archive of (odyssean) exile

I'm beginning to 'get' it, I think - how our material constitutes an 'archive of exile'. The point is that the Odyssey has generated an enormous body of interpretation across time - from the Church Fathers (who see in Odysseus's journey a 'type' of the Christian life) to Lewis Hyde (for whom Odysseus is a manifestation of that disruptive consciousness that he also finds in North American and West African trickster narratives). This great corpus of response is an archive. And, actually, it has a material reality, although it isn't all gathered together in one place. What is more, it is an archive that responds to Odysseus' exile, and this is particularly interesting because it requires a certain effort of reading to make Odysseus into an exile at all. (He does, after all, arrive 'home' at the end of the poem: Clement reads that 'home' as outside this material reality and Hyde sees Odysseus' trickiness as intertwined with his mobility.)

In fact, maybe the archive doesn't constitute the body of responses to the Odyssey in the sense of the Homeric poem. Perhaps it is better to see the Odyssey itself as the first text in the archive - the first one that responds to the myth of Odysseus.

'gustatory, sexual, and scatalogical'

Just another trickster-fragment! When you were over here last month, we talked about the fact that the allure of the sirens is to do with what they *know* rather than any sexual attraction that they might have. Reading Hyde's book, I begin to think that the two kinds of attraction might usefully be seen as mapping on to each other or being entangled in some way. This passage struck me particuarly:

Earlier I suggested that if trickster were free of all appetite he would no longer be trickster. In a sense, this is a matter of definition; the mythology we're looking at is constantly gustatory, sexual, and scatalogical. It seems to require, then, that we connected trickster's inventive cunning to the body's needs.

I don't quite know how I see this working at the moment - it needs some more thought - but it seems interesting that Odysseus has to restrain his desires physically (by having himself bound to the mast) in order to be rewarded with the knowledge that comes from hearing the sirens' song.

Odysseus and Circe

It's interesting that, after telling Alcinous that the demands of the belly take precedence even over grief, Odysseus says exactly the opposite when he recounts the story of his encounter with Circe. By following the instructions of the trickster-god, Hermes, he has evaded her spells, and she has promised that she will not do him any harm. At this point she offers him food, the language of the passage identifying it closely with other feasts, including the one in Phaeacia. But he says that he cannot eat because he is troubled by the fate of his comrades:

‘ὦ Κίρκη, τίς γάρ κεν ἀνήρ, ὃς ἐναίσιμος εἴη,
πρὶν τλαίη πάσσασθαι ἐδητύος ἠδὲ ποτῆτος,
385πρὶν λύσασθ᾽ ἑτάρους καὶ ἐν ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ἰδέσθαι;
ἀλλ᾽ εἰ δὴ πρόφρασσα πιεῖν φαγέμεν τε κελεύεις,
λῦσον, ἵν᾽ ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ἴδω ἐρίηρας ἑταίρους.’

‘Circe, what man that is right-minded could bring himself to taste of food or drink, ere yet he had won freedom for his comrades, and beheld them before his face? But if thou of a ready heart dost bid me eat and drink, set them free, that mine eyes may behold my trusty comrades.’

I'm not sure this is a 'trick' exactly - he doesn't have to avoid eating her food because Hermes has given him a herb which protects him against Circe's spells. (The Greek term for Hermes' herb is the same one used of Circe's own witchcraft, φάρμακον.) But it does sound very much like the kind of dynamic Hyde is talking about - the mortal who is afflicted with appetite somehow controls that appetite in order to achieve a new level of power.

οὐ γάρ τι ... κύντερον ἄλλο

I've started reading Trickster Makes This World and am about fifty pages in. I'm enjoying it but won't try to post much about it until I've got more of a sense of the overall argument. For the moment, I'll just include a quotation from the Odyssey, which Hyde introduces when he is discussing the idea of 'endless hunger' as the lot of humans. It comes from book VII, when Odysseus has arrived in Phaeacia and is desperate to eat. (I've already written about the feast in Phaeacia here.) Trying to get Alcinous to hurry the banquet along, Odysseus says:

ἀλλ᾽ ἐμὲ μὲν δορπῆσαι ἐάσατε κηδόμενόν περ:
οὐ γάρ τι στυγερῇ ἐπὶ γαστέρι κύντερον ἄλλο
ἔπλετο, ἥ τ᾽ ἐκέλευσεν ἕο μνήσασθαι ἀνάγκῃ
καὶ μάλα τειρόμενον καὶ ἐνὶ φρεσὶ πένθος ἔχοντα,
ὡς καὶ ἐγὼ πένθος μὲν ἔχω φρεσίν, ἡ δὲ μάλ᾽ αἰεὶ
220ἐσθέμεναι κέλεται καὶ πινέμεν, ἐκ δέ με πάντων
ληθάνει ὅσσ᾽ ἔπαθον, καὶ ἐνιπλησθῆναι ἀνώγει.

And Perseus offers the following English translation:

But as for me, suffer me now to eat, despite my grief; for there is nothing more shameless than a hateful belly, which bids a man perforce take thought thereof, be he never so sore distressed and laden with grief at heart, even as I, too, am laden with grief at heart, yet ever does my belly bid me eat and drink, and makes me forget all that I have suffered, and commands me to eat my fill.

Hyde quietly offers a different translation of κύντερον - 'doglike'. (It is the compartive of κύων.)

It seems to me that this might be important - the idea that appetite is a kind of problem for Odysseus and it certainly casts all the banqueting scenes in an interesting light.

Eumaeus and Emmaus

This is turning into a day of frenzied posting but it suddenly struck me that there is an interesting coincidence in the names Eumaeus (the swine-herd who looks after the disguised Odysseus when he first arrives back in Ithaca) and Emmaus (the village on the road to which Jesus appears after the crucifixion). In both cases, the story turns upon non-recognition and the debt of hospitality owed to a stranger.

This coincidence has been noted before and you can actually watch a conference presentation on the subject by Kasper Bro Larsen here. It's the second embedded video on the page. I haven't watched the whole of it yet but Larsen's concern seems to be to read the Emmaus story (which appears in Luke 24, 13-35) in relation to a longer tradition of recognition stories, an early example of which is the story of Eumaeus.

more on food and feasting

I'm becoming a little obsessed with the theme of food and feasting in the Odyssey. The point is that Odysseus lives in a world where there is a kind of ethical obligation to show hospitality to strangers and the poem consistently thematises the treatment of the stranger/guest, the xenos, at the hands of different hosts. Throughout the poem we find descriptions of feasts that are held under a range of different circumstances. What's more, the descriptions resemble each other quite closely with certain motifs reappearing in the different passages (rinsing the hands with water from a silver basin, for example). This is partly because oral epics make extensive use of stock material that can be repeated in different contexts but the repetition does have the effect of inviting readers to compare the different instances of feasting and meditate on the differences.

I think this is interesting because the danger of the sirens is that they will not treat you with hospitality. To land on their island is to attend a non-banquet where the food never arrives. And their lack of hospitality is not just a detail of their particular myth but is highly salient in a text where the feasting of strangers is a recurrent element of the narrative.

I think there are around seven or eight descriptions of feasting in the Odyssey and I'll briefly draw attention to some of them. (I'm going to miss out a couple of feasts that happen when Telemachus visits Menelaus in Sparta because I can't think of anything to say about them.)

Odyssey 1: The suitors who are using up Odysseus' wealth in his absence hold a feast in his house. I've already commented on this here. As I said in that earlier post, this is an interesting one for us because Athena, in disguise and commenting with assumed naivety on what is happening, explicitly says that this cannot be an ἔρανος but must be a γάμος or an εἰλαπίνη. There is an irony to this comment because she knows full well that there is no host at home to offer a γάμος or an εἰλαπίνη (except Telemachus, who is still acting as a boy at this stage).

Odyssey 7: Here, Alcinous, King of the Phaeacians, welcomes Odysseus who has been cast up on his shores after the ship wreck, and it is only when they have eaten that his wife, Arete, asks Odysseus anything about who he is. It is in this context that Odysseus describes what has happened to him since leaving Troy, so the narrative of the inhospitable sirens is, in fact, told there in the midst of Alcinous' hospitality. The Phaeacians are really the template of the ideal hosts - their treatment of Odysseus is exemplary. (Incidentally, Alcinous calls the meal he offers Odysseus a δόρπον (evening meal).)

Odyssey 10: Circe offers Odysseus food (and the image of the servant with the silver bowl appears here just as it did in the two earlier examples). But, since she has turned his men into swine by feeding them φάρμακα mixed with a strange concoction of cheese, barley, and honey, he doesn't have much appetite. There is something strange and complex about Circe's hospitality. She rivals Alcinous in her treatment of Odysseus but her treatment of his men is a kind of grotesque parody of the act of feasting the xenos. In the end, it is the fact that Odysseus won't accept her food that leads her to free his men, entertain them all, and provide advice about how to avoid the sirens. Circe actually uses the expression 'eating [your] heart' (θυμὸν ἔδων) to describe Odysseus' fretfulness and unwillingness to take her hospitality.

Odyssey 16: Now we're back in Ithaca and Odysseus has arrived home unrecognised. He stays with the swine-herd, Eumaeus, who does not know who he is. But Eumaeus understands the laws of hospitality and offers the stranger bread (σῖτος) and wine (οἶνος). And, when Odysseus thanks him, he says:

"ξεῖν᾽, οὔ μοι θέμις ἔστ᾽, οὐδ᾽ εἰ κακίων σέθεν ἔλθοι,
ξεῖνον ἀτιμῆσαι: πρὸς γὰρ Διός εἰσιν ἅπαντες
ξεῖνοί τε πτωχοί τε: δόσις δ᾽ ὀλίγη τε φίλη τε
γίγνεται ἡμετέρη [...]"

"It's wrong, my friend, to send any stranger packing -
even one who arrives in worse shape than you.
Every stranger and beggar comes from Zeus
and whatever scrap they get from the likes of us,
they'll find it welcome."

As in Phaeacia, the sharing of food leads on to the telling of stories, but here Odysseus makes up a tale so that he isn't forced to reveal his true identity too soon.

This is taking longer than I'd intended, so I'll break off and perhaps say something about the other scenes of feasting later. The main point is that the sirens' lack of hospitality is described in a text that is, in many ways, about the question of how strangers are to be treated and in which in the sharing of food is the sign of the hospitality one owes to them.

on food and eating

Since we met up earlier this month, I've been trying to avoid adding yet more siren-texts to the existing collection - in the manner so aptly satirised by Despina! - and focusing instead on the texts we have.

As I thought about them, it struck me that there is something interesting going on with food. If you give in to the lure of the sirens you end up dying of starvation, but, if you do as Odysseus did, and listen to them with restraint, then you can assemble an eranos, which is a meal to which many people contribute. Instead of becoming hypnotised by the monstrous singers who will not feed you, you can take nourishment from a wide array of voices.

I was in the Castle Market here in Sheffield over the weekend and the plenitude of old-fashioned food stalls - butchers, fishmongers, grocers, bakers, confectioners, and all - made me think of this idea of a world in which voices are food and the ideal life is one in which you pass through taking nourishment wherever you can find it.

more on the eranos

The term eranos appears in the first book of the Odyssey, when Athena appears to Odysseus' son, Telemachus, disguised as Mentes, an old friend (xenos) of the family. S/he asks him what is happening in Ithaca and, in particular, what all the suitors are doing there. And, in that context, s/he says: 'Is this an eilapinē or a gamos? It clearly isn't an eranos':

τίς δαίς, τίς δὲ ὅμιλος ὅδ᾽ ἔπλετο; τίπτε δέ σε χρεώ;
εἰλαπίνη ἠὲ γάμος; ἐπεὶ οὐκ ἔρανος τάδε γ᾽ ἐστίν:
ὥς τέ μοι ὑβρίζοντες ὑπερφιάλως δοκέουσι
δαίνυσθαι κατὰ δῶμα.

The point is that the other two types of feast are ones offered by a single host, whereas the eranos involves some kind of collectivity. Since the suitors are living at Odysseus' expense, they are not engaged in an eranos. Here are some notes on this provided by Perseus. (Click on them for the full size image.)

Odysseus chooses a new soul

(in the Republic, Book X, in the Myth of Er, we see various people choosing their next lives, and here's what happens with Odysseus: how cool is this?!?!)

κατὰ τύχην δὲ τὴν Ὀδυσσέως λαχοῦσαν πασῶν ὑστάτην αἱρησομένην ἰέναι, μνήμῃ δὲ τῶν προτέρων πόνων φιλοτιμίας λελωφηκυῖαν ζητεῖν περιιοῦσαν χρόνον πολὺν βίον ἀνδρὸς ἰδιώτου ἀπράγμονος, καὶ μόγις εὑρεῖν κείμενόν που καὶ παρημελημένον [620δ] ὑπὸ τῶν ἄλλων, καὶ εἰπεῖν ἰδοῦσαν ὅτι τὰ αὐτὰ ἂν ἔπραξεν καὶ πρώτη λαχοῦσα, καὶ ἁσμένην ἑλέσθαι.


And it fell out that the soul of Odysseus drew the last lot of all and came to make its choice, and, from memory of its former toils having flung away ambition, went about for a long time in quest of the life of an ordinary citizen who minded his own business, and with difficulty found it lying in some corner disregarded by the others, [620d] and upon seeing it said that it would have done the same had it drawn the first lot, and chose it gladly.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0167%3Abook%3D10%3Asection%3D620c

siren references

A classified list of references to the Sirens:

http://www.theoi.com/Pontios/Seirenes.html

online texts

Here are links to online editions of relevant texts - I'll keep up-dating it.

Septuagint

Links to many editions and one that I've looked at.

Clement's Stromata

These appear in volume 2 and volume 3 of an edition of Clement's collected works by Reinhold Koltz.

There are plenty of English translations online, including this one. (You need to scroll down a bit to get to it.)

orpheus and odysseus

This is just a quick note to gather together some of my thoughts on this pair of Siren-heroes: Odysseus and Orpheus. What strikes me is that they fulfil different symbolic functions for Early Christian commentators. Odysseus is the *human* figure, in exile in the world, avoiding attachments that would enmesh him too closely in the texture of earthly life. Orpheus is the *Christ*, entering the underworld to bring back his bride, herself a symbolic representation of humankind, exiled in a dark place and in need of redemption. But if the patterns of identification here are different - Odysseus and humankind, Orpheus and Christ - they are not simple, because the figure of Odysseus at the mast evokes the figure of Christ on the Cross, and Orpheus, in fact, failed to bring Eurydice out of the underworld, thus manifesting as a human shadow of Christ, the divine.

I suppose this complexity shouldn't be surprising because, in Christianity, Christ is both human and God, both the same as and different from us. What is more, the interaction of Christian and pre-Christian material draws out a kind of exilic dimension in both bodies of narrative. And, as I've said before, there are voices everywhere - the voices of the Sirens, the songs of Orpheus, bodies of narrative moving back and forth across languages and interpretive traditions, narratological layers in both the classical and the Christian texts, a layering of voices that might perhaps be thought of as an archive.

Image of the Sirens

This is quite a famous image of the sirens from a red-figure vase. I remember looking at it when I did a course on Greek Art at university.

fragment again

I've also got a reference for where the fragment appears in Clement: Stromata, IV, 26, 172, 1.

Fragmentum incertum 911 is a disturbingly resonant name, it occurs to me...

fragment from euripides

Just a quick line to say that it was *excellent* to speak with you yesterday - so inspiring! I'm feeling really fired up and ready to go now!!

To answer your question about that fragment from Euripides: 'And now golden wings are laid upon my back...'. Apparently it isn't from an extant play and I think it's only preserved in Clement's text. Rahner gives the reference, Fragmentum incertum 911. I may have difficulty tracking this down in Sheffield because we don't have a Classics department so the holdings are a bit patchy. Will see what I can do, though...

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?

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'.

Clement's opponents

Just a short post to point to another interesting text - one that reveals Clement's comments on the Odyssey to be part of a struggle over the appropriate Christian response to classical learning and to the interpretation of the Homeric material itself. Once again, this is from Rahner:

Christians started off by seeing in the Sirens that "know all things", a symbol of the danger that threatened the faith from the allurements of pagan wisdom. In the very century in which Clement wrote we find in the Address to the Hellenes a sort of blustering rejection of all that was Greek; it was a rejection of their smooth-tongued fables, it was a rejection in toto of all Greek "Sirens", and Plato and Aristotle were accounted as being among the latter. As a protection against these dangers the Christian needs a prudent and virtuous perspicacity, agathē phronēsis. "No one who is capable of prudent discrimination will prefer the fine phrases of these two philosophers to the salvation of his soul. No, he will rather, like the mariners in the old story, stop his ears with wax and so escape from the sweet peril of the Sirens that threatens to ensnare him." [Cohortatio ad Gentiles, 36]

Entirely by coincidence, I've recently read a novel by Iain Pears called The Dream of Scipio, one of the three plot lines of which is concerned with a gallic aristocrat from the 5th Century AD who becomes a Christian bishop while still wedded to the Neoplatonist philosophy he has studied throughout his life. It touches upon very much the debates that are emerging here. You might like it!

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...

Biblical Sirens: Isaiah 43, 20

The fourth appearance of sirens in the Septuagint is particularly interesting for us, I think:

Behold I will do a new thing;
now it shall become visible:
I will even make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.
Then shall the beasts of the field praise me
the sirens and the daughters of the ostriches,
because I give waters in the wilderness.

It's the combination of the sirens and the river that struck me particularly! The river here is a blessing (as it is in Gilfillan's quotation from Isaiah - well, actually, it's used there to figure the peace that would have followed from obedience to God's commandments). And this river waters the wilderness which is home to the sirens.