Kafka’s Fairytale Princess – On Josephine the Singer & Living in the Woods

By GILDA GEIST

When I walk through Beebe Woods in Falmouth on a cool, misty and a-little-too-wet afternoon, it’s like stepping into a world of fairytales. I see a sapling with a little hollow. At the base of the hollow, polypores fan outward an inch or so. This is the balcony of a little apartment for a fairy, or maybe a mouse, I imagine.

If a mouse did live in that tree hollow, she might eat ramen from an acorn shell bowl. She might sing to herself as she cooks and cleans, and she might be called Josephine. They say that anyone who has not heard her does not know the power of song.

These woods are carpeted with moss that is soft and springy beneath my feet. A mouse might gather pieces to take back to her mouse apartment, which is in desperate need of a moss area rug to really bring the space together.

When you walk in these woods you’re almost always going uphill or down. Glacial recession created these peaks and valleys thousands of years ago. But there is one especially flat rock that is set back just a few inches from the path and provides the perfect stage. Luckily, no one has ever caught me dancing there.

Josephine has been caught singing there, of course, because she is the only mouse who seems to be able to truly move the Mouse Folk with music alone. Her microphone is the tiny, delicate white flower of a clover. The crowd goes wild.

Franz Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” does not have a happy ending. It’s about being a star and being forgotten. One moment the narrator is portraying Josephine as a great artist, and the next he is seeding doubt in our minds about whether she is even singing. To sing is one thing, but to pipe is another entirely, he says. 

“We all pipe, but of course no one dreams of making out that our piping is an art,” the Mouse Folk narrator says. “We pipe without thinking of it, indeed without noticing it, and there are even many among us who are quite unaware that piping is one of our characteristics.”

The narrator says Josephine’s stardom is “the real riddle that needs solving.” She seems to be piping just like any other mouse would, he argues. Yet, her performances at the stone stage draw crowds of Mouse Folk, eager to catch a glimpse of the famous Josephine. What makes her special?

The narrator later answers this question:

To comprehend her art it is necessary not only to hear but to see her. Even if hers were only our usual workaday piping, there is first of all this peculiarity to consider, that here is someone making a ceremonial performance out of doing the usual thing.

The narrator seems to forget, or not to understand, that making a ceremonial performance out of doing the usual thing is beautiful and often highly regarded as art. The Mouse Folk gather to hear Josephine tell true stories about themselves.

I can step into the woods and hear frogs wailing and birds whistling and I can see trees swaying and the sun peeking through the leaves. I can feel my feet fall one after the other on the moss-covered ground as I continue down the path. I smell wet earth and leaves. When you are somewhere beautiful that is rich with sensory stimuli, you can so easily make a ceremonial performance out of doing the usual things—walking, breathing, listening.

“Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” feels like a fairytale because it is about a little mouse who lives in a village with her fellow mice and sings. It stops feeling like a fairytale the moment the narrator’s contempt for Josephine creeps in. He cannot deny Josephine’s popularity, but he also can’t understand it. He seems jealous that her excessively ordinary piping is celebrated. He doesn’t realize that the first mouse to celebrate Josephine’s piping was Josephine herself. The other Mouse Folk simply followed her lead.

To read meaning into everyday activities is to make your life a fairytale. If Josephine can call herself a singer for her piping, I can call myself a woodland creature for walking in the woods. And I am a woodland creature, after all.

When I walk in these woods with my partner, we remind each other of what it was like to be children playing in the trees. Sticks are swords and the creek is a raging river. Those berries look perfect for making a mud pie. I try again and again to make a daisy chain, always abandoning the project when I’d felt I had wilted it beyond repair.

I love exploring these woods in search of a path my feet have not yet touched. Once I got lost doing this. In my search for home I came across a swing that hung invitingly in the breeze. Someone had nailed a plank between two trees and hung the wooden swing seat by two pieces of blue rope. In my hurry to find my way out before dark, I didn’t sit on the swing. I just took a picture and I never found it again.

Kafta would have loved standing on the rocky, forested hills of Beebe Woods, bracing himself against the biting wind and rain as he looked through the trees to Buzzards Bay. Or at least, that’s just my guess—I certainly don’t claim to know Kafka. I just know what it’s like to be an angst-ridden diaspora Jew basking in gloom and trying to write your way out of it.

Walking at night in Beebe Woods with a friend, I fight to make my voice heard against the endless chirping of nearby Frog Folk. They are surprisingly loud. Perhaps they’re singing backup for Josephine. Or maybe they’re cheering for her, or singing songs of their own.

Hidden among the trees are the woodland instruments of Highfield Hall. I play there as a child might, tapping and banging pipes and drums and chimes at random, eager to see what sound comes out.

But my partner, who is a musician, plays something beautiful on the outdoor pipe organ. Spiders in those pipes beware! My partner makes music so absentmindedly. They think nothing of it. They’re the opposite of Josephine in that way—instead of making the ordinary into art, they make art into the ordinary, infusing it into everyday life.