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
Access provided by Freie Universitaet Berlin (25 Apr 2014 18:00 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jjq/summary/v049/49.1.kager.html
Of Sirens Silent and Loud: The
Language Wars of Joyce and Kafka
Maria Kager
Rutgers University
A
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 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 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, paralyz-
ing, 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.
JJQ
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day, as the two of them stood in front of a window looking down on
the Town Square, Kafka said, There was my Gymnasium [second-
ary 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 execu-
tor, 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 assimi-
lated 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 rebel-
lious 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 experi-
mental 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 adher-
ing 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 eluci-
dates. 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
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43
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 lan-
guage 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 can-
not 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 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 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- Yesterday it occurred to me that I did not always love my moth-
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44
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 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 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 dia-
logue 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 pourrait-
on 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 pro-
vide 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
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45
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 re-
appropriate 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 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 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 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 dans
cette 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 complies
and advertises the many sexual amusements to be found in Paris. He
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46
does this in broken English interspersed with French: All chic wom-
ans 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 encour-
age 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 allu-
sion 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 ambigu-
ity 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 thun-
derword 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):
Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertoo-
ryzooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk.
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 kapakka-
puk refers to the Turkish kapiyi kapat.
17
This insane multilingual
word evokes the comical image of a large crowd of people from dif-
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47
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 mean-
ings: 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 fam-
ily of assimilated and westernized Jews hardly observed traditional
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48
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 fictional-
ized 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
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49
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 pub-
lished 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 hiss-
ing, 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 forti-
fied 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 phi-
losopher 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 meta-
phoric expression mauscheln and taking it literally, he exploits the gap
between the denotative and the figurative meaning of the term. On
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50
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 admit-
ted 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 fash-
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51
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 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 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 mea-
sures) 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 custom-
ers, 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 guileless-
ness, 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
Complete_Issue_49_1.indb 51 6/14/2013 4:03:47 PM
52
only with the singing and piano-playing of the men in the bar but also
with an abundance of talking, joking, farting, laughing, and backslap-
ping, 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 grati-
tude to Fritz Senn, who provided me with a fellowship to the Zurich James
Joyce Foundation, where I completed the essay.
James Joyce Quarterly 49.1 2011
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53
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 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 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 th-
matiques dans une perspective genetique, Gense de Babel: Joyce et la cration,
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54
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 parentheti-
cally 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 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 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 par-
enthetically 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 parentheti-
cally 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,
James Joyce Quarterly 49.1 2011
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55
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 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: 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.
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