NP - Deep Cat Shit

[David Morris]

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?021223crat_atlarge

The Cat in the Hat was a Cold War invention. His value as an analyst of the
psychology of his time, the late nineteen-fifties, is readily appreciated:
transgression and hypocrisy are the principal themes of his little story. But
he also stands in an intimate and paradoxical relation to national-security
policy. He was both its creature and its nemesis—the unraveller of the very
culture that produced him and that made him a star. This is less surprising
than it may seem. He was, after all, a cat.

Every reader of "The Cat in the Hat" will feel that the story revolves around a
piece of withheld information: what private demons or desires compelled this
mother to leave two young children at home all day, with the front door
unlocked, under the supervision of a fish? Terrible as the cat is, the woman is
lucky that her children do not fall prey to some more insidious intruder. The
mother's abandonment is the psychic wound for which the antics of the cat make
so useless a palliative. The children hate the cat. They take no joy in his
stupid pet tricks, and they resent his attempt to distract them from what they
really want to be doing, which is staring out the window for a sign of their
mother's return. Next to that consummation, a cake on a rake is a pretty feeble
entertainment.

This is the fish's continually iterated point, and the fish is not wrong. The
cat's pursuit of its peculiar idea of fun only cranks up the children's
anxiety. It raises our anxiety level as well, since it keeps us from doing what
we really want to be doing, which is accompanying the mother on her murderous
or erotic errand. Possibly the mother has engaged the cat herself, in order to
throw the burden of suspicion onto the children. "What did you do?" she asks
them when she returns home, knowing that the children cannot put the same
question to her without disclosing their own violation of domestic taboos. They
are each other's alibi. When you cheat, you lie.



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