Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Complexity, especially cats

Based on the variety of ways in which they were discussed in the secondary source material we read for class today, cats seem to be particularly good to think with in terms of their complexity and many roles in medieval and early modern life. Cats, we learned, are good for gloves, though only for the cheap sort.[i] This actually surprised me a bit, if we make any assumption that value is attached to difficulty of procurement: as Arya in Game of Thrones learned a few seasons (or books) ago, cats can be rather difficult to catch, and they tend to put up a fight.  If we are convinced by Barbara Newmann’s argument in “The Catte’s Tale,” in spite of her fictional primary source with which she tricks us, cats were also pets and companions. Cats seem to serve as an emblem both for instinct and for the natural order of the world, wherein cats hunt mice.[ii] Conversely, rather outside that order, cats apparently have a fondness for playing the fiddle, an unnatural, non-instinctual activity, and they are associated with those ultimate inverters of order, witches.[iii] In fact, as is well-exemplified by Douglas Gray in his aptly titled “Notes on Some Medieval Mystical, Magical and Moral Cats,” cats seem to both have served many roles and stood for a huge array of things. They can be the devil or God, magical in the fairy sense or magical in the witch sense— as in, they might actually be witches, occasionally.[iv]
Given this wild variety of meanings possible for just one animal, as we discussed at some length today, it seems inaccurate to assume that, whenever an animal appears in any context, it likely holds a particular symbolism. How, then, might we interpret a potentially symbolic animal? Sara Lipton seems to have provided something of a solution to the problem of determining which among any number of symbolisms one might choose from in a given situation. Lipton examines cats in the context of a couple of medieval Christian texts, working out how these texts built an association between Jews, Christian heretics, and cats through images of heretics kissing cats beneath the tail in a heretical ceremony, then in the placement of cats alongside Jews. As Lipton describes, in one folio of the Latin manuscript, a “Jew holds a domestic cat,” and the fact that the other depictions of cats in the text are “so unusual and so graphic” leaves “no doubt” that the cat should be interpreted as a symbol for heresy,[v] at least in this instance— and that seems to be the important part. Here, the manuscript goes out of its way to make the symbol it intends clear, and the associated symbolism suits the context for which it is being used. Lipton’s reading, therefore, seems quite persuasive, while, as we discussed, Alexandra Cuffel’s broader, less nuanced argument that projected symbolisms beyond their context was arguably less so.
            As I pointed out at the end of class, our class discussion on complexity and my concluding argument for the importance of time and place can also be found in fairly famous historical debate between Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier, and it may be helpful to provide a bit more background on that here. Coincidentally (or perhaps not— maybe symbolic complexity is one of the occult qualities of cats?), this argument about symbolism happened to center on the symbolism of cats in Darnton’s analysis of a massacre of those creatures by a group of workers at a printing shop in France in the 18th century. In attempting to explain why a massacre of generally harmless, useful animals struck the workers as wildly funny, Darnton argues that this was because the cats were not just cats.There is something about cats, Darnton argues, an “ambiguous ontological position” that makes them, along with “pigs, dogs, and cassowaries,” particularly suited for use in ritual and taboo symbolism.[vi] Ultimately, in the cat massacre he is investigating, the massacre is funny because cats represented witchcraft, the occult, women, charivari, and cuckoldry: “Cats bore enormous symbolic weight in the folklore of France and that lore was rich, ancient, and widespread enough to have penetrated the printing shop.”[vii]
In return, Roger Chartier contends in his review of Darnton’s book,  rather than being universally shared and agreed upon signs, symbols are “unstable, mobile, equivocal.”[viii] A historian must pay extreme attention to context, and she likely should not assume that every meaning and understanding is in play all at once, as Darnton appears to do. Again, as we argued in class, it might be too easy to project symbols beyond their domains and see things where we shouldn’t, such as in assuming that every pig is meant to represent a religious group. As Professor Fulton Brown also emphasized, it is similarly important to not assume that every person is attaching the same symbolisms and, relatedly, holding the same prejudices.
Plus, assuming one symbolism can blind us to the symbolisms that are actually there, or a more complicated picture, perhaps one in which the lived reality of the animal plays a significant part. For example, in William Baldwin’s 1553 Beware the Cat, which Barbara Newmann mentions in her “The Catte’s Tale” article[ix] and which I am examining in my final project, cats appear as main characters in a satire about Catholicism, were often associated with Catholicism at the time, and at one point in the text, they are explicitly compared to both Catholics and witches. These seem to be the most obvious meanings behind the cat characters. However, the closing message of the text is that the reader should beware of cats, who live in households and have the capacity to spy on their masters. Cats, in this context, seem to also represent moral, state, or neighborly surveillance in an England that was increasingly concerned with such an issue in the 16th century, and this representation seems to rest in large part on their real capacity to enter and leave households, see clearly, and sneak about. I believe it would be a mistake, methodologically speaking, to allow dominant, agreed-upon symbolisms to dictate the way we automatically read an animal character. If we simply assume that cats represent heresy, or witchcraft, or Jews, what are we missing out on about possible reflections of real, lived interactions between people and animals? It seems to me, as well as to a number of animal studies scholars, that universally subsuming animals to their symbolism is doing them a disservice.[x]
Finally, thinking about the many symbolisms as well as the living animals behind those symbolisms raises a couple of questions for me about symbolic animals in general. As Darnton contends, cats are supposed to be some of the most richly symbolic animals out there. After all, the title of this section was of readings had “especially cats” at the end of it. Why is that, exactly? Is it, as Darnton contends, that they are liminal sorts of creatures, or is that they have a particular, as he describes it, “je ne sais quoi”?[xi] Is there something physically special about cats that makes them especially symbolic? Or is this even true? As we discussed in class, and as a couple of our readings mention, “Cats rarely appear in bestiaries, probably because they are absent from the Bile and thus void of allegorical auctoritas.[xii] For such an apparently symbolic animal, it is also striking that, as Lipton mentions, the cat does not appear as a common symbol in Gothic art, and generally in bestiaries, those “that do include a cat refer merely to its ability to see at night and to its skill at catching mice.”[xiii] Plus, in Chaucer, for example, cats appear— but they are just cats being cats. Very often, in fact, they seem to be just cats being cats, doing what cats are known to do best: hunting rodents and cleaning themselves.
Doves, on the other hand, as we saw, have about a million pages of symbolism explicitly attached to them in the authorities we have had a tendency to refer to for animal symbolism in this class: the bestiaries. However, we do not historically think of the dove, necessarily, as an especially symbolic animal. It is a symbolic animal like all of the other symbolic animals in the bestiaries. I think it is worth considering why this might be. Is it because, while the bestiaries drifted out of fashion around the seventeenth century, witch hunts and folk-tales, where we attach and find a lot of the cat symbolism, stuck around longer, especially in popular memory? Do we, as historians, think of cats as particularly symbolic anachronistically? Or is it a preference for popular symbolism that we are displaying? What, exactly, makes an animal lastingly symbolic, and can we assume that our preferences for them are shared? Does it have anything to do with the animal itself or more to do with us?
As a closing thought, this may simply have been a coincidental consequence of the selections of readings for the course, but I found it particularly interesting that our authors did not particularly link cats with women, except for an offhand remark that we found in Newmann’s piece: “This feminist passage is especially interesting because cats were so often used to vilify female sexuality.”[xiv] To again bring in Darnton, he insists that “Cats connoted fertility and female sexuality everywhere.”[xv] Why do we not see this in these readings, and what might we make of, among a number of listings of all the possible symbolisms of cats, this is not one of them? Apart from coincidence, my only idea is that Darnton’s focus was later in the early modern period, and perhaps the link with femininity developed more heavily later on. Symbols, after all, are not static.

SG



[i] Jones, 108.
[ii] Jones, 98, 104.
[iii] Jones, 99-101.
[iv] Gray, 189-191, 198.
[v] Lipton, 364.
[vi] Robert Darnton. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 89-90.
[vii] Darnton, 96.
[viii] Roger Chartier, “Text, Symbols, and Frenchness” The Journal of Modern History 57 (1985): 689-90.
[ix] Newmann, 418.
[x] See, for example, Susan Crane, Animal Encounters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
[xi] Darnton, 89.
[xii] Newmann, 414.
[xiii] Newmann, 364.
[xiv] Newmann, 415.
[xv] Darnton, 95.

5 comments:

  1. The debate between Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier that you talk about mirrors my own thoughts on the subject. Both you and Darnton notice that certain animals are just more useful for symbolism. Could it be that these animals are or appear to be more multi-faceted than other animals? The domestic pig, for instance, can be thought of to be fat and lazy. They don’t feed themselves, but lay in filth and profit off of human labor. However, pigs are also known to be gregarious and intelligent. Pigs that hunt and dig up truffles are insightful and productive. In your review of the literature, cats you note that cats are industrious and capable mouse-catchers, but are also devious and ornery. It’s not just the humans that are engaged in diverse activity, but the animals as well. The cat, pig, and dog may all simply be more diverse than the less symbolic animals.

    This is be where Chartier’s contextual argument comes into play. Each of these faces may emerge in response to cultural factors, or they may be present at the same time. Anti-Semitic pig imagery, embracing the fat and lazy pig face, and Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs, embracing the friendly, intelligent pig face, were made in the same year. Today, the fat and lazy pig is far more popular than the industrious pig of Charlotte’s web. A political cartoon featuring a friendly working pig would just be confusing, unless it deliberately invoked the Three Little Pigs. Of course, how and when these faces emerge or are discarded is an object for future study. The answer may have as much to do with how the animals have changed as how our relationship with them has changed.
    BKing

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  2. The debate between Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier that you talk about mirrors my own thoughts on the subject. Both you and Darnton notice that certain animals are just more useful for symbolism. Could it be that these animals are or appear to be more multi-faceted than other animals? The domestic pig, for instance, can be thought of to be fat and lazy. They don’t feed themselves, but lay in filth and profit off of human labor. However, pigs are also known to be gregarious and intelligent. Pigs that hunt and dig up truffles are insightful and productive. In your review of the literature, cats you note that cats are industrious and capable mouse-catchers, but are also devious and ornery. It’s not just the humans that are engaged in diverse activity, but the animals as well. The cat, pig, and dog may all simply be more diverse than the less symbolic animals.

    This is be where Chartier’s contextual argument comes into play. Each of these faces may emerge in response to cultural factors, or they may be present at the same time. Anti-Semitic pig imagery, embracing the fat and lazy pig face, and Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs, embracing the friendly, intelligent pig face, were made in the same year. Today, the fat and lazy pig is far more popular than the industrious pig of Charlotte’s web. A political cartoon featuring a friendly working pig would just be confusing, unless it deliberately invoked the Three Little Pigs. Of course, how and when these faces emerge or are discarded is an object for future study. The answer may have as much to do with how the animals have changed as how our relationship with them has changed.
    BKing

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  3. Re: BKing-
    I'm really glad you brought up another example with the pigs, since I think you may be right that their physical qualities and role have had an effect on their symbolism. The role of pigs in America is quite different today than it would have been in Europe in the Middle Ages, and, until my parents recently fostered a pet pig, I usually thought of them as the huge beasts, lying on the ground, that you see at the county fair, and, as you said, I agree that now an image of an industrious pig, unless explicitly linked to another traditional pig image, would not process as well.

    I also wanted to briefly add a thought that I forgot to include in my post, which is just a bit about Pangur Bán, the little white cat that lived and worked alongside the ninth century monk who wrote about him as something of a kindred spirit to his own scholarly endeavors. I am sure that one of our readings mentioned this poem, but I can't seem to find the reference anywhere. I believe it was just in passing. Anyway, it made me think that it might be something striking that cats are so often depicted in this role of mouse-catching. Gray already discusses this to some degree, arguing that the cat and mouse was something of a symbol for the order of the world. But it made me think of the elephant, always depicted fighting a dragon, and other bestiary entries with some equally fantastic quality emphasized over the visible ones, even in animals that lived in the every day life of Europeans. Maybe dogs hunting would be an exception, but I'm not sure we have a lot of basis for comparison. Can we think of any other animals that are so heavily defined by a single, real activity? Or perhaps I am just imagining this as special.
    SG

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  4. I looked through a bestiary to see if I could find any other animals that are so powerfully defined by a single, real behavior. You're certainly right that there aren't many—I only found three. There is the turtledove, which is rightly known for its strong fidelity to its mate. The wolf is known for its very real ravenous predation on domestic creatures, particularly sheep. The peacock is known for displaying its remarkable tail. Now that I think about it, the peacock may not be quite so good an example, since its modern symbolic meaning is vanity (fairly realistic), but the bestiary I read said that it symbolized "the Gentiles, coming from the ends of the earth to Christ, who adorns them with the grace and splendour of many virtues." Whatever that may be, it's not a description of the peacock's behavior. But the turtledove and the wolf, at least, have maintained strong symbolic meanings consonant with their actual behavior for centuries.

    If we compare turtledoves to cats, the cats still look special. Cats are to some extent defined by their mousing, but they also have associations with evil, heresy, and so on. Turtledoves, as far as I know, are only ever used to represent romantic fidelity. That's their one symbolic meaning—it's charming, but easily comprehended.

    Wolves are more complicated, at least, since they are wild animals that antagonize society but are still used in favorable comparisons. Witness, e.g., the number of names that include "wolf" and the frequency that wolves appear in heraldry. Can we consider wolves as complicated, in their particular manner, as cats? They're the only competitor I can come up with.

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  5. "What, exactly, makes an animal lastingly symbolic, and can we assume that our preferences for them are shared? Does it have anything to do with the animal itself or more to do with us?" This, it seems to me, is exactly the question! I am not myself quite sure how to answer it: on the one hand, I would say it has to do more with us (humans) and the way we project relationships onto animals, but on the other hand, I find myself in a somewhat Kipling mode: the animals take on certain symbolisms because of the way they behave with us, and that has to do as much with them as with us. The dog and the horse make their bargain with us differently than does the cat ("who walks by himself"). That is, the animals have some say in the relationships, including those whom we (humans) have been able to "domesticate" (see Jared Diamond on how difficult this actually is). Through our symbolism, we try to stabilize these animal choices, but the animals may always think differently--which pushes back against our "uses" of them, symbolic or otherwise. RLFB

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