Benjamin on Kafka on Ulysses #2

Following on from the quotation I posted here, Benjamin starts to talk about the world of myth, which promises redemption to Kafka's 'older' world:

Even the world of myth of which we think in this context is incomparably younger than Kafka's world, which has been promised redemption by the myth. But if we can be sure of one thing, it is this: Kafka did not succumb to its temptation. [I take it that by 'its temptation' Benjamin means the temptation of myth - RSJ.] A latter-day Ulysses, he let the Sirens go by 'his gaze which was fixed on the distance, the Sirens disappeared as it were before his determination, and at the very moment when he was closest to them he was no longer aware of them.' Among Kafka's ancestors in the ancient world, the Jews and the Chinese, whom we shall encounter later, this Greek one should not be forgotten. Ulysses, after all, stands at the dividing line between myth and fairy tale. Reason and cunning have inserted tricks into myths; their forces cease to be invincible. Fairy tales are the traditional stories about victory over these forces, and fairly tales for dialecticians are what Kafka wrote when he went to work on legends. He inserted little tricks into them; then he used them as proof 'that inadequate, even childish measures may alos serve to rescue one.' With these words he begins his story about the 'Silence of the Sirens.' For Kafka's Sirens are silent; they have 'an even more terrible weapon than their song ... their silence.' This they used on Ulysses. But he, so Kafka tells us, 'was so full of guile, was such a fox that not even the goddess of fate could pierce his armour. Perhaps he had really noticed, although here the human understanding is beyond its depths, that the Sirens were silent, and opposed the afore-mentioned pretence to them and the gods merely as a sort of shield.

Kafka's Sirens are silent. Perhaps because for Kafka music and singing are an expression or at least a token of escape, a token of hope which comes to us from that intermediate world - at once unfinished and commonplace, comforting and silly - in which the assistants are at home.

At this point Benjamin refers back to the story of Potemkin, with which the essay began. (In the story, Benjamin describes Potemkin's deep depressions, which resulted in the whole Russian bureaucracy grinding to a halt because he was not in a fit state even to sign papers.)

Kafka is like the lad who set out to learn what fear was. He has got into Potemkin's palace and finally, in the depths of its cellar, has encountered Josephine, the singing mouse, whose tune he describes: 'Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness which can never be found again, but also something of active presentday life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet real and unquenchable.'

There is something that I like about Benjamin's brief allusions to the role of music. And I'm not sure that Rebecca Comay quite captures it in the section of her essay that I quoted here. She presents Benjamin's view as being that 'by Kafka's day, the Sirens have fallen silent because music as such - the last "token of hope" - has been permanently gagged'. But that surely isn't what Benjamin is saying in the two shorter paragraphs I've quoted above. It sounds more as if, even now, music offers a glimpse - or 'token' - of hope, restricted and abject, certainly, but not 'permanently gagged', surely?