Voice and Community: An Interpretation of Kafka’s Short Story “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”

Abstract

This paper examines the meanings and formal techniques in Kafka’s final short story, Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk. The study first outlines the key features of the narrative instance in correspondence with crucial interpretations of Kafka’s zoopoetics (Benjamin, Deleuze) and in relation to Derridean concepts of the animal. Additionally, it presents the fundamental principles of the discourse produced by this narrative instance. Particular attention is given to the frequent self-corrective tendencies in expression and to the heterogeneous nature of the narrator, metaphorically speaking, in terms of the interplay between human and animal nature.
The analysis then moves toward examining the characteristics of the community that contextualizes Josephine’s performances, followed by the relationship between this community and Josephine herself, and finally, the attitude of the mouse folk toward Josephine’s whistling/singing. In addition to identifying the traits of the crowd, which emerges as a form of communality in contrast to Josephine, the study highlights certain features that exclude the mouse folk from the course of history: their lack of interest in communal memory and the absence of a progressive-rationalist consciousness. Ultimately, the community’s reductive understanding and ambivalent evaluation of Josephine’s performances – marked by enthusiasm in reception yet a lack of recognition – largely stem from the scarcity of symbolic practices among the mouse folk, who are ironically referred to as a „people“.
The following section of the paper establishes analogies between the mode of expression in Josephine the Singer and the narrative style of Tristram Shandy, as well as the discourse in Erasmus of Rotterdam’s In Praise of Folly. The narrator’s elusive meaning in Kafka’s text is thus paralleled with narrators who have not yet fully internalized a clear, anthropocentric division between the human and the non-human. Ultimately, the paper argues that the meanings of Kafka’s testamentary story open up toward a transformation of communal forms – moving from minimal symbolic practices of reality representation toward more complex civilizational modes of communal organization. In other words, Josephine the Singer evokes a process that precedes the clear separation between the human and the animal, a separation that underlies the logocentric, meaning-generating tradition of Western thought.