Дослідження ЛСГ “Cat” в поетичній збірці Т.С. Еліота “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”

Despite the fact that the amount of lexical indices is limited in a person's mind, the realization of meaning in expression can be considered unlimited. 
It might be also underlined that the communicative realization of any language unit functions is in their potential. These potential abilities are embodied in the communication first and then they become a part of language system.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part II. Analysis of Lexical-semantic Field of the Word Cat

 From ancient times people have been compared to animals, thus PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS is a well-structured metaphor. Following this view, the present research has been focused on two main aspects: Firstly, we basically deal with the straight meanings and the ways in which the field of the domestic animals was stratified in the formative centuries, while secondly we discuss how some of these terms are applied to human beings in a figurative sense to denote a quality shared by humans and animals or rather a characteristic which does not seem to be present in the animal, but it is attributed to it.

Varieties of domestic cats include: Abyssinian, Maltese, Persian, Himalayan, Kashmir, Siamese, Korat, Manx, Burmese, Sphynx, Angora, British blue, Russian blue, Maine coon, Scottish fold, Egyptian Mau; alley, tiger, tabby, calico, tortoiseshell, shorthair, longhair, wirehair, bobtail.

2.1.Main Features of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

Collected in 1939 as Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, these children’s poems for adults introduce a dozen or more cat personalities who secretly run well-regulated households -- or make a shambles of them, perform vanishing acts and high-wire entrechats, erupt into epiphanic transformations, reminisce about their several former lives, and meditate on their own ineffable names. In a whimsical reading for Decca records, Eliot himself once exploited the theatrical potential of these poems; but they so obviously call for more ambitious musical performance - given their inventive meters, choric refrains, and many ballad styles - that it is surprising no one has done it before [12, 137].

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats covers thirteen distinct characters and plot lines. Each character has his or her poem and is thoroughly discussed. There are also two poems dedicated to the naming and addressing of cats; these chapters do not introduce any characters, but serve as an opening and a closing to the work, thoroughly acquainting the reader with the behavior of cats. The cats range from very practical to highly impractical.

We begin with Jennyanydots, who is a typical cat. Her life is spent doing for others and she is very industrious. After Jennyanydots, however, we move to a different type of character. Although Growltiger is also a cat, he is not like Jennyanydots. He is gruff and feared, a menace to society. His reign of terror is due to end soon, as his enemies gather forces around him.

After the drama of the poem "Growltiger's Last Stand," we meet Rum Tum Tugger. He is labeled as a curious cat, a cat that is never happy. No matter what you do, you will never be able to please this cat. "The Song of the Jellicles" introduces the Jellicle Cats, who are a very rare breed. They are extremely impractical and spend their time preparing for a big event [19].

Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer provide some comic relief to the book as they go about destroying everything in their path. These two cats work together to perform the most heinous deeds, and it is almost impossible to tell who is responsible.

Old Deuteronomy is a practical cat who has it good and isn't going anywhere anytime soon. He is as old as the hills, some say even older, and as he comes to town, the entire population goes into paroxysms to please him. "The Awful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles" is an amusing adventure that features a cat only at the last. A horrible battle is averted just in time by the arrival of the Great Rumpuscat.

Mr. Mistoffelees is a cat that can do almost anything, but his is still very practical. Whether disappearing into thin air or appearing unexpectedly, Mistoffelees is sure to surprise everyone. Macavity: The Mystery Cat is a cat that would put The Godfather to shame. He has many secret agents under his employ, and his exploits are fabulous. One thing is certain: this is a cat that will never be caught in the act.

Gus: The Theater Cat works at the theater door. His career as an acting cat was extensive, but nothing will ever compare to the role of his lifetime, Firefrorefiddle, The Fiend of the Fell. Bustopher Jones: The Cat About Town is an amusing character. He does not hold a steady job, but has his plans all worked out. Regardless of what time it is, you can always find Bustopher getting a free meal. Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat is a cat much like Jennyanydots. He works for the railroad, taking care of the passengers. No matter what may arise, Skimbleshanks is on the job.

The book ends with Cat Morgan, who is a very likeable character. His youth was spent on illegal exploits, and his tales are exciting. However, he is now living out his days as a legitimate business cat, taking care of the door at Faber and Faber.

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats challenges the usefulness of accepted literary categories—genre, tone, theme—by its tendency to slip out from under their heavy-handed application [17, 71].

We would emphasize the word "practical" as the qualifier of "cats," asserting the indomitable pragmatism (in contrast to dogmatism) that distinguishes the concrete world of satire. Eliot’s own "Lines for an Old Man," in which he figuratively embraces the cat-like in himself, gives a more accurate sense of Old Possum’s tone than the mellowed love suggested by Elizabeth Sewell. Here he presents himself as a tiger, not ferocious and archetypal, but rather trapped and irritable. The satirist’s function as scourge involves, then, a complex attitude:

When I lay bare the tooth of wit

The hissing over the arched tongue

Is more affectionate than hate,

More bitter than the love of youth,

And inaccessible by the young.

In the opening poem, "The Naming of Cats," Old Possum’s tone is probably most "affectionate." He maintains a deferential manner towards -these secretive, superior creatures who know their own "deep and inscrutable singular" names and identities as we humans can hardly manage to do. All is honorific, but implicit in Old Possum’s deference is a warning against condescending to these felines or taking their activities lightly. It is rather like Pope with his sylphs and gnomes: they should be introduced with all due respect, approached delicately and with awe. But once we fully accept and thus enter their world, when we get down to tabulating their exploits, we find that this world can accommodate a range of responses, from wry appreciation to fear and outrage.

The following twelve cat-portraits, then, exploit a variety of satiric structures. As potential metaphor, the cat may in one case image a human type and in another evoke a perspective deliberately opposed to conventional human activity. For example, in the complementary portraits "Gus: the Theatre Cat," the has-been, and "Bustopher Jones: the Cat about Town," confident he will "last out" his time, the irony springs from the human characteristics reflected in the social behavior of the cats. Gus regales his clubmates "if someone else pays,! With anecdotes drawn from his palmiest days," while Bustopher, in "fastidious black, is so well-preserved because he’s observed! All his life a routine." The follies of Gus and Bustopher are taken for granted; these cats are secure in a one-dimensional world, qualified only gently by the eruption of puns in Gus’s portrait ("The gallery once gave him seven cat-calls") and by the catalogue of in-places in Bustopher’s, ironically implying the literal perspective: the cat-snob, an anal-obsessive, is dining on Pall Mall garbage [17, 73].

In "Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer," on the other hand, the satiric structure is more complicated. These notorious operators represent an elusive underworld defiantly antagonistic to human society, whose only response to each feline offensive is the helpless, "And there’s nothing at all to be done about that." Throughout the portrait, the human world is developed in alternate stanzas in unfavorable contrast to the attractive freedom of the cats. The second stanza, describing the small destructions wreaked on the house (an image with symbolic resonance in Eliot), culminates in a derisive reference to one of the girls’ "Woolworth pearls." The fourth stanza assembles the whole family primed for Sunday dinner, "With their minds up that they wouldn’t get thinner," and then sweeps "Argentine joint, potatoes and greens" - out from under their watering mouths with the cook’s implausible, "I’m afraid you must wait and have dinner tomorrow!" thanks to Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer. The final stanza further deflates the human values with an almost Popean thematic rhyme:

Or down from the library came a loud ping

From a vase which was commonly said to be Ming.

Thus, as Northrop Frye might say, the world in "Gus" and "Bustopher" is not "displaced," and beyond the literal level it functions as microcosm for a human society which is not seriously under attack. Old Possum’s tone echoes bemused acceptance, the implicit, prudent "Take note!" of low-norm satire. "Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer" presents a new satiric phase in which the conventional world is displaced, a way of life is established in opposition to it, and Old Possum’s function as scourge is bestowed on the new hero: the eiron as successful rogue, a descendant of Reynard the Fox, who ridicules conventional human society without setting up any positive standard. These two possibilities for satire are, in fact, implicit in Eliot’s summary "The Ad-dressing of Cats." In his Old Possum voice, simply pointing out an incorrigible but amusing world, he comments:

You have learned enough to see

That Cats are much like you and me

And other people whom we find

Possessed of various types of mind.

But as he proceeds to the addressing of cats, he himself slips into a ridiculous posture, playing up their inscrutable, unpredictable power:

I bow, and taking off my hat,

Ad-dress him in this form: O CAT!

He proffers little tokens of esteem, for a cat requires evidence of respect:

Some caviare, or Strassburg Pie,

Some potted grouse, or salmon paste.

Eliot’s shift between these two satiric phases creates a loose structure for the Book as a whole. To introduce his portraits, he appoints the do-good Gumbie; to conclude, he presents the well-organized Skimbleshanks, bolstered by the immediately preceding whimsical pair, Gus and Bustopher. In each, it is the analogy rather than the antithesis between feline and human behavior that is ultimately stressed; their world recalls the very world we accept and comfortably inhabit. The ineffectuality of Gumbie Cat’s projects for domestic organization is simply amusing, for her antagonists consist of harmless, though ill-mannered, cockroaches and mice. Convinced that there is no such thing as a bad household pest, she typifies the permissive, liberal mentality whose solution to "idle and wanton destroyment" by cockroaches is to shape them into a troop of boy scouts. In political contrast stands the last portrait of Skimbleshanks’ smoothly administered authority:

He established control by a regular patrol

And he’d know at once if anything occurred.

Although this benevolent dictator is doubtless a cat after Eliot’s own heart, his reassuring conservatism is not without its covert sting [16, 112]. The price of law and order is implied in the reductive perspective of the third stanza, in which humans are compared first to animals, as their Pullman berths become "little dens," then to primitive ignorants in a new-fangled world, and finally to prisoners. Old Possum describes the accommodations available on the Skimbleshanks express:

There is every sort of tight—you can make it dark or bright

There’s a handle that you turn to make a breeze.

There’s a funny little basin you’re supposed to wash your face in

And a crank to shut the window if you sneeze.

Then the guard looks in politely . . .

And we recall that Skimbleshanks doesn’t like hilarity and pranks.

These portraits of the milder low-norm satire buffer the affectionate framing addresses of Old Possum against the gallery of rogues that threaten with chaos the displaced world of the body of the Book. Gumbie’s microcosm lacks effective social controls; Skimbleshanks’ suffers from too many. Neither flaw is seriously dysfunctional. The central portraits of the Book, however, develop the theme of social control from another perspective. In these, we find Eliot exploring with a certain exuberance the forces of social disruption, uncontrollable, perhaps incorrigible.

Like the denial from the Marabar Caves, confusion and disaster in this displaced world stream from a central vacancy, the criminal par excellence, Macavity. Macavity draws on numerous associations and recollections, from Gay’s Macheath to James Whitcomb Riley’s goblins, from the oriental god of positive absence to the children’s Mr. Nobody. His defiance of "the Law" establishes in the end his non-presence as The Law, a sort of inexplicable inefficiency on the domestic scene, and then more ominously in the bureaucracies responsible for activity on national and international levels. Eliot’s tag-line for this phenomenon: "Macavity’s not there."

Eliot hints at an elaborate underworld drama unfolding around this vacant center. A more conventionally conspicuous predecessor, perhaps, Growltiger is overthrown early in the Book through the cooperation of the seductive Griddlebone, who is later disclosed as an agent of Macavity’s. Supporting the reign of the new criminal czar, dedicated to perpetrating disorder and distress in the human world, are the deliberate nuisance, Rum Tum Tugger, who likes nothing more than a "horrible muddle," Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, as well as the delightful Deuteronomy. This aged beast is elevated to the status of law by the villagers (an offense, perhaps, against the second law forbidding idolatry), but his "authority" means chaos and compromise in the daily activity of his human worshippers. A comic sidekick for Macavity is Mistoffelees, whose "character" gradually refutes the serious, diabolical evil suggested by his name. Like Macavity, he excels in "performing surprising illusions / And creating eccentric confusions," but his "singular magical powers" spring from the myopia of his human masters: "not long ago this phenomenal Cat / Produced seven kittens right out of a hat!" Miss Toffelees!

In the midst of this disrupted world, we discover two possible solutions to the problem of social control. Far beyond the low-norm extremes of the unrecognized do-too-good, Gumbie, and the not-so-benevolent dictator, Skimbleshanks, breathes the GREAT RUMPUSCAT. He is explicitly dissociated from the conventional means of authority, the police dog and the fire brigade. And we note that as he, the eiron, approaches the stature of divine avenger (he looks to the sky before he gives his great leap), the displaced world is reduced literally from the human to the canine. Thus absent for the first forty-odd lines of barking, he asserts in the last ten lines his spectacular presence and dissolves the scene into empty silence [18].

"The Song of the Jellicles" suggests another transcendental solution to the problem of social control. While the Great Rumpuscat restores order by the miracle, heroic or divine, of his appearance, the undifferentiated Jellicles evoke the perspective as well as the image of romanticized childhood, where order is natural and not yet lost. The Jellicles don’t see or make problems; they just live to dance. The syntax of their song is simple: a succession of declarative, repetitive statements in parallel. These cats are clear-cut and manageable: "black and white," "rather small," "not too big." They are pleasant and predictable: they "jump like a jumping.jack." If, as Elizabeth Sewell suggests, they provide a "clear image of heaven,"5 they and their verse are also rather simplistic and banal and offer a weak antidote to the company of fallen rogues that surrounds them.

Two possibilities for satire are balanced in Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats. The cats of the framing portraits mirror human foibles; their world, as a microcosm of human society, becomes the vehicle for its oblique presentation. The cats of the middle portraits, on the other hand, are inscrutable and unpredictable by human standards. Energetically perverse, they compose a sub-society of conspiring outsiders and provide a deflating perspective on the habitual lives of their alleged human masters. These rogues are the attractive nucleus of Eliot’s Book. Indeed, it is tempting to find his Book the receptacle not for all the "love and charity" excised from his serious work, but rather for all the mischief and muddle that could find no place in the ordered universe of a classicist, royalist, and Anglo Catholic.

 

2.2. Characteristics of Language of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

‘The Naming of Cats’

        Some of the traits of the average cat, all based round the concept of the ‘Naming’ of a cat:

‘The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,

It isn’t just one of your holiday games;

You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter

When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.’

        The different types of name portray the personality of a cat perfectly. There are three types of name. Firstly its name its given and uses daily, secondly, the fancier name which in essence must be more dignified, aloof a little bit like the personality of an individual cat. The third name is the name that the cat knows only itself, it is the name that makes it hold its tail up high, a name that the cat will never disclose. The poem itself is very light hearted and is an excellent introduction to the collection. It sets the tone for the remainder of the book & says that this is a book that is ‘delightful’ ‘witty’ but for everyone [17, 79].

‘The Old Gumbie Cat’

        Rather strangely named cat ‘Jennyanydots’. This poem is about a cats antics once all the ‘humans’ are in bed. These are not the antics of a normal cat however because they involves teaching mice music, crocheting and tatting! In addition ‘Jennyanydots’ makes them mouse-cake of bread and dried peas. The emphasis of this poem to me is about the mysterious, secretive antics of cats. It kind of answers the question ‘what do they get upto’, ‘where do they go’, it creates an illusion much like a fairy tale and would excite even the smallest child.

‘Growltigers Last Stand’

        Growltiger is a tale of a cat and his notoriety. He is the cat with the torn ear, baggy skin and shabby coat. A cat whom instantly has character. In this poem ‘Growltiger’ is described as a cat to be feared across the lands. The tale unfolds as a battle with ‘Growltiger walking the plank of a ship and meeting an untimely end! A wonderful poem once again that details a wonderful battle that will have many a reader whooping for joy & joining in the action. It is somewhat like the battle that ensues between pirate ships with an inevitable gory ending.

‘The Rum Tum Tugger’

Oh the contrary cat! A particular part of the poem highlights this all too well:

‘The Rum Tum Tugger is a terrible bore:

When you let him in, then he wants to be out;

He’s always on the wrong side of every door.’

        Most cat owners will spot numerous little mannerisms described in this poem that will have them nodding their head in agreement. It really highlights the general personality of cats perfectly;

‘For he will do

As he do do

And there’s no doing anything about it!’

The Song Of The Jellicles’

        This is quite a musical poem as the title implies. The rhythm of the poem is instantly evident and you can hear yourself reading along to the beating of a drum. Jellicle cats are described perfectly as the ‘black and white cats’. The poem centres around their dance to the ‘Jellicle Moon’. The imagery is wonderful once again. This poem also highlights another slant on the secret life of cats, but this time as a collective of cats rather than as individuals. In your mind you can see them doing their dance at the ‘Jellicle Ball’

‘Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer’

        These two strangely named cats are the original mischievous pair! They are tightrope walkers, join of meat stealers and cat burglars all in one. They are however also incredibly endearing and get away with many a crime. This is a poem that perfectly illustrates the way in which cats in general have the ability to get upto all manner of crimes but through the love of their owners are never castigated. This poem also reminds me fondly of the relationship between two of my cats and their ability at times to team up against us mere mortals! Hilarious poem from beginning to end.

‘Old Deuteronomy’

        This poem is a wonderful tale of a cat that we all must recognise. The cat that has lived out its nine lives and is happily living its day sunning itself with one eye on the world. It’s the cat we find in the same spot everyday or in our favourite shop. It’s the cat you see sitting peacefully in a window day after day, hardly moving. ‘Old Deuteronomy’ is the original ‘Saggy Old Cloth Cat’!

‘Of The Awful Battle Of The Pekes And The Pollicles’

        This poem is the cat version of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ it reads as a battle between two opposing families of cats the ‘Pekes’ and the ‘Pollicles’. The poem is a tale of a particular confrontation that is interrupted by the feared ‘Police Dog’.

‘Mr. Mistoffelees’

        This is a poem about a ‘Conjuring Cat’, it highlights perfectly the wonder that we have at the cats ability to perform, to walk the tightrope that is the garden fence and to sneak in past us as we walk from one room to another. It perfectly illustrates what we all fear to be true that cats are just far too clever for their own good! ‘Mr. Mistoffelees’ is the cat that defy’s us deceives us and generally out smarts us!

‘And we all say: OH!

Well I never!

Was there ever

A Cat so clever

As Magical Mr. Mistoffelees!’ 

‘Macavity: The Mystery Cat’

        This is probably the most popular and most well known poems within the collection. It is the one that most people remember. It details the antics and crimes of ‘Macavity’ who is the most elusive cat within the collection. He has the ability to be involved in all manner of wrong doings but forever evades capture. The poem is particularly delightful for children as it has a part that is repeated over and over again throughout the poem:

‘For when they reach the scene of crime – MACAVITY’S NOT THERE’

It is an interesting poem that delights more and more, it really does capture the sneaky side of a cats nature perfectly:

‘Macavity, Macavaity, there’s no one like Macavity,

There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.’

‘Gus: The Theatre Cat’