One Little Woman: Two Landladies

Introduction

There is a lot more to this little story than at first meets the eye. At first it seems like one of Kafka's least likeable stories. It is merely about a very difficult situation, someone's clear hostility, the subject-matter makes it uncomfortable. What the point of this slight story? Is there indeed, as Malcolm Pasley argues, no development in it? It is one of Kafka's least popular stories. What can we say of the circumstances of its writing?

The Burrow: Kafka's lie?

In the first place we need to look at the wider context. The three stories Kafka wrote at the end of his life are The Burrow, A Little Woman and Josephine The Singer. There is an unconscious assumption that Kafka wrote A Little Woman before The Burrow, but I take the view that The Burrow came first. It is difficult to establish the precise order of writing of some of the stories, or the dates of writing. The case of The Burrow is rendered particularly difficult if we decide not to believe Dora Dymant's claim that Kafka wrote the story in a single night. The Burrow consists of (in the Penguin version) some forty pages: The Judgement, which certainly was written in a single night, has only eleven. In addition The Burrow reads very slowly. This suggests to me that it must have been written slowly. You cannot go through it at a gallop. The opposite is true of The Judgement, which drives you forward with increasing speed. Further, I do not think that Kafka would have written more quickly in 1923 than in 1912. So it does look unlikely that Dora's claim is true.

In that case why does she say that? She has no conceivable reason for wanting to lie about it, there is nothing that she covers up by saying it. Kafka, then? Dora wrote of their relationship as follows: "The writing was at most unimportant. All that mattered was him and me." One associates Dora with a degree of possessiveness, in a good way I hasten to add. Her attitude to his writing would appear to lie somewhere between antipathy and indifference. It could be that Kafka was writing The Burrow over a period and concealing it from her, on the grounds that she might be hostile towards it. At the end, when she might have become mollified to the question of him writing, or when he is certain she will not object, he produces it like a conjuror out of his hat and insists that he wrote it in the night. He is so insistent that she believes this somewhat improbable story without thinking about it.

In that case, are we to conclude that Kafka lied to Dora? Kafka, who was incapable of lying? One curious passage in Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka has Kafka explaining that he does not tell lies because if one is to lie one must lie with passion, and he would not be able to muster the necessary passion. This is very typical Kafka, looking at the unethical purely from the point of view of feasibility. Janouch notes, a little cryptically until one considers the controversy that now rages over the reliability of his recollections, that this comment of Kafka's made a very deep impression on him. (Perhaps it is a tacit acknowledgement that he may have been making up some of the recollections to get himself through a tight spot.)

So could Kafka have found the necessary passion to lie to Dora? No doubt he had to, in order to conceal the implicit betrayal of writing and not telling her. I do not know. This is merely speculation. But it is consistent with what we know of both of them. I would observe that in spite of Milena's assertion that Kafka was incapable of lying, living, getting drunk etc., that he had perhaps more resources than she was willing to give him credit for (not out of malice but because she believed it to be true), and that in the last year of his life we see not only a happier Kafka but, at least spiritually, a stronger and more robust Kafka. The difference is that he has written The Castle. The Castle gives him a focus we have not seen before. Further, Dora was passionate, and this passion must have given Kafka the strength to be passionate also. We think of him in the last days in the sanatorium, saying to Robert Klopstock, "Kill me, or you are a murderer!"

So why might Dora's attitude towards his writing have ameliorated?

The Burrow and Kafka's writing

As a result of this it is quite possible that Kafka wrote The Burrow before he wrote A Little Woman. From the point of view of his own development it makes more sense if The Burrow was written first. The three stories, The Burrow, A Little Woman, Josephine The Singer, are like a progression. The Burrow is all about an underground animal of some description, and the burrow that this creature has built. In many ways it seems like a portrayal of Kafka himself. The Burrow is like Kafka's writing, indeed one might have the impression in reading the story that Kafka was using his writing deliberately as a basis for his description of the burrow.

The beginnings of the burrow for example. And the Castle Keep.

This is a new development. If Kafka is writing about his writing, and clearly enough that we can see this (Eleven Sons is supposed to consist of descriptions of the stories Kafka was working on at the time, although it is difficult to understand which story each son corresponds to), then even as he writes he is now standing back from his writing. In so far as it is about his writing, it is about his writing as a created object, with a creator. This implies that he is moving away from it. From one angle The Burrow can be seen as a self-portrait of Kafka in his writing, but in the context of the fact that there is a world outside his writing. He is no longer seeking to immerse himself completely in his art, as the trapeze artist was. He is aware that he cannot do this in any case. This awareness informs The Burrow. The creature is apprehensive of dangers outside the burrow, always looking around for enemies. Such enemies may not exist. We do not have to assume that the Beast exists. The Beast is ambiguous, and in the extant story may be no more than an interpretation of the evidence. (In Kafka's planned ending to the story the narrator meets the Beast and is defeated in a fight. This does not disprove my argument, which is based on the extant story as we have it, and its drift.)

What really makes the difference, apart from the fact that Kafka has written The Castle, is the presence of Dora, and it seems to me that The Burrow is a self-portrait as it were from her viewpoint. In the context of her he is paranoid and petty, concerned only with his meaningless burrow. Dora is present in The Burrow, at the back of it. In a way Kafka is using the story to say goodbye to his old life. The tone from the beginning treats of his accumulated writing as though it were complete. Of course it is not complete; the fact that he continues to write belies that thought.

A progression

The three stories form a progression. The Burrow is about the place where you live; A Little Woman is about problems in dealing with other people in the world outside; and Josephine The Singer is about living in a community. We can see progressions from other angles as well. In The Burrow we see paranoia about some vague threat; in A Little Woman actual hostility in another person is confronted; and in Josephine The Singer there is no longer a sense of paranoia, rather, there are dangers, but that is a part of life. It is as though in these three stories we see Kafka climbing out of his writing and adapting to the world outside.

Of the three A Little Woman is the turning point, in that there the implicit and deliberate hostility of other people, of which the burrow creature is afraid, is directly confronted.

Structural similarities

Before I go on to discuss it, however, there are structural similarities between the three stories which repay attention. In all three the premiss is not shocking but aesthetically relatively uninteresting: the story consists in how the situation carries on in the context of the premiss. Rather than have one event which comes to an end as the basis of the story, such as the harrow in In The Penal Colony, these stories are characterised by individual small events in the context of an unchanging premiss. In The Burrow the premiss is the burrow creature in his (or her) burrow. In A Little Woman it is the unrelenting hostility of the woman. In Josephine The Singer it is the fact that the characters are mice and also perhaps Josephine's singing.

But in the context of an unchanging premiss there is nevertheless change. Halfway through The Burrow the narrator begins to describe the scratching of small creatures, and three-quarters of the way through he first considers the existence of a Beast. His attitude of paranoia becomes more and more apparent. In this case the change does not mean that the premiss comes to an end: it is not change in terms of an event but in terms of what we know of the character. The burrow continues.

More decisive change can be seen at the end of A Little Woman, when the character has reached the point where he can put up a hand, as he puts it, against all the outbursts of the woman. In other words she can, somehow, be overcome. She is not the menace to him that she was in the beginning. But this is not something we immediately think of when we read the story. All we think of is how difficult is the predicament of the narrator. But by the end a change of some kind has clearly taken place. The woman is not going to be any different but the narrator's attitude is. Perhaps in merely describing what is going on he is able to get over it.

In Josephine The Singer we are told the situation. Every so often it appears that the situation has changed very slightly or is not what we originally assumed. For example, Josephine has disappeared. It may be that this has happened in the meantime, since the story began, or it may be that she had disappeared when the story started but we are only being told now. (Compare the writing of The Burrow.) Thus our picture of the situation alters. Again Josephine continues to be the people's singer, the premiss does not change. The ending of the story only looks forward to her death, it does not necessarily include her death.

The landladies

A Little Woman is based on one or two landladies Kafka and Dora knew when they were living together. These stories are all similar in terms of the way they develop.

As far as being based on a real event goes, it does not appear to have been developed very far. We are presented with the bare bones of the situation. No giant insects, no appalling instruments of torture, and no dancing penguins. It is not at first glance a very appealing story, and is often overlooked.

Malcolm Pasley in his analysis of Kafka's method of writing, divides Kafka's stories into two groups, those which developed in the act of writing and (he does mean the shorter pieces) simply being written down is inconsistent with Kafka's own view of his writing as set those which existed already as an idea and were simply written down. He includes A Little Woman among the latter. I am inclined to disagree: first because the idea of any of Kafka's stories out by Pasley; secondly because as we have seen already there is indeed development in A Little Woman, which clearly takes place during the writing of the story.

So why did Kafka write this story? It was obviously important to him to write it. The landlady (or landladies, but I shall speak as if only one were involved) clearly caused such agony for Kafka and Dora that he had to write the story in order to deal with it. Kafka does not generally write to such a specific purpose, although his writing does have a very strong cathartic side. In that case it would appear that Kafka wrote the story in order to deal with the aggravation caused by the landlady's hostility. Was it because it upset him so much that he had to write the story. I am sure that Kafka had had to deal with hostility in the past. He writes to Felice about the incomprehensible hostility one of her relatives bears towards him. So why A Little Woman?

The hostility no doubt arose from the her attitude to discrepancy in age between the two of them. In consequence it was directed at both of them and came about because of the relationship. So it affected the relationship. It makes much more sense that Kafka should have written the story in order to help the relationship. First, the relationship was now more important to him than his writing, for the first time in his life. Secondly it is typical of the new more outward direction in his life that we have already seen shown up by the late stories, that he should confront hostility in the world outside.

It is not for his own sake that he writes the story but for Dora's. Dora observed of him that "He would stand in food queues for hours, not with the intent of buying anything, but with the thought, blood was flowing, so his blood must flow too." But Kafka is very subtle about how he uses the writing. The purpose of the story is to strengthen the developing relationship between himself and Dora, and it works in the following way. Kafka does nothing so crass as attempt to depict the suffering the woman caused Dora; rather he tackles purely the suffering she causes him, as if it had nothing to do with Dora.

This is not selfishness. In the first place he has to tackle the extent to which he has been thrown off-course by it, as he is bound to be so thrown, simply to keep the balance. Secondly, if he did not acknowledge the extent to which he had been upset by it, any attempt on his part to address her distress would have been imposing his own upon hers, using hers as an excuse to give vent to his own feelings without admitting they were his own. Some people do this. Thirdly, this refusal to consider her in the story is the highest consideration he could show, as it demonstrates his belief that she can look after her own sorrows unaided. Fourthly, it gives her an example of somebody else overcoming the woman's influence. Finally, it sets her free of any obligation to worry about his feelings, which is perhaps the most important detail. Kafka need not have thought any of this out consciously, but as a reading it addresses the fact that Dora is left out of the story completely and is consistent with what else we know of Kafka. For example the fact that he bowed on first being introduced to Oskar Baum, whom he knew to be blind.

In this light, Dora might be better disposed towards the writing, which Kafka was now using to support and develop the relationship, and could be shown The Burrow. This is all of course speculation, but literary and historical analysis so often is, and a little imagination does not go amiss.

Set up 26 October 1998

Last updated 29 March 1999

© R. Millar 1998-1999