Benjamin on Kafka on Ulysses

I wrote here about Rebecca Comay's article and the references she makes to Benjamin's essay on Kafka. (Incidentally, I also mentioned there an article by Laurence Rickel but I've looked at that now and didn't find it helpful.) Over the last few days I've been following up Comay's reference by reading Benjamin's essay, 'Franz Kafka on the tenth anniversary of his death'. I hope it's OK with you if I quote some sections from the essay? The discussion of Ulysses and the Sirens is preceded by some thoughts on hope and on the issue of who can reasonably feel hope in the present world. I'll just quote that for today - the connection with the Ulysses myth will become apparent later:

'I remember,' [Max] Brod writes, 'a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race. "We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God's head," Kafka said. This reminded me of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall. "Oh no," said Kafka, "our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his." "Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know." He smiled. "Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope - but not for us."' These words provide a bridge to those extremely strange figures in the Kafka, the only ones who have escaped from the family circle and for whom there may still be hope. These are not the animals, not even those hybrids or imaginary creatures like the Cat Lamb or Odradek; they all still live under the spell of the family. It is no accident that Gregor Samsa wakes up as a bug in the parental home and not somewhere else, and that the peculiar animal which is half kitten, half lamb, is inherited from the father; Odradek likewise is the concern of the father of the family. The 'assistants', however, are outside this circle.

These assistants belong to a group of figures which recurs though Kafka's entire work. Their tribe includes the confidence man who is unmasked in the 'Meditation'; the student who appears on the balcony at night as Karl Rossman's neighbour; and the fools who live in that town in the south and never get tired. The twilight in which they exist is reminiscent of the uncertain light in which the figures in the short prose pieces of Robert Walser appear. In Indian mythology there are the gandharvas, celestial creatures, beings in an unfinished state. Kafka's assistants are of that kind: neither members of, nor strangers to, any of the other groups of figures, but, rather messengers from one to the other. Kafka tells us that they resemble Barnabas, who is a messenger. They have not yet been completely released from the womb of nature, and that is why they have 'settled down on two old women's skirts on the floor in a corner. It was ... their ambition ... to use up as little space as possible. To that end they kept making various experiments, folding their arms and legs, huddling close together; in the darkness all one could see in their corner was one big ball.' It is for them and their kind, the unfinished and the bunglers, that there is hope.

What may be discerned, subtly and informally, in the activities of these messengers is law in an oppressive and gloomy way for this whole group of beings. None has a firm place in the world, firm, inalienable outlines. There is not one that is not either rising or falling, none that is not trading qualities with its enemy or neighbour, none that has not completed its period of time and yet is unripe, none that is not deeply exhausted and yet is only at the beginning of a long existence. To speak of any order or hierarchy is impossible here. 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.

It is this mention of myth that leads on the story of Ulysses but I'll leave that for now so that the posting doesn't become too long. I'll just say that one sentence leaps out at me from the passage I've just quoted and I hope I'm not making too much of it just because it 'fits' with some of what we've been discussing. The sentence is this one: 'None has a firm place in the world, firm, inalienable outlines'. The state of the characters whom Benjamin calls 'assistants' is hardly enviable in any normal sense but they are the ones in whom hope resides and their condition is to be 'out of place' and without 'inalienable outlines'.