Love at a Distance: Kafka and the Sirens
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In the short story “The Silence of the Sirens,” Kafka rewrites the myth of how Odysseus escapes the sirens in his own unique style. I will argue that, far from being an idiosyncratic reading of Homer, Kafka’s text uses the rich history of the myth to explore an idea prevalent in the Austrian sexual psychology of his day: Distanzliebe, or love at a distance. With its origins in “courtly” love poetry of the Middle Ages, Distanzliebe plays upon the mutual exclusivity of idealised (male) love and proximity to its object. The idea is articulated most radically in Otto Weininger’s book Sex and Character, a text that voiced the underlying misogyny of the times in its attempt to solve the “Woman Question.” Love at a distance is a paradigm for both Kafka’s story and his relationships with women, though it also has a wider application. Kafka’s friend and executor, Max Brod, uses it as a metaphor for racial and cultural relations in the twentieth century. He sees the relationship as paradoxical, since: “where love is there can be no distance – and where there is distance, no love.” I will examine Kafka’s story as a metaphor through which the paradox and its implications may best be grasped.