Speaking of cats
T.S. Eliot's poem "The Naming of Cats," invoked in class today, can be found all over the Web, for example here.
We invoked it, of course, because of the cat in Gaiman's Coraline:
We invoked it, of course, because of the cat in Gaiman's Coraline:
The cat yawned slowly, carefully, revealing a mouth and tongue of astounding pinkness. "Cats don't have names," it said.And in discussing cats as guides -- however problematic they may be -- in fantasy fiction (Coraline, Link's "Catskin," Stephen King's Pet Sematary, etc.), we forgot to mention the most famous, and most problematic, of all:
"No?" said Coraline.
"No," said the cat. "Now, you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names."
"In THAT direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a Hatter: and in THAT direction," waving the other paw, "lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad."
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
posted by Andy Duncan at 4:54 PM
3 Comments:
At first I had the feeling that the cat would be a possible antagonist, but I guess that is the way I always feel about cats. Sometimes I turn out to be right, but in this case I was wrong. The cat was probably the most interesting character to me, though.
Psh, my cat talks.
She knows "Mom", "food," and, her personal favorite "No."
For some reason, I more envy dogs, with their sense of shear ignorance and bliss :-P
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