Do canto e do silêncio das sereias: um ensaio à luz da teoria da narração de Walter Benjamin

Abstract

Of the sirens´ singing and silence. An essay under the light of Walter Benjamin´s theory of narration. The narrative issue is discussed under Walter Benjamin´s theory of narrative as its background reference, and the correlation between philosophy and literature it purports. The narrative issue is discussed from the episode wherein Ulisses meets the sirens, reported in the Odissey´s XII chant, and read here as a metaphoric enactment of epic narrative itself. Resorting to the interpretation which Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer formulate in the Dialectics of enlightenment for the Odissey and for the sirens singing episode, focalizing that interpretation ethical-political character, which recognizes in the epopee the narrative of another history of western rationality, where myth and reason imbricate within a dialectics of lights and shadows. Lastly, Franz Kafka´s narrative work is read under the light of Walter Benjamin´s problematic of narrative decline in modernity, and the constitution of new narrative forms in XX century literature, referring for such a purpose to the short narrative titled The silence of the sirens, in which that Czech writer recaptures the Homeric episode of Ulisses and the sirens in the form of a parody