For Dr. Eldredge, one reason to study the evolution of cultural artifacts is to improve the understanding of the interaction between what he calls genealogical and economic hierarchies.... in material culture..."the marketplace is the ecosystem." In culture, as in nature...the economic environment inevitably serves as an unpredictable force, driving some species to extinction. Yet death is also the engine of innovation. As one group dies, it is replaced by new forms.

• What is the meaning of this story?
  
• Why does the cat in the hat come back?
  
• What motivates his entrance into the text?
  
• What is his function in the text?
  
• What sense do you make of the pink stain? Of its eradication?
  
• Why will the cat in the hat be happy to come here again?
  
• What else is peculiar? striking? interesting to you in this story?
  
• (Have you read it/had it read to you before?
  What are your memories of your earlier experiences?)
  
• What is the role of the alphabet in this tale?
  
• What is the role of the absent mother and father? (of their clothes, of their bed...?)

Possible Contexts for reading The Cat in the Hat Comes Back:

• economic (Random House's 1950's money-making scheme)
• psychological (did Ted Geisel's mother leave him alone too much?)
• phonetic/rhythmic/rhyming
• cultural (Cold War with the Red Russians)
• pure? fun?
• all of the above?
  Cf. Louis Menand, "Cat People: What Dr. Seuss Really Taught Us." The New Yorker. (December 23 & 30, 2003):

William Spaulding, director of the education division at Houghton Mifflin...asked Geisel to write a story that used only a limited number of similar words, words recognizable by a first grader....The success of "The Cat in the Hat" persuaded [Random House's publisher, Bennett] Cerf to start a division...called Beginner Books....

The cat's improvisations with the objets trouves in the home he has invaded are obviously an allegory for his creator's performance with the two hundred and twenty arbitrary words he has been assigned by his publisher. The cat is a bricoleur. He has no system--or, rather, his system is to have no system. He is compelled to make meaning from whatever is there. He fails, the bricolage topples, the fish ends up in a teapot; and this hint of semantic instability is expanded on in Dr. Seuss's most difficult work (No. 26 all-time), "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back," published in 1958.

"The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" is the "Grammatology" of Dr. Seuss. It is a book about language and structure, those Cold War obsessions....

These semiotic felines do exactly what a deconstructionist would predict: rather than containing the stain, they disseminate it. Everything turns pink. The chain of signification is interminable and, being interminable, indeterminate. The semantic hygiene fetishized by the children is rudely violated; the "system" they imagined is revealed to have no inside and no outside. It is revealed to be, in fact, just another bricolage. The only way to end the spreading stain of semiosis is to unleash what, since it cannot be named, must be termed "that which is not a sign." This is the Voom, the final agent in the cat's arsenal. The Voom eradicates the pink queerness of a textuality without boundaries; whiteness is back, though it is now the purity of absence--one wants to say (and, at this point, why not?) of abstinence. The association with nuclear holocaust and its sterilizing fallout, wiping the planet clean of pinkness and pinkos, is impossible to ignore. It is a strange story for teaching people how to read.

SO: the production of literature (and the interpretations of its meanings--the results of the encounter between text and reader, code and de-coder--which we call literary theory) generate new accounts, new stories....

But how? What's the source of the new?

Here's how--in response to Anne's talk on The Relation between Numbers and Narrative--Michael Tratner (BMC English Department Chair) described the ways in which the seeking and identification of new patterns by literary scholars is generative of new stories:

the outlier, in literary history, that matters is the one that somehow generates a whole series of object similar to itself....a text that stands as simply 'different' from all the others around it (in a period, in a genre...) is not very important unless it somehow provides a pattern for repeated variants....for a surprising text to be readable to many different minds, it must have some regularity, and for it to generate the desire to be read by many persons, it has to provide something 'unusual' that is at the same time repeatable...for a text to be both surprising and regular/original and influential it has to interact not only with the norms for texts, but with the questions being debated about texts at that moment: the surprise that is also regular or predictive....

A particularly useful version of this process, on the level of words, is traced by Jonathan Culler in his introductory essay in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters (1987, pp. 1-16):

in both etymologies and puns...two similar sounding but distinct signifiers are brought together, and the surface relationship between them invested with meaning through the inventiveness and rhetorical skill of the writers....as in punning, the interest of etymologies lies in the surprising coupling of different meanings.... Etymologies...give us respectable puns, endowing pun-like effects with the authority of science....Etymologies show us what puns might be if taken seriously: illustrations of the inherent instability of language and the power of uncodified linguistic relations to produce meaning....etymologies, like puns,. ..are instances of speakers intervening in language, articulating relations....intently or playfully working to reveal the structures of language, motivating linguistic signs, allowing signifiers to affect meaning by generating new connections....Puns present the disquieting spectacle of a functioning of language where boundaries--between sounds, between sound and letter, between meanings--count for less than one might imagine ....The relations perceived by speakers affect meanings and thus the linguistic systems, which must be taken to include the constant remotivation produced by impressions of connection or similarity....

Not surprisingly, in both the realm of puns--relations between signs in a language at a particular moment--and the realm of etymology--relations between signs from different periods--there is no dearth of people anxious to control relations, to enforce a distinction between real and false connections. Puns are an exemplary product of language or mind....the exploration of formal resemblance to establish connections of meaning seems the basic activity of literature; but this foundation...depends on relations...is a function of practices of reading, forms of attention, and social convention....

Punning frequently seems...a structural, connecting device...to offer the mind a sense and an experience of an order that it does not master or comprehend....we are urged to conceive an order.....Insofar as this is the goal or achievement of art, the pun seems an exemplary agent....

In Ferdinand de Saussure's account, the linguistic system consists of ...signs defined by their relations with one another. Emphasis on new punning relationships disrupts the system.....If, as Saussure writes, the most precise characteristic of a linguistic unit is to be what the others are not, what happens when it seems to be another sign also?...we should ask whether in fact the language one speaks or writes is not always exposed to the contamination of arbitrary signs by punning links....

Some examples from my section:
What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft?
What do you get when you drop a piano onto a military base?
Why couldn't the pony talk?
What did the string say when the barman refused to serve him
(and he returned, a second time, all frazzled and frayed)?

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