body is meant for adornments” (43). In principle,
non- referential
ornaments could take the place of white space in order to make
referential
graphemes (“the genuine script”) legible. For instance, one can
imagine a text
composed of the letters of the Latin alphabet in which all the
spaces between
words and lines are replaced by dots, drawings or non- Latin
letters that is still
completely legible for someone familiar with the Latin script.
Likewise, the
officer claims the condemned are able to distinguish between
the ornaments
91
and the “genuine” script as they are both being inscribed onto
their bodies.
However, based on the composition of the sheet alone, it is
impossible to de-
termine whether this is the case. As he shows the sheets to the

traveler, the
authority to decide between referential signs and adornments
resides with the
officer.
Later in the story, the officer shows another sheet to the
traveler. He tries
to convince him that the sheet contains referential signs (the
“letters” of the
verdict):
It was impossible. Now the officer began to spell out the
inscription let-
ter for letter and then read it again in context. “It says, ‘Be
just!’ ” he said
once more; “now you can surely read it.” The traveler bent so
low over
the paper that the officer moved it farther away, fearing that it
would be
touched; the traveler said nothing more, true, but it was clear
that he still
had not been able to read it. “It says, ‘Be just!’ ” the officer
repeated. “May-
be,” said the traveler, “I believe that that’s what it says.” (54)
Because the sentence “Be just!” only carries meaning within the
context pro-
vided and embodied by the officer, the repetition does not
change or add sig-
nificance. It lacks the capacity to be repeatable in different
contexts. Therefore,
it is an act of repetition, but not of “iterability.” Derrida shows
that this concept
of productive repetition is fundamental for a sign to function:
Every sign, … can be cited, put between quotation marks;

thereby it can
break with every given context, and engender infinitely new
contexts in
an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This citationality,
duplication, or du-
plicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or an
anomaly, but
is that (normal/ abnormal) without which a mark could no
longer even
have a so- called “normal” functioning. What would a mark be
that one
could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way?
(1982,
320– 21)
The officer points out the law’s legibility – he tries to
convince the traveler
that the verdict is governed by some code consisting of
productive marks – by
spelling out the letters and reading it again “in context.” This
context, however,
is decided and provided only by the officer. The sentence can
therefore not
break with its given context. The officer’s insistence on the
legibility of the
verdict is a final attempt to save what is dearest to him: the
belief that the
legal procedure functions as a form of writing – the principle
idea that the law
is iterable.
92 Bluijs
The Machine Escapes Notice

The traveler’s inability to confirm that the system is readable
for someone out-
side the context of the legal system confronts the officer with
the notion that
the legal system is not durable. The traveler’s arrival indicates
that the sheets
and the workings of the machine are meaningless without
someone who is
connected to the system’s origin assigning meaning to them.
The officer has
been a proponent of a system that he believed existed beyond
him and outside
of his presence. Until the traveler visited the colony, the officer
had believed he
represented a just order. The traveler’s inability to function as a
reader has lain
bare that this is not the case. The officer therefore takes matters
to their logical
conclusion and carries out his own verdict. He takes a sheet
with the verdict
“Be just!” and asks the traveler to insert it into the machine as
he straps himself
to it, thus realizing his own death. The traveler understands why
the officer
subjects himself to the machine:
He knew what would happen, true, but he had no right to stop
the officer
in any way. If the legal procedure to which the officer w as
devoted was
really so near to being eliminated – possibly as a consequence
of the trav-
eler’s intervention, to which the latter, for his part, felt
committed – then
the officer was now acting quite correctly; the traveler would

not have
acted any differently in his place. (55)
The traveler feels he has no right to stop the officer. Whereas he
had initially
decided not to interfere in the colony’s practices, he now
realizes his presence
has instigated a process that was already inscribed into the
colony’s legal order.
The order was only able to function within its own confined
context. The trav-
eler’s “intervention” laid bare his inability to become part of
this context. As a
consequence of his arrival, the legal system’s context is
confronted with an out-
side element that leads to its destruction since no such outside
is allowed for.5
The traveler becomes aware of the logic of the juridical
procedure when the
consequences of his arrival on the island are taken to their
logical conclusions.
Paradoxically, the juridical order is only transparent for the
traveler the mo-
ment it comes into effect for the representative who guarantees
its meaning.
5 The story’s narrative framework mirrors the traveler’s
inability to enter the law. The under-
stated and detached extradiegetic narrator does not provide
access to the officer’s inner
world (but the reader does gain access to the traveler’s
considerations). Therefore, the reader
remains, like the traveler, an outsider to the law in (and of ) the
story, opening it up to endless
possible interpretations.

93
That is to say, the machine carries out the juridical order in a
readable way for
the traveler when the officer merges with the machine. This
moment of legi-
bility is underlined when the machine initially runs
perfectly: “The traveler …
remembered that one of the scriber’s wheels was supposed to be
squeaking;
but everything was still, not the softest humming could be
heard. As a result of
this quiet operation, the machine literally escaped notice” (56).
Here, a differ-
ent, more practical notion of readability is introduced that
relates to the act of
reading in a more commonplace sense.
To illuminate this passage, I find it useful to turn to the field of
typography,
where, especially since the age of typographic modernism, the
concept of leg-
ibility concerns the rejection of attention to the text’s form or
its medium in
favor of attention to the work’s content. Beatrice Ward’s
influential 1955 pam-
phlet from this tradition uses the metaphor of the crystal goblet
to illustrate
that it is typography’s aim “to reveal rather than to hide the
beautiful thing
which it was meant to contain” (1). Likewise, in 1928, the
German typographer
and type designer Jan Tschichold defined typography as a

functional art in the
service of readability of the text’s content (116). As these two
examples illus-
trate, legibility in this common conception favors immediacy
over hypermedi-
acy, to put it in the terms of Jay David Bolter and Richard
Grusin: “If the logic of
immediacy leads one either to erase or to render automatic the
act of represen-
tation, the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges multiple acts of
representa-
tion and makes them visible” (86).6 This notion of immediacy is
fundamental
to understanding the concept of readability as it is commonly
used with regard
to the design of a text. When one, for instance, reads the words
on a page, one
“looks through” the letter characters to gain access to the
meaning “behind” the
words. The moment the reader focuses her attention on the form
of the letters,
she stops reading and starts looking. In the act of reading, the
reader feels she
has immediate access to the text’s content.
This ideal of immediate access to the work’s content betrays an
underlying
assumption that the “essence” of the text (its content or
meaning) exists prior
to, above or beyond its material manifestation(s). Continuing
the works of Der-
rida, N. Katherine Hayles brings forth a critique of the failure
of the Western
philosophical tradition to understand itself in relation to the
material qual-
ities of writing. Philosophy in the West has generally

understood itself as an
activity of the mind, Hayles contends, neglecting its material
dimension and
6 Bolter and Grusin make clear that immediacy and
hypermediacy form a false dichotomy.
They propose the term “remediation” to show how both terms
are sides of the same coin.
For the particular point in this chapter, however, the distinction
between immediacy and
hypermediacy is relevant.
94 Bluijs
disregarding notions of the medium in which acts of writing are
essentially
caught up. Hayles claims that the separation between form and
content, which
she links to the Cartesian split between the immaterial mind and
the material
body, has predominated Western discourse about text. In her
essay “Print Is
Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media- Specific
Analysis” (2004), she
states:
In retrospect, we can see the view that the text is an immaterial
verbal
construction as an ideology that inflicts the Cartesian split
between mind
and body upon the textual corpus, separating into two fictional
entities
what is in actuality a dynamically interacting whole.
(Hayles 86)

Hayles argues that a text’s or a work’s content cannot exist
outside or before its
material embodiment, but that it is the result of, or emerges
from, a dynamic
interaction of which the work’s materiality and its medium are
fundamental
aspects.
In Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” the distinction between an
immaterial idea
(the legal system – a machine of sorts) and its material
manifestations (the
machine – as in: the device) is problematized. The
representation of the legal
order is erased when the officer’s verdict is carried out and he
merges with the
machine. The logic of the legal order and the subsequent ordeal
of the officer
are rendered automatic: for the traveler, it is entirely clear why
the officer con-
victs himself. In this moment of transparency of the law’s logic,
the machine
escapes notice; as a medium, it becomes immediate (it effaces
its mediacy and
mediation). In doing so, it arrives at the supreme ideal of
legibility expressed
by typographic modernists. As the traveler “looks through” the
machine and
its workings, he gains direct access to that which the machine
represents; he
fully understands the logic of the colony’s legal system when its
representative
coincides with the machine. However, at the very moment this
highest level of
readability is achieved, the contextual link of the legal system –

consisting of
the machine, the sheets and the officer – is destroyed.
Recalling Derrida’s con-
sideration of the readability of the law, when one gains a “clear
and graspable
sense” of the law’s essence and is able to “enter” the law, it
stops functioning
(1992: 197).
Therefore, even though the machine seems to escape attention in
the mo-
ment the officer’s own verdict is carried out, its immediacy
does not provide
access to a truth that lies beyond it. Since Hayles makes clear
that every imma-
terial ideal needs a physical manifestation in order to function,
the machine
and the officer are themselves integral parts of the colony’s
legal system. The
self- condemnation of the officer is a unique instance of the
legibility of the
95
legal procedure, but it does not function as writing in the
Derridean sense be-
cause this moment is not iterable. The machine is useless
without a subject
vouching for its meaning in the present. What it produces is
meaningless: “The
harrow was not writing, it was merely stabbing” (Kafka 57).
The traveler is un-
able to read the verdict from the officer’s face after the machine

has carried
out the verdict onto the officer’s body: “he saw, almost against
his will, the face
of the corpse. It was as it had been in life; no sign of the
promised deliverance
could be detected; what all the others had found in the machine
the officer did
not find” (58).
The traveler’s inability to read the verdict from the face of the
officer (even
though he knows what it is that he is supposed to be reading)
signifies the
inability of the legal order to function beyond its own context .
This ending
makes clear that the officer read the authority of the verdict not
from but into
the reactions of the condemned. That an outsider to the colony
would be un-
able to read the law was already “inscribed” into the colony’s
legal order; the
traveler’s reading of the officer’s face is “as it had been in
life,” that is, without
a sign. Thus, Kafka’s story brings home the point that a law
becomes meaning-
less in the absence of its original context when its meaning
fully coincides with
the origin of its documentation. The machine is useless without
the presence
of the officer; therefore, as the only person guaranteeing the
context for signifi-
cation of the verdict is destroyed, the machine falls apart. It
disintegrates into
the different elements (cogwheels, springs, etc.) that make up
its totality. The
machine, as it functioned in the mind of the officer before the

traveler’s arrival,
cannot be reconstructed from these elements, for the link to the
law’s original
conception is irreversibly destroyed. As the immaterial idea of
the colony’s law
vanishes, its material manifestation (the machine) breaks down
as well.
In the appendix to Kafka’s story, the dependency of the law on
its original
creator is expressed in terms of religious faith. After the officer
is executed and
the machine has fallen apart, the traveler visits the grave of the
old comman-
dant, which bears “an inscription in very small letters”:
Here lies the old commandant. His followers, who must now be
nameless,
dug this grave for him and laid the stone. A prophecy exists that
after a
certain number of years the commandant will rise again and lead
his fol-
lowers from this house to reconquer the colony. Have faith and
wait! (59)
A few of the colony’s inhabitants observe the traveler, standing
behind him “as
if they had read the inscription along with him” (59). From the
looks on their
faces, the traveler concludes that these people find the prophecy
“ridiculous,
and were inviting him to share their opinion” (59). Although
they do not seem

96 Bluijs
to believe in the religious foundation of the colony’s law, these
people have
been subjected to the will of an unlawful dictator and his
followers. They had
been inscribed into the contextual chain of the colony’s legal
system that cer-
tified its principles. The traveler understands their facial
expressions as an in-
vitation to regard the prophecy as meaningless. As a
consequence of the law’s
own logic, he has already acknowledged this invitation.
Works Cited
Allen, Danielle. “Sounding Silence.” Modernism/ Modernity 8.2
(2001): 325– 334.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation:
Understanding New Media.
Cambridge, MA: The mit Press, 2000.
Butler, Judith. “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily
Inscriptions.” The Journal of Philosophy,
86.11 (1989): 601– 607.
Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. Kafka: Towards a Minor
Literature. 1975. Trans, Dana
Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Trans. Alan Bass.
Margins of Philosophy.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 307– 30.
Derrida, Jacques. “Before the Law.” Trans. Avital Ronell and
Christine Roulston. Acts of

Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992.
181– 220.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The
Importance of Media- Specific
Analysis.” Poetics Today 25.1 (2004): 67– 90.
Kafka, Franz. “In the Penal Colony.” 1919. Trans. Stanley
Corngold. Kafka’s Selected
Stories: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Stanley Corngold.
London: W.W. Norton, 2007.
35– 59.
Kafka, Franz. The Trial. 1925. Trans. Breon Mitchell.
New York: Schocken Books, 1998.
Steinberg, Erwin R. “The Judgment in Kafka’s In the Penal
Colony” Journal of Modern
Literature, 5.3 (1976): 492– 514.
Tschichold, Jan. The New Typography: A Handbook for
Modern Designers. 1928. Trans.
Ruari McLean. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
Warde, Beatrice. The Crystal Goblet: Sixteen Essays on
Typography. London: Sylvan
Press, 1955.
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In the Penal Colony
by Franz Kafka (1919)
Translation by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College,
Nanaimo, BC
downloaded from http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/
“It’s a peculiar apparatus,” said the Officer to the Traveller,
gazing with a certain
admiration at the device, with which he was, of course,
thoroughly familiar. It
appeared that the Traveller had responded to the invitation of
the Commandant only
out of politeness, when he had been asked to attend the
execution of a soldier
condemned for disobeying and insulting his superior. Of
course, interest in the
execution was not very high even in the penal colony itself. At
least, here in the small,
deep, sandy valley, closed in on all sides by barren slopes, apart
from the Officer and
the Traveller there were present only the Condemned, a vacant-
looking man with a
broad mouth and dilapidated hair and face, and the Soldier, who
held the heavy chain
to which were connected the small chains which bound the
Condemned Man by his
feet and wrist bones, as well as by his neck, and which were
also linked to each other

by connecting chains. The Condemned Man, incidentally, had
an expression of such
dog-like resignation that it looked as if one could set him free
to roam around the
slopes and would only have to whistle at the start of the
execution for him to return.
The Traveller had little interest in the apparatus and walked
back and forth behind the
Condemned Man, almost visibly indifferent, while the Officer
took care of the final
preparations. Sometimes he crawled under the apparatus, which
was built deep into
the earth, and sometimes he climbed up a ladder to inspect the
upper parts. These
were really jobs which could have been left to a mechanic, but
the Officer carried them
out with great enthusiasm, maybe because he was particularly
fond of this apparatus
or maybe because there was some other reason why one could
not trust the work to
anyone else. “It’s all ready now!” he finally cried and climbed
back down the ladder.
He was unusually tired, breathing with his mouth wide open,
and he had pushed two
fine lady’s handkerchiefs under the collar of his uniform.
“These uniforms are really too heavy for the tropics,” the
Traveller said, instead of
asking some questions about the apparatus, as the Officer had
expected. “That’s true,”
said the Officer. He washed the oil and grease from his dirty
hands in a bucket of
water standing ready, “but they mean home, and we don’t want
to lose our
homeland.” “Now, have a look at this apparatus,” he added

immediately, drying his
hands with a towel and pointing to the device. “Up to this point
I had to do some
work by hand, but from now on the apparatus should work
entirely on its own.” The
Traveller nodded and followed the Officer. The latter tried to
protect himself against
all eventualities by saying, “Of course, breakdowns do happen.
I really hope none will
occur today, but we must be prepared for it. The apparatus is
supposed to keep going
In the Penal Colony
2
for twelve hours without interruption. But if any breakdowns do
occur, they’ll only be
very minor, and we’ll deal with them right away.”
“Don’t you want to sit down?” he asked finally, as he pulled
out a chair from a pile of
cane chairs and offered it to the Traveller. The latter could not
refuse. He sat on the
edge of the pit, into which he cast a fleeting glance. It was not
very deep. On one side
of the hole the piled earth was heaped up into a wall; on the
other side stood the
apparatus. “I don’t know,” the Officer said, “whether the
Commandant has already
explained the apparatus to you.” The Traveller made an vague
gesture with his hand.
That was good enough for the Officer, for now he could explain

the apparatus himself.
“This apparatus,” he said, grasping a connecting rod and
leaning against it, “is our
previous Commandant’s invention. I also worked with him on
the very first tests and
took part in all the work right up to its completion. However,
the credit for the
invention belongs to him alone. Have you heard of our previous
Commandant? No?
Well, I’m not claiming too much when I say that the
organization of the entire penal
colony is his work. We, his friends, already knew at the time of
his death that the
administration of the colony was so self-contained that even if
his successor had a
thousand new plans in mind, he would not be able to alter
anything of the old plan, at
least not for several years. And our prediction has held. The
New Commandant has
had to recognize that. It’s a shame that you didn’t know the
previous Commandant!”
“However,” the Officer said, interrupting himself, “I’m
chattering, and his apparatus
stands here in front of us. As you see, it consists of three parts.
With the passage of
time certain popular names have been developed for each of
these parts. The one
underneath is called the Bed, the upper one is called the
Inscriber, and here in the
middle, this moving part is called the Harrow.” “The Harrow?”
the Traveller asked.
He had not been listening with full attention. The sun was
excessively strong, trapped
in the shadowless valley, and one could hardly collect one’s

thoughts. So the Officer
appeared to him all the more admirable in his tight tunic
weighed down with
epaulettes and festooned with braid, ready to go on parade, as
he explained the matter
so eagerly and, while he was talking, adjusted screws here and
there with a
screwdriver.
The Soldier appeared to be in a state similar to the Traveller.
He had wound the
Condemned Man’s chain around both his wrists and was
supporting himself with his
hand on his weapon, letting his head hang backward, not
bothering about anything.
The Traveller was not surprised at that, for the Officer spoke
French, and clearly
neither the Soldier nor the Condemned Man understood the
language. So it was all
the more striking that the Condemned Man, in spite of that, did
what he could to
follow the Officer’s explanation. With a sort of sleepy
persistence he kept directing his
gaze to the place where the Officer had just pointed, and when a
question from the
Traveller interrupted the Officer, the Condemned Man looked at
the Traveller, too,
just as the Officer was doing.
“Yes, the Harrow,” said the Officer. “The name fits. The
needles are arranged as in a
harrow, and the whole thing is driven like a harrow, although it
stays in one place and

In the Penal Colony
3
is, in principle, much more artistic. You’ll understand in a
moment. The condemned
is laid out here on the Bed. First, I’ll describe the apparatus
and only then let the
procedure go to work. That way you’ll be able to follow it
better. Also a sprocket in
the Inscriber is excessively worn. It really squeaks. When it’s
in motion one can
hardly make oneself understood. Unfortunately replacement
parts are difficult to
come by in this place. So, here is the Bed, as I said. The whole
thing is completely
covered with a layer of cotton wool, the purpose of which you’ll
find out in a moment.
The condemned man is laid out on his stomach on the cotton
wool—naked, of
course. There are straps for the hands here, for the feet here,
and for the throat here,
to tie him in securely. At the head of the Bed here, where the
man, as I have
mentioned, first lies face down, is this small protruding lump of
felt, which can easily
be adjusted so that it presses right into the man’s mouth. Its
purpose is to prevent him
screaming and biting his tongue to pieces. Of course, the man
has to let the felt in his
mouth—otherwise the straps around his throat would break his
neck.” “That’s cotton
wool?” asked the Traveller and bent down. “Yes, it is,” said the
Officer smiling, “feel it
for yourself.”

He took the Traveller’s hand and led him over to the Bed. “It’s
a specially prepared
cotton wool. That’s why it looks so unrecognizable. I’ll get
around to mentioning its
purpose in a moment.” The Traveller was already being won
over a little to the
apparatus. With his hand over his eyes to protect them from the
sun, he looked up at
the height of the apparatus. It was a massive construction. The
Bed and the Inscriber
were the same size and looked like two dark chests. The
Inscriber was set about two
metres above the Bed, and the two were joined together at the
corners by four brass
rods, which almost reflected the sun. The Harrow hung between
the chests on a band
of steel.
The Officer had hardly noticed the earlier indifference of the
Traveller, but he did
have a sense now of how the latter’s interest was being aroused
for the first time. So
he paused in his explanation in order to allow the Traveller time
to observe the
apparatus undisturbed. The Condemned Man imitated the
Traveller, but since he
could not put his hand over his eyes, he blinked upward with his
eyes uncovered.
“So now the man is lying down,” said the Traveller. He leaned
back in his chair and
crossed his legs.
“Yes,” said the Officer, pushing his cap back a little and
running his hand over his hot

face. “Now, listen. Both the Bed and the Inscriber have their
own electric batteries.
The Bed needs them for itself, and the Inscriber for the Harrow.
As soon as the man is
strapped in securely, the Bed is set in motion. It quivers with
tiny, very rapid
oscillations from side to side and up and down simultaneously.
You will have seen
similar devices in mental hospitals. Only with our Bed all
movements are precisely
calibrated, for they must be meticulously coordinated with the
movements of the
Harrow. But it’s the Harrow which has the job of actually
carrying out the sentence.”
“What is the sentence?” the Traveller asked. “You don’t even
know that?” asked the
Officer in astonishment and bit his lip. “Forgive me if my
explanations are perhaps
In the Penal Colony
4
confused. I really do beg your pardon. Previously it was the
Commandant’s habit to
provide such explanations. But the New Commandant has
excused himself from this
honourable duty. The fact that with such an eminent visitor”—
the Traveller tried to
deflect the honour with both hands, but the Officer insisted on
the expression—“that
with such an eminent visitor he didn’t even once make him

aware of the form of our
sentencing is yet again something new, which . . . .” He had a
curse on his lips, but
controlled himself and said merely: “I was not informed about
it. It’s not my fault. In
any case, I am certainly the person best able to explain our style
of sentencing, for here
I am carrying”—he patted his breast pocket—“the relevant
diagrams drawn by the
previous Commandant.”
“Diagrams made by the Commandant himself?” asked the
Traveller. “Then was he in
his own person a combination of everything? Was he soldier,
judge, engineer,
chemist, and draftsman?”
“He was indeed,” said the Officer, nodding his head with a
fixed and thoughtful
expression. Then he looked at his hands, examining them.
They didn’t seem to him
clean enough to handle the diagrams. So he went to the bucket
and washed them
again. Then he pulled out a small leather folder and said, “Our
sentence does not
sound severe. The law which a condemned man has violated is
inscribed on his body
with the Harrow. This Condemned Man, for example,” and the
Officer pointed to the
man, “will have inscribed on his body, ‘Honour your
superiors.’”
The Traveller had a quick look at the man. When the Officer
was pointing at him, the
man kept his head down and appeared to be directing all his
energy into listening in

order to learn something. But the movements of his thick
pouting lips showed clearly
that he was incapable of understanding anything. The Traveller
wanted to raise
various questions, but after looking at the Condemned Man he
merely asked, “Does he
know his sentence?” “No,” said the Officer. He wished to get
on with his explanation
right away, but the Traveller interrupted him: “He doesn’t know
his own sentence?”
“No,” said the Officer once more. He then paused for a
moment, as if he was asking
the Traveller for a more detailed reason for his question, and
said, “It would be useless
to give him that information. He experiences it on his own
body.” The Traveller
really wanted to keep quiet at this point, but he felt how the
Condemned Man was
gazing at him—he seemed to be asking whether he could
approve of the process the
Officer had described. So the Traveller, who had up to this
point been leaning back,
bent forward again and kept up his questions, “But does he
nonetheless have some
general idea that he’s been condemned?” “Not that either,” said
the Officer, and he
smiled at the Traveller, as if he was still waiting for some
strange revelations from
him. “No?” said the Traveller, wiping his forehead, “Then does
the man also not yet
know how his defence was received?” “He has had no
opportunity to defend himself,”
said the Officer and looked away, as if he was talking to himself
and wished not to
embarrass the Traveller with an explanation of matters so self-
evident to him. “But he

must have had a chance to defend himself,” said the Traveller
and stood up from his
chair.
In the Penal Colony
5
The Officer recognized that he was in danger of having his
explanation of the
apparatus held up for a long time. So he went to the Traveller,
took him by the arm,
pointed with his hand at the Condemned Man, who stood there
stiffly now that the
attention was so clearly directed at him—the Soldier was also
pulling on his chain—
and said, “The matter stands like this. Here in the penal colony
I have been appointed
judge. In spite of my youth. For I stood at the side of our Old
Commandant in all
matters of punishment, and I also know the most about the
apparatus. The basic
principle I use for my decisions is this: Guilt is always beyond a
doubt. Other courts
could not follow this principle, for they are made up of many
heads and, in addition,
have even higher courts above them. But that is not the case
here, or at least it was not
that way with the previous Commandant. It’s true the New
Commandant has already
shown a desire to get mixed up in my court, but I’ve succeeded
so far in fending him
off. And I’ll continue to be successful. You want this case

explained. It’s simple—just
like all of them. This morning a captain laid a charge that this
man, who is assigned to
him as a servant and who sleeps before his door, had been
sleeping on duty. For his
task is to stand up every time the clock strikes the hour and
salute in front of the
captain’s door. That’s certainly not a difficult duty—and it’s
necessary, since he is
supposed to remain fresh both for guarding and for service.
Yesterday night the
captain wanted to check whether his servant was fulfilling his
duty. He opened the
door on the stroke of two and found him curled up asleep. He
got his horsewhip and
hit him across the face. Now, instead of standing up and
begging for forgiveness, the
man grabbed his master by the legs, shook him, and cried out,
‘Throw away that whip
or I’ll eat you up.’ Those are the facts. The captain came to me
an hour ago. I wrote
up his statement and right after that the sentence. Then I had
the man chained up. It
was all very simple. If I had first summoned the man and
interrogated him, the result
would have been confusion. He would have lied, and if I had
been successful in
refuting his lies, he would have replaced them with new lies,
and so forth. But now I
have him, and I won’t release him again. Now, does that clarify
everything? But time
is passing. We should be starting the execution, and I haven’t
finished explaining the
apparatus yet.”
He urged the Traveller to sit down in his chair, moved to the

apparatus again, and
started, “As you see, the shape of the Harrow corresponds to the
shape of a man. This
is the harrow for the upper body, and here are the harrows for
the legs. This small
cutter is the only one designated for the head. Is that clear to
you?” He leaned
forward to the Traveller in a friendly way, ready to give the
most comprehensive
explanation.
The Traveller looked at the Harrow with a wrinkled frown. The
information about the
judicial procedures had not satisfied him. However, he had to
tell himself that here it
was a matter of a penal colony, that in this place special
regulations were necessary,
and that one had to give precedence to military measures right
down to the last detail.
Beyond that, however, he had some hopes in the New
Commandant, who obviously,
although slowly, was intending to introduce a new procedure
which the limited
understanding of this Officer could not cope with.
In the Penal Colony
6
Following this train of thought, the Traveller asked, “Will the
Commandant be present
at the execution?” “That is not certain,” said the Officer,
embarrassingly affected by

the sudden question, and his friendly expression made a
grimace. “That’s why we
need to hurry up. As much as I regret the fact, I’ll have to make
my explanation even
shorter. But tomorrow, once the apparatus is clean again—the
fact that it gets so very
dirty is its only fault—I could add a detailed explanation. So
now, only the most
important things. When the man is lying on the Bed and it
starts quivering, the
Harrow sinks onto the body. It positions itself automatically in
such a way that it
touches the body only lightly with the needle tips. Once the
machine is set in this
position, this steel cable tightens up into a rod. And now the
performance begins.
Someone who is not an initiate sees no external difference
among the punishments.
The Harrow seems to do its work uniformly. As it quivers, it
sticks the tips of its
needles into the body, which is also vibrating from the
movement of the bed. Now, to
enable someone to check on how the sentence is being carried
out, the Harrow is
made of glass. That gave rise to certain technical difficulties
with fastening the needles
securely, but after several attempts we were successful. We
didn’t spare any efforts.
And now, as the inscription is made on the body, everyone can
see through the glass.
Don’t you want to come closer and see the needles for
yourself.”
The Traveller stood slowly, moved up, and bent over the
Harrow. “You see,” the
Officer said, “two sorts of needles in a multiple arrangement.

Each long needle has a
short one next to it. The long one inscribes, and the short one
squirts water out to
wash away the blood and keep the inscription always clear. The
bloody water is then
channeled here in small grooves and finally flows into these
main gutters, and the
outlet pipe takes it to the pit.” The Officer pointed with his
finger to the exact path
which the bloody water had to take. As he began to
demonstrate with both hands at
the mouth of the outlet pipe, in order to make his account as
clear as possible, the
Traveller raised his head and, feeling behind him with his hand,
wanted to return to
his chair. Then he saw to his horror that the Condemned Man
had also, like him,
accepted the Officer’s invitation to inspect the arrangement of
the Harrow up close.
He had pulled the sleeping Soldier holding the chain a little
forward and was also
bending over the glass. One could see how with a confused
gaze he also was looking
for what the two gentlemen had just observed, but how he didn’t
succeed because he
lacked the explanation. He leaned forward this way and that.
He kept running his
eyes over the glass again and again. The Traveller wanted to
push him back, for what
he was doing was probably punishable. But the Officer held the
Traveller firmly with
one hand, and with the other he took a lump of earth from the
wall and threw it at the
Soldier. The latter opened his eyes with a start, saw what the
Condemned Man had
dared to do, let his weapon fall, braced his heels in the earth,

and pulled the
Condemned Man back, so that he immediately collapsed. The
Soldier looked down at
him, as he writhed around, making his chain clink. “Stand him
up,” cried the Officer,
for he noticed that the Condemned Man was distracting the
Traveller too much. The
latter was even leaning out away from the Harrow, without
paying any attention to it,
wanting to find out what was happening to the Condemned Man.
“Handle him
carefully,” the Officer yelled again. He ran around the
apparatus, personally grabbed
In the Penal Colony
7
the Condemned Man under the armpits and, with the help of the
Soldier, stood the
man, whose feet kept slipping, upright.
“Now I know all about it,” said the Traveller, as the Officer
turned back to him again.
“Except the most important thing,” said the latter, grabbing the
Traveller by the arm
and pointing up high. “There in the Inscriber is the mechanism
which determines the
movement of the Harrow, and this mechanism is arranged
according to the diagram
on which the sentence is set down. I still use the diagrams of
the previous
Commandant. Here they are.” He pulled some pages out of the

leather folder.
“Unfortunately I can’t hand them to you. They are the most
cherished thing I possess.
Sit down, and I’ll show you them from this distance. Then
you’ll be able to see it all
well.” He showed the first sheet. The Traveller would have
been happy to say
something appreciative, but all he saw was a labyrinthine series
of lines, criss-crossing
each other in all sort of ways. These covered the paper so
thickly that only with
difficulty could one make out the white spaces in between.
“Read it,” said the Officer.
“I can’t,” said the Traveller. “But it’s clear,” said the Officer.”
“It’s very elaborate,” said
the Traveller evasively, “but I can’t decipher it.”
“Yes,” said the Officer, smiling and putting the folder back
again, “it’s not calligraphy
for school children. One has to read it a long time. You too
will finally understand it
clearly. Of course, it has to be a script that isn’t simple. You
see, it’s not supposed to
kill right away, but on average over a period of twelve hours.
The turning point is set
for the sixth hour. There must also be many, many
embellishments surrounding the
basic script. The essential script moves around the body only in
a narrow belt. The
rest of the body is reserved for decoration. Can you now
appreciate the work of the
Harrow and the whole apparatus? Just look at it!” He jumped
up the ladder, turned a
wheel, and called down, “Watch out—move to the side!”
Everything started moving.
If the wheel had not squeaked, it would have been marvelous.

The Officer threatened
the wheel with his fist, as if he was surprised by the disturbance
it created. Then he
spread his arms, apologizing to the Traveller, and quickly
clambered down, in order to
observe the operation of the apparatus from below.
Something was still not working properly, something only he
noticed. He clambered
up again and reached with both hands into the inside of the
Inscriber. Then, in order
to descend more quickly, instead of using the ladder, he slid
down on one of the poles
and, to make himself understandable through the noise, strained
his voice to the limit
as he yelled in the Traveller’s ear, “Do you understand the
process? The Harrow is
starting to write. When it’s finished with the first part of the
script on the man’s back,
the layer of cotton wool rolls and turns the body slowly onto its
side to give the
Harrow a new area. Meanwhile those parts lacerated by the
inscription are lying on
the cotton wool which, because it has been specially treated,
immediately stops the
bleeding and prepares the script for a further deepening. Here,
as the body continues
to rotate, prongs on the edge of the Harrow then pull the cotton
wool from the
wounds, throw it into the pit, and the Harrow goes to work
again. In this way it keeps
making the inscription deeper for twelve hours. For the first six
hours the condemned
man goes on living almost as before. He suffers nothing but
pain. After two hours, the

In the Penal Colony
8
felt is removed, for at that point the man has no more energy for
screaming. Here at
the head of the Bed warm rice pudding is put in this electrically
heated bowl. From
this the man, if he feels like it, can help himself to what he can
lap up with his tongue.
No one passes up this opportunity. I don’t know of a single
one, and I have had a lot of
experience. He first loses his pleasure in eating around the
sixth hour. I usually kneel
down at this point and observe the phenomenon. The man
rarely swallows the last
bit. He turns it around in his mouth and spits it into the pit.
When he does that, I
have to lean aside or else he’ll get me in the face. But how
quiet the man becomes
around the sixth hour! The most stupid of them begin to
understand. It starts around
the eyes and spreads out from there. A look that could tempt
one to lie down under
the Harrow. Nothing else happens. The man simply begins to
decipher the
inscription. He purses his lips, as if he is listening. You’ve
seen that it’s not easy to
figure out the inscription with your eyes, but our man deciphers
it with his wounds.
True, it takes a lot of work. It requires six hours to complete.
But then the Harrow
spits him right out and throws him into the pit, where he

splashes down into the
bloody water and cotton wool. Then the judgment is over, and
we, the Soldier and I,
quickly bury him.”
The Traveller had leaned his ear towards the Officer and, with
his hands in his coat
pockets, was observing the machine at work. The Condemned
Man was also
watching, but without understanding. He bent forward a little
and followed the
moving needles, as the Soldier, after a signal from the Officer,
cut through his shirt
and trousers with a knife from the back, so that they fell off the
Condemned Man. He
wanted to grab the falling garments to cover his bare flesh, but
the Soldier held him up
and shook the last rags from him. The Officer turned the
machine off, and in the
silence which then ensued the Condemned Man was laid out
under the Harrow. The
chains were taken off and the straps fastened in their place. For
the Condemned Man
it seemed at first glance to signify almost a relief. And now the
Harrow sunk down a
stage lower, for the Condemned was a thin man. As the needle
tips touched him, a
shudder went over his skin. While the Soldier was busy with
the right hand, the
Condemned Man stretched out his left, with no sense of its
direction. But it was
pointing to where the Traveller was standing. The Officer kept
looking at the
Traveller from the side, without taking his eyes off him, as if he
was trying to read
from his face the impression he was getting of the execution,

which he had now
explained to him, at least superficially.
The strap meant to hold the wrist ripped off. The Soldier
probably had pulled on it
too hard. The Soldier showed the Officer the torn-off piece of
strap, wanting him to
help. So the Officer went over to him and said, with his face
turned towards the
Traveller, “The machine is very complicated. Now and then
something has to tear or
break. One shouldn’t let that detract from one’s overall
opinion. Anyway, we have an
immediate replacement for the strap. I’ll use a chain—even
though that will affect the
sensitivity of the movements for the right arm.” And while he
put the chain in place,
he kept talking, “Our resources for maintaining the machine are
very limited at the
moment. Under the previous Commandant, I had free access to
a cash box specially
set aside for this purpose. There was a store room here in
which all possible
In the Penal Colony
9
replacement parts were kept. I admit I made almost extravagant
use of it. I mean
earlier, not now, as the New Commandant claims. For him
everything serves only as a
pretext to fight against the old arrangements. Now he keeps the

cash box for
machinery under his own control, and if I ask him for a new
strap, he demands the
torn one as a piece of evidence, the new one doesn’t arrive for
ten days, and it’s an
inferior brand, of not much use to me. But how I am supposed
to get the machine to
work in the meantime without a strap—no one’s concerned
about that.”
The Traveller was thinking: it is always questionable to
intervene decisively in strange
circumstances. He was neither a citizen of the penal colony nor
a citizen of the state
to which it belonged. If he wanted to condemn the execution or
even hinder it, people
could say to him: You are a foreigner—keep quiet. He would
have nothing in response
to that, but could only add that he did not understand what he
was doing on this
occasion, for the purpose of his traveling was merely to observe
and not to alter other
people’s judicial systems in any way. True, at this point the
way things were turning
out it was very tempting. The injustice of the process and the
inhumanity of the
execution were beyond doubt. No one could assume that the
Traveller was acting out
of any sense of his own self-interest, for the Condemned Man
was a stranger to him,
not a countryman and not someone who invited sympathy in any
way. The Traveller
himself had letters of reference from high officials and had been
welcomed here with
great courtesy. The fact that he had been invited to this
execution even seemed to

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