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

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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 …show more content…

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.”

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