Japanuary II: CAT

I've written about the relationship between cats and language elsewhere, arguing, somewhat diffusely, that something about the cat-function (passively refusing to let yourself be understood as active by actively understanding yourself as passive) is – from and for a human perspective – most comprehensible through a linguistic notion: "I take myself as passive" is grammatically active, "I am taken as active" is grammatically passive; the former, although it circles around passivity, holds a much stronger agency for the I in question.

Again housed together with cats, I am also reminded of author's predilection to adopt the viewpoint of a/their cat. To Germanophone readers, E.T.A. Hoffmann's Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr (first volume published 1819, second 1821) will immediately come to mind, but among many more, we might also think of Karel Čapek's short and succinct From the Point of View of a Cat (I can, unfortunately, neither find nor remember the original Czech title) from 1935, and, especially in Japan, of Natsume Sōseki's I am a Cat (jap. 吾輩は猫である), published in instalments from 1905 through 1906.

Apart from the feline viewpoint, all three texts have in common that they feature a slant portrait of their author: Composer Johannes Kreisler from Lebens-Ansichten bears Hoffmann's own pseudonyme, Čapek's cat is obviously living with a writer, and Sōseki's novel features a double portrait: Kushami Chinno, breadwinner of the household, high-school English teacher, and helpless neurotic, shares these qualities with Sōseki himself; some scholars argue that Chinno's colleague friend Meitei, an irritating, arrogant, and self-absorbed man, is also a portrait of Sōseki's.

Now, virtually all writers like to talk about themselves if there's the chance (see also Ida Lødemel Tvedt's discussion of omphaloskepsis in The Mariana Trench, 2019), and pretending that other people, or, even better, other beings, care, adds to the fun.

There might thus be a genuine component of self-importance involved in all three texts: Even when the writerly (or artistic, for Kreisler is a musician) endeavors are slightly diminished or even ridiculed through feline eyes with their quite different set of priorities – an affect and effect revisited in Derrida's L'animal que donc je suis, where the eye of the cat cannot but see and recognize and realize human 'nakedness' near-devoid of pretension – the feline eye also recognizes and realizes the existence of both the human and a trace of its activity. It does not represent 'blind nature' or 'empty cosmos' (whatever these things might be); it does not even represent inhuman disinterest. It registers and recognizes. Quoth Sōseki's Cat (translated into English): "As yet I have no name. I’ve no idea where I was born. All I remember is that I was miaowing in a dampish dark place when, for the first time, I saw a human being." Or, more condensed, quoth Murr: "O das Sehen!". Human activity, even when producing something potentially inaccessible to cat intelligence – human writing – is modelled as important enough to be registered by the other. Important enough, maybe, to cause or at least influence the feline other's readiness to call the human 'master' (we are now entering territory where 'recognition', Anerkennung, begins to sprout Hegelian feathers). Quoth Čapek's cat: "In his paws [my master] carries a sharp black claw and he scratches with it on white sheets of paper".

Now, this aspect of implicit self-importance (my cat notices me and my activity), underlying explicit modesty or even self-debasement (my cat thinks me and my activity laughable), rather precisely inverts the relationship within the literary voice – that of the cat – within the texts: Here, an explicit self-importance and self-aggrandizing (condensed in the bombastic first person pronoun wagahai used by Sōseki's narrator to refer to himself; unfolded in Murr's boundless cultural and artistic ambition and confidence) is accompanied by an implicit deflation: they're a cat.

Is this motivic chiasmus – implicit importance and explicit ridicule on the part of the human character, explicit importance and implicit ridicule on the part of the cat character – related to the chiasmus of the cat function (active passivity vs. passive activity)? Maybe, but this relationship would be difficult to describe.

On first (and second, and third) sight, these literary grasps of the cat seem like a way of 'taking them as active' – as actively self-aggrandizing, actively aiming to become human Bürgers (in Hoffmann), or behaving as quasi-daimyōs of a domestic realm (in Sōseki); at least as active registration systems of human activity (in Čapek). In the first two cases, this activity also make them co-butts of the joke, and thus a complicated mirror of the human: Kreisler is as much a joke as is Murr; Chinno is as much a joke as his cat. Both intermingle importance and ridiculousness to equal degrees, both should not and cannot be taken very seriously; but the intermingling is, as described above, inverted – they truly mirror.

It is thus almost 'only logical' that Gottfried Keller, when he riffs on the motif of the cat-narrator in a somewhat different way, would call his protagonist Spiegel (German for 'mirror'; the novella in question is Spiegel, das Kätzchen, the final text in the collection Die Leute von Seldwyla, published 1856). I say "in a somewhat different way", because Keller uses the cat protagonist differently and, perhaps and arguably, to another end.

First of all, the important 'artist' in Keller's text is, unlike Keller's, Sōseki's, and Čapek's, not the narrator. As usual, Keller favors an auctorial third-person viewpoint that allows his novellas to play with the genres of the fairytale and the récit (both usually featuring a third-person voice that sets in like a somersault from nowhere). The only 'artist' of relevance in Spiegel is Pineiß, the witch-master ("Hexenmeister"); but at least, he is the 'master' of the cat, too – just like the artist-figure is the 'master' of Murr, and of the nameless cats in Sōseki and Capek. Pineiß, too, becomes the laughing stock of the story, just like the other artist-figures. Yet whereas Hoffmann, Sōseki and Čapek model the artist-figures after themselves – and take care to provide the paratexts that make it clear their cat-narrators are fashioned after their really existing, 'own' cats (Hoffman owned a cat named Murr and published an obituary notice after its death; Sōseki stated that 'his' cat was modelled after a stray he had adopted, the death of which he commemorated in an essay collection) – scholarship agrees that it is Spiegel the cat that is intended to mirror Keller. Spiegel, hard working but not too hard working, clever, reasonable, and modest, wielding a power of imagination and rhetoric, becomes the stand-in for the author; Pineiß on the other hand, greedy and small-minded, is the stand-in for the publisher. Perhaps in consequence, Spiegel is the only cat among this feline quartet that celebrates an actual 'triumph' in the end, with Pineiß clearly bearing the brunt of the ridicule and the cat coming out safely.

I talk about Keller's text because, although it is not actually the sort of cat-text that interests me here (having no cat narrator, but only a cat protagonist), it sheds one very bright light: onto the role of labour in all of these texts. In Keller, this aspect stands front and center: not only is the relationship between cat and witch master meant to satirize a work relationship (between author and publisher), but the initial description of both characters focuses primarily on how they spend their time. Between the two, Spiegel remains outside of waged work, but seems to have adopted some sort of feline Taylorism. Everything Spiegel does follows a neat organization – an economy – of modesty, precision, and balance.:

[Spiegels] einzige Leidenschaft war die Jagd, welche es jedoch mit Vernunft und Mäßigung befriedigte, ohne sich durch den Umstand, daß diese Leidenschaft zugleich einen nützlichen Zweck hatte und seiner Herrin wohlgefiel, beschönigen zu wollen und allzusehr zur Grausamkeit hinreißen zu lassen. Es fing und tötete daher nur die zudringlichsten und frechsten Mäuse, welche sich in einem gewissen Umkreise des Hauses betreten ließen, aber diese dann mit zuverlässiger Geschicklichkeit; nur selten verfolgte es eine besonders pfiffige Maus, welche seinen Zorn gereizt hatte, über diesen Umkreis hinaus und erbat sich in diesem Falle mit vieler Höflichkeit von den Herren Nachbaren die Erlaubnis, in ihren Häusern ein wenig mausen zu dürfen, was ihm gerne gewährt wurde, da es die Milchtöpfe stehen ließ, nicht an die Schinken hinaufsprang, welche etwa an den Wänden hingen, sondern seinem Geschäfte still und aufmerksam oblag und, nachdem es dieses verrichtet, sich mit dem Mäuslein im Maule anständig entfernte.

Witch master Pineiß, on the other hand, is something of a jack of all trades ("ein Kann-Alles", in Keller's words), who does a bit of everything, but really everything, from care work to maintenance work, from trade to surveillance, from weather-forecasting to weather-making:

Herr Pineiß war ein Kann-Alles, welcher hundert Ämtchen versah, Leute kurierte, Wanzen vertilgte, Zähne auszog und Geld auf Zinsen lieh; er war der Vormünder aller Waisen und Witwen, schnitt in seinen Mußestunden Federn, das Dutzend für einen Pfennig, und machte schöne schwarze Dinte; er handelte mit Ingwer und Pfeffer, mit Wagenschmiere und Rosoli, mit Häftlein und Schuhnägeln, er renovierte die Turmuhr und machte jährlich den Kalender mit der Witterung, den Bauernregeln und dem Aderlaßmännchen; er verrichtete zehntausend rechtliche Dinge am hellen Tag um mäßigen Lohn und einige unrechtliche nur in der Finsternis und aus Privatleidenschaft, oder hing auch den rechtlichen, ehe er sie aus seiner Hand entließ, schnell noch ein unrechtliches Schwänzchen an, so klein wie die Schwänzchen der jungen Frösche, gleichsam nur der Possierlichkeit wegen. Überdies machte er das Wetter in schwierigen Zeiten, überwachte mit seiner Kunst die Hexen, und wenn sie reif waren, ließ er sie verbrennen; für sich trieb er die Hexerei nur als wissenschaftlichen Versuch und zum Hausgebrauch, so wie er auch die Stadtgesetze, die er redigierte und ins reine schrieb, unter der Hand probierte und verdrehte, um ihre Dauerhaftigkeit zu ergründen.

In his daily (and nocturnal) work, too, there is a heavy component of order, even though it looks chaotic: he does the legal stuff by day, the illegal by night; he apparently only makes the weather when times are bad (and not by default); he controls and somehow 'cultivates' witches and burns them when they're ripe (whatever that is meant to mean); and his own witchcraft, in turn, remains scientific ("als wissenschaftlichen Versuch") and domestic ("zum Hausgebrauch").

His interest in Spiegel is eonomic, too; he is hoping to be able to fatten the cat in order to harvest its "Schmer", that is, its fat. The novella is then mainly concerned with how Spiegel manages to stay with Pineiß and profit from his feeding while not getting fat enough for Pineiß to slaughter him (again, an economy). Limited hilarity ensues, some of it pretty misogynistic, Pineiß will fail completely and be punished for it, but this is now going beyond what interests me. What does interest me is merely this front-and-center-position of labor organization and a labor relationship. (This joke, by the way, was received and interpreted pretty variedly; Richard Wagner, for example, would once playfully address Gottfried Keller as "Stadthexenmeister von Hottingen" – Town Witch-Master of Hottingen – apparently seeing a lot more of Keller in Pineiß [and maybe at lot less of him in Spiegel] than Keller might have liked.)

Let's return to the cat narrators. Murr is notoriously occupied with intellectual work, as Murr imagines it to be the core of what humans consider the trajectory of Bildung, a trajectory he is willing to go and, so to speak, surpass. The activity of Meister Abraham – he, too, associated with witchcraft, a notion that surrounds his study with a mythical surplus – is less an enigma than a puzzle to Murr: something to solve. The passages in which he learns to read and write belong to the most frequently commented in the book and I am not sure it would make a lot of sense to describe them in detail here; they seem to me to be primarily interesting to people who are fascinated by questions of (different) media and the senses. I do not belong to those people. In brief: Murr learns to read by comparing what Meister Abraham says (or mumbles) with what Meister Abraham (and Murr) sees on the page at the same time; then learns to write, again through something like slant mirroring – he realizes that writing has to do with smearing ink in shapes onto a page, but he has to adopt a different style (pun intended) of holding the pen. Having thus 'solved the riddle' of writing, he proceeds to immediately push out a logorrhoic amount of literary works. "O das Sehen": This proclamation of Murr's could almost be translated into "O the possibility of learning!"

Sōseki's cat, on the other hand, is a lot less interested in emulating any sort of human activity (except in the authorative stance of an Edo period elder statesman he harbors within his rhetorical performance). Murr is drawn to and through humanite study by his conviction to be a genius, and the study thus to be determined to succeed. Sōseki's cat witnesses human activity, but has no interest in imitating it, a consequence of their conviction to be a dignified other with another dignity. It soon appears that this "different dignity" they wish to claim for themselves is intricately tied in with their grand rhetorical posture. Quoth the cat:

Incidentally, I would like to take the occasion of this incident to advise my readers that the human habit of referring to me in a scornful tone of voice as some mere trifling “cat” is an extremely bad one. Humans appear to think that cows and horses are constructed fromrejected human material, and that cats are constructed from cow pats and horse dung. Such thoughts, objectively regarded, are in very poor taste though they are no doubt not uncommon among teachers who, ignorant even of their ignorance, remain self-satisfied with their quaint puffed-up ideas of their own unreal importance. [...] Despite the fact of such obvious differentiation, humans, their eyes turned up to heaven by reason of the elevation of their minds or some such other rubbish, fail to notice even obvious differences in our external features, that our characters might be characteristic is beyond their comprehension. Which is to be pitied. I understand and endorse the thought behind such sayings as, the cobbler should stick to his last, that birds of a feather flock together, that rice-cakes are for rice-cake makers. For cats, indeed, are for cats. And should you wish to learn about cats, only a cat can tell you. Humans, however advanced, can tell you nothing on this subject."

This cat, however, is very convinced that they can tell you a lot about humans (that, again, is part of their unquestioned self-assurance that remains partly humorous throughout). And what they can tell you is that most of what humans consider study is simply not worth imitating. It is not that the cat perceives human activity as 'worthless', but seeing how little it helps them and how lonely they remain, it would be naive to try and imitate it:

My master ate his dinner and went off into his study. His wife, feeling the autumn chill, tightens her collar, settles over her sewing box, and gets on with her remodeling of a worn-out kimono. The children, lying in one row, are fast asleep. The maid has gone out to a bathhouse. If one tapped the deep bottom of the hearts of these seemingly lighthearted people, it would give a somewhat sad sound.

Why follow a path that leads to this? To this cat, human activity remains an enigma as much as cats who try and follow human example remain puzzling. Quoth this cat: "I was recently much surprised to meet another cat, some German mog called Kater Murr, who suddenly turned up and started sounding off in a very high-falutin’ manner".

Two concepts are crucial to this in the sense that they turn up again and again in the cat's description: the concept of 'the master' and, again and still, the concept of work. Unlike Murr, Sōseki's cat is far from any ambition to imitate the work of their master (who is here, too, an intellectual); unlike Spiegel, they are in no confrontation with it (and have to fear no danger arising from it). They seem to take themselves as passive, and happily so.

My master seldom comes face-to-face with me. I hear he is a schoolteacher. As soon as he comes home from school, he shuts himself up in the study for the rest of the day; and he seldom emerges. The others in the house think that he is terribly hard-working. He himself pretends to be hard-working. But actually he works less hard than any of them think.

Hard-working is a mere screen; a social convention, maybe, but certainly a mutually shared pretension of this particular household. This is a typical observation of Sōseki's cat, dismantling, as it does, the human's preferred semblances. But it is equally typical that this is no negative judgment on the part of the cat. The fact that the schoolteacher does not really work hard is a good thing. Quoth the cat: "If you are born a human, it’s best to become a teacher." This is pretty far away from Murr's intense and intensely burgeois aspiration and studiousness. This master's activity does not lead to a profoundly happy life, but at least it allows him to sleep for a lot of time – that's something, the cat's argument runs.

As mentioned, this argument is made from a point of detached felinity, grammatically – although this is mostly lost in the English translation – marked as lordly. The latter aspect is important, because if some of the cat's viewpoints combined with its detachedness could render the cat close to a late-19th-century dandy, their linguistic performance put them closer to a feudal authority, in which a rhetoric of superiority, of detachment, and of war, are intertwined:

Miss Blanche [...] assured me that, to maintain our own parental love and to enjoy our beautiful family life, we, the cat-race, must engage in total war upon all humans. We have no choice but to exterminate them. I think it is a very reasonable proposition.

The presence and performance of such a domestic neko-daimyō bears impact on another concept: that of the master. Obviously, some sort of arrangement must be made for two lordly claims – both linguistically condensed, in the opening wagahai used and in the title master readily conceded by the cat – to coexist. Here, the aforementioned explicit ridicule of human activity and self-assurance comes into play. The master of the house (Sōseki's self-portrait) commands his servants around with ease, we might assume that he holds a similar authority in his function as schoolteacher, but through the eyes of the cat, he is diminished to a yellowish drooling creature:

Occasionally his mouth is drooling onto some book he has begun to read. He has a weak stomach and his skin is of a pale yellowish color, inelastic and lacking in vitality. Nevertheless he is an enormous gormandiser. After eating a great deal, he takes some taka-diastase for his stomach and, after that, he opens a book. When he has read a few pages, he becomes sleepy. He drools onto the book.

The master is neither an object of respect nor of great fondness:

Resigned, I try to spend as much of my time as possible with the master, the man who had taken me in. In the morning, while he reads the newspaper, I jump to curl up on his knees. Throughout his afternoon siesta, I sit upon his back. This is not because I have any particular fondness for the master, but because I have no other choice.

And:

First you must understand that this master of mine lacks the talent to be more than average at anything at all; but nonetheless he can’t refrain from trying his hand at everything and anything.

The 'other dignity' Sōseki's cat claims for themselves thus comes at an expense of the dignity of the human, insofar as and as long as 'the human' derives its dignity from a sense of superiority (what Sōseki's cat terms "selfishness") over other humans or over other non-human animals, such as cats. This sense of superiority finds its source and expression in moments such as random cruelty against animals ("When the fancy takes them, they hang me upside-down, they stuff my face into a paper-bag, they fling me about, they ram me into the kitchen range"), ignorance against feline epistemology, conversation with the ambition to 'make oneself look good/clever/well-read', social powerplay, and, of course, the pretense of "hard-working". All of this, the cat realizes, features a type of split; between pretension and reality, aspiration and speciality. According to the cat, this split is exemplified best by the human practice of keeping a diary. If the diary is an instrument to "maintain[ one's] real character", then that means that what one presents to the outside world, within the social reality, is a hindrance to that real character; it means that how a given human acts and presents is at odds with what it wants or knows to be. "No doubt human beings like my two-faced master", the cat argues, "find it necessary to keep diaries in order to display in a darkened room that true character so assiduously hidden from the world." In contrast, cats "live [their] diaries". This split is the source of the master's ridiculousness – his pretension to mastership is at odds with what he knows to be true about himself, and works only to gloss over and aggravate his own suffering and that of others (the sadness you would hear when tapping the deep bottom of their hearts). "It is, moreover, idiotic that, while [the master] fills his diary with lamentation over his stomach troubles, he does his best to present a brave face to the world; to grin and bear it."

Witch-Master Pineiß was an actual enemy, Master Abraham a teacher and Kreisler a gifted artist (if an absentminded and slightly preposterous one); Master Chinno, is a somewhat pitiful and self-deluded character. But then, of course, the point of I am a Cat is that the cat narrator, too, features just such a split, and is equally prone to self-delusion: This split is, just as with Murr, the split between the lordly aloofness (with Murr: the bourgeois ambition) of the cat and the fact that it is, well, a cat – that is, that its social, if not material, reality as shaped by human beings essentially excludes it from just the sort of positions it rhetorically assumes. The pompous pronoun this cat uses for themselves betrays a pretension to mastership similar to that of Master Chinno. Both punch above their weight, both know that they do but are scarcely ready to admit it, both fail to alleviate the sadness of those around them (the cat never actually gets to truly help any of the other feline characters; they never actually support Miss Blanche's revolutionary ambitions – they just deem it "reasonable", from the heights of their self-ascribed throne). Master Chinno keeps a diary, but what else are we supposed to read the text I am a Cat as, if not as a sort of report by a cat? And is this report not symptom of a similar split?

Here, we are at the heart of the inversion I described further above. Master Chinno is explicitly made fun of, but the formulation of his lampooning entails an implict send-up of the one who satirizes him: the cat. In turn, the cat-narrator explicitly champions themselves, but this championing is a game won, as it were, on the field of the master: I am a Cat is narrated by the cat, but it predominantly circles around the activities of the master. Although the activities of this master are no longer portrayed as something inherently valuable and worthy of imitation across species boundaries, they remain in focus, they remain the 'object' of feline study. As if to accentuate this, the cat's imagination is filled to the brim with human paradigms: the cat easily marshals Balzac, Confucius, and Nietzsche, to make their point – and although we do not know (unlike with Murr) how the cat acquired all of that knowledge, I think we still must concede that this is a very human pantheon. It is a cat's eye that watches human activity, but it judges by the standards of human thought. Maybe this is an upshot of the cat's tenet that "should you wish to learn about cats, only a cat can tell you" – maybe this means that should you wish to learn about humans, only a human [say, Nietzsche or Confucius] can tell you. But if only humans can tell you anything about humans, all of the cat's own observations on human activity would be as faulty as the humans' observations on feline activity. Even more intensely, then, the cat's accusations would fall back on themselves. Just as Master Chinno makes stupid claims about cats, his cat makes stupid claims about humans, because none could make a useful remark on the other. Inter-species Stalemate.

Let's now turn to the last and latest of the three texts, Čapek's From the Point of View of a Cat. The fact we owe the word 'robot' for 'automated worker' to Čapek lets one dream of From the Point of View of a Roomba. But we're not there. We're with the cat.

Čapek's text is the only short story of the three (although Sōseki's actually evolved from a short story – remaining in the novel as its first chapter – and both his and Hoffmann's novels exhibit an assemblage of potentially standalone chapters and a mix of genres; poems, diary excerpts, straightforward narrative, etc., thus remaining 'allied' with short forms). From its opening lines on, Čapek's text condenses motifs present in the other two (and in Keller's):

This is my Man. I am not afraid of him. [...] He is not beautiful, for he has no fur. Not having enough saliva, he has to wash himself with water. He meows in a harsh voice and a great deal more than necessary. [...] He sleeps at night instead of by day, he cannot see in the dark, he has no pleasures.

There is the diminishing description of 'the master', his lack of beauty, his cumbersome ways, his being near devoid of authority. "He is very strong, for he eats a great deal", the cat concedes, but this never amounts to a quality they really admire. They only notice it, with barely a judgment, nothing nearing the putting-the-paw-down-rhetoric of "[h]e is not beautiful". The human enigma is present, too, in an even stronger form:

I don’t know how he has made himself Master; perhaps he has eaten something sublime. He keeps my rooms clean for me.

Murr and Sōseki's cat consider human work a puzzle and an enigma respectively, but they do realize that part or all of human authority is derived from that 'work', and that respect between humans has something to do with it, even to the point that faking it becomes an instrument in itself (everyone has to believe that Master Chinno is hard-working, even Master Chinno himself). Čapek's cat does not believe in that link or does not consider it. The authority of the master remains itself an enigma, and is most likely connected to an act of eating. That is, whether it is an authority at all remains an enigma: The main function of the capital-M Master is to keep the rooms of the cat clean – meaning, to perform what humans would typically consider a servant duty.

As the enigma has shifted from human activity to human authority, the concept of 'work' slips away entirely. Čapek's cat does not even consider its possibility. What they could consider the 'work' of their master – writing – they take as a game:

In his paws he carries a sharp black claw and he scratches with it on white sheets of paper. That is the only game he plays. 

I think it is a direct consequence of this interpretation of writing that unlike Murr and the neko-daimyo, Čapek's cat is not interested in any 'depth' of writing. Writing remains scratching, yet scratching is infinitely more fascinating than any semantic development, any ideal 'content'.

[Master] sits at the table with his head bent and goes on and on, scratching with his black claw on the white papers. Don’t imagine that I am at all interested in you. I am only listening to the soft whispering of your claw.

This "soft whispering" might bear some relation to another sound important to this cat. It is not the harsh meow of the master, and probably not the way he "sometimes [...] purrs in his sleep". Rather, this soft whispering seems associated with dark and magical voices.

Often at night when I can hear mysterious and magic voices, when I can see that the darkness is all alive, he sits at the table with his head bent and goes on and on, scratching with his black claw on the white papers.

Impossible to tell whether this sentence, oppositionally as it is organized, claims a true opposition of activities on the basis of their content (hearing mysterious and magic voices is opposed to scratching on white paper), or whether it claims alternative approaches: (hearing mysterious voices is a different access way to something also accessed to by scratching on white paper). Both the scratching on the paper and the voices in the dark (and arguably only those two) are interesting to the cat. In their overlap, something like an oblique affection arises.

Sometimes the whispering is silent, the poor dull head does not know how to go on playing, and then I am sorry for him and I meow softly in sweet and sharp discord. Then my Man picks me up and buries his hot face in my fur. At those times he divines for an instant a glimpse of a higher life, and he sighs with happiness and purrs something which can almost be understood.

Only to this latter 'purring' the cat concedes something like an approach to meaning. Easy, but maybe wrong, to assume that the voices in the dark provide someting much more understandable. Easy, and probably right, to assume that 'understandability' is once again not what is interesting in the act humans call writing. The scratching surpasses it, and gives rise to the possiblity of something like an oblique affection – where the cat feels sorry for the Master and the Man haphazardly stumbles unto some consolation. Nevertheless:

But don’t think that I am at all interested in you. You have warmed me, and now I will go out again and listen to the dark voices.

For the first time in the three texts, an unknown also arises on the side of the cat, a deep and impenetrable unknwon. What allows for the moment of consolation in this text, I think, is that (1) this unknown never becomes a puzzle in the sense of a task; and that (2) it is shared by both cat and human (in the sense that they both partake in it, by listening and by scratching). The human comes somewhat near it by writing, yet might miss the point of why writing matters by thinking that it matters because of its textual result (or because it provides a screen of "hard-working"). The cat also comes somewhat near it, knowing that it exists and that a cat can listen to it, but they still call the voices "mysterious". The cat does not miss the point, they seem to simply have no interest in lifting the mystery. It is not a puzzle to them, not something to learn about.

Instead of an interspecies fight over human knowledge and/as knowledge about humans – a fight that, as I've tried to show, means that 'the human' comes out on top even if 'a human' is ridiculed within the text; a sign of which is that the cat is always also being made fun of on the basis of 'they're just a cat' – Čapek's text is circling about an unknown that is neither human nor feline, yet shared by both. Both have ways of participating in the 'dark voices', to both, the dark voices remain mysterious.

And are the 'dark voices' in this text not somehow in it in the place of – work? Do they not arise precisely in its absence? Čapek's – recall that this is the guy who coined the term 'robot' – is the only cat never talking about labour. What is interesting to them about the process of writing is the scratching, but scratching is never described as 'work'. Instead: "That is the only game he plays."

"Nothing to show for it", as Shulamith Firestone once characterized the acts of an Utopian future experience. In any house, Čapek's cat seems to know, "the darkness is all alive", teeming with, haunted by, voices from that future.

It knows that "I take myself as passive" is grammatically active, "I am taken as active" is grammatically passive; the former, although it circles around passivity, holds a much stronger agency for the I in question.