A Political Fable

by Robert Coover

As Robert Coover read Dr. Seuss to his children in 1968, he noticed “the little Cat in the Hat symbol on the front cover: ‘I CAN READ IT ALL BY MYSELF.’ It looked remarkably like a campaign button, and, by changing one letter, it was one.” Sensing a strange affinity between the anarchic Seussian world and the riots, assassinations, warfare and social upheaval that forever marked 1968 as a year of turmoil, Coover began to write. With the slogan “I CAN LEAD IT ALL BY MYSELF,” he imagines a hedonistic, novelty-crazed public and their shameless, nonsense-spewing, hat-wearing demagogue: the Cat in the Hat.

While this mind-bending classic vividly evokes the late 1960s—with psychedelic flights of fancy and tropes of the sexual revolution, civil rights, and Vietnam all heaving out of its pages—it also feels chillingly prescient a half century later. Its hilarity shot through with anger and fear, The Cat in the Hat for President anticipates and diagnoses the unheard-of spectacle of the current political circus, and, well, a cat in a (MAGA) hat.

Genres: Fiction, American, Humor

88 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1980

About the author

Robert Lowell Coover was an American novelist, short story writer, and T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. He became a proponent of electronic literature and was a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Even an imagination with Coover's scope can't keep up with a world in which Trump thinks he's running for president. The Cat in the Hat for President. Bill the Cat for President. When Ross Perot looks like a regular kind of guy=candidate, well, it's just that fiction maybe can't keep up. This kind of thing.




_____________
The Cat in the Hat for president. 1968? 1980? 1992? Remember?

Been there. Done that. Still there. Still doing that. [eta: yep, still doing that]

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

The only Rump book you'll need this year. Written in 1968.


___________
You all who's reading the Wolf book ;; you might want to cut through the crap a bit with this little piece of Politico=Literary-o Realism. Something a little more down=home and down-to-earth after reading about the Roadrunner-level antics of the WHITE(s only) House all day.

['bout time this nugget get a re=release. Coming April 10, right around TAX day.]

“I CAN LEAD IT ALL BY MYSELF.”

[Sam D’Antonio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, very very nihilistic, but honestly that was probably the most rational state of mind to be in during the middle of Vietnam.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

What did I just read?....... WOW! More Coover please. After spending years reading mostly science fiction, I cannot believe what I've been missing. Coovers' writing is excellent, a man that can hit a nerve, that can shock, disturb and yet you cannot decry or hate him. A writer of great genius that I am looking forward to visiting again.

some writers will get you riled.
modern writers might give you piles .
but the cat in the hat says,
Coover will make you smile.

[Lara Dominique Solante · Rating 3 out of 5]

that was cray cray

[Phyllis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sure seems like this could’ve been written in 2016, or this year.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

“You know, Clark, if you can accept that damned Cat, you can accept almost anything... even the universe! Even the universe, Mr. Brown!” (28)

[Manly Elkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Politics as entertainment, History as myth, the American myth. In the late 1960's when left and right wing extremists were fighting The Man and The Reds respectively, when a nuclear bomb dropping through your roof was a legitimate fear to many, while American souls dissipated in a humid jungle and political system acted as if everything was normal. Why wouldn't America "go to bat for the cat in the hat"? A great fable of government absurdity come true, a country that would decades later vote an actor for president, make Shirley Temple an ambassador, give a wrestler and a terminator their very own states to govern (the Terminator campaigned against a pornstar and a child actor), followed by a reality television star as president who makes the opposing party so unhappy that as of January 2018 they are pushing a daytime talk show host to run against him in 2020 where she will most likely have the campaign of a rap artist to compete with. You apparently can, entertain yourself retarded.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hooboy but this one hits a lot closer to home than I bet it did in 1968.

(Or maybe not, who's to say?)

[Lu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Iaca și Kanye deamu candidează

[E. C. Koch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somehow in the same year that he published The Universal Baseball Association, Coover also managed to come out with this weird little novella, A Political Fable (later rebranded as The Cat in the Hat for President). I’d say that Coover definitely has Nixon in mind here – and so probably also has A Public Burning in mind too (there’s a lot of the Cat’s zaniness in Uncle Sam and The Phantom) – but in a more general, how-does-a-Nixon-even-become-possible? kind of way, where the emphasis is less on the politician and more on the electorate (I was put in mind of the Zaphod Beeblebrox–Humma Kavula dynamic from Hitchhiker’s Guide). Anyway, we get the story of the Cat in the Hat’s rise to political superstardom in the 1968 presidential election from the perspective of Mr. Brown, the stoic political strategist and sitting Attorney General who doesn’t like the Cat or what the Cat’s popularity suggests but does reluctantly go to work for. The Cat’s incredible rise, eerily mirroring another recent politician’s rise (see: on-the-nose reissue cover), is what matters here because it’s only possible (against all probability and decency) in the first place because we, the people, are just so susceptible to showmanship and spectacle and anarchy. Just like Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, that anarchic fun turns not-fun in a big hurry—it becomes disorienting and scary until the kids (us) are desperate for their parents to come home. From a political vantage, the warning is pretty clear: don’t conflate salesmanship with capability, since, at the end of the day, politics is (and should remain) boring. Yet, since this is Coover after all, I can’t help but also read literary periodization into this, and so also arrive at a comment on postmodernism. The literary moment in which Coover is writing this piece is, like the Cat’s arrival, suddenly anarchic, as all of the tacit “rules” of literary fiction were being ignored and teased through the moment’s self-reflexive, ironic, playful novels (including ones written by Coover), and so I find myself reading this as a warning against the ensorcelling thrall of postmodernism’s antics, a reminder that someone, eventually, has to be the parent who sets things right. Setting things right means returning a sense of order to the mayhem by anchoring texts with a version of the principles that postmodernism evacuated from the culture (a belief in language’s ability to contact the real world, for one; literature’s ability to move cultural thought, for another). Whatever. A Political Fable is neither a hidden gem nor political science—read this if you want filler for your dissertation reading lists or because you plan to bring it up at parties knowing that no one else will have heard of it and you savor the sense of superiority that comes from reading stuff that others don’t even know about.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

This fable of creation through destruction was originally published in the New American Review in 1968, and republished as a short (69 page) novel fifty years later.

It's hard to imagine this being written at any time other than the late 1960s. The Cat comes across as the ultimate Merry Prankster, a sort of magical Yippie. (He even levitates the Pentagon.)

Aided by his supporters Clark (One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish), Sam (Green Eggs and Ham), and the narrator Mr. Brown (Hop On Pop), the Cat subverts not merely partisan politics but conventional notions of reality. His "campaign" is intended to, as Clark puts it, "help all men once more to experience reality concretely, fully, wholly, without mystification, free from mirages, unencumbered by pseudosystems." This is absurdity put to the service of enlightenment.

As an aside, I realized today that I don't remember those old Dr. Seuss books as well as I thought. I've checked a bunch out of the library and am looking forward to some fun.

[Ben Oreper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, it only took 57 years, but I think we're there.

"A lot of it was due simply to the power of sensationalism - who'd ever done what he was doing? -but also, I had to admit it, we were all hungry for some good fun, tired of war and all our private miseries, sick of the old clichés, the bomb scare and the no exits, in the mood for extravagance and whimsy ("Tom-foolery," the press labeled it); there was a long-repressed bellylaugh rumbling deep in the collective gut, and the Cat was loosing it. Clark called it a kind of exorcism, and I had to agree. 'We'll rid you yet, Mr. Brown, of all those troublesome 'vectors,' he added, and since against all logic and my own instincts, we were winning, I only grinned and supposed it might be so."

"Clark stared at me. I grew uneasy. 'I believe, simply, that we live in an age of darkness, that humanity, with all efficiency and presumed purpose, has gone mad. What we must do, Mr. Brown, is help all men once more to experience reality concretely, fully, wholly, without mystification, free from mirages, unencumbered by pseudo-systems. If we succeed at that, don't you see, elections may no longer be relevant."

[Peter Hayes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I continue my journey into Coover-land with this short novella. Would have easily made for a bigger story- so it did feel a little rushed at the end, with characters opened up and seemingly left hanging in their possibilities. Clark, being one. However, few can match Coover's anarchic satire. I've often said that 'The Public Burning' was easily one of the boldest, angriest and funniest political satires I've ever read. I very much recommend this 'Cat in the Hat for President' because while it may be fairly stunted in it's telling, the book couldn't be more timely. You couldn't ask for a better mirror image of today's political landscape. And I sat that even as a Trump supporter.
In the end, isn't that the true mark of a great work of art?: That it is timeless, always wise, ruthless in it's depiction of human truths and funny no matter what side of the fence you might vote from.

[Sally · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a strange and fantastical novella. Written in 1968 for a magazine and republished in hard cover in 1980, the story is narrated by the political fixer Soothsayer Brown, who watches with alarm as the political party not in power decides to nominate the Cat in the Hat as the presidential candidate. Chaos ensues. As you might expect, the Cat does magic tricks, alters reality, and makes no sense. But in an era of division (true then as well as now), the public longs for something totally different and the cat is certainly that. When he becomes increasingly vulgar, he is lynched and cut into little pieces, although the hat stays on his head and the gloves on his hands. American democracy goes back to the status quo, although there are rumors that there are other cats out there.....Me-You!!

[Nan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written during the upheavals of 1968 and reprinted for the 2016 presidential election travesty, The Cat in the Hat for President may not be Coover at his finest. His love of bending a story is here. He turns an anarchic children's story character into a Christ. Interesting, bu maybe not so effective. Maybe I've gotten too old and cynical to think the book funny or clever. Too many politicians have already made too much chaos of my life and mind.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

The return of a brief tale originally published in 1968 in which a major political party picks an unpredictable and unqualified candidate whose more interested in creating distractions and attracting attention to himself than in governing. Unbelievable?

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sadly I am not as up-to-date on my Dr Seuss as I would need to be to really enjoy this book. However it was kinda fun, and eerily prescient given that it was written in 1968. It made me think. And drink pink ink.

[Patti · Rating 3 out of 5]

Its like Coover time-travelled to 2015 and witnessed trump in action.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

time is a flat circle

[Reva Gandhi · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book is complicated and i have complicated feelings about it. it think that it illustrates very well the state of american politics today in a very complex way that is interesting to combine with the childish perception of the cat in the hat. especially considering that this book was written before trump era politics, the analogies are crisp and strong.

i think that this book is better appreciated when read for a class/in a group setting, because more cross content references are made than what is possible for one person to digest on their own while reading this short short book (cover to cover read in less than 3 hours easy).

-- i read this book for writ 5 (writing at the limits of democracy)

[Kent Winward · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 1968 prescient precursor to the current political world . . .

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting to reread this old book after Trump's reelection.

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

JUST A MINOR WORK
BUT IT'LL MAKE YOU SMIRK!

[Vel Veeter]

This isn’t very good of a novella, but it is really funny and interesting and prescient in its way. For one thing, this was written in 1968 as a kind of farcical tale of desperate Democrat operatives looking for a way to subvert the obvious momentum of Nixon in the wake of RFK’s assassination. And so they nominate the indecipherable Cat in the Hat.

And somehow Robert Coover invented Donald Trump years before the would-be shithead was still just dreaming of racially discriminating housing and sexually assaulting women and lying his way into a brain-numbing oblivion.

So anyway, enjoy the quotes below before we all die.

““But who is surviving, Mr. Brown? We are engaged in brutal wars, we live in the shadow of thermonuclear world-death, we continue to exist by virtue of dead forms, cut off from all life, from all being, as much murderers as survivors . . . and

then we all die anyway.” I stared at Clark. He was intense, assertive, ugly. He radiated concern and en- gagement. And he knew too much about loneliness. “Say, listen, Clark, tell me: do you have a single goddamn friend in the world?” “Certainly, Mr. Brown. You.” I was sorry I had asked. “You’re not quitting, are you?” I sighed. I was close to it that night. “No, but, nutty or not, I’d sure as hell like to win this election.” “Who says we won’t?” “Well, I tell you, it’d sure help if you could get the Cat to act just a little more . . . well . . . normal.” “
”

My job, as I saw it, was to keep the party regulars in line, and given the Cat’s irreverent antics, they were pretty nervous, so it was a fulltime job. He projected all our Chicago ward bosses right through the Planetarium dome one evening, for
example, and kept them in orbit for seven days before soft-landing them in a Zen Buddhist monastery in the Sierra Nevada, where, every time they asked how to get to Chicago, a Zen master would slap their faces or dump bowls of porridge on their heads. Two of them came back with flowers in their hair, but the rest of them, quite naturally, wanted to quit. I reminded them that the Cat was sweeping the country, that that very stunt in fact had added another three percent to the Cat’s advantage, that this was no time to get off the winning team, and I even, with great difficulty, managed to get Honorary Astronaut medals for them. They stayed. “