Mermaids becoming silent (or not)

Abstract

As part of a study of contemporary overhauls of the Odyssean myth, we propose to read Kafka’s short story “The Silence of the Sirens” in light of Walter Benjamin’s ideas about the impossibility of traditional narrative because of the degradation of experience. We point out that this story pulsates with the constituent elements of contemporaneity: certainties crumbling away, doubt rendered absolute, absence of reliable references that might structure us, the game of appearances to which reality has been reduced, the individual’s glacial loneliness. What is surprising is that Kafka anticipates by one century, and in an astonishing way, what has now become socially and politically de rigueur in 2020 Brazil: the age of post-truth, of fake news, of the staggering demoralization of politics, of lying as a strategy. We thus hope to show that if Walter Benjamin’s reflections help us to read Kafka’s tale, both Kafka and Benjamin help us to “read” our own time.