So full a year as this has not lacked for anniversaries: during the summer one such centenary did mark the death of Franz Kafka (aged not quite forty-one years, of tuberculosis, in an Austrian sanitarium). Accordingly, just before the next makes its debut, there remains a calendrical window for brief reflection upon his final text, published by the literary supplement of a Prague newspaper, in April 1924.* And, the world’s melodies being arranged as they are, such an opportunity is as though positively given for the seizing.
* The same day a slightly earlier text, “Eine kleine Frau,” appeared in another; only posthumously did his writings really begin to take wing, for better or for worse. Now, a century later, whether in translation or in the original, they are perhaps more revered than read.
Music and sound play large roles in the publication. “Josefine, die Sängerin” his text was entitled at first, while later, once the editors set to work (they of whom there has been no dearth in the century since), a subtitle emerged from the papers which he may not quite have wished to bequeath, and the piece now is known under this fuller title: “Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse.” Yet even in advance of such an amplification, readers could take the measure of the story’s theriomorphism and surmise what the idea was which had guided the author to choose that approach; for not only is she perceptibly akin to a mouse, but those to whom she sings, her own people, also embodies the likeness: behind the mutual rapport there looms a symmetrical aspect founded on one moment of sonority, some not inaudible feature expressive of bemusement on the part of the language itself, consequently a playful-serious hint given to be heard, in heeding which the keen auditor would decide to compose his last work around mousic.
Opting for the company of animals, always a hallmark of satirists and especially so once the major events of the twentieth century began to descend, may meet with a sense of recognition as 2024 finishes, the year in which, in one North American locale, not even two months ago the public’s outrage at the reign of abuses hailing from above was catalysed by one egregious instance of it all, where one state’s administrative apparatus, as though simply to show that it could, exercised its power to seize and kill a couple of private citizens’ half-domesticated house pets.* That those creatures fell victim to an authority become beastly without realising how by its aberrant act it would open itself to any number of reproaches running the gamut from the bite of satire to . . . ? – all that volatility suggests how extensive still are the fields where audacious theriomorphic manœuvres may be brought to bear by the skilled writer and esteemed by careful readers, against the powerful. If the points to be made are sharp, what can’t be said or sung under an animal guise?
* For a denunciation and analysis of this small-scale illustration of so much that had gone terribly wrong, see the Tweet by James Woods of November 3, 2024.
Underscoring some unspoken or latent distances, as protagonist animals may do when introduced if the literary setting is satiric in intent, also could help the writer skirt too direct a rendering of the physiognomy and indeed the physiology of the contemporary reality. Not every decent satirist can or would want to pin his prey to the wall in a Groszian fashion (much though the times might warrant such an excoriation), for then the great distaste would beset him of having to stare at things which once were not deformed but have made themselves so by separating their constituent parts one from another, virtually compelling each of them to contend against the rest, splitting up members which could not possibly exist apart and yet, under these grotesquely anti-natural conditions, do now appear to seek just that.
Den Eindruck, den ihre Hand auf mich macht, kann ich nur wiedergeben, wenn ich sage, daß ich noch keine Hand gesehen habe, bei der die einzelnen Finger derart scharf voneinander abgegrenzt wären wie bei der ihren; doch hat ihre Hand keineswegs irgendeine anatomische Merkwürdigkeit, es ist eine völlig normale Hand.
— “Eine kleine Frau”
Such an inkling of a human instrument nearly on the verge, in effect, of turning against itself and smashing its parts to bits, was manifest in the case of the “small woman,” whose hand the speaker could but barely bring himself to look at.
Pause just a little to consider that horrid sight! –
– Although, were the inclination not as terrible, the itching to tear itself into pieces would come to look a bit ridiculous, perhaps, in the instance of what are amongst the most indispensable of the human being’s own tools, the hands; and if so, then some questions might be put about the great attention he pays this one.
– Well, the original and, the speaker grants, not yet obliterated normality of hers, possibly may figure amongst the more disconcerting and repulsive of its attributes. On the other . . . – however, a sight like her hand can exert a morbid fascination of its own. It lingers on in order to malinger, just on this side of the threshold beyond which its functionality would be destroyed. Maintaining, upholding itself at that spot, it senses a kind of power if by its antics others’ eyes can be drawn to itself. Possibly, though a bodily organ, to some degree a condition mainly attributed to minds or souls, a sullen gathering of pleasure taken in ressentiment, has seized it.
– Gripped by an idea of its own making, this hand, presumably the stronger, more dextrous of the pair, seems to be one of those which can pull itself together, its fingers then indeed working each with the others to grab all they can, a typical mode of action where every item is quickly counted out in larger amounts. And by the same token, during its intervals of leisure, this hand’s fingers, more disjointed now in their dispositions, still manage to do their part when the time comes for reading. Or else to bang out the loud one-handed tunes of which the times are full.
– Full?
– Certainly: filled, not least because in its recreations too it comports itself as a “normal hand.” Hence this five-fingered thing symbolises, represents, stands for a great many others of its kind, and in the aggregate the sheer number of them (they have become legion) might be brought in to account for the missing keys and the neglected tuning of that unique instrument, the concert grand that was the world.
– Fanciful! It seems this word-image or an idée fixe has taken you in . . . Ach . . .
– Ah yes, the “idée fixe.” That notion was bound to come in, sooner or later. For, strangely enough, the topic of it is one of those his other last work circles around, though there the term itself is not used (perhaps for the sake of the humour in it).
– Hmmm. This has to be spelled out somewhat more, especially since that text is supposed to evince the mobility of satire, wholly or partially. And moreover, how would the singer herself ever regard the claim, were she somehow to hear of it?
Already more than a century before her singing, as she called it, or, more aptly for mice such as they, the word often used by her audience, whistling (Pfeifen) – here, whichever term one prefers, it may indeed seem curious (curieux) to surmise how sound’s intrusion in fact is tied to the movement of raising or straightening the head (l’intrusion du son se fait en connexion avec le mouvement de dresser ou redresser la tête)* – had ever been heard of, already long before, circa 1814, the rapid growth, sped up markedly with the revolutions a few decades earlier, of the institutions and the channels through which opinions circulated, formal or informal, high or low, large or small as they were, had brought one to speak without hesitation in the singular of “opinion” as a tremendous, nearly natural and necessary power that penetrates people’s minds like the air they breathe (elle pénétre dans les esprits avec l’air qu’on respire), an influx whereby numbers of individuals seem to concur spontaneously in some one opinion, which thus becomes the habitual sentiment, the fixed idea of everyone (elle devient le sentiment habituel, l’idée fixe de chacun).**
* Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka, ch. 1
** Benjamin Constant, De l’Esprit de conquête et de la usurpation, pt. ii, ch. xviii
Idées fixes, then, came to play vital roles in the course of political and social life, but this is no place to expound upon processes which appear by turns metabolic and dramatic; the salient point is only the great curiosity aroused by the operations whereby opinion, under this or that guise, actually did “flow into” someone’s mind. Suggestibility, become such a force in its various modes and degrees amidst the novel, nascent conditions, could hardly be avoided as a serious topic of reflection; persuasive accounts of the moments it comprised brought to bear a vocabulary borrowed from music. Thus was suggestibility identified as the counterpart of a power of soul that attacks the strings within ourselves, which otherwise did only rustle past one another, so that now they vibrate and resound, and we may clearly hear the pure chord they emit (die psychische Macht, die die Saiten in unserm Innern, welche sonst nur durch einander rauschten, anschlägt, daß sie vibriren und ertönen, und wir den reinen Akkord deutlich vernehmen). These analogies are provocative; yet what could it be which, when properly strummed from without, is awakened within anyone’s mind? Well, at times a soul’s silent dialogue with itself, thinking tout court, might take its start and become audible if one’s inner strings were deftly plucked; at others, however, and more to the point at issue, it was the clamorous voices of desire which this targeted intervention by external powers aimed to incite and arouse. To attain this end a developed finesse was also needed, and cognisance too of a particular kind, expertise in practical divination: its trickery would have to foster in someone’s mind the peculiarly retro-active belief that the voice which a very knowledgeable power outside ourselves appears to lead us to hearken to, actually hails from the recesses of ourselves and comes forth to speak words clearly meant for us (die Stimme, welche uns fremdes Wissen zuzuführen scheint, doch nur aus unserm eignen Innern kommt und sich in verständlichen Worten ausspricht).* All such operations would lend themselves to mystification; and so, to pull back the curtain, already in 1814 it seems prescient minds were beginning to fathom the anatomy and the usage of an ample arsenal of manipulative techniques soon to develop: the body of applied knowledge that is modern advertising. Perhaps it could only have taken on the dimensions it has, far in excess of the domain of marketplace transactions, once the power of opinion had built an empire; but suffice it to suggest that for it too the main vehicles are the idées fixes. These accumulate amongst its targets, as an immaterial kind of litter.
* E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Die Automate” (Zeitung für die elegante Welt (April 12, 1814))
Soon idées fixes began to ramify pathologically, while the term itself both spread and began to narrow in its reference. In a more specific sense it appeared in a German form (eine fixe Idee) in 1819, used for a delusion to which one character succumbed, to the perplexity and even shame of her family,* while in Paris the notion came to play a role in criminal proceedings, being adduced in an etiological fashion to account for violent monomanias, somewhat as an extenuation which could affect the verdict on those deemed insane; then very quickly artists and especially composers adopted and modified it, for instance under an indelible impression made by an overwhelming encounter at the theatre,** in order to characterise certain experiences they wished to embody in their works, at the behest of an inspiration appearing to them as something of an idée fixe.*** An artist’s seriousness could or even should approach the condition of obsession or other dominating states of mind, a difficult contest entered into for the sake of the work that would eventuate from it, with talent emerging ultimately victorious (in the more fortunate cases). Of course, at least in the capital, an element of posturing was quickly detected in those artists who consorted with mental maladies, and in one satire brought to the stage the protagonist makes an attempt at doing away with himself largely in order, one surmises, subsequently to bolster his artistic credibility by the mania which he said had overcome him: there’s only one excuse, one justification for it (je n’ai qu’une excuse..... une justification), he declared when asked about the matter: it was stronger than I am, it was an idée fixe, a monomania (c’était plus fort que moi..... c’était une idée fixe... une monomanie).****
* Hoffmann, Die Serapions-Brüder, vol. ii, sec. iii (the “ghost story”)
** Hector Berlioz, Mémoires, ch. xviii
*** Berlioz, Épisode de la vie d’un artiste, “Rêveries – passions”
**** Eugène Scribe and Paul Duport, Une Monomanie
Josefine had no monomania to boast of, but it does seem she was in the grip of an idée fixe. The singer desired nothing more nor less than to obtain the public’s recognition of her artistry, and for this she was prepared to strategise and struggle; but the audience would not engage, for in the whistling they discerned something which was perhaps even more than beauty or art. Namely, an acoustic invitation to the next chapter in an enduring history, the history in which new perfections were always found in the imperfections of an object practically indispensable, new imperfections in those perfections, and so on without end, yet nor with anything on the order of true boredom and its attendant dangers ever really setting in. Some perpetual status apart appears to constitute the sense inherent to this endeavour, and, during her times at least, as long as it is upheld with the degree of mobile freedom proper to the mice people (Volk der Mäuse), the mousic of her notes, so at variance with what generally is called “music,” nonetheless will hold instructive lessons in readiness for it; even if, whistled softly though they are, interpreting them or even overhearing them at all, remains a task for keen-eared translators whose ideas are still decidedly unfixed.
This centenary notice has addressed merely one or two of the struggles which the text of 1924 circles around; perhaps in the course of next year, now nearly upon us, there will be time to describe some of the others.