Welcome back to the new thing. My name is David Barn with me as always. Is my good friend Alex Priu. How are you doing Alex?
I'm doing all right. I'm calling in from the sanitary prison of my desires. I'm trying to come up with a prison that I was going. I'm in a penal colony.
Where are you? All of a sudden I can hear you so much more clearly. I'm going to the mic close now. I'm lying down in bed for this classic David Bar move.
Well I'm moving right now so all of my desk is gone and everything's gone. So is either this in the living room or I'll wake up the kids. So today we are talking about one of my favorite writers, Franz Kafka, who I think everybody's heard of. Or at least everybody.
Yeah. Many people haven't read his stuff but I think he's like Edgar Allan Poe. I think he's kind of permeated into popular culture but little to highbrow culture I guess. So he's one of the few authors that I have an adjective right?
Cough get asked. Whenever I say it's Cough get asked. Whenever I see an impoverished child I say how de-kinsian. I like to come up with.
You like to miss a plot this term? That's always fun. I'm pretty sure I've known how I was supposed to be. I'm not going to say David I say how do Moss.
You might have been actually a bit of a Botero. Botero is? I did. The painter at Google and B-O-T-E-R-O.
I'm not going to do that. No, I'm not going to do that. Last time I did that it sent me to a different kind of Italian site but it wasn't art. I was like how's Sefredian?
Who was Kafka? So Kafka. How's about Franz? Yeah, so Franz lived a relatively short life.
He died when he was 40 so he was born. Oh my God. Well you've already outlived Greg. Oh shoot.
Yeah, you're okay. It's me. I'm 39. So he's born in 1883 in the Kingdom of Bohemia.
So he was Czech. He was Czech. Baby, one, two, three, four. He was born in 1883.
He died in 1924. He was a kind of reclusive private man. He actually worked as an insurance agent and he wrote on the side. And Wallace Stevens, both insurance agents.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Except Wallace Stevens if I recall was successful, very successful, wasn't he? An insurance or poetry? No, an insurance book, both.
It was continued. I heard Jake from State Farm also writes poetry. This introduction is very, very Kafka. That's not that some way guy that you call your hero, right?
The Jared guy. He just eats heroes. That's not the same thing. Kafka.
He said he bohemian wraps the year or something. I can't remember what you said. He's the author of a great many works. The most popular of which are the venom work is this and that's about a man that wakes up.
That's over dude. It's not trying to pull this. He's a bug. A dung beetle.
Never woken up and thought you were a dung beetle, but you really were a dung beetle. How people might treat you. That's what that story is about. David, I thought it was based on your life.
I know sometimes you have to settle up to the mist and say, hey, here's the little dung beetle about the burrow and the dung. It's actually... Am I awake? Am I awake?
I feel like I've been at Dereem. No, it's good. It's very Kafka-esque. Extremely.
The trial is another famous. Unfinished. In fact, his major novels, I think his three major novels are the trial, America. America?
Yeah. What do I call them, America? But I think they're all unfinished. The short stories, though, they have a nice collection of the short stories.
Everybody should just have that in their library. Didn't he ask that his works be destroyed after he died? Right. He had a good friend or a bad friend, depending on Max Broad, who saw the value in his work and refused to destroy it after a friend died.
Nice. Max is... Max Broad. He has short stories.
His diaries are really interesting. I was flipping through them today and it's funny. It looks like five successive entries. He's like, writers block.
Can't write. Can't write. He was Jewish. There's a lot been written on Jewish themes in his work.
Some people call him an existentialist. I think that he best captures... Or he subtly captures alienation in the modern world. And he was passed over for a Nobel prize in literature.
But the Swallow Iver. Yeah. You have to be a lot. I do not.
So just to wrap it up, his short stories are excellent. And again, for me, what attracts me, why he's one of my favorite writers, is the way that he treats alienation, the individual and increasingly complex and mysterious world. But he'll use metaphors. So the trial...
Alex, who did that film? Orson Welles. Have you seen Orson Welles the trial? No, sir.
I have not. I did hear his stuff. Yeah. Very, very good.
And it's just a man. He's running through endless corridors. And another theme for Kafka, obviously, maybe this is some of this Jewish background is the law and justice. And they're mysterious and unfair.
But today, we are talking about one of his most famous short stories, Shrasar Langthies. What's the call of great? The penal colony. The penal colony.
Now, what's the penal colony? That's not a colony of penal, right? Much to my disappointment. My intent to do with...
Alex, I got a look up... Alex, yeah. Alex, I thought that they... Alex, not penile.
Alex, I thought it was penile. Alex, I was really looking forward to this episode. Alex, but then it's penile. Alex, yeah, exactly.
Alex, what's your favorite short story, by the way? Alex, it's the one I wrote a Forbes article on. Alex, I can't even remember the Great Wall. Alex, the Great Wall.
Yeah, it's about the Great Wall of China, but it's used as a metaphor for that. It's built so long ago that the people that started building it couldn't remember why, only that they had to keep going. I'd love to... It's like the...
It's like the podcast. Yes, no. This is my favorite short story of Kafka's. Really?
Yeah, I've actually taught it a couple of times. I've actually... I've actually taught it a couple of times. I've proposed it, yeah.
I think it's interesting with Play the Scordius or Gileontia story from Republic Book 4, that it presents an account of punishment and punishment as a kind of education or something I've ever teaching. We refer to our own sort of punitive system as the corrections system as if... You know, you made a little mistake. So we're going to teach you by locking you in a tiny cage for 20 years, then to learn.
That kind of pretense we have where we hope that punishment could be rehabilitative, but it also has to be somewhat brutal, the sort of hope that the violence we do to people will somehow teach them. Aside from sort of more pragmatic or prudential sort of justifications of punishment and deterrence and all that, but that kind of visceral desire to get vengeance against somebody who's done injustice, I think it works really well as that kind of story. I think there's a lot there. It's pretty fascinating.
I'll say also on this read through something that jumped out to me more is the sort of technological and global component that's lurking in the background that I think is worth meditating on. As an account of punishment, it's great, yeah. Yeah, and Alex, one thing we haven't said, so you're drawing out interesting themes, the deep themes in the story, but for listeners who haven't approached Kafka before, don't be intimidated. He doesn't write in a complex manner.
It's very, very straightforward. There are no big words. I mean, what's complex are the ideas behind the short stories, but if you were to just read this story all the way through, it's about a man in a penal colony subjected to brutal torture, and his crimes are inscribed on his back with a penetrating needle, and then he bleeds to death. Was that about it?
Well, it's about a man who's supposed to have that done, and then somebody else and things go around. Maybe this is our cue to pass the mic over to Greg. Greg, give us a summary, my friend. All right, I shall.
First off, before we, I want to jump in this, but I actually found this really hard to read. I found it not because it was, sorry, dear point, not David. It's not hard to read. Like you said, in certain, as far as it's not difficult reading or anything like that.
I found it hard to read psychologically. It was the way that the punishment is described. I found really unpleasant to read, but I wonder if you guys had the same. Oh, it's torture.
It was a way in which the reading of it imitated the act that's happening in the short story. I found it torturous. Is that the right way to say it? That's a really good observation.
I know. That's why I'm here. The idea that it's slowly in a nasty way digging into its lesson or something like that, I think that's a fair judge. It is easy reading as far as comprehension of what's going on.
There are, David, I like your point about it having simple vocabulary. It does, and yet there are these very simple additions or simple choices, right? Easy to understand what's actually being said, but they end up being incredibly meaningful. Yeah.
It was great. Take it away, my friend. Yeah, so the plot's somewhat straightforward and fairly simple. There are only, I only count four characters in the short story.
There's the officer, the traveler, a man who's been condemned and a soldier. There's maybe some other's alluded to, but there's only four characters in this little story. When the story opens, there's an officer who's very proud of a device called the apparatus and the apparatus is alluded to several times. And I had to sort of Google some of the terms.
It's described actually in some detail. And so we want to get some image of it. But I sort of had, it's nothing like a guillotine, but I sort of had in the back of my mind a guillotine just as far as the way that the apparatus, the device is essential to the punishment. I saw some analogies there.
And in even this officer is very proud of his apparatus and he's showing off the apparatus to a traveler. What happens is there's a man who's been condemned. Oh, by the way, there's a penal colony. We're in some undetermined place in the Caribbean where the local people do not speak the native tongue.
By the way, there were no Czech or Bohemian colonies as far as I could tell by quick looking around. So I was a good man. Boy, my lazy. I never even thought of that.
So, yeah, in any event. So there's some colony. It's not exactly clear where. It's not exactly clear who the colonizers are, although I assume it's German because this is written in German.
And this officer is showing off the apparatus to a traveler who's otherwise completely undescribed. And the traveler, the officer assumes that the traveler is there to report on the punishment to his superior, whom we never meet. And then he takes the officer spends a great deal of time describing the apparatus how it works and what kind of a punishment it inflicts. The condemned man is a guy who's committed a crime.
I was say convicted, but that hardly seems fair because it seems that there isn't really a trial. He's a pretty pronounced guilty. So there's no real defense. There's no trial really.
And he's put into this contraption. He will be put into this contraption where this device etches out. It draws into the skin of the convicted or condemned man the crime that he is committed gradually over the course of like 12 hours or something like this. There's around about the midway points.
The condemned man begins to have some revisions of some kind that the officer is very proud of. He thinks this is actually an impressive part of the entire thing. And the officer is gradually realizing that our little traveler is not at all impressed. The soldier and the condemned man have a little bit of interactions here and there.
The condemned man doesn't seem to understand what's happening all. By the way, if someone incredible that the condemned man wouldn't like look at this giant needly thing and think, well, that's things seem fine. But apparently he doesn't really get captured or gather that he's going to be punished. In any event, I don't want to, I guess we're doing the plots.
We can't ruin it. But at some point the officer decides, don't forget this. I'm going to show you exactly how this thing works. He decides to strap himself on the machine and he's going to tattoo, is it be just?
Is that what he's going to tattoo on himself? Yeah. But the device, the device malfunctions, oh, the device is old. It's been dilapidated.
The officer who's so proud of the device is sad that the old Commandant, who's designed it is no longer living and there's this new Commandant who seems to think it's barbaric and archaic. So in any event to prove how awesome the device is, he straps himself in or he doesn't strap himself and he just sort of goes in and doesn't even do the strapping properly. He's going to carve the just on himself with the device completely malfunctions and it starts etching at him and it kills him. That's where what happens.
He doesn't get this weird visions that the other folks are having. And then at the very end, they take him as his body away, but he's not allowed to be buried or something like this. I don't understand what's going on. The ending was a little unclear to me.
Anybody have anything else on the ending? A couple of details. Yeah. Yeah.
He sees the grapes of the old Commandant. Yeah. He was the one who was not allowed to be buried. Right, right, right.
The old Commandant was not allowed to be buried. The officer who's really fond of this apparatus, I think is sort of spelling out a little bit that the new Commandant is pretty clearly trying to get rid of this and he's trying to use this traveler as a way to get. That's what the officer says many times and clearly is what he believes. Yeah.
It seems reasonable enough that there's no textual evidence that that's actually the case, except maybe the traveler is a special device. Well, the Commandant, the new Commandant, he invites this traveler to go see it. Right. And it seems pretty clear that this new Commandant also isn't very interested in upkeeping the machine.
Right. And so, and it seems to have fallen out of favor because nobody goes to see it. And this struck me at one bit of evidence. This was a peculiar, just like the guy's like, yeah, this is fine, whatever this is.
He seems to have no idea what this thing is. And yet if you trust the officer, people used to flock to this thing. Right. And I don't know, the guy might be old, but he can't be old enough that whole generations of young were watching it when he was still an adult and working on this thing.
And then they sort of grew up and forgot about it like this. It wasn't talked about. I didn't understand it all unless this guy is sort of eager because he knows that like enlightenment comes with this thing. I don't know.
It's very hard to understand. But he is when he's let go and he's freed. He's eager for vengeance. Right.
So, yeah, the only other thing I'll add is the traveler is called a great scientist. I have no idea why. Right. And he's some kind of expert.
What's the guy? Just one small point on that. I mean, the one, like you said, I agree, there was this one part like, well, people used to love watching people be executed and now it's completely falling out of favor. And I did find that a little incredible, but I don't know, when you see pictures of 19th century hangings and stuff like that.
And even how people used to go see, I don't know, it does seem that only 100 years ago, the United States, like watching people be executed was a big public deal. And it seems like a whole other world to me. It just doesn't seem like anything that I would ever do for fun. I also wondered if the complexity of the machine is somehow an indictment on the brutality of the new scientism of Kafka's day, there's that dawning of the era, that era.
You know, Church saw as that famous letter or was in one of his books where he talks about the like, what is he called? Like the blighted. He talks about this new science. I could never understand what reference he was talking about.
It wasn't the atom bomb. But anyway, so Kafka is writing at that time where the bits and bytes are suddenly like popping and coming alive. And for many people, and certainly like his predecessors in the Enlightenment age, they thought that that science would somehow usher in a new more moral motive existence. They've just made brutality more complex.
Is he called a great scientist by the officer? Because I remember stumbling over that too and thinking it was only like one unique reference to him as that if I remember properly. Yeah, towards the end, there's two times. He also refers to himself.
He says, I'm not an expert in criminal justice as though he possesses some other expertise, but it's twice mentioned and he's mentioned to be distinguished. It does seem like he's been received very well here. Yeah, for sure. And about the technological, I get the sense that the penal colony stands for this kind of out of the way part of ourselves that doesn't sit well with what you were talking about David, that sort of presumption of moral progress.
And it's something we don't like to look on. The traveler was supposed to go see the kind of don't. He decides after seeing this apparatus to go straight to the boat. Even before he's seen it actually work, he's like, I'm just going to go right to the boat.
Even if I can't leave town. He says, I'm going to sail off and if not, I'm just going to go to the boat. So there's a sense that he's quite disgusted with this. And he leaves the accused man who's set free and the soldier who walked over him.
The accused man by the way was the condemned man. I should say the condemned man was by the way a soldier before him. And they're both very hungry and thin. So it seems like things are pretty awful in this place.
They want to go with this guy. And instead of saving them, he holds up a rogue and threatens them as he's sailing off. And I took that to be a sign that this is a part of ourselves, but this new great scientist or expert or whatever you want to call him who's on a steamship, right? Sort of industrial thing.
He sees this piece of technology, this mechanism, which is built from foreign parts we learn at one point is appeals to a very dark part of our personalities, a very real part that wants vengeance and which can be made more effective and can be satisfied more effectively with this technology. Why is the technology isolated to this island? Have you even thought to do the geography? Just that it's an island.
I mean, I took it into the barbarism within us or something like that, symbolically. No, that's sufficient explanation for me. I didn't get any. I just wanted to do it.
I just wanted to do it. I just wanted to do it. You know, penal colonies are found everywhere. Yeah.
Yeah. In fact, why hide the delights of this machine from the world if it's so efficacious? That was a question. Let me ask a question that's sort of presupposing that one that I haven't really answered.
I think it's interesting to sort of toy with this. So the machine inscribes slowly in your body with a series of needles. What's going on? And then it's cleaned and it's kind of like the bleeding is stopped with this like pad and then it goes again and it does again, it keeps doing this.
And it does it for six hours. And for six hours you're screaming in this room and then you lose your energy and you're just like lying there and then you eat some porridge and then you realize the guy like realizes, oh my God, something's happening. And for the next six hours, they're decoding what the thing is writing in their skin. And they're said to be some kind of realization and sort of awareness.
Is this right? I mean, I don't know. I mean, at certain points, it seems like the author slash the traveler seems to assume it works. I don't know.
I could have figured it out. What do you mean, assume what works? Like the device actually, yeah, the device actually teaches you that you did something wrong. Oh, this punishment.
Does it actually is it effective in what it claims to do? All right, because if it's ineffective, you hear this refrain that with various punishments and illegal systems, that's not effective. People still commit murder. Why do we have it?
It's so barbaric. Do away with it. Right? It has no effect on keeping criminals from doing crime.
Laws against people, you know, having relations with animals don't seem to prevent it. So we should just go shooting off the books. I agree with that. What purposes serve by them?
Yeah, especially people always act like when human beings have sex with animals, that the human being is in the dominant position. But Greg, you know, sometimes you're in the passive position, right? More often than that, how does that hurt the animal hurts you? I mean, it hurts the person.
It was the real victim. It was the real victim. Yeah. Well, I think it is Greg has, you know, indicated tuss, if you do it right, nobody's really hurt.
Right? Yeah. I mean, eggs are pretty big. I mean, anyways, eggs.
Yeah, like egg can fit in a chicken. You know, this if an egg can fit a Greg can fit. That was pretty good, Greg. Yeah, that was pretty good.
You got to give him that. He introduced the subject. Yeah, he did. He did.
Shame on. And as usual, you guys enjoy a little bit of innuendo. Yeah, I just made it explicit. The kinds of like that machine, I think, would break down Alex.
They were like, all right, I'll your punishments are set to be inscribed. I think you could beat the machine because you have so much, like, wrong. We never get through it. So you mentioned Greg, capital punishment.
At what point, the guy's like, you probably have European sentiments, like you don't like capital punishment or like not every crime should be punished with death. Apparently on this island, doesn't matter what you do. So the guy who's condemned was sold. This guy didn't did nothing.
Really? He fell asleep because he was asked to wake up every hour and salute a guy who's sleep, salute the door. It makes no sense. Yeah.
He says a few decades later after, you know, he died in 24, but how have you been alive? All of this would have made sense. That's true. So maybe, yeah, sorry, just to try to answer your question in a serious way.
Like, have you guys ever been punished? I mean, and you sort of alluded to this at the beginning, Alex, that there's this way in which we think that punish is corrective. I mean, you guys have children. I now have one too.
You punish them. And there is this hope that you're punishing them, even though it is sometimes corporeal or physical will teach them, right? And so I just wondering, and you're not thinking about you punishing your children. I'm just thinking about you having been punished as a child.
Were there any times where being punished? I mean, like having your mouth washed out with soap seems like I never had this happen to me because I'm not like you pottymouthed. It seems like that's one where the physical act is tied somewhat to the crime and maybe it could have this adjective function. Is that insane to think?
I don't know. I mean, it's pretty, I never had that happen to me. Obviously. I never learned that lesson.
I think it happened. I once put the yoga mouth being like, oh, why is this so awful? It's pretty disgusting. I did that.
I was, I don't know. Yeah. Anyways, yeah, I don't know. It's hard to say.
I mean, like, I don't know why you're punishing your newborn. But I. He can't tell himself. That filthy shameful child.
I'll sometimes give my daughter time out. So she's like, if she hits the baby or something like that. And yeah, she'll she'll come in and she'll sometimes be like, yeah, I shouldn't do that. I'm sorry.
She'll apologize to the baby or whatever. I don't know, like physical beatings. I don't know. They beat your kids.
What do you think? Not hard enough, apparently. I mean, self-flagellation people like punching themselves to get them to stop doing something. Why wouldn't it work?
That's one thing. I mean, like I realize this is sort of taking to an extreme and therefore maybe to show the absurdity of it. But if not taking to the extreme, like, like, like, I know I should need these donuts. So my punishment to myself is not me at all 12.
Yeah, but so have you given thought to why it's inscribed on his back rather than his chest? He can't see what's not here. What's the point? And what language are they even describing it in?
Well, assuming it's a language that he understands, that's that's fair point, right? But assuming, yeah, no, go on. No, you're right. I mean, like he can't, it's on his back.
I think it's all, I think it's all these layers. It's on his back. He can't read it. He doesn't even know what crime he's been convicted of or condemned, convicted and applies.
There's a trial, I guess. But it makes sense that he wouldn't because if this is why I think that I keep coming back to the question of does the apparatus works? If the apparatus punishes and kills you, but also teaches you at the same time, who needs to do process? Who needs to be told?
You'll find out and you'll agree because in a weird way, the apparatus or the conceit of the apparatus is that the inscription on your flesh of the two we hear are both imperatives, be just obey your commander or whatever your superior, both of them. If, apparently, as it works its way into your skin and into your body, will produce a kind of enlightenment and you will realize what you ought to have done and somehow. So this always reminds me of the end of the Gorges where there's this description of punishment as a kind of teaching in a way. And somehow the lashes you give someone or the beatings you give someone should go through the body to the soul to the mind or something like that to be teaching.
And the reason I like this story, I think it works so well with Plato is because for that to work, the idea of an inscription that as it carves deeper, you understand better, somehow captures this absurdity or paradox of just punishment, right? That it would both teach and hurt at the same time. Does that make sense? So, I don't have an answer.
Just like in the trial, he's never allowed to, he never learns. They never share with him what he's condemned for. And so he doesn't know the law is totally opaque. In fact, there are these two parables that are usually affixed to the collections of Kafka short stories.
One of them is called Before the Law. And Alex, you've read this one. And it's about a gatekeeper. In fact, let me see if I can call it up.
Let me add on to the question. Let me just say, see if this helps flush out what I think might be going on in this, which is when the hell we f***ed flush it out. Let me dig into this a little bit. At the end, when the traveler says, I plan to tell the command or command or command, I don't know what this is, commanded that the commandant.
I'm going to tell the commandant that this thing should be gotten rid of. It's horrible. The guy knows his goose is cooked. He's like, you know what?
That means I'm unjust. So I'm going in. I deserve it. I'm going in.
And I think that's where it gets absurd because, okay, if you can think of a rational punishment that teaches, you don't need due process, right? You just go right for the punishment. If then the punishment actually works, then the person who sort of creates it would in a way fully accept this idea and submit to it. And so you don't actually even need the inscription.
If you're aware of this possibility and you were put into it, you'd just be killed. And I think that's the truth of the whole thing is that ultimately this idea of physical punishment as teaching, if you actually accepted it as a notion, you wouldn't need this machine. It would just be stabbing somebody to death, right? And at the end, it said he has no awareness, just looks calm, like regular and he's just dead.
And it's pretty grim, the sort of end result. Yeah. Can I read one of the small passage real quick? It's on page 84.
This is going to highlight something that I didn't quite make sense of. So, so this, as you mentioned, this contraption is etching into his skin, the crime is committed. And here the, our officer is just describing how it works. It's only the sixth hour is the very top of the page.
Will he lose his pleasure in eating? Then I usually kneel here and observe this phenomenon. The man rarely swallows his last mouthful. He just turns it round in his mouth and spits it into the ditch.
Then I have to duck for otherwise it will land in my face. But how still the man becomes at the sixth hour? And here's the sentence that I want to pay attention to. Understanding dawns upon even the most stupid.
It begins with the eyes from here. It spreads further. A sight that might tempt you to join him lying beneath the arrow. Indeed, nothing further happens.
The man simply begins to decipher the script. He purses his lips as if he were listening. You have seen it is not easy to decipher the script with one's eyes. You can't even read what the, what's being written on the guy.
But our man deciphers them with his wounds. So a lot of stuff there. One, right? Like the guy literally can't read what it says, but somehow he can mouth what it says.
But this goes to my, you know, you said enlightenment. And I'm, I guess some question in my mind whether or not it's being described in some mystical fashion as opposed to enlightenment. So is it a rational thing? Oh my God, I can't believe I did this wrong thing.
Or is it mystical? In which case, you know, you asked a little video, Alex, does the machine actually do this in the short stories, is it the conceit real? And one way to think to say that it does is to be like, we, I mean, we do know, like, I mean, extreme, extreme torture probably can lead your mind to start having all kinds of weird stuff. Right.
So is it a mystical experience? Is this a rational punishment that makes you see logically what you've done wrong? Or is it some kind of mystical religious experience and the pain somehow unlocks some deeper understanding of the world? I like that because I had a question and I think your proposal helps answer it.
He says, understanding dawns upon even the most stupid. So it's like he's aware, but he's actually deciphering it for six hours. Right. And then he says he needs six hours to accomplish it.
Right. But, but then the hair of spirits and right through with those, right, right, right. But, but notice that it's a mystical experience, but I think the author's or who's relating this is, is projecting or sort of intrigued by, he says, so easy to pass this on. You read it, he says, a site that might tempt you to join him lying beneath the hero.
You want to be there and you want to feel it, which indeed he does. And he, and he really goes to it at the end. And so there's a kind of, I think you never really get a sense of whether they do learn. I like the idea of a mystical experience, perhaps after six hours, they can't even eat anymore.
They can't don't have the energy to screen and the idea that they're now decoding this thing carefully and the energy that would take. It just seems like it's like this weird sort of sensation leading to some kind of. Yeah. And how would you even know?
I mean, they don't speak the same language. Why do you think that? Why do you keep saying that? I miss you miss that.
Well, they don't speak the same language. And so it's in the text, I can find it. But, you know, I just how would one know that somebody understands what, like I'm just imagining what I mean, as gruesome as it sounds, trying to imagine someone who's been having this done to them for six hours. And then what are you going to hear them say?
Like, that's going to show you that they actually understand what is going on. Right. That's like, it seems like the officers imputing to this victim things that just, yeah, it strains the imagination. You know, the other thing that I was thinking of, huh, this machine was not built or at least it's not being employed with any deterrent deterrent.
That's right. That's right. Nobody seems to know. That's right.
Well, because they're on an island. So usually it's like, why did you have people in the stockades? Why did you have public hanging? Right.
There are a few cynical answers for the public hanging and stuff, but it's you make a spectacle of it and it should keep people on the straight and narrow, presumably. But here nobody knows, right, except for the few that witness it. Right. Yeah.
Wait, Greg, are you dancing a sadomasochistic interpretation? I think so, actually. I mean, the mystic, I'm joking with you, but no, I think I am actually. I don't know if Kaka himself holds that, but the officer has something like that view.
Yeah. But why do you think it's degrading over time, the contraption? Why is it? I mean, the officer's very upset that it hasn't been kept up, but what's the significance of the story of the fact that the apparatus has sort of caved?
Why hasn't it been kept up? The officer implies that the new commandant hasn't kept it up, but it would seem like because of its state of disrepair that it had been in that, it had been in a state of disrepair for some time, it seems to me. So somehow the knowledge of keeping up the machine is then, so what can we take from that? That it's complex and apparatus to be maintained by one person.
It's not like you just turn a few knobs that become loose over time, right? Or that the, maybe it is, there is a more or less simple fix, but the knowledge is been not. I think he knows, I think he knows when he needs to be done, he's pretty clear. He's like, you need this new piece that's worn out.
This I don't think answers ever, maybe it starts to go this in a direction. There's an interesting theme throughout the story of cleanliness and filth. He wants everything to be clean, even though this is a remarkably filthy thing, right? Everything you can imagine, this whole scene is quite disgusting.
Yet he's obsessed with cleanliness. Even as the process works, he washes his hands and he finds out the water is dirty and so he's very upset and so he covers it in sand and says, well, that'll have to do. I didn't understand exactly what was going on here, but it seems like the disrepair could be something like a part of this thing, right? Because it said that if it didn't make noise, and at the end, because something was done incorrectly, it seems like it doesn't actually make noise, at least at first.
But it seems like if it doesn't make noise, it's properly operating, it's actually quite allocating clean and clear. The noise somehow disrupts the purity, perhaps the sort of fiction of this machine, that it's like a clean, pure educating thing. I don't know if that explains the whole bit of it. Is this anti-colonialism or is that just nothing to do with the actual story?
It's just a pretext for investigating punishment. I would accept that that would work on some level. Maybe there were layers to it, maybe that's not the primary. No, of course not.
The way that the officer views the natives, for example. Yeah, but I mean, you could say that, but isn't the way that he views the natives. Some people in America would contend that that's the way that the people that hold the levers of justice view the rest of us anyway, with that same kind of thing. No, sure, sure.
I mean, I'm not sure that the officer speaks this European language, the French, right? But he is not clear that he is... Say French at some point? I thought it did at some point.
Right. You're right. You're right. I thought the officer spoke French.
And certainly neither this soldier nor the condemned man understood French. Yeah. So it's not clear whether the officer is a Frenchman or he's just speaking French and he's a native. He's a traveler.
Yeah, because he just happens to be violent. Right. But I did get the sense that there's these European sentiments and a kind of Christian sort of undercurrent to the story. It comes out much...
I saw a lot of Christian stuff in here. Yeah. And the Christian man is buried here, the priest refused of a place in the graveyard. There's also some...
There's a Christ-like image. I mean, I think the apparatus itself is sort of indicative of the crucifixion. Yeah. And I mean, this is going to sound a little stretch, but I mean, right from the start, I thought about Christianity and the three men being condemned on the cross and something like this and how they're going to move them.
But I mean, this is what... I mean, you're talking Jewish, but is this what he's doing? That the crucifix somehow imprints the crime onto the body, onto the soul somehow? Yeah, there's also...
You can even take it as a reference to the stigmata, right? Yeah, of course. The piercing of the body. Yeah, there's a few moments, but I get the sense that...
But that's right. To go back to... To be a serious critique of Christianity, right? In other words, if that's right, then it would point...
Then Kafka would be pointing to some weird, say, this psychology at the heart of Christianity, then, right? Yeah, in part... But I think... So more immediately to David's question about colonialism.
That was my question. That was my question. That was your question. Yeah, that was too good for you, David.
The question about colonialism, it could be that this is a critique of what happens when you take a kind of humanitarian natural science and technology and you bring it to a non-Christian place. Right. My push back on that is, why do you have to even take that step? Why can't it be when you bring that kind of science around just normal heat gains?
Yeah, I mean, I didn't want to apply the Christians aren't normal, but you're the believer. But I think there's a statement there, right? It's said that they get their parts from overseas at one point, right? And then everything has to be ordered to some of these parts.
And so you get the sense that this is a technological development, right? The guy comes in on a steamship, but it's put to a completely novel use. It's invented by this old fashioned, old custom, commandant. I get the sense that this is what it might look like if you take modern technology and you remove Christianity and put it in non-Christian context, it could lead to a kind of violent...
It could come in contact with some not so pretty parts of the soul that Christianity has happily suppressed. And it could lead to this kind of behavior, this horrible thing. I wonder that whether maybe Kafka has a term in mind, just given the history that would follow, right? Or even given what happened in World War I, you wonder whether he was somewhat aware that the Germans, their Christianity, isn't that deep felt?
And perhaps there's this deeper or sort of uglier side of the... I don't want to besmirch the Germans, but I don't know if you've heard of the guy in Adolf Hitler. No. Give him a quick Google, not a good guy.
No, to be serious, I wonder whether he's maybe he hasn't mind the Germans, right? Yeah, I let it point out, I looked at the way we were talking about. This story belonged to a collection of stories that were published after his lifetime, but they were intended by Kafka and okayed by Kafka for publication. So he meant this story, he was okay that the story be consumed by the point.
You know what I'm saying? I do say. Do you have other thoughts? How are we feeling?
I think it's a nice wrap up. I'm good. Let me ask you guys a question. Let's go around.
Alright. Alright. If you had to inscribe a punishment on each of your co-hosts, Bax, what would it be? David, you go first.
I don't want to... What would you inscribe on Greg's back? What would you inscribe on mine? I just wanted to...
I just wanted to... Just wanted to... You got to choose the Chief's set. The what?
The Chief's set that each is guilty of and that they need to be haven't scribed on their flush. Oh, Greg? Oh, I see. What's it called?
Greg lacks humility and a very profound sense sometimes. But it's like a very thin veneer. Well, no, it's not a thin veneer. You have to penetrate it.
It's very thick. You realize this guy thinks he belongs on the cover of LL Bean. That may or may not be... Hey, listen.
It's not a fan of... I guess like all this wisdom and sometimes Greg will talk to me like I'm really stupid. God, just a normal stupid. It's like, come on, Dave.
Like, blah blah blah. I'll say, hey, Greg, you thought about this passage instead of funny stuff? That's a good try. He goes, he's so nice.
But inside, he's like, God damn, this dumb motherfucker. Anyway, maybe ask for him. Skipping, skipping, skipping. I didn't like that.
I don't want to do that. Skipping, skipping. No, what would you do with Scraddle my back? Me?
No, no, David has to give one to each of us. You give one to each of us. I think humility is not the whatever the odd versus. What's the odd versus?
Vandy? Pride? Yeah. I'm also joking though, Greg, because I don't think you really suffer from that.
But thanks. For Alex, I don't know. You're for... I don't know.
I mean, I already know what mine is from you guys. That's easy. It starts with a G. No, no, sloth, sloth.
Okay. Yeah. What would you do? It was not the word that starts with a G that I was thinking about, but whatever.
I thought for sure you meant to do it for whatever. Don't have any vices. You got D. That's funny.
What would you inscribe on both of us? I would inscribe Raph on Alex's. Raph. Really, you think Alex is Raph?
Yeah. You guys are here with Greg? One time we were catching the cabin in Philadelphia, the NPSA. And we got in and the guy, he was raining and he got in the cabin and I was like, why don't you pull up closer to the curb next time?
You stupid, and then there was a racial epithet, which I didn't like. It was just shameful really. You just got rid of plausibility in that story. You want to hear a funny one about Alex?
Yeah. He used to joke around a lot. Because he likes to make some of his brand of humor, which I shared. But he does it in an extreme.
Extreme. He's making people uncomfortable. We were once out of Benagan's on the lark. I think, you know, I was like, Benagan's like, I've TGI Fridays?