Oldal 245 [245]
THE TRAGEDY OF MAN AS THEATRUM THEOLOGICUM (A DRAMATURG’S DIARY)
where the light from the entrance is no longer visible and the light from the exit
is so faint that one must search for it constantly, and it constantly disappears,
and where, in addition, even which way is which is uncertain.
The passengers experience the resulting situation, however, in many dif¬
ferent ways, so that no overall picture develops that would prompt either the
group or any individual stuck in the tunnel to action:
All around us, however, in the confusion of the senses or in their intensified
sensibility, are monstrosities and, depending on the disposition or injuries of the
individual, a kaleidoscopic game that is either entrancing or enervating.
“Depending,” writes Kafka: people in each other’s proximity, indeed piled up
on each other, have lost the ability to join to create a picture of their own situ¬
ations despite having been dealt blows by the same fate: though the picture
fragments wind up adjacent to each other, they can nonetheless form either
horrific or beautiful images, bearing no meaning at all, so in consequence,
they lead to no relevant action.
Kafka is first to recognize and record the dissolution of humanity’s ethical
order and the orderly-seeming operation of evil that captivates us all, but the
euphoria that this process continually generates renders us, ourselves, also
the system’s devoted, even celebratory, supporters. “Honor your superior!” —
this is the sentence they sew into the skin of the condemned man of the short
story The Penal Colony because fundamentally this is the only law that has
remained in effect, and this is the one that supports the system and renders
it operational. The horrors that happen (before our eyes and to us) are no ac¬
cident but normality itself. Amerika, however, devotes itself to the course of
the suit against cosmic misfortune. Karl Rossmann, exiled from Prague to
America, sees the Statue of Liberty, greeting the immigrants with its torch
raised high, as the goddess of the Last Judgment waving her sword, inciting
him to the speedy prosecution of his suit.
There is scarcely a better stage for the suit’s prosecution than the theater to
the extent, of course, that the performance is not in the least “entrancing and
enervating,” thus an event that switches off our sensitivity to the world. The
theater takes all of us into the Kafkaesque tunnel and certainly repeats the
cataclysm that has taken place, unobserved, within us. Its explicit intention is
to show that all of us are the devoted, happy captives of our situation, and then
it prosecutes the suit with the most precise formulation possible.
But we viewers are not seated on the defendant’s bench, not at all: we sit in
the judge’s chair. We must pass judgment. Given the artificially created law
court of the theater, we must enforce our realizations without delay.
* 243 +