An Imperial Message: The Relays of Desire

Author(s): Herman Rapaport

Source: MLN, Vol. 95, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1980), pp. 1333-1337
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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NOTES
An Imperial Message:
The Relays of Desire
Herman Rapaport
Kafka's fiction often confronts its critics with a collapsed or collapsing
center of authority, a dead or powerless father, who condemns those in his
orbit to a circuitous ruin. No one or nothing is in control; no one has the
power to authorize. And yet all the subjects still seem to be controlled and
continue to work. This paradox of inertia and ceaseless activity, of master-
lessness combined with continued servitude, is the central feature of one of
Kafka's most interesting parables, "Eine kaiserliche Botschaft."
Michel Foucault's description of certain texts as heterotopias is particularly
relevant for Kafka's parable, because it names the possibility of a text or
system composed of disconnected infrastructures, a text made up of
asymmetric parts which can only work or operate provided there is a condi-
tion of disorganization or entropy, a mechanics of resistance, frustration,
dysfunction.1 Kafka's texts, like the heterotopias Foucault describes, display
this kind of perverse operating procedure whose economy is initiated by
the collapse of the center, often represented as the death of the father, and
having clear Oedipal aspects.
It is in the Oedipus complex that we might locate the mechanism of
resistance (the "machine desirante," to appropriate Deleuze and Guattari's
anti-Oedipal term) that at once accounts for the absent father and makes
possible the work of his subordinates in the shadow of his absence.' The
Oedipal situation is responsible for at once an imposition of its regulatory
apparatus over the father, its "symbolic" content in the Lacanian sense,
which results in the slaying of the father, and a suffering of guilt and loss
of control that such an absence of the father inaugurates. What we must
realize is that such a complex or mechanism of desire does not serve so
much to inhibit or limit Kafka's writing to a simple principle, a constella-
tion or dynamic which in itself becomes a substitute for the center effaced
within the text, but that such a complex is an entropaic principle of disper-
MLN Vol. 95 Pp. 1333-1337
0026-7910/80/0955-1333 $01.00
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1980 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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1334 HERMAN RAPAPORT
sion that curiously energizes a thematic or semantic field of
fragmentary
particles.
In the parable, "Eine kaiserliche Botschaft," one can clearly see
the
manner in which the "you" or "Du" wishes the end of the
father,
the
death
of the Emperor, and how that wish carries with it a letter, albeit an
oral
one, that disperses itself throughout the circular
kingdom, energizing the
text with its frustrating, but nevertheless directive force: its desire.
Nowhere is the content of the message revealed, but that is not so much
because the message is a secret, but because it is so
very apparent. The
situation of the "jammerlichen Untertanen" or "pitiful subject" ("miserable
dependent" is an intended pun) who waits for the
Imperial message, a
message that is not personal, but official, betrays
the content. For
what
other message could an insignificant subject
receive if it were neither
an
"invitation" nor a "pardon"? What other
message
would a humble
servant
long for?
The message participates in an economy of contradictory desire: fort!
da!4 On the one hand the father must die; the Emperor must be on his
deathbed (fort!). But on the other hand the subject must receive the mes-
sage that the father is still there (da!). Like Freud's little Hans, the "Du" or
dreamer of the parable is attempting to gain or imagine mastery over a
parent, and in the Kafka parable this constitutes wishing mastery over a
father by at once desiring him dead and alive. What carries the force of this
ambivalent, Oedipal network of desire is the message which delicately
affirms the simultaneity of two wishes that are contradictory and yet mu-
tually supportive. The one wish, let us call it thefort-wish, would like the
Emperor to die, because the dreamer of the parable (us) would like to be
the father. The slaves would like to become the master. However, in order
for that wish to be realized, the father or Emperor must never truly disap-
pear, since he is the Law upon which even usurpers depend, without which
there would be no such thing as usurpation. Thus there has to be a da-wish,
the desire that the Law be upheld and exercised. This Oedipal network of
desire is carried by the message in two distinct senses: as pardon and as
invitation. As pardon, the message carries both the subject's "crime," the
breaking of the Law or denial of the Father (fort-wish), and the fact that the
Law is still in effect, that the Father is still exercising power, is still present
(the da-wish). As invitation, the message requests that the subject come into
the father's presence (da-wish) even if time and space preclude such a
journey, such a possibility (fort-wish). There is, finally, the Emperor's ask-
ing the servant to repeat the message, the repetition compulsion, which
establishes at once that the message has, indeed, left the deathbed (isfort!)
and yet remains within the possession of its author or authorizer, the
exerciser of the Law (is da!).
The message, we are told, will never reach the subject of the dream, a
collective "subject" as it turns out, because such a message is itself the
condition of frustration or entropy which energizes the heterotopia in which
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M L N 1335
the messenger is running so hard and tiring so quickly. The symbol for
such an energizing but entropaic sign is the sun which the messenger
carries on his breast, the sign of the Imperial courier. The sun is a most
fitting symbol, because it represents not only the dissemination of power,
energy, force, but also the debilitating effect that such power often pro-
duces, the over-burdening effect the heat of the sun has upon, say, a man
crossing a desert on foot. This sort of effect, both energizing and impotent,
is certainly manifest in the parable, for the message or "truth" of the
Oedipus complex, a message that must be communicated so rapidly before
the Emperor dies, is forestalled even in the chambers of the innermost
palace. And even if the messenger succeeded in getting beyond these
chambers,
... niemals wird er sie jiberwinden; und gelange ihm dies, nichts ware gewon-
nen; die Treppen hinab musste er sich kampfen; und gelange ihm dies, nichts
ware gewonnen; die Hofe waren zu durchmessen; und nach den Hofen der
zweite umschliessende Palast ...5
And so on. Even if the messenger could get beyond the Imperial palace
itself, he would only be in the center of an even far greater capital filled to
bursting with its own refuse. And, "Niemand dringt hier durch und gar
mit der Botschaft eines Toten." This line is very important because it
affirms that it is above all the Oedipal message, the message that longs for
the death of the Emperor (thefort-wish) that cannot traverse easily, but
rather stands before an awesome accumulation of fragmentary settings:
stairs, rooms, courtyards, crowds, gates, refuse. It is the longing for death
that is forestalled before its own entropaic desire. But if death frustrates its
own working out, if the death wish is blocked, the da-wish which makes
itself known in terms of the pardon or invitation from the father is also
stymied. The message of presence or exercise of the Law cannot arrive,
and it is in this sense that one can say the father never properly dies nor
properly exists. Like Amfortas of the Parzival legend, or Edgar Allan Poe's
M. Valdemar, the Emperor is but liminally active. He is the threshold or
limit where the two contradictory desires of the "subject" (in Lacan's sense
of the term) play themselves out, and his message is the oral sign of this
violent crossing point wherefort and da insist.
It goes without saying, however, that a kind of transference is experi-
enced in the parable, for the message is the relay back to the "subject," an
answer from the threshold where the violent interplay of desire occurs.6
And this answer, this "truth" of the Oedipus complex which comes from
the father, Lacan's Autre, simply manifests itself in terms of a repetition of
the barrier between "be gone!" and "come back!", which is to say both,
"you are forgiven" and "you are not forgiven," or, to put it still another
way, "enter my presence" and "don't enter my presence." This message
from the Emperor is precisely what is needed for the Oedipus complex to
maintain itself, since the Oedipus complex encapsulates desire, the wish
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1336 HERMAN RAPAPORT
for something that is missing or out of reach. As long as the message from
the father promises fulfillment of desire while at the same time energizing
that desire by delaying or deferring itself, the circuit from "subject" to
father and father to "subject" remains unbroken, endlessly forestalling
closure.
What we have in its full terror is a machine of desire, the Oedipus
complex, that both organizes and disorganizes, that energizes an economy
of relays within Kafka's text imperiled by a steady entropaic force. Here a
mechanics of frustration, resistance, perhaps even dysfunction operates, a
mechanics authorized by the collapsing center or the dreaming "subject."
It is a mechanics that is "condensed" in the parable and that could, in ways
we have not already touched upon, be applied to the entire story out of
which the parable may be taken, "Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer,"
itself a heterotopia of fragmentary walls, departed emperors, filial desires, in
short, a ludicrous network of relations whose incongruity is forever on the
threshold of coherence.
Loyola University
NOTES
1 "Les hat~rotopies inquietent, sans doute parce qu'elles minent secretement le lan-
gage, parce qu'elles empechent de nommer ceci et cela, parce qu'elles brisent les
noms communs ou les enchevetrent, parce qu'elles ruinent d'avance la 'syntaxe',
et pas seulement celle qui construit les phrases, -celle moins manifeste qui fait
'tenir ensemble' (at c6te et en face les uns des autres) les mots et les choses."
Quoted from Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 9.
2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, L'Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Editions de Minuit,
1972). According to these authors, "Les machines desirantes ne marchent que
detraquees, en se detraquant sans cesse," p. 14. Desire is a mode of psychological
production, a machine whose operation, however, is always subject to "d&
traquement" or "breakdown." What we could argue is that the Oedipus complex
itself incorporates psychotic or anti-Oedipal "detraquement," that Oedipal/
anti-Oedipal difference is not clear cut and may accede to differance. In Kafka we
are broaching a path by which one might pursue a deconstruction of the opposi-
tion Oedipus/anti-Oedipus.
3 See Jacques Lacan, "Du traitement possible de la psychose," Ecrits (Paris: Seuil,
1966), p. 556. "Comment Freud ne la reconnaitrait-il pas en effet, alors que la
necessite de sa reflexion l'a mene a lier l'apparition du signifiant du Pere, en tant
qu'auteur de la Loi, a la mort, voire au meurtre du Pere,-montrant ainsi que si
ce meurtre est le moment fecond de la dette par oui le sujet se lie a vie a la Loi, le
Pere symbolique en tant qu'il signifie cette Loi est bien le Pere mort."
In Kafka's "Eine kaiserliche Botschaft" the signifier of the Father is the mes-
sage or letter sent to the subject, a letter predicated, as we shall see, upon the
concept of death, even to the murder of the Father, as Lacan says. Lacan's
symbolic Father is a syntax of otherness, for he is not someone who speaks, but
the speaking itself. What the subject wants is at once to foreclose or slay this
speaking and appropriate it too. Lacan's point is that appropriation and slaying
or foreclosing dialectically work to maintain a relation between conscious and
unconscious, a relation the psychotic does not have, since the psychotic slays the
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M L N 1337
Father, totally represses the speaking, and thereby destroys the relays of desire,
those Oedipal relays whose function it is to maintain contact, no matter how
strained or elusive, between subject and symbolic Father or Other. It is in this
sense that Kafka's parable strives to maintain sanity by keeping open the Oedipal
relays of desire which move at once towards preserving and destroying the
Father.
One can argue further that such a movement constitutes a "defense" that is
elaborated in the story from which the parable may be taken, "Beim Bau der
Chinesischen Mauer," for in the story one immediately perceives that what
makes the wall a most powerful instrument of "defense," that is to say, what
allows the wall to protect the "subject" is the very fact that it is fragmentary and
as such is an object that facilitates very contradictory relays of desire. Thus, if the
"subject" desires to submit himself to the wall as if he were but a slave, if the
"subject" willingly submits to the frustrating labor decreed by the Father, the
Law, the Emperor, he desires at the same time to conquer (metaphorically, to
kill) the wall, to finish it, to have the wall serve him as an agency of protection as
well as identification (Chinese as nomad), to force the Law to submit to the
"subject's" priority. The "subject," then, wants to master and serve at the same
time, and he can only do so if the fortifications are in bits and pieces, that is, if
they carry within their very structure their own ruin, their own death, their own
defeat. Only in this way can they channel the relays of desire, and only in this
way can they protect the state from the threat these ruins are built to resist, a
threat that comes not so much from the nomads, but from the "subjects" of the
Chinese Empire, the threat of unchanneled desire, foreclosure, psychosis.
4 The reference is, of course, to Freud's "Jenseits des Lustprinzips" in Gesammelte
Werke (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1940), Vol. XIII. It is important to
note that in Freud's text the game offortida has everything to do with Oedipal
desire. "Dasselbe Kind, das ich mit 11/2 Jahren bei seinem ersten Spiel
beobachtete, pflegte ein Jahr spdter ein Spielzeug, uber das es sich gedrgert
hatte, auf den Boden zu werfen und dabei zu sagen: Geh' in K(r)ieg! Man hatte
ihm damals erzahlt, der abwesende Vater befinde sich im Krieg, und es vermis-
ste den Vater gar nicht, sondern gab die deutlichsten Anzeichen von sich, dass es
im Alleinbesitz der Mutter nicht gestort werden wolle" (p. 14). But if Freud
insists the child's game offortida expresses his desire to be rid of the father and
to have his mother, he introduces this observation with the insight that the little
boy may be revenging himself on the father for having been deserted by him. In
this sense, the father substitutes for the mother and the dis-pleasure associated
with her at an earlier time is transferred to the father. At least, we ought to con-
sider the likelihood that the Father's death sentence is commuted even as it is
pronounced by "dasselbe Kind," or, if you like, by dasselbe Spiel.
5 Franz Kafka, "Eine kaiserliche Botschaft" in Franz Kafka: Sdmtliche Erzahlungen,
ed. Paul Raabe (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1970), p. 156.
6 If one wanted to pursue further a Lacanian reading, one would argue that the
message is nothing less than the phallus, "of what the subject is-symbolically-
deprived of," to quote Lacan in "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in
Hamlet" in Yale French Studies, No. 55-56, 1977. According to Lacan in "La
signification du phallus," Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), the phallus is a message
emitted from the locus of the large Autre or Father. The phallus is a signifier that
the subject wants in order to know the Autre, to grasp its potency or power. As
such it is the master signifier of desire. Yet, it is "the very imposition of a limit,"
to quote Shoshana Felman, "the principle of censorship and of repression which
forever bars all access to the signified as such." See Shoshana Felman, "Turning
the Screw of Interpretation" in Yale French Studies, No. 55-56, 1977, p. 172.
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