How could we make the great stories of the literary canon better? Why, by replacing all the protagonists with cats, of course! Here’s a refresher course on the novels and epics you studied in college with a bit of feline flair.
The Great Catsby
Catsby, being a cat, doesn’t really care all that much about neighboring cat, Daisy. He really keeps staring at the lighthouse because he thinks it’s a laser and he wants to try and catch it. And he wouldn’t be caught dead near any pool: you DO know that thing is FILLED with water, right??
Tail of Two Kitties
Crossing between London and Paris, this Dickensian story of disparate lives of alley cats versus aristocats paints a stark portrait of feline famine in prerevolutionary France and the inequities inherent between tabby cats and pure breeds.
As I Spay Driving
A stark view on one cat’s journey to the vet to be neutered, as narrated from the viewpoints of the other family members in the station wagon. The famously short chapter, with only the sentence, “My mother is a fish,” symbolizes the cat’s fleeting sense of self as linked to its sexuality, as well as its hunger for Fancy Feast, which it was denied due to mandatory twelve hour preoperative fasting.
The Cat of Monte Cristo
After being framed for peeing on the bedroom carpet by the dog and exiled into the super-cold-tile-floor laundry room by cruel Dad, the Cat of Monte Cristo embarks on an elaborate plot of revenge, revealing Dad’s online pornography habit and the dog’s sordid defacement of family heirlooms all during a family reunion.
The Oedipuss Cycle
In Sophocles’ dramatic masterpiece, Oedipuss is chained to the fate of murdering his father and marrying his mother, Jocatsta. He encounters his father in an alleyway and kills him, not realizing their relationship. Oedipuss and Jocatsta then have a litter of kittens, which Jocatsta eats anyway, ’cause that’s what cats do sometimes. Oedipuss finds out Jocatsta is his mother, but instead of gouging out his eyes, he notices a bird and runs outside and is never heard from again.
Romeow and Juliet
The classic tale of a star-crossed love: cat falls in love with dog; a doomed romance from both social and scientific viewpoints. Despite disapproving families and the laws of interspecies mating, Romeow goes the distance to prove his devotion to Juliet. Juliet returns the favor by biting Romeow, who has to get 12 stitches at the vet, and isn’t allowed to be an outdoor cat anymore.
The Brothers Kittymazov
An epically long tale about kitty love triangles, kitty father-son-brother relationships, kitty religious skepticism, kitty descents into madness, kitty murder and catnip-drenched orgies.
Remembrance of Things Scratched
One cat’s incidental tasting of a Pounce which fell into his wet food conjures up via involuntary Proustian sense-memory a seven-volume novel exploring themes of time, space, memory, and feathers tied to the end of a string on a stick.
What’s your favorite work of the kitty canon?
Photoshoppin’ by Erika Cervantes and Emily McGregor!
Thanks for this very entertaining, funny post. Sharing with friends.
These are so great! I’ve always liked “Bright Lights, Big Kitty” and “The Sound and the Furry.”