An Imperial Message

The act of communication always involves a loss, the transmission of information that is no longer current, just as our eyes are always showing us a world that existed a moment before.

Posted on April 1, 2017 in Publisher Editorial

We all need to be reading more Kafka.

That was the conclusion I came to the other day when I happened upon a recent translation of “A Message from the Emperor.” The story is a parable, scarcely 320 words, that among many things addresses a fundamental problem in information. Perhaps you remember the story: An imperial messenger is entrusted by the dying emperor with a message to a faraway subject. The messenger immediately sets out to deliver the message, pushing his way through the courtiers crowding around the emperor’s deathbed, the walls of the death chamber receding before him. At last he emerges from the chamber only to realize that other chambers, one after another, lie ahead, each thronged with people, and that having won through them, he must press through staircases and courtyards to a second palace enclosing the first, and after that, a third palace enclosing the second, and then another, and another until finally—but it cannot happen—he emerges into the City, the center of the world, having scarcely begun his journey. An infinite distance still lies between him and the recipient. He will never reach his destination, and already the emperor has died.

The parable is actually a version of one of Zeno’s paradoxes, in which motion is proved logically impossible. To go from point A to point B one must first go half the distance. But to go half the distance, one must first go half the distance to the halfway point. And so on. In the end, moving between any two points requires an infinite number of interim movements, meaning one will never arrive. QED.

But the parable suggests another point. Even were the message to arrive, the source of the message no longer exists. It is a message from the past, from the dead. The act of communication always involves a loss, the transmission of information that is no longer current, just as our eyes are always showing us a world that existed a moment before. The real world, the thing itself, can never be revealed to us.

It is at just this moment that the genius of Kafka emerges most clearly, for in the parable the labor of the messenger, his cosmic journey, is itself set inside a frame of deepest humanity. As the parable begins the emperor whispers his message to the courier, even makes him repeat it. It is important. Important and deeply personal. At the end of the parable the intended recipient sits by a window dreaming of the message as evening falls. Gone are the palaces with their walls vanishing like the walls in a play, gone the city at the center of the world, the distances expanding exponentially into infinity. Instead, there is an appeal to an entirely human experience: a bond between people united somehow in memory and intention—past and present—although we cannot and will never know the nature of their relationship. The juxtaposition of these two truths, no longer mutually exclusive, is the real message of the parable.

In a time of alternative facts we all need to be reading more Kafka.—MC

About the author:

Mark Cummings is the editor and publisher at Choice

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