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"Notlagen": Kafka's Intervention in Wagner's Musical Politics
Abstract
The author analyzes Kafka's "Josephine die Sängerin" as an intertextual parody and subversion of Wagner's aesthetic ideology. To gauge the social and political portent of this tale, it must be viewed as an esoteric contribution to the peculiarly German dream of musical community. Kafka's version of this dream bears a special relation to Wagner's through the fact that, in both, the possibility of musical community stems from music's being rooted in nature qua Not (need, emergency) or Notwendigkeit (necessity). Kafka's parody contains a number of distortions and reversals, the ultimate point of which is to invert the sense of community as such. Whereas for Wagner the volkisch musical community is characterized by absolute selfsameness and self-immanence, Kafka's community is formed precisely through the rupture of self-immanence, or exposure to sheer exteriority. As a deathbed meditation on the act of artistic creation, Kafka's tale contains further implications for the historical significance, or social "relevance," of his life's work.
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Zusammenfassung
Kafkas Jose fine reflektiert die Problematik moderner Kunst auf drei Ebenen: im Spiel mit dem Mythos weiblicher Musikalität; anhand einer kritischen Analyse von Kunst und Macht; mit Hilfe einer ‘zeichentheoretischen’ Reflexion. Das Ergebnis ist ein radikales Konzept der Negation. Dieses wird im Vergleich mit René Magrittes Bild Ceci n’est pas une pipe erläutert.
On the night of September 22, 1912, Franz Kafka wrote his story "The Judgment," which came out of him "like a regular birth." This act of creation struck him as an unmistakable sign of his literary destiny. Thereafter, the search of many of his characters for the Law, for a home, for artistic fulfillment can be understood as a figure for Kafka's own search to reproduce the ecstasy of a single night. In Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, the preeminent American critic and translator of Franz Kafka traces the implications of Kafka's literary breakthrough. Kafka's first concern was not his responsibility to his culture but to his fate as literature, which he pursued by exploring "the limits of the human." At the same time, he kept his transcendental longings sober by noting--with incomparable irony--their virtual impossibility. At times Kafka's passion for personal transcendence as a writer entered into a torturous and witty conflict with his desire for another sort of transcendence, one driven by a modern Gnosticism. This struggle prompted him continually to scrutinize different kinds of mediation, such as confessional writing, the dream, the media, the idea of marriage, skepticism, asceticism, and the imitation of death. Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka concludes with a reconstruction and critique of the approaches to Kafka by such major critics as Adorno, Gilman, and Deleuze and Guattari.
Germans as the 'People of Music and especially Applegate's discussions of the most seminal event in the history of this movement, namely the revival of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in 1829. Applegate has recently expanded her article on this subject into a book
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Narrative depends on the ability to sustain dif-ferences, and as Josefine's experience illustrates—it is impossible to maintain difference among the mouse folk
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