In the year 1914 Franz Kafka wrote most of what we have of The Trial, abandoned in January 1915; and he wrote ‘In the Penal Colony’, the most historically freighted, and most clairvoyant, of all his stories. Clairvoyant? Is this a casual metaphor or a serious claim to foreknowledge? It is a metaphor, but not a casual one. The knowledge is only knowledge, but none the less impressive and frightening for that.

In the first part of this chapter I look at the ways in which Kafka's characters seek to domesticate surprise, to refuse the extraordinariness of the extraordinary. Of course, they shouldn't be trying to do this. No one should have to live through the unlivable, or be driven to think the manifestly unthinkable. But history has shown us that moral imperatives, like logic itself in Kafka's view, are ‘no doubt unshakable, but … can't withstand a person who wants to live’. The second part of the chapter explores what we might call the moral engineering of the extraordinary, the way people can represent (and have represented and are representing) an appalling atrocity as, in their case, a special exercise of virtue. ‘I have learned one thing,’ the speaker says in Geoffrey Hill's poem ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’. ‘Not to look down / So much upon the damned.’ The suggestion, I take it, is that the damned are not as far from us as we like to think they are.