Whistling Lillabullero

Abstract: In a universe populated by singularities, is there room for accompaniment? Departing from Sam Weber’s discussion of Kafka’s story “Josefine the Songstress, or the People of Mice,” in which “whistling” figures at every turn against interpretive expectation and at every overturning of conventional accounts of sociability and representational discourse, this essay explores the ground and consequences of literary singularity in and for broader claims about collectivity and impermanence, vulnerability and separation. To do so, the essay recovers the traces of another “whistling” that, as Weber reveals in a recent interview, “has accompanied [him] throughout [his] life”: Uncle Toby’s “whistling Lullabullero,” which in Tristram Shandy meets any attempt to “pin things down” or extract general conclusions with the anti-performative and the absurd. Frustrating conventional divisions between voice, speech and discourse, Josefine’s “fricative” whistling exposes the conventions of sociability as “situationally relative” and unable to fully erase their alternatives. Coyly attuning the interpretive process to the force of ambiguity, Toby’s whistling musters another thinking altogether on the situational and the social, one that unsettles the settled for the sake of the ungrounded and keeps language and code alike constantly open to revision.