Kafka and the Sirens

Over the weekend, I looked up some of the literature on Kafka's story and I've particularly enjoyed reading an article by Rebecca Comay called 'Adorno's Siren Song', which appeared in New German Critique in autumn 2000. I'm writing in haste, so I'll just quote a couple of passages from it - ones that focus on Kafka rather than Adorno. Here's the first:

Kafka wonders whether the Sirens were not, indeed, quite silent; whether it was not Odysseus who seduced himself with his own drive to mastery; whether it was not indeed the cure itself which was in the end the real disease. Who could withstand the vertical exaltation [Überhebung] induced by the exerience of the upright stance?

"Against the feeling of having triumphed over them by one's own strength, and the subsequent exaltation [Überhebung] that bears down on everything before it, no earthly powers could have remained intact [widerstehen]."

And what would be the effect of such a binding? What if the binding which was homeopathically to counter the enchanting song - for in Greek, as in other languages, "binding" and "spellbinding" share a common semantic thread - was only to redouble its constricting power? If the Sirens themselves were stringing Odysseus along with promises as binding as they were untethered. According to at least one etymology, the word "Siren" relates to seira, the word for "cord" or "line" or "bandage": the enchanters would be, then, the enchainers. Suggesting, finally, that the binding power is from the outset split and doubled. A double bind.

The second passage that I'm going to quote is about Walter Benjamin's comments on Kafka's story. (I think this is interesting not least because Jess and Pam are focusing quite closely on Benjamin in their thread of work). Here it is:

Benjamin suggests that by Kafka's day, the Sirens have fallen silent because music as such - the last "token of hope" - has been permanently gagged. [Reference: Walter Benjamin, "Franz Kafka," Gesammelte Schriften 2.2 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1977) 416; In English, trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969) 118.] This will not prevent them, perversely, from exerting a certain hypnotic spell. In "Josephine the Singer" (Kafka's final testament, written on his deathbead while his own voice, was, under the impact of tubercular laryngitis, disappearing) the mass mouse audience fails to appreciate the pathetic squeaking which nonetheless, they insist, "enchants" them. [Reference: Franz Kafka, "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken, 1971) 362.] Having missed out on proper childhood, these rodent exiles - "nearly always on the run" - are at once too "childish" and "too old for music," and hardly notice when the enchanting Josephine, on strike for better working conditions, stops singing.

In a footnote to this passage, Comay cites an essay by Laurence Rickel with the title 'MUSICPHANTOMS: "Uncanned" conceptions of Music from Josephine the Singer to Mickey Mouse'. It appeared in Sub-stance in 1989 and sounds as if it might be interesting! Comay goes on to talk about Adorno's views on the 'gagging' of music but perhaps this is enough for today...