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Of Sirens Silent and Loud: The Language Wars of Joyce and KafkaMaria Kager

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

Published by The University of TulsaDOI: 10.1353/jjq.2011.0106

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Freie Universitaet Berlin (25 Apr 2014 18:00 GMT)

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Of Sirens Silent and Loud: TheLanguage Wars of Joyce and Kafka

Maria KagerRutgers University

Awriters stock and trade is his language, yet James Joyce andFranz Kafka actually work against language. In their texts,language becomes a site of struggle, of conflict, of vexationthat is, at times, almost violent. Because of the complex linguistic,

political, and national circumstances they confronted, their relation tolanguage was a love/hate one, an intricate battle of tongues. Neither Joyce nor Kafka was able to regard his native language as completelyhis own, yet neither chose to write in an alternative one. Instead, theyattacked language as they wrotean assault that both authors con-ducted by including foreign languages: Yiddish in the case of Kafka,Irish, Italian, Latin, and myriad others in the case of Joyce. If, as MichelFoucault 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 literaryspaces.2 Both viewed their hometowns as provincial, paralyz-ing, and claustrophobic. When referring to its marginal location, Johannes Urzidil, the Czech writer and friend of Kafka, calls Praguethe Dublin of the East.3 Joyce escaped Dublin early, because, as heputs it in Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages, [n]o self-respectingperson wants to stay in Ireland. Instead he will run from it, as if froma country that has been subjected to a visitation by an angry Jove,4

a sentiment echoed by Little Chandler, who, reflecting on Gallahersaccomplishments in London, ponders: There was no doubt about it:if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothingin Dublin (D 73). Like Gallaher, Joyce fled Dublin to seek, and tofind, his success abroad.

Kafka, on the other hand, did not leave Prague until shortly beforehis death when his health forced him to visit sanatoria abroad. Hehad many plans to emigrate but never did. The Kleine Mutter mitKrallen, the little mother with claws, as he called Prague, had her

hooks firmly secured and would not let him go.5 Thus, for most ofhis 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.

JJQ

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day, as the two of them stood in front of a window looking down onthe Town Square, Kafka said, There was my Gymnasium [second-ary school], over there, in the building that faces towards us, wasthe university, and a short way to the left was my office. Within thissmall circledrawing a few circles with his fingersmy whole lifeis enclosed.6 In fact, he barely managed to move out of his parentsapartment: at thirty-eight, he still lived at home, albeit reluctantly.

Even though Joyce lived most of his adult life on the continent andonly returned to Ireland a few times, his works are definitively Irish.Except forGiacomo Joyce, they are all set in Dublin and populated byIrish characters who speak a recognizably Irish form of English; onehas only to think, for instance, of the Cyclops episode ofUlysses,which is filled with Dublin slang and Irishisms (begob!). Conversely,Kafkas fiction, as Max Brod, Kafkas friend, editor, literary execu-tor, and biographer, notes, never even mentions the word Jew.7 His characters are not noticeably Jewish, and they use none of theYiddishisms that were typically part of the vocabulary of an assimi-lated Jew. Kafka wrote a German purged of nearly all local influence.Ritchie Robertson observes, He was a linguistic purist who . . . tookpains to adjust [his works] spelling, vocabulary, and punctuation inorder to adjust to the High German standard.8

The authors different reactions to their hometownsa rebel-lious departure versus a more passive, and perhaps fearful, refusal

to leaveare reflected in the way they deal with language. Kafkassparse, unadorned style is completely devoid of the radically experi-mental multilingual play in which Joyce engages, and, unlike Joyce,he does not appear to be interested in dislocating language. Yet acloser look at their writings and at the techniques with which they both resist and reclaim language shows they are not as differentas they might seem. A careful examination of Kafkas language, incomparison with Joyces, demonstrates that, while outwardly adher-ing to the rules of standard High German, underneath the surface,

Kafka opens up language to foreign elements in ways stronglyresembling the rebelliousness of Joyce. Similarly, the comparison toKafka helps accentuate the ways in which Joyce inhabits English.That Joyce employs English uneasily and undertakes to break awayfrom Victorian parlance is well known. In an April 1907 diary entry,Stanislaus Joyce remembers an occasion when Joyce threatenedto forget English and write in French or Italian instead ( JJII 397n).Obviously he never went through with that threat. Instead, he laborsfrom within English in ways that the juxtaposition with Kafka eluci-

dates. This essay compares the multilingualism of Joyce and Kafkaand postulates that what happens above the surface in Joyce, in plainview, goes on underneath in Kafka, in the underworld of language.These two different approaches are, in reality, two sides of the same

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coin. Joyce and Kafka were both apprehensive about the language in

which each was raised and in which each wrote. Joyce regarded theIrish people as condemned to express themselves in a language nottheir own ( JJII 217). Through Stephen Dedalus, Joyce declares thatEnglish, a language so familiar and so foreign, would always be forhim an acquired speech (P 189). Comparing his own speech to thatof his English-born Dean of Studies in the famous tundish passagefrom A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Stephen reflects, The lan-guage in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How differentare the wordshome, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I can-not speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. . . . My voiceholds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language (P 189). The distance Stephen perceives between himself and the Englishlanguage, this notion of not belonging in his own language is crucialto Joyces assault upon English.

I use the word assault, with all its violent implications, because itwas in such terms that Joyce spoke about language. In an often-citedletter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce wrote: What the language willlook like when I have finished I dont know. But having declared warI shall go on jusquau bout (LettersI 237). The word war evokesimages of brutality and bloodshed that are reinforced by his pro-claimed 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 noloyalty towards the grammatical regulations that hold languagetogether. Thus, his linguistic alienation is at the basis of his desire todestroy English, although, as he wrote in a letter to Max Eastman, thedestruction need not be permanent: Ill give them back their Englishlanguage. Im not destroying it for good ( JJII 546). At the same time,however, these claims are also just bravado. The instances where heprofessed 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 itslimits or its boundssomething that his sense of estrangement fromthe 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 hislanguage, as his biographer Ronald Hayman relates (252). In a diaryentry from 1911, Kafka wrote, echoing Stephen:

Gestern fiel mir ein, dass ich die Mutter nur deshalb nicht immer sogeliebt habe, wie sie es verdiente . . . weil mich die Deutsche Sprachedaran gehindert hat. Die jdische Mutter ist keine Mutter. Die mitMutter benannte jdische Frau wird nicht nur komisch sondern auchfremd. (Yesterday it occurred to me that I did not always love my moth-Yesterday it occurred to me that I did not always love my moth-

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er as she deserved . . . because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is no Mutter. A Jewish woman who is called Mutterdoes 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 lan-guage as Yiddish, even though Yiddish was never his real language but one he had acquired through study. Thus, in Kafka, we find a typeof social and cultural estrangement from language similar to Joyces.German alienates Kafka from all that is familiar. He cannot use theGerman word Mutter without experiencing a Joycean unrest ofspirit.

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 elsesproperty, something not earned but stolen.10 In the same letter, hestates that Jewish writing in German is a Zigeunerliteratur die dasdeutsche Kind aus der Wiege gestohlen und in groer Eile irgendwiezugerichtet hatte, weil doch irgendjemand auf dem Seil tanzen muss(338a gypsy literature which has stolen the German child out ofits cradle and in great haste put it through some kind of training, forsomeone has to dance on the tightrope287). It is significant that Joyce too connects writing to theft, whenFinnegans Wake announcesitself the last word in stolentelling (FW 424.35). Thus, Joyce andKafka both compare language to something borrowed, or stolen, andthus not really their own.

In his essayLe monolinguisme de lautre, an autobiographical accountof his relation to language as a French Algerian and framed as a dia-logue between two nameless speakers, Jacques Derrida writes, Je naiquune langue, ce nest pas la mienne (I only have one language; itis not mine), to which his interlocutor replies, Comment pourrait-on avoir une langue qui ne soit pas la sienne? (How could anyonehave a language that is not theirs?).11 In a way, Joyce and Kafka pro-vide an answer to this question. Derrida, as a Franco-Maghrebian Jew,felt estranged from French without having an alternative language inwhich to write or to express himself. His interlocutor accuses him ofsophistry and exclaims:

voil que vous allguez, en franais, que le franais vous a toujours tlangue trangre! Allons donc, si ctait vrai, vous ne sauriez mme pasle dire, vous ne sauriez si bien dire! (18there you are, claiming, inFrench, that French has always been a foreign language to you! Comeoff 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 andKafka, of whom the same thing might be said: in perfect English and

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German, they claim that they are estranged from English and German.Where Derrida was unable to feel at home in the Frenchness of theFrench that was his mother tongue, Kafka could not feel at home inthe Germanness of German nor Joyce in the Englishness of English.

As a consequence of this problematic relation to their mothertongue, Joyce and Kafka try to destabilize language as a way to re-appropriate it. They feel alienated from language and alter it so thatthey may feel more at home. The most important process by whichthis process of destabilization occurs in their works is by makingthem multilingual.

It has long been recognized that Joyces texts are multilingual.Ulysses features myriad foreign languages (the first snippet of speechwe encounter is in Latin), Dublin slang, and Irishisms, and the textsuccessfully exploits double meanings of sounds and homonymsacross linguistic borders. This adds not only to an increased senseof language as a living thing but also to a heightened awareness ofthe materiality of language. InStephen Hero, Stephen likes to repeatwords to himself till they lost all instantaneous meaning for him and became wonderful vocables (SH 30). This type of repetition enableshim almost to taste words, to perceive their thingness, something thatforeign 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, forinstance, he is reminded of a line fromLa Vie de Jsus by Leo Taxil, inwhich Taxil imagines Josephs reaction when he finds Mary impreg-nated 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 fol-lowing train of thought in Stephen: My fathers a bird, he lapped thesweet lait chaud with pink young tongue, plump bunnys face. Lap,lapin (U 3.164-66). The French lait chaud in connection with theEnglish bunnys face triggers the association between lap and

lapin or rabbit. As Juliette Taylor points out, Joyce uses the semanticambiguity intrinsic to interlingual communication here to create anew figure of speech, a compound image in which a person drinkingmilk is represented, through a faux ami, as a rabbit lapping milk.13

This instance is recalled, and parodied, in Circe, arguably themost multilingual episode ofUlysses. Upon Kitty Ricketts mention-ing Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from Jimmy Pidgeon, Philip Drunk asks ( gravely) Qui vous a mis danscette fichue position, Philippe? to which Philip Sober responds ( gaily)

Ctait le sacr pigeon, Philippe (U 15.2578-79, 2583, 2585). Circe con-tinues to parody Stephens French musings from Proteus when Zoe begs him to give her some parleyvoo (U 15.3875). Stephen compliesand advertises the many sexual amusements to be found in Paris. He

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does this in broken English interspersed with French: All chic wom-ans which arrive full of modesty then disrobe and squeal loud to seevampire man debauch nun very fresh young withdessous troublants.(he clacks his tongue loudly) Ho, l l! Ce pif quil a! (U 15.3891-94).14The whores are pleased with Stephens performance and encour-age him with shouts of Bravo! Parleyvoo! and Encore! Encore!while Lynch exclaims Vive le vampire! (U 15.3898, 3920, 3896). BothStephens vampire man and Lynchs vampire constitute an allu-sion to the short poem Stephen writes in Proteus: He comes, palevampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea,mouth to her mouths kiss (U 3.397-98), strengthening the parodyof the earlier episode. Lynchs call can also be seen as a play on theexpression Vive la France and thus as a more general reference toStephens recollections of Paris in Proteus and to his reflections inand on the French language. Thus, Circe appears to caricature themultilingualism of Proteus, while at the same time constituting anintensification of the multiplicity of languages to be found there.

Finnegans Wake continues the Protean play with semantic ambigu-ity and multilingual puns, albeit in a more radical manner. In fact, itmakes such experimentation a central part of its narrative; the Wake isreally one big example of interlingual compound words and imagesand multilingual puns. Joyce himself called the Wake a tower ofBabel where [a]ll the languages are present,15 and, although not

quite all languages are present, it does draw, according to LaurentMilesi, from over seventy different ones.16 Here, Joyce not only forcesopen the borders of English to an explosion of foreign languages butchallenges the idea of any standard, monolingual idiom by creating anew multilingual language not bound to any of the rules of grammarand syntax that usually tie writing down. The hundred-letter thun-derword that introduces the Babel passage is an apt example. Herecan be found, in one word, the edict shut the door in nine differentlanguages (FW 257.27-28):

Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertoo-ryzooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk.

Roland McHugh traces the origins of this word as follows: Lukkedoeris 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 soundslike the German tre zu; sphalnabortan is the Greek sphalnaportan; sporthaok is the slangy sport ones oak, to keep onesdoor shut; sakroidver is the Russian zakroi dver; and kapakka-puk refers to the Turkish kapiyi kapat.17 This insane multilingualword evokes the comical image of a large crowd of people from dif-

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ferent national backgrounds all shouting together, Shut the door!Yet this is not just a semantic repetition, for, as the signified phrasetraverses from language to language, it seems to lose all meaning.Thus, the additional languages do not add meaning but rather reduceit. At the same time, however, a word this long inevitably containsother words that, paradoxically, open it up to a multiplicity of mean-ings: according to McHugh, Fermoy is also a town in County Cork;kapakka is Finnish for tavern; kapuk sounds like the Germankaput or broken; loos can mean lost or wrong in Dutch;and then there are the multitude of English words to be found, suchas zoo, askew, hoof, porter, and probably many more (257).In this way, numerous different connotations are conjured, resultingin a confusion of tongues and signification.

Ellmann recounts that, while writingUlysses, Joyce remarked, Idlike a language which is above all languages. . . . I cannot expressmyself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition ( JJII 397).This is precisely what he accomplishes in the Wake. Here, Joyce is trulyau bout de langlais ( JJII 546), or, as the Wake itself proclaims, this isnat language at any sinse of the world (FW 83.12). Yet, at the sametime, the Wake still clearly uses the syntax and sentence structure ofEnglish. No one will mistake this for a French novel: its patterns areundoubtedly those of the English language. Thus, although, on theone 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, hestays within certain linguistic boundaries. It is here that a comparisonwith Kafka is illuminating.

If Joyce wages an open war against the English language, Kafkais more of a guerrilla warrior. In Kafka, other languages are neverpresent on the surface. His perfect standard German is devoid ofany local influences or foreign words, yet this seeming referentialregard 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 in1912, as an introduction for a performance of Yiddish poems by hisfriend, the actor Yitzhak Lwy, he calls it a Gaunersprache, thievescant,18 and celebrates its Wakean ability to take words from otherlanguages.

This lecture is a key piece in Kafkasoeuvre. As a young man, he

was not particularly religious. Judaism meant less a commitmentto religious tradition than a setting for Kafka seniors social ascent,marked by his repeated moves to smarter Synagogues.19 His fam-ily of assimilated and westernized Jews hardly observed traditional

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customs, and his father mocked most things Jewish.20 Consequently,Kafka felt estranged from Judaismas he writes in his diary, Washabe ich mit Juden gemeinsam? Ich habe kaum etwas mit mirgemeinsam (What do I have in common with the Jews? I barelyhave 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 CafSavoy dressed in shabby costumes; and their plays were bad, butKafka loved them and attended over thirty of their performances. He became friends with Lwy, and under his influence started learningabout Jewish history and Yiddish literature. Lwy and the Yiddishactors showed Kafka a way of being a Jew that was different from theassimilated Judaism of Prague and of his parents, who were eithersecretly or openly embarrassed to be Jewish and wanted to show theworld that Jews were as good as gentiles. Jacques Kohn, the fictional-ized version of Lwy in Isaac Bashevis Singers story A Friend ofKafka, 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 theypossessed a sense of identity that Kafka lacked but wanted.

Robertson notes that, because Kafka had begun to regain his Jewishconsciousness 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 wrotean introductory lecturewhich caused him much stress but whichwas well received. In it, Kafka describes Yiddish as a disorganizedand incongruous force, a continuous flux that could not be caughtand pinned down in any written grammar.23 Yiddish belongs to thepeople, he insisted, who would guard it against grammarians andwould make sure that it remained a spoken languagejust as Joycedismissed both Irish and English in favor of Hiberno-English as

the unruly, because uncodified, but living language of the people,according to Milesi.24For Kafka, Yiddish consists exclusively of foreign words. As is

typical of the ever-changing nature of Yiddish, Kafka observes, theseforeign words ruhen aber nicht in ihm, sondern behalten die Eileund Lebhaftigkeit, mit der sie genommen wurden (Jargon 189are not firmly rooted in it, but retain the speed and liveliness withwhich they were adoptedTalk 264); thus, they remain part oftheir original languages once they are contained within Yiddish. Like

Finnegans Wake, Yiddish seems more a structure for holding togetherdifferent foreign languages than a language with its own distinctidentity. Additionally, there are the many dialects of which dieseSprachgebilde von Willkr und Gesetz, (Jargon 190this medley

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of whim and law) is comprised (Talk264). Ja der ganze Jargon besteht nur aus Dialekt (Jargon 190Yiddish as a whole existsonly of dialectTalk 264) is a notion that seems to foreshadowKafkas later claim to Brod that, in German, only the dialects are reallyalive.25 Yiddish is the quintessential foreign language, because evenwithin itself it is foreign. This is precisely what Kafka values aboutYiddish. As David Suchoff notes, it takes pleasure in the foreign as aliving 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 Kafkawrote, just months before his death in June 1924, which was pub-lished posthumously by Brod.26 Here he takes up the concept ofmauscheln, a word derived from Moyshe, the Yiddish for Moses,which is a disparaging term for the particular accent and intonationof Jews speaking German. Kafka himself likedmauscheln and, in aletter to Brod, even called it beautiful, yet Germans ridiculed Jewsfor it.27 Richard Wagner, for instance, complained about the hiss-ing, abrasive sound ofmauscheln, a shrill, sibilant buzzing thatfalls strangely and unpleasantly on our ears.28 The Jew, wroteWagner, still speaks German as a foreigner (197). Wagner (and not just Wagner) objects to the foreignness, the strangeness thatmauscheln opens up within German.

Mauscheln might literally mean speaking like Moses, but it alsoconnotes the Germanmaus or mouse. Thus, Kafka creates a storycentered on actual mouse people and on their singer, Josephine,who, in her prophet-like function of bringing people togethereinPublikum zusammenrufen (221)also constitutes a more literalallusion to Moses. Josephine is a female mouse-Moses who providesher 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 forti-

fied in the very beginning of the story, which explains the mysteriouspower of Josephines song: Es gibt niemanden, den ihr Gesang nichtfortreit, was um so hher zu bewerten ist, als unser Geschlecht imganzen 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 amusic-loving race360). This seems to be a tongue-in-cheek replyto accusations made by people like Otto Weininger, the Jewish phi-losopher turned protestant anti-Semite, who, in his famous studySexand Character, writes that the Jew doesnt sing and that Jews have a

curious aversion to song.29

In this way, Kafka generates a fictionalliteralization of what is, at heart, a racist slur. By inverting the meta-phoric expressionmauscheln and taking it literally, he exploits the gap between the denotative and the figurative meaning of the term. On

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the surface, he never strays outside the borders of canonical highGerman, yet he manages to turn the language inside out and exposeits fear of foreign elements.

Kafka does something similar in the story Forschungen einesHundes (Investigations of a Dog), written in 1922, publishedposthumously, and given its title by Brod.30 Here, we find a play onthe Yiddish concept ofLuftmensch or air-person. This term denotesan impractical, contemplative person without a definite businessor income, a parasite on society. It was often used by assimilated Jews to designateand denigratelesser-integrated Yiddish artistsfrom eastern Europe such as Kafkas friend Lwy. Kafka takes upthis notion and plays with it, creating a story centering on a groupof air-dogs,Lufthunde, instead of air-people. Like their stereotypicalcounterpart in the Jewish world of Kafkas Prague, theLufthunde are fully dependent on their fellow dogs, but unlike their humanequivalents they are not scorned for this because, as the dog-narratorrelates, versucht man sich in ihre Lage zu versetzen, versteht manes (262if one tries to put oneself in their place one will see that295). Although it is unclear what the air-dogs contribute to society,their presence is accepted, and the other dogs are convinced that, intheir own way, the air-dogs make a valuable contribution to the dogsociety. No one understands exactly what they do, but that does notautomatically mean they accomplish nothing. This is a humorous

attack on the attitude of civilized Jews toward their more artisticand 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, aMann vom Lande, waits his entire life for permission to be admit-ted to the Law, only to die without having been able to secure thedesired consent (61, 60). Mann vom Lande is a translation from theYiddishamoretz, which comes from the Hebrewamha-aretz and meansnot 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, asSuchoff 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 playswith foreign languages on the surface of his narrative, above-groundas 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 theyadapt Homers Sirens tale.Both Joyce and Kafka take up the ancient myth of Odysseuss

encounter with the alluring Sirens and, in typical modernist fash-

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ion, transform it into something that diverges thoroughly from itslegendary counterpart. In Homer, Odysseuss men stuff their earswith wax and tie their captain to the mast. This way, he can hear thefamous Siren song without being in danger of fleeing towards theSirens and a certain death. In Kafkas parable Das Schweigen derSirenen (The Silence of the Sirens), conversely, we find a differ-ent kind of Odysseus.32 Kafka wrote this tale in October 1917, dur-ing an eight-month visit with his sister Ottla in the Bohemian townof Zurau, shortly after he was diagnosed with the tuberculosis thatwould eventually kill him, and it became part of a small collection ofparables posthumously published as the Zurau Aphorisms. Here,we encounter an Odysseus who is tied to the mastand stops his earswith wax. It is part of the maladroit version of Odysseus that Kafkacreates; a bit of a fool who relies on kindische Mittel (childish mea-sures) for his survival and who, in unschuldiger Freude ber seineMittelchen (88in innocent elation over his little stratagem), doesnot realize that he will not need the wax if he has the chains (89). Atthe end of Kafkas tale, the Sirens too have changed: they no longerwant to seduce Odysseuswhich, in Homer, is the only action theyare givenbut instead have been seduced by him: sie wollten nichtmehr verfhren, nur noch den Abglanz vom groen Augenpaar desOdysseus wollten sie so lange als mglich erhaschen (90theyno longer had any desire to allure; all that they wanted was to hold

as long as they could the radiance that fell from Ulyssess greateyes91).In Joyces Sirens, we see a similar diversion from the original.

Whereas, in theOdyssey, the Sirens seduction and their music areone, in Joyces episode, music and seduction are separate. On the onehand, there are the Siren barmaids who try to tempt male custom-ers, and on the other there are music, singing, and piano-playing bymen in the Ormond Hotel bar. It is the music that Bloom strugglesto resist, since he does not want to be moved too much during this

emotional time of day, the moment of Mollys rendezvous with BlazesBoylan. Thus, for Bloom, seduction lies in the music more than in thedesirable Siren-like barmaids. In fact, the barmaids do not even try toseduce 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 guileless-ness, in Joyce the shrewd prince has become a seedy advertisementcanvasser.33

There is, however, also an interesting difference in the way Joyceand Kafka adapt Homers tale, and it is this contrast that is the mostsignificant for the present discussion. In Sirens, noise abounds; itis, arguably, one of the loudest episodes in the novel. It is filled not

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only with the singing and piano-playing of the men in the bar but alsowith an abundance of talking, joking, farting, laughing, and backslap-ping, with the clinking of glasses, the rattling of china, and the cheersand 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 itsmusical effects, causing an estrangement similar to that produced byhis 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 ispowerful, their silence is an even more devastating weapon, and itpermeates the short narrative. In Kafkas parable, there is no noisewhatsoever: the Sirens do not sing, and Odysseus has his earsplugged. He would not have been able to hear them if they hadsung, after all. The description of the Sirens as Odysseus passes themreads almost like the scene from a pantomime: Sie aberschnerals jemalsstreckten und drehten sich, lieen das schaurige Haaroffen 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 everythingclung 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), includedin the Zurau Aphorisms, an unnamed character announces hewants to dig a subterranean passage, because he finds his station toohigh.35 At the end of the tale, the narrator announces: Wir grabenden Schacht von Babel (34we are digging the pit of Babel35).If Joyces multilingual approach is an overt celebration of linguisticdiversity, and ifFinnegans Wake is a vociferous performance of theBabelian confusion, then perhaps Kafkas subterranean approach isthe 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 languagesthey inhabit so uneasily, and both attempt a Babelian solution to theirunease.

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 forgenerously reading and commenting on several drafts of the study and MariaDiBattista for encouraging me to publish it. I also want to express my grati-tude to Fritz Senn, who provided me with a fellowship to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, where I completed the essay.

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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: HarvardUniv. Press, 2004), p. 127.

3 Johannes Urzidil is quoted in Franz Kuna, Vienna and Prague 1890-1928, 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 parentheticallyin the text asKafka.

9 Franz Kafka,Tagebcher 19101923, ed. Brod (Frankfurt am Main: S.Fischer, 1967), p. 82, and reprinted asThe 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 reprintedLetters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richardand Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 286: die laute oder

stillschweigende oder auch selbstqulerische Anmassung eines fremdenBesitzes, den man nicht erworben, sondern durch einen (verhltnismssig)flchtigen Griff gestohlen hatthe loud or silent or even self-torturingappropriation of someone elses property, that one has not earned, but stolen by means of a (relatively) hasty movement. Further references to both workswill 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 parentheticallyin the text.12 Who put you in this terrible position? It was the pigeon, JosephseeLo Taxil,La Vie de Jsus (Paris: Librairie Anti-Clericale, 1884), p. 20.

13 Juliette Taylor, Foreign Music: Linguistic Estrangement in Proteus andSirens, JJQ, 41 (Spring 2004), 412.

14 This is a taunting reminder of the Proteus instance where Stephenrecollects how, when he returned to Dublin from Paris, he pretended tospeak broken English as you dragged your valise, porter threepence, acrossthe 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 deFinnegans Wake: recherches th-matiques dans une perspective genetique,Gense de Babel: Joyce et la cration,

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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 citedparenthetically in the text.

18 Kafka, Einleitungsvortrag ber Jargon,Nachgelassene Schriften undFragmenten 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: SchockenBooks, 1989), p. 264. Further references to both works will be cited parentheti-cally in the text as Jargon and Talk.

19 Robertson, a review ofKafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine , byIris Bruce,University of Toronto Quarterly , 78 (Winter 2009), 334-35.

20 Hayman points out that the odd words of Yiddish that survivedin his fathers vocabulary were mostly expletive (p. 17), illustrated by adiary entry of Kafkas where he records how his father referred to Brod as ameschuggenen Ritoch, a crazy hotheadsee Kafka,Tagebcher 1910-1923

(p. 94) andDiaries 1910-1923 (p. 98).21 Diary entry from 8 January 1914see Kafka,Tagebcher 1910-1923 (p.255) andDiaries (p. 252).

22 Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Friend of Kafka,Collected Stories: A Friend ofKafka to Passions (New York: Library of America, 1970), p. 14.

23 Er hat keine Grammatiken. Liebhaber versuchen Grammatiken zuschreiben aber der Jargon wird immerfort gesprochen; er kommt nicht zurRuhe. Das Volk lt ihn den Grammatikern night (Jargon, p. 189)Nogrammars of the language exist. Devotees of the language try to write gram-mars, 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 inFinnegans Wake, Joyce Studies Annual, ed. Thomas Staley, 4 (Summer 1993),113.

25 See David Suchoff, Kafkas Canon: Hebrew and Yiddish inThe Trial and America, Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations, ed. Doris Sommer(New York: Palgrave Press, 2003), p. 253. Further references will be cited par-enthetically in the text.

26 Kafka, Josefine, die Sngerin oder Das Volk der Muse,Die groeErzhlungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 219-38, and reprintedin The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books,1971), pp. 360-78. Further references to both works will be cited parentheti-cally in the text.

27 See Brod and Kafka,Eine Freundschaft. Briefwechsel, ed. Pasley (Frankfurtam 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 parentheticallyin 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,

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1946), pp. 240-90, and see Kafka,The Complete Stories (pp. 278-316). Furtherreferences will be cited parenthetically in the text to the original and thetranslation.

31 Kafka, Vor Dem GesetzBefore the Law,Parables and Paradoxes, inGerman and English (Berlin: Schocken Books, 1958), pp. 60-80. Further refer-ences 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: AGuide to European Literature, 1890-1930 (p. 393).

34 See Taylors article for a more in-depth discussion of the defamiliarizedlanguage of Sirens.

35 Kafka, Der Schacht von BabelThe Pit of Babel,Parables andParadoxes (pp. 34-35). Further references will be cited parenthetically in thetext.