SOURCE: Gailus, Andreas. “Lessons of the Cryptograph: Revelation and the Mechanical in Kafka's ‘In the Penal Colony.’” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 2 (April 2001): 295-302.

In the following essay, Gailus explores Kafka's idea of the law as a “force without significance” as developed through his satire of the law machine in “In the Penal Colony.”

According to a great Rabbi, Walter Benjamin recalls in his essay on Kafka, the coming Messiah “will not wish to change the world by force but will merely make a slight adjustment in it.”¹ A slight adjustment of the ordinary—this is indeed what happens everywhere in Kafka's texts in which daily objects, made all but invisible through familiarity, are transformed into enigmatic signs. The archetype of the enigmatic object-sign for Kafka is the door, and it is indeed doors that structure the parabolic and mythic space of his narratives. Opened and shut, locked and unlocked...