ENGL 320 British Literary TraditionsBorders and Boundaries: Human/Animal

Christopher Smart, “My Cat Jeoffry”Sept 26

Questions1. What is the appeal

of “My Cat Jeoffrey”?

2. If the poem shows

the cat as “visible

evidence of the prov-

idential plan,” how does

this figure historical

human relationships with animals?

Christopher Smart, unknown artist (1745) National Portrait Gallery, London.

Psalm 100. King James Bible.

1: Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands. 2: Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing. 3: Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. 4: Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name. 5: For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.

From Jubilate Agno

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.

For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.

For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.

For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.

For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer. 5

For he rolls upon prank [prankishly] to work it in.

Smart’s cat as a symbol of the divine

a main purpose of Jubilate Agno is to show that animals as well as all visible things are symbols of the divine. In Smart’s poem the whole visible universe is seen shot through with the glory of God - and this is true for things that seem absurd and evil as well as for good things. In particular, there is no animal so small, so large, so pernicious, or so ridiculous that Smart cannot use it to suggest a linking of the animal world with the world of man and of both with the divine. (Price Parkin 1191-2)

18th-century attitudes towards animals?

The day has been, I grieve it to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated ... upon the same footing as ... animals are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. … the question is not, Can they [animals] reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?... The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes...

Jeremy Bentham (1748 - 1832), Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

Derrida’s Catmy cat, … does not appear … to represent … the immense symbolic responsibility with which our culture has always charged the feline race … If I say “it is a real cat” that sees me naked, this is in order to mark its unsubstitutable singularity. … It … comes to me as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, into this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized [rebelle a tout concept]. (Derrida 9)

For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature. 40

For he is tenacious of his point.

For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.

For he knows that God is his Saviour.

For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.

For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion. 45

For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually--Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.

For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.

For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.

How can we fit these cat poems into a history of the human/animal distinction?

[T]he idea of the animal that we have inherited from the Enlightenment and thinkers such as Descartes and Kant is better seen as marking a brief period (if the formative one for our prevailing intellectual, political, and juridical institutions) bookended by a pre- and

posthumanism that think

the human/animal distinction

quite otherwise. (Wolfe 564)

[H]istory without animals is unthinkable. The new sub-discipline [of animal studies] is very different to the histories in which animals were merely blank pages onto which humans wrote their own perceptions …. This new history is a history in which we are being asked to look at the ways

in which animals and humans no longer

exist in separate realms; in which nature

and culture coincide; and in which we

recognize the ways in which animals,

not just humans, have shaped the past.

(Fudge)

References• Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am.

New York: Fordham UP, 2008.• Fudge, Erica. “The History of Animals.” H-Animal.

H-Net, 25 May 2006. Web. 24 Sept. 2012.• Price Parkin, Rebecca. “Christopher Smart’s

Sacramental Cat.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 11.3 (1969): 1191-1196. JSTOR. Web. 24 Sept 2012.

• Wolfe, Cary. “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities.” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 564-575.