Kafka's Mousetrap: The Fable of the Dying Voice

You're wrong to adopt a moral point of view. I adopt that of an animal. I am not a man among men. I am animal.

—Georges Bataille in conversation with Maurice Heine

We have made the louse in our image; let us see ourselves in his.

—Michel Serres, The Parasite

I. The Dying Voice

Sometimes fiction acts in a gently prophetic way and by a strange coincidence a writer awakes one morning to find himself taken at his word by reality, the literary dream having become a biographical actuality. This idea is not as strange as it first sounds, especially when one considers how Aristotle distinguishes the historian from the poet in the Poetics: "The difference," Aristotle writes, "is that one tells of what has happened, the other of the kinds of things that might happen" (2000: 68). Given that the poet speaks of "the kinds of things that might happen," there is no reason why fiction can't act predictively. The last story Franz Kafka wrote, "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," is a case in point, being poetic in just this sense of the term. It concerns a mouse called Josephine who believes herself to be gifted with the ability to sing and compose songs, but who really just cheeps like the rest of her folk and whose destiny it is to "be forgotten like all her brothers" (1979: 145). Kafka completed the piece in the spring of 1924—just before the terminal phase of his tuberculosis extinguished his voice and forced him to communicate with his friends by writing out short sentences on pieces of paper. The tragic coincidence did not escape Kafka's attention and the author remarked wryly to his friend Robert Klopstock that fiction seemed to be showing reality the way in this particular instance: "'I think I undertook my research into animal chirping at the right moment'" (qtd in Blanchot 264).

How should we take account of this astonishing remark in which autobiography mingles uncomfortably with autopsy? According to Kafka's gallows humor, his last piece of fiction tells the fable of the dying voice. In it, the fabulous animal mimics—or, if you like, ventriloquizes—the artist's own fatal descent into silence. Before being a story about art, "Josephine the Singer" is thus a story about the death of the artist—the real rather than the metaphorical death. But what entitles Kafka to give his dying voice to an animal—or to claim that he "undertook his research into animal chirping at the right moment"? In a word, it is the feeling that he will die like an animal. What is startling about Kafka's identification with Josephine is that it is self-deprecatory at the level of the species. Rather than seeing death as what elevates him as a human above the status of an animal, Kafka reiterates the anti-humanist sentiment of Ecclesiastes 3:19: "Man's fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal." There are two distinct parts to Kafka's comparison, both of which work to erase the distinctiveness of (the) human being. The first part is easy enough to understand: the loss of speech reduces Kafka to the level of an animal; human and animal—Kafka and Josephine—share the burden of speechlessness. The second part of the comparison is much harder to follow: the fact that Kafka continues to write after losing his voice changes nothing in the equation. The act of writing does not serve to elevate the human being above the animal; Kafka's literature, like Josephine's singing, remains an art of oblivion in the sense that it will not prevent him from being "forgotten like all [his] brothers."

Insofar as it evokes the real rather than the metaphorical death of the author, "Josephine" recalls a significant letter that Kafka wrote to Max Brod some two years before he died. In this July 5, 1922 letter, which forms a kind of...