What do you think of this passage from Kafka On The Shore?

[Eyal]

Hey guys this is a passage from chapter 7 im having trouble understanding. Kafka speaks here about Franz Kafka's "the penal county";

"That's my favorite of his short stories."
"No kidding?"
I nod.
"Why's that?"
It takes me a while to gather my thoughts. "I think what Kafka does is give
a purely mechanical explanation of that complex machine in the story, as sort of a
substitute for explaining the situation we're in. What I mean is..." I have to
give it some more thought. "What I mean is, that's his own device for explaining
the kind of lives we lead. Not by talking about our situation, but by talking
about the details of the machine."
"That makes sense," Oshima says...
Oshima most likely found my explanation of the Kafka story convincing. To
some extent at least. But what I really wanted to say didn't get across. I wasn't
just giving some general theory of Kafka's fiction, I was talking about something
very real. Kafka's complex, mysterious execution device wasn't some metaphor or
allegory--it's actually here, all around me. But I don't think anybody would get
that. Not Oshima. Not anybody.

What i cant understand is: 1. How did franz kafka's choice of focusing on the mechanical explanation of the machine reflects "the lives we lead" and what is the purpose of that
2. How is that machine "real" around kafka (tamaura) nowadays? And why?

Thank you very much. Its hard for me to go on reading w/o understanding part of the story and im stuck.

 

[JeffD]

Hey guys this is a passage from chapter 7 im having trouble understanding. Kafka speaks here about Franz Kafka's "the penal county";

".......

What i cant understand is: 1. How did franz kafka's choice of focusing on the mechanical explanation of the machine reflects "the lives we lead" and what is the purpose of that
2. How is that machine "real" around kafka (tamaura) nowadays? And why?

Thank you very much. Its hard for me to go on reading w/o understanding part of the story and im stuck.

In Kafka's story "The Penal Colony" the narrator goes into meticulous detail about the torture/execution machine, how it works by carving the sentence of the condemned prisoner into his body until he bleeds to death. The narrator is even perhaps enthusiastic about his description, the way someone may describe a favorite app on the cell phone. What is totally ignored in his description is the horror of the machine, and whether such punishment is cruel.

So one might say that we are perhaps destroying our humanity incrementally in the soul draining jobs we have and dehumanizing interactions we are forced into through technology, and instead of talking about the horror and consequences, we talk about the machinery of it, the how and what, the technology. (I am not saying I believe this personally, I am just positing that this is what the author could have meant. Though I did have an argument with a telephone menu system, and with Siri come to think of it.)

Just a thought. Hope that helps.