The Penal Colony And Karen Russell's Reeling For The Empire

In Kafka’s The Penal Colony, the machine is both a symbol of imagine and literal power which also reminds me of the machine that is mentioned in Karen Russell’s Reeling for the Empire who also illustrated it as an embodiment of power. In both stories, the two machines are inanimate objects but for some reason they possess this power and seen as almighty objects even though they aren’t human. In The Fine Line, Zerubavel states that “It is the fact that it is differentiated from other entities that provides an entity with a distinctive meaning as well as a distinctive identity that sets it apart from everything else.” I believe that it means that power, control, and borders only exist if people believe in them.
The machine in The Penal Colony

is only seen as powerful because it has the power to physically kill people. In the story, there is this officer and this traveler. The officer shows the traveler the machine that has like this three part system; “the bed, the upper one is called the inscriber, and here in the middle, this moving part is called the harrow.” (Kafka 4). When the officer described the process, it was in such a vivid way that it was really disturbing. The offenders are stripped and then strapped onto the table lined with cotton. Then needles slowly carve inscription into the prisoner’s flesh until the prisoner's dies from blood loss. The whole whole process of carving goes on for a total of 12 hours and after the whole procedure, the prisoner's body is dumped into a pit which is sadly, their final resting place. The officer refers to the machine as “the legacy of the Old Commandant” (Kafka 14) and even though he looks so highly towards this machine, he ends up putting himself through the machine in the end.
The reeling machine in Karen Russell’s Reeling for the Empire has the same influence as the “apparatus” in The Penal Colony.

Russell’s story takes place in old Japan where Women become hybrids of silkworm and human, they live and work in a mill where they produce thread. The whole procedure to get the thread from their bodies to turn into silk is just as awful as the machine from The Penal Colony. The machine is described as “. . . a great steel-and-wood beast with a dozen rotating eyes and steaming mouths-it’s twenty meters long and takes up half the room. . . Pulleys swing our damp threat left and right across it, refining it into finished silk” (Russell 31). In order to remove the threads from their body, they dip their hands into boiling water, which helps loosen the thread then machine reels it from them and turns it into silk. These poor women are treated like animals, they are made to work continuously in an environment that reminds me of a sweatshop. They have no choice but to work because of their mutated bodies so even if they didn’t want to, they’ll have to. The machine has so much power over the women because it relieves them of the silk that builds up within them. At a certain of the story, one worker, Kitsune who is the main character goes on strike. The story describes her body as “her belly is grotesquely distended and stippled with lumps, like a sow’s pregnant with a litter of ten piglets. Her excess thread is packed in knots. Strangling Dai from within.”

(Russell 44). After Dai’s death, Kitsune also states “It’s clear to us now that we can never leave this room—we can never be away from the Machine for more than 5 days. Unless we live here, where the Machine can extract the thread from our bodies at speeds no human hand could match, the silk will build and build and kill us in the end.” (Russell 43). The women cannot live without the machine because it what keeps them alive and well enough to keep producing silk and if they don’t relieve themselves from the threads then they get sick. The will never be able to leave and it’s an endless loop. Thought they depend on the machine, the machine doesn’t control them, it’s their fear that gives the machine the power to control them.
Fear is what has power over these people and because they fear these machine, they unknowingly gave these machines the power that they probably shouldn’t have gotten. If these people wouldn’t have given them value then these machine would have had no power. “It is boundaries that help us separate one entity from another…” (Zerubavel 2), which means that when we draw lines to see where we stand where the one with higher power it helps us eliminated giving unnecessary people the power that can control us. If the people in The Penal Colony would have stood up and saw that this machine holds no power they could have easily “overpower” the machine and could have lived a fearless life. As for the women, in Reeling for the Empire, I’m sure that there’s a way for them to relieve themselves without becoming overpowered by the machine.