'Notlagen': Kafka's Intervention in Wagner's Musical Politics

摘要

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 self-sameness 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. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]