Babel Revisited

Abstract

In the Summer 2001 issue of Critical Inquiry, James Conant imagines “Kafka in Florida,”¹ revisiting the absurdities of a voting machine gone terribly wrong. In this “précis of a Kafka story,”² we as an audience are transplanted from Franz Kafka’s penal colony into the electoral college. The Harrow, the murderous instrument of a lost system of justice that destroys and is ultimately destroyed by the officer who mourns this lost system in Kafka’s story, becomes here the physical signifier of and vehicle for the perpetuation of a broken, if not altogether corrupt, system. From our post-September 11 vantage point, forced upon us just months after this summer issue went to print, Conant’s placement of Kafka seems almost unbearably quaint. In the same way that Kafka’s work seems to take on a horrifying prescience when viewed through the filter of the Holocaust,³ here, in this cataclysmic moment separating “before” from “after,” the interpretive stakes suddenly become higher. Taking Conant’s lead, we can now imagine Kafka in the space of utter ruin the responses to this moment represent—from the American campaign to spread democracy and “liberation” to the attendant atrocities of terrorism and state-sanctioned violence. If we strain to listen, we can almost make out his barely perceptible warning to recognize the inevitably fatal consequences of national myths cloaked in religious rhetoric.