T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats: O.P.’s Tabby-Case of Modernist Tongue-in-Cheek

Abstract

This article examines a number of puns and conceits that are the trademarks of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). The aim is to demonstrate how these “minor” poems, which have drawn little attention from critics, in fact question the very notions of “minor” and “major” with humour and irony. The poems notably challenge the moral and genre-related grounds on which a children’s story should be based, but also on which a major piece of literature is supposedly founded, notably in view of the literary canon—a critical concept which T.S. Eliot himself greatly contributed to defining. In the present case, the poems seem to belong to no specific literary genre or category of any type. They read like “syncretic” odd pieces, showing the funny intricacies of a mackerel tabby’s coat. The poems’ tongue-in-cheek humour looks and sounds like a cross between college humour and more biting irony towards remnants of Victorian Puritanism, or any ideological essentialism within the context of the 1930s. This type of humour also belongs to “wit,” often with a touch of nonsense to it, which T.S. Eliot, as an American possum in London, England, enjoys cultivating seriously, in order to adapt to the ways of some “Wonderland” to him: Bloomsbury, London—still the haunt and the hunting-ground of the great felines of modernism.