Of Sirens Silent and Loud: The Language Wars of Joyce and Kafka

Maria Kager

James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 49, Number 1, Fall 2011, pp. 41-55 (Article)

Published by The University of Tulsa DOI: 10.1353/jjq.2011.0106

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jjq/summary/v049/49.1.kager.html

Access provided by University College London (UCL) (15 Dec 2013 14:06 GMT)

JJQ
Of Sirens Silent and Loud: The Language Wars of Joyce and Kafka
Maria Kager Rutgers University
writers stock and trade is his language, yet James Joyce and Franz Kafka actually work against language. In their texts, language becomes a site of struggle, of conflict, of vexation that is, at times, almost violent. Because of the complex linguistic, political, and national circumstances they confronted, their relation to language was a love/hate one, an intricate battle of tongues. Neither Joyce nor Kafka was able to regard his native language as completely his own, yet neither chose to write in an alternative one. Instead, they attacked language as they wrotean assault that both authors conducted by including foreign languages: Yiddish in the case of Kafka, Irish, Italian, Latin, and myriad others in the case of Joyce. If, as Michel Foucault writes, discourse is the power which is to be seized,1 then Joyce and Kafka grasped this power with all their might. The two authors were born on the periphery of large empires, in what Pascale Casanova has described as dominated literary spaces.2 Both viewed their hometowns as provincial, paralyzing, and claustrophobic. When referring to its marginal location, Johannes Urzidil, the Czech writer and friend of Kafka, calls Prague the Dublin of the East.3 Joyce escaped Dublin early, because, as he puts it in Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages, [n]o self-respecting person wants to stay in Ireland. Instead he will run from it, as if from a country that has been subjected to a visitation by an angry Jove,4 a sentiment echoed by Little Chandler, who, reflecting on Gallahers accomplishments in London, ponders: There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin (D 73). Like Gallaher, Joyce fled Dublin to seek, and to find, his success abroad. Kafka, on the other hand, did not leave Prague until shortly before his death when his health forced him to visit sanatoria abroad. He had many plans to emigrate but never did. The Kleine Mutter mit Krallen, the little mother with claws, as he called Prague, had her hooks firmly secured and would not let him go.5 Thus, for most of his life, Kafka lived, studied, and worked in the place where he grew up: the Jewish neighborhood of Prague. A friend reports that one
James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 49, Number 1 (Fall 2011), pp. 41-55. Copyright for the JJQ, University of Tulsa, 2011. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved.

James Joyce Quarterly 49.1 2011

day, as the two of them stood in front of a window looking down on the Town Square, Kafka said, There was my Gymnasium [secondary school], over there, in the building that faces towards us, was the university, and a short way to the left was my office. Within this small circledrawing a few circles with his fingersmy whole life is enclosed.6 In fact, he barely managed to move out of his parents apartment: at thirty-eight, he still lived at home, albeit reluctantly. Even though Joyce lived most of his adult life on the continent and only returned to Ireland a few times, his works are definitively Irish. Except for Giacomo Joyce, they are all set in Dublin and populated by Irish characters who speak a recognizably Irish form of English; one has only to think, for instance, of the Cyclops episode of Ulysses, which is filled with Dublin slang and Irishisms (begob!). Conversely, Kafkas fiction, as Max Brod, Kafkas friend, editor, literary executor, and biographer, notes, never even mentions the word Jew.7 His characters are not noticeably Jewish, and they use none of the Yiddishisms that were typically part of the vocabulary of an assimilated Jew. Kafka wrote a German purged of nearly all local influence. Ritchie Robertson observes, He was a linguistic purist who . . . took pains to adjust [his works] spelling, vocabulary, and punctuation in order to adjust to the High German standard.8 The authors different reactions to their hometownsa rebellious departure versus a more passive, and perhaps fearful, refusal to leaveare reflected in the way they deal with language. Kafkas sparse, unadorned style is completely devoid of the radically experimental multilingual play in which Joyce engages, and, unlike Joyce, he does not appear to be interested in dislocating language. Yet a closer look at their writings and at the techniques with which they both resist and reclaim language shows they are not as different as they might seem. A careful examination of Kafkas language, in comparison with Joyces, demonstrates that, while outwardly adhering to the rules of standard High German, underneath the surface, Kafka opens up language to foreign elements in ways strongly resembling the rebelliousness of Joyce. Similarly, the comparison to Kafka helps accentuate the ways in which Joyce inhabits English. That Joyce employs English uneasily and undertakes to break away from Victorian parlance is well known. In an April 1907 diary entry, Stanislaus Joyce remembers an occasion when Joyce threatened to forget English and write in French or Italian instead (JJII 397n). Obviously he never went through with that threat. Instead, he labors from within English in ways that the juxtaposition with Kafka elucidates. This essay compares the multilingualism of Joyce and Kafka and postulates that what happens above the surface in Joyce, in plain view, goes on underneath in Kafka, in the underworld of language. These two different approaches are, in reality, two sides of the same 42

coin. Joyce and Kafka were both apprehensive about the language in which each was raised and in which each wrote. Joyce regarded the Irish people as condemned to express themselves in a language not their own (JJII 217). Through Stephen Dedalus, Joyce declares that English, a language so familiar and so foreign, would always be for him an acquired speech (P 189). Comparing his own speech to that of his English-born Dean of Studies in the famous tundish passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen reflects, The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. . . . My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language (P 189). The distance Stephen perceives between himself and the English language, this notion of not belonging in his own language is crucial to Joyces assault upon English. I use the word assault, with all its violent implications, because it was in such terms that Joyce spoke about language. In an often-cited letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce wrote: What the language will look like when I have finished I dont know. But having declared war I shall go on jusquau bout (LettersI 237). The word war evokes images of brutality and bloodshed that are reinforced by his proclaimed desire to destroy English. When Joyce, through Stephen, claims of English that he has not made or accepted its words (P 189), he also suggests he has not accepted its rules, that he feels no loyalty towards the grammatical regulations that hold language together. Thus, his linguistic alienation is at the basis of his desire to destroy English, although, as he wrote in a letter to Max Eastman, the destruction need not be permanent: Ill give them back their English language. Im not destroying it for good (JJII 546). At the same time, however, these claims are also just bravado. The instances where he professed his love for English, that best of languages, are legion (JJII 397). His project is to inhabit English, to use it, but not to submit to its limits or its boundssomething that his sense of estrangement from the language allows him to do. We find a similar alienation from language in Kafka. Like Joyce, he often felt trapped by the sense that German was not really his language, as his biographer Ronald Hayman relates (252). In a diary entry from 1911, Kafka wrote, echoing Stephen:
Gestern fiel mir ein, dass ich die Mutter nur deshalb nicht immer so geliebt habe, wie sie es verdiente . . . weil mich die Deutsche Sprache daran gehindert hat. Die jdische Mutter ist keine Mutter. Die mit Mutter benannte jdische Frau wird nicht nur komisch sondern auch fremd. ( Yesterday it occurred to me that I did not always love my moth-

43

James Joyce Quarterly 49.1 2011

er as she deserved . . . because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is no Mutter. A Jewish woman who is called Mutter does not just become comical but strange).9

The Yiddish word for mother is mamaloshon, or mother-tongue, and, for Kafka, ironically, German could never be as maternal a language as Yiddish, even though Yiddish was never his real language but one he had acquired through study. Thus, in Kafka, we find a type of social and cultural estrangement from language similar to Joyces. German alienates Kafka from all that is familiar. He cannot use the German word Mutter without experiencing a Joycean unrest of spirit. The use of German by Jews seems illicit to Kafka and, accordingly, in a letter to Brod, he likens it to the appropriation of someone elses property, something not earned but stolen.10 In the same letter, he states that Jewish writing in German is a Zigeunerliteratur die das deutsche Kind aus der Wiege gestohlen und in groer Eile irgendwie zugerichtet hatte, weil doch irgendjemand auf dem Seil tanzen muss (338a gypsy literature which has stolen the German child out of its cradle and in great haste put it through some kind of training, for someone has to dance on the tightrope287). It is significant that Joyce too connects writing to theft, when Finnegans Wake announces itself the last word in stolentelling (FW 424.35). Thus, Joyce and Kafka both compare language to something borrowed, or stolen, and thus not really their own. In his essay Le monolinguisme de lautre, an autobiographical account of his relation to language as a French Algerian and framed as a dialogue between two nameless speakers, Jacques Derrida writes, Je nai quune langue, ce nest pas la mienne (I only have one language; it is not mine), to which his interlocutor replies, Comment pourraiton avoir une langue qui ne soit pas la sienne? (How could anyone have a language that is not theirs?).11 In a way, Joyce and Kafka provide an answer to this question. Derrida, as a Franco-Maghrebian Jew, felt estranged from French without having an alternative language in which to write or to express himself. His interlocutor accuses him of sophistry and exclaims:
voil que vous allguez, en franais, que le franais vous a toujours t langue trangre! Allons donc, si ctait vrai, vous ne sauriez mme pas le dire, vous ne sauriez si bien dire! (18there you are, claiming, in French, that French has always been a foreign language to you! Come off it! If that were true, you would not even know how to say it; you would not know how to say it so well!5)

Yet Derridas assertions make perfect sense with regard to Joyce and Kafka, of whom the same thing might be said: in perfect English and 44

German, they claim that they are estranged from English and German. Where Derrida was unable to feel at home in the Frenchness of the French that was his mother tongue, Kafka could not feel at home in the Germanness of German nor Joyce in the Englishness of English. As a consequence of this problematic relation to their mother tongue, Joyce and Kafka try to destabilize language as a way to reappropriate it. They feel alienated from language and alter it so that they may feel more at home. The most important process by which this process of destabilization occurs in their works is by making them multilingual. It has long been recognized that Joyces texts are multilingual. Ulysses features myriad foreign languages (the first snippet of speech we encounter is in Latin), Dublin slang, and Irishisms, and the text successfully exploits double meanings of sounds and homonyms across linguistic borders. This adds not only to an increased sense of language as a living thing but also to a heightened awareness of the materiality of language. In Stephen Hero, Stephen likes to repeat words to himself till they lost all instantaneous meaning for him and became wonderful vocables (SH 30). This type of repetition enables him almost to taste words, to perceive their thingness, something that foreign words accomplish as well. One of many examples can be found in the Proteus episode, where Joyce plays with homonyms between English and French. As Stephen walks along the strand towards the Pigeonhouse, for instance, he is reminded of a line from La Vie de Jsus by Leo Taxil, in which Taxil imagines Josephs reaction when he finds Mary impregnated but not by himself: Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position? Cest le pigeon, Joseph (U 3.161-62).12 This memory prompts the following train of thought in Stephen: My fathers a bird, he lapped the sweet lait chaud with pink young tongue, plump bunnys face. Lap, lapin (U 3.164-66). The French lait chaud in connection with the English bunnys face triggers the association between lap and lapin or rabbit. As Juliette Taylor points out, Joyce uses the semantic ambiguity intrinsic to interlingual communication here to create a new figure of speech, a compound image in which a person drinking milk is represented, through a faux ami, as a rabbit lapping milk.13 This instance is recalled, and parodied, in Circe, arguably the most multilingual episode of Ulysses. Upon Kitty Ricketts mentioning Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from Jimmy Pidgeon, Philip Drunk asks (gravely) Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position, Philippe? to which Philip Sober responds (gaily) Ctait le sacr pigeon, Philippe (U 15.2578-79, 2583, 2585). Circe continues to parody Stephens French musings from Proteus when Zoe begs him to give her some parleyvoo (U 15.3875). Stephen complies and advertises the many sexual amusements to be found in Paris. He 45

James Joyce Quarterly 49.1 2011

does this in broken English interspersed with French: All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then disrobe and squeal loud to see vampire man debauch nun very fresh young with dessous troublants. (he clacks his tongue loudly) Ho, l l! Ce pif quil a! (U 15.3891-94).14 The whores are pleased with Stephens performance and encourage him with shouts of Bravo! Parleyvoo! and Encore! Encore! while Lynch exclaims Vive le vampire! (U 15.3898, 3920, 3896). Both Stephens vampire man and Lynchs vampire constitute an allusion to the short poem Stephen writes in Proteus: He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouths kiss (U 3.397-98), strengthening the parody of the earlier episode. Lynchs call can also be seen as a play on the expression Vive la France and thus as a more general reference to Stephens recollections of Paris in Proteus and to his reflections in and on the French language. Thus, Circe appears to caricature the multilingualism of Proteus, while at the same time constituting an intensification of the multiplicity of languages to be found there. Finnegans Wake continues the Protean play with semantic ambiguity and multilingual puns, albeit in a more radical manner. In fact, it makes such experimentation a central part of its narrative; the Wake is really one big example of interlingual compound words and images and multilingual puns. Joyce himself called the Wake a tower of Babel where [a]ll the languages are present,15 and, although not quite all languages are present, it does draw, according to Laurent Milesi, from over seventy different ones.16 Here, Joyce not only forces open the borders of English to an explosion of foreign languages but challenges the idea of any standard, monolingual idiom by creating a new multilingual language not bound to any of the rules of grammar and syntax that usually tie writing down. The hundred-letter thunderword that introduces the Babel passage is an apt example. Here can be found, in one word, the edict shut the door in nine different languages (FW 257.27-28):
Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertooryzooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk.

Roland McHugh traces the origins of this word as follows: Lukkedoer is the Danish luk dren; dunandurrass is the Irish dn an doras; kewdyloosho is a phonetic rendering of the Italian chiudi luscio; fermoyporte is the French fermez la porte; tooryzoo sounds like the German tre zu; sphalnabortan is the Greek sphalna portan; sporthaok is the slangy sport ones oak, to keep ones door shut; sakroidver is the Russian zakroi dver; and kapakkapuk refers to the Turkish kapiyi kapat.17 This insane multilingual word evokes the comical image of a large crowd of people from dif46

ferent national backgrounds all shouting together, Shut the door! Yet this is not just a semantic repetition, for, as the signified phrase traverses from language to language, it seems to lose all meaning. Thus, the additional languages do not add meaning but rather reduce it. At the same time, however, a word this long inevitably contains other words that, paradoxically, open it up to a multiplicity of meanings: according to McHugh, Fermoy is also a town in County Cork; kapakka is Finnish for tavern; kapuk sounds like the German kaput or broken; loos can mean lost or wrong in Dutch; and then there are the multitude of English words to be found, such as zoo, askew, hoof, porter, and probably many more (257). In this way, numerous different connotations are conjured, resulting in a confusion of tongues and signification. Ellmann recounts that, while writing Ulysses, Joyce remarked, Id like a language which is above all languages. . . . I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition (JJII 397). This is precisely what he accomplishes in the Wake. Here, Joyce is truly au bout de langlais (JJII 546), or, as the Wake itself proclaims, this is nat language at any sinse of the world (FW 83.12). Yet, at the same time, the Wake still clearly uses the syntax and sentence structure of English. No one will mistake this for a French novel: its patterns are undoubtedly those of the English language. Thus, although, on the one hand, Joyce really is au bout de langlaishe is not following the grammatical rules of standard English and forces open the language borders to let in whatever foreign words he fancieson the other, he stays within certain linguistic boundaries. It is here that a comparison with Kafka is illuminating. If Joyce wages an open war against the English language, Kafka is more of a guerrilla warrior. In Kafka, other languages are never present on the surface. His perfect standard German is devoid of any local influences or foreign words, yet this seeming referential regard for German is illusory: underneath the strictures of a standard idiom, Kafka opens up his language to an intricate play on Yiddish, Yiddishisms, and anti-Semitic slurs. If the German used by Jews is something like a stolen child, it is a thievery that Kafka appreciates. In a lecture he gave on Yiddish in 1912, as an introduction for a performance of Yiddish poems by his friend, the actor Yitzhak Lwy, he calls it a Gaunersprache, thieves cant,18 and celebrates its Wakean ability to take words from other languages. This lecture is a key piece in Kafkas oeuvre. As a young man, he was not particularly religious. Judaism meant less a commitment to religious tradition than a setting for Kafka seniors social ascent, marked by his repeated moves to smarter Synagogues.19 His family of assimilated and westernized Jews hardly observed traditional 47

James Joyce Quarterly 49.1 2011

customs, and his father mocked most things Jewish.20 Consequently, Kafka felt estranged from Judaismas he writes in his diary, Was habe ich mit Juden gemeinsam? Ich habe kaum etwas mit mir gemeinsam (What do I have in common with the Jews? I barely have anything in common with myself).21 This changed when he met a group of Yiddish actors from Lemberg, directed by Lwy. They were poor; they performed in the seedy Caf Savoy dressed in shabby costumes; and their plays were bad, but Kafka loved them and attended over thirty of their performances. He became friends with Lwy, and under his influence started learning about Jewish history and Yiddish literature. Lwy and the Yiddish actors showed Kafka a way of being a Jew that was different from the assimilated Judaism of Prague and of his parents, who were either secretly or openly embarrassed to be Jewish and wanted to show the world that Jews were as good as gentiles. Jacques Kohn, the fictionalized version of Lwy in Isaac Bashevis Singers story A Friend of Kafka, puts it well: The Jews of [Kafkas] circle had one idealto become Gentiles.22 Lwy and the Yiddish actors, on the other hand, represented an unself-conscious form of Judaism. Their identity as Jews was completely independent of the Christian world, and they possessed a sense of identity that Kafka lacked but wanted. Robertson notes that, because Kafka had begun to regain his Jewish consciousness at the Yiddish Theatre, he wanted to expose the Jews of Prague to its influence so that it might have the same effect on them (Kafka 21). He organized an evening of Yiddish poetry and wrote an introductory lecturewhich caused him much stress but which was well received. In it, Kafka describes Yiddish as a disorganized and incongruous force, a continuous flux that could not be caught and pinned down in any written grammar.23 Yiddish belongs to the people, he insisted, who would guard it against grammarians and would make sure that it remained a spoken languagejust as Joyce dismissed both Irish and English in favor of Hiberno-English as the unruly, because uncodified, but living language of the people, according to Milesi.24 For Kafka, Yiddish consists exclusively of foreign words. As is typical of the ever-changing nature of Yiddish, Kafka observes, these foreign words ruhen aber nicht in ihm, sondern behalten die Eile und Lebhaftigkeit, mit der sie genommen wurden (Jargon 189 are not firmly rooted in it, but retain the speed and liveliness with which they were adoptedTalk 264); thus, they remain part of their original languages once they are contained within Yiddish. Like Finnegans Wake, Yiddish seems more a structure for holding together different foreign languages than a language with its own distinct identity. Additionally, there are the many dialects of which diese Sprachgebilde von Willkr und Gesetz, (Jargon 190this medley 48

of whim and law) is comprised (Talk264). Ja der ganze Jargon besteht nur aus Dialekt (Jargon 190Yiddish as a whole exists only of dialectTalk 264) is a notion that seems to foreshadow Kafkas later claim to Brod that, in German, only the dialects are really alive.25 Yiddish is the quintessential foreign language, because even within itself it is foreign. This is precisely what Kafka values about Yiddish. As David Suchoff notes, it takes pleasure in the foreign as a living presence in ones mother tongue (254). In his work, Kafka opens up German to the foreignness of Yiddish. A good example is Josefine, die Sngerin oder Das Volk der Muse (Josephine the Singer or the Mouse People), the last story Kafka wrote, just months before his death in June 1924, which was published posthumously by Brod.26 Here he takes up the concept of mauscheln, a word derived from Moyshe, the Yiddish for Moses, which is a disparaging term for the particular accent and intonation of Jews speaking German. Kafka himself liked mauscheln and, in a letter to Brod, even called it beautiful, yet Germans ridiculed Jews for it.27 Richard Wagner, for instance, complained about the hissing, abrasive sound of mauscheln, a shrill, sibilant buzzing that falls strangely and unpleasantly on our ears.28 The Jew, wrote Wagner, still speaks German as a foreigner (197). Wagner (and not just Wagner) objects to the foreignness, the strangeness that mauscheln opens up within German. Mauscheln might literally mean speaking like Moses, but it also connotes the German maus or mouse. Thus, Kafka creates a story centered on actual mouse people and on their singer, Josephine, who, in her prophet-like function of bringing people togetherein Publikum zusammenrufen (221)also constitutes a more literal allusion to Moses. Josephine is a female mouse-Moses who provides her people an identity and a center around which to gather. The connection between the mouse people and the Jewsthat is, the stereotypical image of Jews that anti-Semitism suggestsis fortified in the very beginning of the story, which explains the mysterious power of Josephines song: Es gibt niemanden, den ihr Gesang nicht fortreit, was um so hher zu bewerten ist, als unser Geschlecht im ganzen Musik nicht liebt (219There is no one but is carried away by her singing, a tribute all the greater as we are not in general a music-loving race360). This seems to be a tongue-in-cheek reply to accusations made by people like Otto Weininger, the Jewish philosopher turned protestant anti-Semite, who, in his famous study Sex and Character, writes that the Jew doesnt sing and that Jews have a curious aversion to song.29 In this way, Kafka generates a fictional literalization of what is, at heart, a racist slur. By inverting the metaphoric expression mauscheln and taking it literally, he exploits the gap between the denotative and the figurative meaning of the term. On 49

James Joyce Quarterly 49.1 2011

the surface, he never strays outside the borders of canonical high German, yet he manages to turn the language inside out and expose its fear of foreign elements. Kafka does something similar in the story Forschungen eines Hundes (Investigations of a Dog), written in 1922, published posthumously, and given its title by Brod.30 Here, we find a play on the Yiddish concept of Luftmensch or air-person. This term denotes an impractical, contemplative person without a definite business or income, a parasite on society. It was often used by assimilated Jews to designateand denigratelesser-integrated Yiddish artists from eastern Europe such as Kafkas friend Lwy. Kafka takes up this notion and plays with it, creating a story centering on a group of air-dogs, Lufthunde, instead of air-people. Like their stereotypical counterpart in the Jewish world of Kafkas Prague, the Lufthunde are fully dependent on their fellow dogs, but unlike their human equivalents they are not scorned for this because, as the dog-narrator relates, versucht man sich in ihre Lage zu versetzen, versteht man es (262if one tries to put oneself in their place one will see that 295). Although it is unclear what the air-dogs contribute to society, their presence is accepted, and the other dogs are convinced that, in their own way, the air-dogs make a valuable contribution to the dog society. No one understands exactly what they do, but that does not automatically mean they accomplish nothing. This is a humorous attack on the attitude of civilized Jews toward their more artistic and unassimilated brothers. As a last example, let us look at Kafkas famous parable Vor dem gesetz (Before the Law).31 Here, a man from the country, a Mann vom Lande, waits his entire life for permission to be admitted to the Law, only to die without having been able to secure the desired consent (61, 60). Mann vom Lande is a translation from the Yiddish amoretz, which comes from the Hebrew amha-aretz and means not only a man from the country but also a schlemiel or fool. This usage does not just enforce the idea that the man from the country is banned from practicing law because of his apparent ignorance but, as Suchoff points out, also suggests the notion that he might be barred because of the different languages he brings to the door of the Law (251). Thus, unlike Joyce, who violates language in plain view and plays with foreign languages on the surface of his narrative, above-ground as it were, Kafka goes underground, beneath the language. Where Joyce assaults language overtly, Kafka assaults language silently. This difference is captured symbolically by the different way in which they adapt Homers Sirens tale. Both Joyce and Kafka take up the ancient myth of Odysseuss encounter with the alluring Sirens and, in typical modernist fash50

ion, transform it into something that diverges thoroughly from its legendary counterpart. In Homer, Odysseuss men stuff their ears with wax and tie their captain to the mast. This way, he can hear the famous Siren song without being in danger of fleeing towards the Sirens and a certain death. In Kafkas parable Das Schweigen der Sirenen (The Silence of the Sirens), conversely, we find a different kind of Odysseus.32 Kafka wrote this tale in October 1917, during an eight-month visit with his sister Ottla in the Bohemian town of Zurau, shortly after he was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him, and it became part of a small collection of parables posthumously published as the Zurau Aphorisms. Here, we encounter an Odysseus who is tied to the mast and stops his ears with wax. It is part of the maladroit version of Odysseus that Kafka creates; a bit of a fool who relies on kindische Mittel (childish measures) for his survival and who, in unschuldiger Freude ber seine Mittelchen (88in innocent elation over his little stratagem), does not realize that he will not need the wax if he has the chains (89). At the end of Kafkas tale, the Sirens too have changed: they no longer want to seduce Odysseuswhich, in Homer, is the only action they are givenbut instead have been seduced by him: sie wollten nicht mehr verfhren, nur noch den Abglanz vom groen Augenpaar des Odysseus wollten sie so lange als mglich erhaschen (90they no longer had any desire to allure; all that they wanted was to hold as long as they could the radiance that fell from Ulyssess great eyes91). In Joyces Sirens, we see a similar diversion from the original. Whereas, in the Odyssey, the Sirens seduction and their music are one, in Joyces episode, music and seduction are separate. On the one hand, there are the Siren barmaids who try to tempt male customers, and on the other there are music, singing, and piano-playing by men in the Ormond Hotel bar. It is the music that Bloom struggles to resist, since he does not want to be moved too much during this emotional time of day, the moment of Mollys rendezvous with Blazes Boylan. Thus, for Bloom, seduction lies in the music more than in the desirable Siren-like barmaids. In fact, the barmaids do not even try to seduce Bloom; they are much more interested in Boylan. Here, then, we have Sirens who seem clueless about the object of their seduction. And, as in Kafka, in Joyce too, we find a changed Odysseus. Where, in Kafka, he appeared to exchange his mythical guile for guilelessness, in Joyce the shrewd prince has become a seedy advertisement canvasser.33 There is, however, also an interesting difference in the way Joyce and Kafka adapt Homers tale, and it is this contrast that is the most significant for the present discussion. In Sirens, noise abounds; it is, arguably, one of the loudest episodes in the novel. It is filled not 51

James Joyce Quarterly 49.1 2011

only with the singing and piano-playing of the men in the bar but also with an abundance of talking, joking, farting, laughing, and backslapping, with the clinking of glasses, the rattling of china, and the cheers and applause after each song is finished. People walk in and out; leather shoes creak on the bar floor; trams pass noisily by; and the barmaids are constantly humming and singing. In Joyces Sirens, the communicative function of language becomes secondary to its musical effects, causing an estrangement similar to that produced by his multilingualism.34 As the title suggests, Kafkas Das Schweigen der Sirenen is not just a silent tale but a tale about silence. If the song of the Sirens is powerful, their silence is an even more devastating weapon, and it permeates the short narrative. In Kafkas parable, there is no noise whatsoever: the Sirens do not sing, and Odysseus has his ears plugged. He would not have been able to hear them if they had sung, after all. The description of the Sirens as Odysseus passes them reads almost like the scene from a pantomime: Sie aberschner als jemalsstreckten und drehten sich, lieen das schaurige Haar offen im Winde wehen und spannten die Krallen frei auf den Felsen (90But theylovelier than everstretched their necks and turned, let their cold hair flutter free in the wind, and forgetting everything clung with their claws to the rocks91) all in complete silence. To close, I will focus on another of Kafkas parables. In the short, four-line tale Der Schacht von Babel (The Pit of Babel), included in the Zurau Aphorisms, an unnamed character announces he wants to dig a subterranean passage, because he finds his station too high.35 At the end of the tale, the narrator announces: Wir graben den Schacht von Babel (34we are digging the pit of Babel35). If Joyces multilingual approach is an overt celebration of linguistic diversity, and if Finnegans Wake is a vociferous performance of the Babelian confusion, then perhaps Kafkas subterranean approach is the creation of a pit of Babel, a polyglot underworld existing silently underneath the tip of canonical High German. Where Joyce builds up, Kafka digs down, yet both authors work from within the languages they inhabit so uneasily, and both attempt a Babelian solution to their unease. NOTES
This essay evolved from a conference paper I gave at the International James Joyce Symposium in Prague in 2010. I wish to thank Myra Jehlen for generously reading and commenting on several drafts of the study and Maria DiBattista for encouraging me to publish it. I also want to express my gratitude to Fritz Senn, who provided me with a fellowship to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, where I completed the essay.

52

1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Discourse, Language and Politics, ed. Michael Shapiro (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1984), p. 110. 2 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004), p. 127. 3 Johannes Urzidil is quoted in Franz Kuna, Vienna and Prague 18901928, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin Publishers, 1976), p. 130. 4 James Joyce, Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), p. 123. 5 See Sabine Rothemann, Kleine Mutter mit KrallenFranz Kafka und das alte Prag: Betrachtendes Denken und Raumentwurf in der frhen Prosa (Bonn: Bernstein-Verlag, 2008). 6 Klaus Wagenbach, Kafka (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), p. 14. 7 Max Brod is quoted in Ronald Hayman, Kafka: A Biography (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 6. Further references to the work will be cited parenthetically in the text. 8 Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (London: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 27. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as Kafka. 9 Franz Kafka, Tagebcher 19101923, ed. Brod (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1967), p. 82, and reprinted as The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1923, ed. Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh et al. (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), p. 88. 10 See Kafka, Briefe 1902-1924, ed. Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), p. 336, and the reprinted Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 286: die laute oder stillschweigende oder auch selbstqulerische Anmassung eines fremden Besitzes, den man nicht erworben, sondern durch einen (verhltnismssig) flchtigen Griff gestohlen hatthe loud or silent or even self-torturing appropriation of someone elses property, that one has not earned, but stolen by means of a (relatively) hasty movement. Further references to both works will be cited parenthetically in the text. 11 Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de lautre: ou la prothse dorigine (Paris: ditions Galile, 1996), pp. 13, 15, reprinted as Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 1, 2. Further references to both works will be cited parenthetically in the text. 12 Who put you in this terrible position? It was the pigeon, Josephsee Lo Taxil, La Vie de Jsus (Paris: Librairie Anti-Clericale, 1884), p. 20. 13 Juliette Taylor, Foreign Music: Linguistic Estrangement in Proteus and Sirens, JJQ, 41 (Spring 2004), 412. 14 This is a taunting reminder of the Proteus instance where Stephen recollects how, when he returned to Dublin from Paris, he pretended to speak broken English as you dragged your valise, porter threepence, across the slimy pier at Newhaven. Comment? (U 3.194-96). 15 Joyce is quoted in Jacques Mercanton, The Hours of James Joyce, Portraits of the Artist in Exile: Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans, ed. Willard Potts (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1979), p. 207. 16 Laurent Milesi, Lidiome Babelien de Finnegans Wake: recherches thmatiques dans une perspective genetique, Gense de Babel: Joyce et la cration,

53

James Joyce Quarterly 49.1 2011

ed. Claude Jacquet (Paris: ditions du CNRS, 1985), p. 173. 17 Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991), p. 257. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 18 Kafka, Einleitungsvortrag ber Jargon, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmenten I, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1992), p. 189, and reprinted as Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language, Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Sicle, ed. Mark Anderson (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. 264. Further references to both works will be cited parenthetically in the text as Jargon and Talk. 19 Robertson, a review of Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine, by Iris Bruce, University of Toronto Quarterly, 78 (Winter 2009), 334-35. 20 Hayman points out that the odd words of Yiddish that survived in his fathers vocabulary were mostly expletive (p. 17), illustrated by a diary entry of Kafkas where he records how his father referred to Brod as a meschuggenen Ritoch, a crazy hotheadsee Kafka, Tagebcher 1910-1923 (p. 94) and Diaries 1910-1923 (p. 98). 21 Diary entry from 8 January 1914see Kafka, Tagebcher 1910-1923 (p. 255) and Diaries (p. 252). 22 Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Friend of Kafka, Collected Stories: A Friend of Kafka to Passions (New York: Library of America, 1970), p. 14. 23 Er hat keine Grammatiken. Liebhaber versuchen Grammatiken zu schreiben aber der Jargon wird immerfort gesprochen; er kommt nicht zur Ruhe. Das Volk lt ihn den Grammatikern night (Jargon, p. 189)No grammars of the language exist. Devotees of the language try to write grammars, but Yiddish remains a spoken language that is in continuous flux. The people will not leave it to the grammarians (Jargon, p. 264). 24 Milesi, The Perversions of Aerse and the Anglo-Irish Middle Voice in Finnegans Wake, Joyce Studies Annual, ed. Thomas Staley, 4 (Summer 1993), 113. 25 See David Suchoff, Kafkas Canon: Hebrew and Yiddish in The Trial and America, Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations, ed. Doris Sommer (New York: Palgrave Press, 2003), p. 253. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 26 Kafka, Josefine, die Sngerin oder Das Volk der Muse, Die groe Erzhlungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 219-38, and reprinted in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 360-78. Further references to both works will be cited parenthetically in the text. 27 See Brod and Kafka, Eine Freundschaft. Briefwechsel, ed. Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1989), p. 359: das Mauscheln an sich ist sogar schn. 28 Richard Wagner is quoted in Anderson, Kafkas Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Hapsburg Fin de Sicle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 197. Further references to Wagners statements will be cited parenthetically in the text to this work. 29 Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) (Vienna: Braumller and Company, 1903), p. 436; Weininger is quoted in Anderson (p. 207). 30 Kafka, Forschungen eines Hundes, Beschreibung eines Kampfes: Novellen, Skizzen, Aphorismen aus dem Nachlass, ed. Brod (New York: Schocken Books,

54

1946), pp. 240-90, and see Kafka, The Complete Stories (pp. 278-316). Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text to the original and the translation. 31 Kafka, Vor Dem GesetzBefore the Law, Parables and Paradoxes, in German and English (Berlin: Schocken Books, 1958), pp. 60-80. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 32 Kafka, Das Schweigen der Sirenen, Parables and Paradoxes (pp. 88-92). Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 33 Bradbury and John Fletcher, The Introverted Novel, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930 (p. 393). 34 See Taylors article for a more in-depth discussion of the defamiliarized language of Sirens. 35 Kafka, Der Schacht von BabelThe Pit of Babel, Parables and Paradoxes (pp. 34-35). Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

55