Every so often, a narrative plays out on the national or international stage that can only be described as “Kafkaesque”—a term, according to Merriam-Webster, that refers to anything that might be “suggestive of Franz Kafka or his writings; especially, having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.”
A quite recent echo of one of the iconic early 20th-century writer’s more bizarre literary creations can be found, I believe, in the experiences of two of the top participants in this summer’s Paris Olympics. Rather than evoking one of his more celebrated works, like The Trial or the sci-fi-style short story, “The Metamorphosis,” what they brought to mind was a somewhat lesser-known tale of his called “In the Penal Colony,” which describes the final episode of a sadistic practice carried out on an island used for that purpose overseen by bureaucrats involving an elaborate execution device that slowly tortures its subjects to death by inscribing the name of their capital offense—in this case, disobeying and disrespecting a superior—on their body over a 12-hour period, during which the victim has ample time to decipher and understand the nature of his crime.
As the story unfolds, a traveler who has been invited to witness such a procedure and even offer an opinion about it becomes aware of just how far out of favor it has fallen with both the island’s administrator, who inherited it, and its population that as he watches, the officer charged with overseeing it frees the condemned man and takes his place, substituting the inscription with one that says, “Be just,” at which point the now-defective machine immediately kills him.
But it is in Kafka’s description of how this devilish device and its being used to make examples of rulebreakers goes from mesmerizing the island’s inhabitants to ostensibly losing its hold on them, culminating in the officer’s decision to sacrifice himself, that it becomes applicable to contemporary events, as reflected in the separate yet related sagas of those two aforementioned champion athletes.
“This process and execution, which you now have an opportunity to admire, have no more open supporters in our colony,” he confides to the traveler. “I am its only defender…When the Old Commandant was alive, the colony was full of his supporters. I have something of the Old Commandant’s persuasiveness, but I completely lack his power, and as a result, the supporters have gone into hiding. There are still a lot of them, but no one admits to it.”
So what, you might ask, is the correlation between this strange century-old morality tale and the separate trials and triumphs of those two aforementioned competitors?
Hellbound and Down 