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What makes humans so adaptable, so able to thrive in various environments? For evolutionary biologists, the answer is evident—to paraphrase Dr. Seuss, we have brains in our heads. Put simply, our large brains enable us to develop language, progressive technology, and abstract thought. Evolutionary historian Yuval Noah Harari uses that scientific premise to pivot toward a more philosophical argument about how, specifically, our big brains make us different than other species; according to Harari, we are “the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in [our] own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights.”^[2] Our imagination positions us to thrive because it allows us to construct, communicate, and collectively accept a stream of enabling fictions. In short, we alone in the animal kingdom possess the capacity to live in and through imagination; we alone have the ability to transform the abstract into the real.

Of course, evolutionary biologists and historians are a little late to the party on this one. Since the Enlightenment, philosophers and poets have positioned the imagination as integral to our understanding and processing of knowledge and the world. Specifically, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley developed an evolving philosophical theory of poetry that highlighted the constructive capacity of the imagination. Despite the fact that he began publishing his books more than one hundred years after the end of the Romantic period, Seuss functions as a philosophical ancestor of Romanticism’s engagement with imagination. From his first book (And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street [1937]) to his last (Oh, the Places You’ll Go! [1991]), he demonstrates the powers of imagination and develops a progressive concept of its creative potential. As Seuss’s work evolves, it pushes on beyond reason in order to sketch out an argument for imagination’s capacity to productively construct reality.

The Kantian (Proto-Romantic) Imagination

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) represents an early Romantic-period attempt to account for the ways in which human knowledge “may strive independently of all experience.”^[3] That is, in the midst of the systematic rise of science and reason, Kant shifts the foundations and limits of epistemology away from the British-Empiricist (namely, Hume) notions that rely on the empirical by dividing knowledge into two “stems”: “sensibility and understanding. . . . Through the former, objects are given to us; through the latter, they are thought.”^[4] Thus, the stems of sensibility and understanding generally correspond to empirical knowledge (sensation), which we experience in the world, and conceptual knowledge (the positing and ordering of sensation), which exists in our mind a priori. From there, Kant extrapolates “pure” knowledge, which also exists in the mind—but rather than merely invert empiricism and exist as the result of understanding, “pure” knowledge is produced through a synthesis of sensibility and understanding, the combination of empirical and a priori knowledge. Importantly, that synthesis is enabled by imagination: “Synthesis in general . . . is the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we would have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious.”^[5]

Kant posits imagination as the center of our thought-existence; it synthesizes/structures/constructs all knowledge. Yet he stops short of positioning it as a thing in and of itself. For Kant, synthesis is not produced directly by imagination; rather, it comes into being passively, as a sort of by-product, “the mere result of the power of imagination.” And he further abstracts and muddies the process by modifying it as “blind” and a vague and unconscious “function of the soul.” Thus, at the same time that Kant centers the concept of imagination in his system, he scarcely fleshes it out. We can see its vital product—synthesis—but on imagination itself, Kant remains fuzzy. It is essentially a mystery that explains the existence of mystery. According to Milos Rastovic, Kant avoids a clear explanation of imagination “because it is difficult for him . . . to explain synthesis by something as ‘irrational’ as the imagination.”^[6]

The Romantic Imagination

Fortunately, the Romantic poets were scarcely concerned with issues of reason and epistemology and were thus far more comfortable with the irrationality of imagination. The rise of Romanticism (as a poetic construct) came on the heels of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and it too would center imagination in order to offer a response to the age’s overreliance on reason. In Lyrical Ballads (1798), William Wordsworth attempted to fuse realism with imagination to construct a poetry that could fill in the considerable gaps left by scientific rationalism. “Expostulation and Reply” presents a rational character who upbraids the poet for spending his day idly dreaming rather than reading. The poet replies that, though he merely sits on a rock appearing idle, his mind is engaged in vital work:

In “The Tables Turned,” the companion poem to “Expostulation and Reply,” Wordsworth treats a further exchange on the same subject between the two men; however, this time it is the poet upbraiding his friend for his attempt to understand and process the world solely through intellect and reason, faculties Wordsworth considers inferior: “Our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— / We murder to dissect.”^[8] The poem ends with a call for synthesizing the world through something beyond intellect.

Where Kant locates the imagination in the soul, Wordsworth houses it in the heart. Regardless of location, it has the same basic function—to comprehend the “beauteous form of things.” Through this lens, Wordsworthian Romanticism functions as a counter-Enlightenment movement, pointing out the movement’s failure to account for the considerable mystery that still exists in the world even after science and reason have their say. And Romanticism provides an answer: imagination (specifically, the poetic imagination) can bridge those rivers of uncertainty.

While Wordsworth offered theoretical sublimations of imagination in verse, Coleridge overtly expanded Kant’s notions of imagination and carried them forward. Rather than vaguely describe imagination as a “function of the soul,” Coleridge centers imagination as that which produces perceptions and concepts:

Coleridge replaces Kant’s stems of knowledge with the primary and secondary imagination. The primary imagination parallels Kantian sensibility—it delivers the empirical world. But that empirical reality is static, “fixed and dead.” By implication, “life” stems from the work of the secondary imagination, the “vital” imagination, which simultaneously functions as Kant’s understanding and synthesizing imagination. The Coleridgian secondary imagination refers to our ability to transcend experience and reassemble perceptual elements to create new meaning.

The physical world—what we experience empirically—does not exist (at least not in any real and productive sense). What exists is the secondary imagination’s ability to vitalize the “fixed and dead” empirical world through creativity and then unify it with our essential self. That is, the physical world does not really exist—only the metaphysical world, which is the unity between the primary and secondary imagination. Here Coleridge has fleshed out what the Critique of Pure Reason only suggests with regard to the function of imagination. For Kant, imagination is necessary, but its literal function remains vague. Not so for Coleridge. He centers imagination to construct what we now see as the Romantic Imagination. So what began with Kant’s parsing of reason as a governing principle for processing and functioning in the world flowers fully with Romanticism.

Within the philosophy of Romanticism, the secondary imagination represents the creative or poetic imagination. It not only gives rise to the ideal but also functions to unify that ideal with our primary-imagination concept of empirical reality. That concept acknowledges and constructs a dual existence for us—the condition whereby we exist in a reality of primary and secondary imagination simultaneously. The possibility of such a dual consciousness paves the way for “the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”^[11] Coleridge coined the term willing suspension of disbelief to describe the mental process required to productively read his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a supernatural tale that seeks to cover emotional ground similar to Wordsworth’s realist nature poetry.

For Coleridge, to willingly suspend disbelief is to reside in imagination. Romanticism’s actualization of the Romantic Imagination resides in such moments of poetic faith: we all sleep, we all dream, and perhaps we all wonder about the linkages between the imaginary worlds our minds create and the physical world our bodies inhabit. For Coleridge, this balancing act between imagination and world was central to his poetry and philosophy. Within the Coleridge quote that serves here as an epigraph, the poet destabilizes our hold on certainty and engages with the possibilities of imagination. Yet the sentence’s structure—the fact that it ends with a question—shows Coleridge’s ambivalence about imagination’s real capacity to structure our experiences. The wistful tone of that final question (“Aye! and what then?”) suggests a deep optimistic desire to believe in the depth of those possibilities of imagination.

The Seussian Imagination:
Waking Up the Brain Cells

We find a similar dynamic in early Seuss, where stories of daydreaming young boys allow the author to rehearse the ways that imagination can transform mundane everydays into vibrant worlds of endless possibility. With his first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), Seuss creates a structure that he will revisit many times throughout his career. The book begins with young Marco on the last leg of his journey home from school. He knows two things—one, his father will ask him what he saw on the way home, and two, he saw nothing of interest. Marco longs for excitement and difference, but his daily routine is boring. His father’s daily demand that he recount his dull experience only reaffirms the emptiness of the pattern. Marco’s frustrations are twofold; he is frustrated by both the sameness of his small world and his father’s demand that he report that sameness day after day.

Of course, the child develops an elegant workaround: his imagination. The brunt of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street is made up of Marco’s imaginings, all sorts of fantastic inventions that effectively transform his drab walk into an amazing journey and his boring report to his father into a surprising poem. Through an act of imagination, Marco expands and enlivens his world. Dull Mulberry Street crackles and pulses with life, energy, and color. The long walk shortens, and his dreaded report becomes something he relishes. In short, Marco’s actual daily activities are transformed by his imagination; his world becomes a bigger, fuller place.

Seuss repeatedly returns to this story structure. Each time, he considers and further develops our imagination’s capacity to transform reality. McElligot’s Pool (1947) once again finds Marco contending with the boredom and limitations of his world. This time he is fishing at a small, polluted pool. When an adult informs him that the pool is empty and he’s wasting his time, Marco answers by imagining a series of fantastic possibilities of the marine life that might exist beneath the surface of the tiny fishing hole. Marco’s daydreams rehearse the same divide between imagination and reality as Coleridge’s sleeping dream, as well as Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness” in “Expostulation and Reply.” When Marco imagines, he models a specific way of interacting with and constructing reality, of dexterously and deftly negotiating Life’s Great Balancing Act between the banality of what-is and the possibility of what-if. Marco’s negotiation has much in common with Coleridge’s Romantic Imagination. He, like Coleridge, stops short of declaring his dream reality, but the optimism of the possibilities is front and center:

Marco’s activation of imagination demands that we allow for the possibility of an expanded world. That is the move of the Romantic Imagination—it enacts the suppositional powers of the mind; once we allow for the Seuss/Coleridge “might be”/“what then?” we must also allow the possibility that the world is a brighter, bigger place than it appears on the surface. And allowing the possibility of an expanded world actually does expand the world.

The Ever-Evolving Seussian Imagination

Seuss repeated the structural formula of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and McElligot’s Pool in If I Ran the Zoo (1950), Scrambled Eggs Super! (1953) and If I Ran the Circus (1956). Each book offers a main character that represents a daydreamer faced with a boring reality. Rather than succumb to the banality of reality, however, these characters resort to spicing up their plain everyday lives with imagination. In the end, however, they return to the status quo—though we’re all a little richer for the flights of fancy.

Yet within the identical macro-structure of these early exercises in imagination, Seuss develops an evolution with regard to the positioning and reception of such dreams. Each story represents a child using his imagination to extend the limited possibilities of his reality and transform his world into a more interesting and vibrant place, and each story employs a narrative that restores order by returning the child to his predaydream locale. However, the child’s relationship with and attitude toward the power and possibility of his acts of imagination strengthens and develops across the texts. And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street ends with Marco abashed by his father’s potential reaction to his daydreaming. When faced with his father’s daily request—“[T]ell me the sights / On the way home from school”—Marco capitulates to reality, abandoning his flight of fancy: “‘Nothing,’ I said, growing red as a beet, / ‘But a plain horse and wagon on Mulberry Street’” (Mulberry). In refusing to reproduce the fantastic inventions that energized his trip home, the story calls back to his father’s initial censure of imagination: “Stop telling such outlandish tales. / Stop turning minnows into whales” (Mulberry). What began as a demonstration of the power of imagination ends in containment, a story about reality and telling the truth.

In McElligot’s Pool, the power of imagination increases: Marco’s active imagination is no longer contained by an initial parental charge to describe the world accurately. There the boy’s flight of fancy legitimately enlivens his time fishing, regardless of whether the fish he dreams of actually exist. And in the bookended illustrations, the farmer’s initial, closed-eyed, condescending confidence that nothing exists beneath the hole’s surface has been replaced by a final, wide-eyed, chin-stroking acknowledgment that there just might be something down there. Marco’s expression in the illustrations undergoes a transformation, beginning as neutral and ending as knowing and optimistic. In the end, Marco is more confident for his act of imagination, and he appears to have given the adult something to consider.

If I Ran the Circus represents another step in the evolutionary capacity of the Seussian imagination. It mimics the structure of the earlier books: a bored young man, Morris McGurk, wanders alone around a vacant lot behind the local general store. To pass the time, he imagines cleaning up the lot and building a circus there. Of course, it won’t be just any circus—it’ll be the greatest circus with all sorts of fantastic animals, some real (a walrus, elephants, whales) but most imaginary (a drum-tummied snumm, a foon, a walloo, etc). Trapped in his mundane all-too-familiar setting, Morris uses his vivid imagination to create a fantastic world. On the final page, order is restored: Morris returns to his everyday reality. However, in this iteration, the boy’s imagination has not merely dreamt a fantastic and exotic world; it has transformed the owner of the store and lot, old Mr. Sneelock, into a death-defying hero. Sneelock should function much like the farmer in McElligot’s Pool—which is to say, as a myopic adult unable to see the potential for magic all around him. But in Morris’s visions, the old shopkeeper is the star of the show. Just as Morris sees magic and possibility in the vacant lot, he sees something special in old Sneelock. Seuss dedicated the book to his father, “Big Ted of Springfield, the finest man I’ll ever know” (Circus), suggesting that the story represents a son’s recognition of his father’s everyday heroism. To the literal-eyed world, Sneelock is nothing more than an old shopkeeper. But to Morris (and, by extension, to the reader), an act of imagination transforms him into a hero. And through Seuss’s act of imagination, the reader can associate that heroism with the author’s father. Thus, we get the nod to the possibility that the imagination can produce something that is not contained by the restoration of order.

Imagination Unbound, or My Alphabet Starts Where Your Alphabet Ends

In fact, by the time If I Ran the Circus appeared, Seuss had already begun to experiment with untethering imagination from formulaic containment and shifting toward more open-ended possibilities. On Beyond Zebra! (1955) begins with a familiar set-up: an unnamed narrator who looks much like Marco (and Peter T. Hooper in Scrambled Eggs Super!) and his younger friend Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell stand in a school room. Conrad engages in the monotonous process of writing the alphabet on a blackboard and reciting corresponding animals: “The A is for Ape. And the B is for Bear . . .” The boy quickly reaches Z is for Zebra and declares anticlimactically, “Now I know everything anyone knows” (Zebra), suggesting that, in the end, either knowledge is nothing more than the recitation of mundane facts or it does little other than make us all the same. But the narrator steps in and suggests that, for select individuals, for those who care to take the journey, the alphabet continues well beyond Z. He proceeds to introduce the boy to a series of letters that correspond to a series of fantastic animals and landscapes, which the two boys visit. On Mulberry Street or at McElligot’s Pool, the presence of a rational adult at the end of the fantastic journey would restore order and code the flights of fancy as creative daydreams that temporarily enlivened mundane reality through imagination. They suggest the possibility of an expanded world, but we understand that reality still belongs to the adults, to reason and facts. But in On Beyond Zebra! the narrator takes the place of the authority figure. And in the end, he declares that the product of their activated imagination now exists in the world. Rather than being contained, the enabling change in his small friend, catalyzed by imagination, becomes a permanent one: “NOW the letters he uses are something to see! / Most people still stop at the Z . . . / But not HE!” (Zebra). The restoration of order fails to close the loop. On the journey, Conrad has been converted, to the extent that even though he and the narrator return to the schoolroom, their imaginations are no longer contained by the reality they find there. In fact, the schoolroom that they return to is transformed—the blackboard that Conrad writes on has now expanded exponentially to accommodate his new understanding of the world. Here, for the first time, Seuss alters/expands reality to correspond to an act of imagination.

This shift accords with a philosophical shift affected by Shelley toward the end of the Romantic period. As with his Romantic forefathers, Shelley equates imagination with poetry; however, his claims for both extend even further. In A Defence of Poetry (1821), Shelley uses Coleridge’s treatment of reason and imagination as a starting point and pushes his exploration of imagination through Platonic idealism: “Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.”^[12] So Shelley begins with a Coleridgian concept of primary and secondary imagination, which he distinguishes as “reason” and “imagination.” He seems to accord with Coleridge (and Wordsworth) when he makes the analogy: reason:imagination as instrument:agent. Once again, we see the idea that reason is a tool that can only be utilized by someone with imagination. Shelley then sublimates the analogy further: reason:imagination as body:spirit. Here he equates reason with base existence and imagination with essential existence. Again, this is well within the parameters set out by Coleridge. But then he makes a distinct turn toward Plato: reason:imagination as shadow:substance. For Shelley, the imagination becomes the REAL—or the real real. He theoretically transforms poetry’s provocative question (“What if when you awoke you had a flower in your hand?”) into poetry’s provocative statement: “You will awake with a flower in your hand.” For Shelley, reason functions as the shadow real, the mere perception of the real. Through that Platonic shifting of knowledge, Shelley posits imagination as actually structuring reality rather than vice versa. Imagination/poetry does not offer alternate realities; rather, it returns us to the real state of reality, which exists within us: “Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the imagination’: and poetry is connate with the origin of man.”^[13] Imagination exists inside of us as a fundamental essence, and poetry functions as a fundamental manifestation of that essence. But the poet’s output does not merely express subjective consciousness; rather, it reflects an objective collective reality: “[Poetry] is less [the poets’] spirit than the spirit of the age . . . the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.”^[14] This represents a long stride forward from the marginal claims staked by Coleridge’s dream poetry. Shelley’s conclusion—“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”^[15] —stakes a much larger claim for the power of imagination. That final metaphor pushes beyond the earlier expression of poetry-as-mirror. In its final line, Defence posits imagination as not mere reflections of reality through an internal glass—within Shelley’s formulation, imagination constructs, structures, and governs reality.

Seuss’s later work embodies and illustrates these ideas. In that later work, his books carry idealism to its logical conclusion—creating and rehearsing worlds composed entirely of imagination. In that way, he leads his young readers to a declarative construction of reality and fundamental self through imagination.

Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! (1977) and Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (1991) are testaments to the centrality of imagination in Seuss’s construction of the world. They are, in a sense, Seuss’s answer to Coleridge’s question, “Aye! and what then?” While both books resemble the author’s early work with regard to the function of imagination, they depart completely from the initial structure outlined earlier. Whereas Seuss’s initial engagements contained the power of imagination within a recognizable frame of the familiar, he sets his later work in worlds almost completely untethered from reality. Indeed, Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! develops a central argument that parallels Shelley’s radical claims for imagination. The book suggests that we construct our world by thinking it into existence. The initial examples of this capacity are recognizable in form: “You can think about birds . . . yellow . . . blue . . . red . . . pink . . . a horse” (Thinks). At the same time, Seuss’s illustrations are fantastic, suggesting that the world in which these things are thought into existence is newly invented. And the narrative quickly shifts to match the concepts with the visual flights of fancy. Seuss invents all sorts of things that can be thought (“a guff . . . snuvs . . . the rink rinker fink . . . a jaboo” [Thinks]), and he argues that through acts of imagination, we fundamentally alter and construct our world: “Think of black water / Think up a white sky / Think up a boat / Think of bloogs blowing by” (Thinks). In the end, Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! posits the world as a place that will be constructed through the mind, a place where the only limits of our experience are the limits of our imagination.

While Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! constructs its world through imagination, Seuss’s final book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! instructs its reader how to find a place for one’s own imagination in a world already constructed by the imaginations of others. Thus, the book advocates an individual idealism, but rather than act as escapism, Seussian idealism lays out the world as collectively constructed through ideas. Success, then, lies in the ability to navigate that world’s obstacles through imagination.

In a way, the book is an expansion of Seuss’s Hunches in Bunches (1982), in which an unnamed narrator, who looks exactly like Marco, struggles with his own conflicting ideas of what he should do one day. The ideas are represented as physical characters, called hunches, which attempt to manipulate him into certain activities, some dull (homework, chores, etc.) and some more stimulating (going outside and exploring). In the end, the narrator’s complex and active imagination creates so many conflicting hunches that his world descends into chaos: “Wild hunches in big bunches / were scrapping all around me, / throwing crunchy hunchy punches” (Hunches). Here, the restoration of order comes not from a return to reality but rather from the acknowledgment that his imagination is multiple, not singular. In response to the multiplying hunches, the narrator imagines a series of selves that can debate the pros and cons of the warring hunches and ultimately succeeds in moving forward with his day. Where Hunches in Bunches presents a local problem—what will the narrator do on a given day?—Oh, the Places You’ll Go! extends that question further to, what will you do with your future?

The book works through a series of existential obstacles that are thrown in the path of a young character trying to chart his future. As with Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!, the physical world of the book is a place largely untethered from reality, a series of fantastic landscapes that spring from the imagination of its author. But the crises/obstacles found along the way are familiar: not feeling at home at home, setbacks (“Bang-ups and Hang-ups”), stasis (“The Waiting Place”), solitude/loneliness, and fear and confusion. Each of these crises represents, in some sense, a failure of imagination. Specifically, the character repeatedly finds himself trapped in situations constructed by the imaginations of others. The solutions require him to appeal to and maintain contact with his own imagination in order to navigate those flawed landscapes. In the end, the book argues that one’s ability to succeed in a world collectively constructed by the ideas of others will depend on one’s own ability to imagine a place in that world.

As Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief shows, any act of reading functions as an act of imagination; it involves the active mental experience and acceptance of another world—in Seuss’s cases, a better world. That is the function of imagination: it allows us to construct the world as it could be and allows us to rehearse possibilities for ourselves in that world that don’t yet exist in reality. And in doing that, all of these poets argue, we actually alter reality. Or, to put it in Seussian terms, imagination is how we get where we’re going—it’s how we move mountains, kid.

Notes

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae: from the Unpublished Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Heinemann, 1895), 282.

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper, 2015), 7.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Random House, 1958), Axii.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B29.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B103, A78.

Milos Rastovic, “Kant’s Understanding of the Imagination in Critique of Pure Reason,” in E-Logos (November 2013): 6.

William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads with Pastoral and Other Poems (London: T. N. Longman, 1802), 2.

Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads with Pastoral and Other Poems, 6.

10.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and
W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 304.

11.

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 308.

12.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1904), 12.

13.

Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 12–13.

14.

Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 90.

15.

Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 90.

Aristotle and the Cat on Fun That Is Funny

Theodor Geisel’s first big success as Dr. Seuss was The Cat in the Hat. He had published several books before, but the success of The Cat in the Hat is what immortalized him. Geisel himself told an interviewer, “It’s the book I’m proudest of,” and explained that it was written as a response to a call for better books for introductory readers.^[2] Geisel deliberately limited himself to a list of three hundred words to make it accessible to the beginner. The Cat in the Hat was the first in the series of Beginner Books with the motto, “I can read it all by myself.” It also presents an important lesson for children: that it is fun to have fun, but you have to know how. You will have a better life and people will like you if you know how to have fun. Jokes are a great way to help you endure hardships and make friends with others, and friends are also a great help in enduring hardships. Not that they should try the tricks of the Cat in the Hat. On the contrary, both the Cat and the fish in the pot present the extremes of what not to do, and the children in the story learn to navigate between them to find moderation and appropriateness using a model first described by Aristotle (384–322 BC) in his Nichomachean Ethics.

The Things That Went on There That Day

The Cat in the Hat opens with the kids stuck inside on a gloomy, rainy day. Their boredom is interrupted with a “BUMP!” on the front door, and then the titular Cat in the Hat barges into the house uninvited with this promise:

The kids aren’t sure about this because their mother is out of the house for the day. However, the fish in the pot is sure about this and loudly exclaims, “He should not be here when your mother is out!” (Cat). The Cat in the Hat reassures the kids that he knows lots of tricks and games that are fun and balances the naysaying fish in a pot on an umbrella to demonstrate. This is dangerous, as the fish in the pot says, but the Cat insists on balancing more and more items until it’s too much and they all come crashing down.

Despite another scolding from the fish in the pot, the Cat in the Hat insists on showing “Another good game that I know!” (Cat). This game involves opening a box and letting loose Thing One and Thing Two, who proceed to knock over belongings in the house with antics like flying kites indoors. At this point, the fish in the pot sees that their mother is returning, and so the boy catches Thing One and Thing Two with a net and the Cat sadly removes them from the house with a description of the mess they left behind:

Luckily, in the penultimate scene, the Cat in the Hat returns with a many-handed machine that puts everything back in its proper place just in time before their mother comes in the front door. The book ends with the kids back in their seats as if nothing had happened, wondering whether they should tell their mother about the Cat in the Hat.

An Ancient Lesson in Fun That Is Funny

Theodor Geisel’s writing of The Cat in the Hat mirrors elements of Aristotle’s discussion of the virtuous life in his Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle writes that a virtue is a habit—you have to practice the virtues to be any good at them. Aristotle is not a fan of the “rising to the occasion” theory of virtue. He’s not a fan of the coward who overcomes his fears and rises to the occasion to be brave. Aristotle prefers the brave person who practices being brave, such as firefighters who practice putting out fires so that they are confident and skilled when a real fire happens. Similarly, the virtuously witty person must practice being witty. Geisel practiced as Dr. Seuss for years before the success of The Cat in the Hat. His first book was rejected by dozens of publishers, but he kept trying until it happened. But even then his first book wasn’t a great success, and he kept trying and published many books before finally obtaining the success of The Cat in the Hat.

Aristotle also writes that virtue is a deliberate and enjoyable choice. You can’t be coerced into virtue, you can’t be virtuous by accident, and you can’t hate being virtuous. Geisel was inspired to write The Cat in the Hat after reading a challenge for better writers to tackle early reading primers and bemoaning the paltry state of Dick and Jane books. Geisel chose to do it and enjoyed the challenge that the restricted vocabulary left him. The virtuous person chooses to do it “at the right times, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end, and in the right way.”^[3] The Cat in the Hat was published at the right time when there was an audience of beginner readers, and about the right things that those readers would want to read about, and for the right end of encouraging young readers, and in the right way with the restricted vocabulary, rhyme scheme, and wacky visuals.

Aristotle wrote that virtue is found as a mean of moderation between two extremes. He uses an analogy with eating. Too much food is bad for your health, and too little food is bad for your health. The correct amount to eat is a mean between those two extremes: one should eat in moderation. This too much/too little/just right model is Aristotle’s basic schema for each virtue. In regard to facing dangers, the foolhardy person does too much while the coward does too little. The virtuous, brave person knows moderation and when it is appropriate to rush into danger and when one should run away. In regard to giving money to those in need, the foolish person gives away all their money and becomes someone in need while the stingy person never gives money to anyone. The virtuous, generous person knows when it is appropriate to give and how much to give and to whom to give and so on. For Aristotle, the best life is the virtuous life of deliberately chosen and habitual moderation in all things.

Aristotle applies this mean-between-the-two-extremes moderation model to the virtue of wit—knowing how and when to joke. The buffoon goes too far and laughs inappropriately and harms others. The boor goes too far in the other extreme and frowns upon any frivolity. The witty person learns how and when to joke appropriately by being somewhere between the buffoon and the boor. The Cat in the Hat nicely illustrates this concept.

The Buffoon in the Hat

The Cat in the Hat goes too far in his tricks. It’s true that we laugh at him, but it’s also evident that we aren’t supposed to be like him. He starts off with barging into the house uninvited, which itself is a no-no. He then claims to know “some new tricks” and “good tricks” (Cat), which itself seems odd and suggests that these are actually bad, old tricks. He introduces his first “game”:

This isn’t a game. This “game” is nothing more than holding the fish in a pot up on top of an umbrella. This “game” is nothing more than putting other people in danger.

The Cat in the Hat then brags that he can hold more and more things up in the air, including a book and a cup, all while standing on one foot on a ball. But because he is able to do it, that’s not enough, and the Cat adds more stuff: a cup, a cake, two books, the fish in the pot, a toy ship, and milk in a dish, all while now hopping on one leg on the ball. But because he is able to do this too, it is still not enough, and the Cat adds more: a little toy man in a toy ship, a red fan on his tail, and now the fish in the pot is balanced on a rake. All while hopping one-legged on a ball. And he promises even more.

It’s a cliffhanger that encourages the beginning reader to turn the page and find out if the Cat can actually do it. We can see in the Cat’s face in the illustration that he is really struggling, and, despite his boasting, he might not be able to keep it up. The boast with the ellipses encourages the young reader to turn the page to find out. And CRASH! The juggled objects fall to the ground all around the Cat. That’s not good. The fish in the pot lists some of the damages:

The Cat could have tried holding up just a couple of things, but instead he kept adding more and more stuff until he went beyond his ability to hold it all up and everything crashed. The Cat’s game damaged stuff and endangered others precisely because he went too far in his quest to make everyone laugh, failing to take into consideration who might get hurt.

Things Go Too Far

The Cat in the Hat really only has two games: holding up too much stuff until it all falls down and opening a box that contains Thing One and Thing Two. The Cat reassures us that FUN-IN-A-BOX is another “good game”:

Well, it’s reassuring to know that these Things he keeps locked up in a box won’t bite. But what do they do? Thing One and Thing Two basically run through the house breaking rules and breaking things.

They don’t act house trained; they act more like wild animals. Thing One and Thing Two are some of the least namelike names ever and signify that they are not persons who act like good people should. You are not to be a Thing; you are to be a person with a name. It’s fun to laugh at their antics from the safe distance of reading about them, but you shouldn’t be like them. Thing One and Thing Two fly kites in the house, run down the halls knocking over a vase and knocking pictures off walls, and even damage Mother’s new gown and the head of her bed. They are going way too far.

Aristotle wrote, “Those who go to excess in raising laughs seem to be vulgar buffoons. They stop at nothing to raise a laugh, and care more about that than about saying what is seemly and avoiding pain to the victims of the joke.”^[4] And that’s the problem: the “tricks” and “games” of the Cat in the Hat and of Thing One and Thing Two hurt other people and damage things. The Cat’s juggling puts the fish in the pot in danger and bends the rake. Thing One and Thing Two destroy valuable things like Mother’s new gown. The beginning reader can see this and understand that while it is funny to read at the distance of a book, their behavior is too extreme and dangerous to be brought into the real world. There must be a way to have fun that isn’t harmful.

The Fish in the Pot Is a Boor

The Cat in that Hat is the buffoon who is fun to laugh at but goes too far and needs to be stopped. The other side is the boor, the killjoy, the wet blanket: the fish in the pot who doesn’t like having fun and doesn’t like it when others have fun. Geisel calls him “my version of Cotton Mather,” which means that he’s an old-fashioned Puritan who’s against music and art and laughter and is angered when others are having fun.^[5] On the third page of The Cat in the Hat the fish is shown contentedly sleeping in the fishbowl. It grabs your attention because real fish don’t look like that. Real fish swim in fishbowls. So the fish in the pot is not an ordinary fish, but rather a symbol of something else: of the frowning Puritan moralist. The fish in the pot would have preferred to spend the whole day sleeping in that fishbowl. The fish in the pot likes it to be quiet and boring. The fish in the pot likes it when nothing happens. Here’s what the fish in the pot says about playing:

Notice that the fish in the pot doesn’t say that this is an inappropriate time or place for playing. No, the fish says something stronger: you do NOT want to play. Playing itself is bad. There should be no playing at any time. How awful! Here’s what Aristotle writes about those who not only don’t have fun but also are upset when others have fun: “Those who would never say anything themselves to raise a laugh, and even object when other people do it, seem to be boorish and stiff.”^[6]

Don’t be boorish and stiff like the fish in the pot, because, as Aristotle writes, “The boor is useless when he meets people in these circumstances. For he contributes nothing himself, and objects to everything; but relaxation and amusement seem to be necessary in life.”^[7] Why does amusement seem necessary in life? Why not be a boor? Aristotle seems to provide some clues in his discussion about friendship, writing that “it is most necessary for our life. For no one would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other goods.”^[8]

The modern philosopher of jokes, Al Gini, explores the importance of making friendly connections in his recent book The Importance of Being Funny: Why We Need More Jokes in Our Lives. Gini writes that there are three main reasons for making jokes: for pleasure, for relationships, and for defense. Regarding the importance of jokes in building friendly relationships, Gini writes:

The fish in the pot can’t do these things because the fish is a boor and frowns on making jokes. Thus the fish in the pot has difficulty getting close to others because it doesn’t realize that jokes help us be successful with others. The witty person knows how to use jokes to make their world a better place by shortening that distance between two people.

Always Pick Up Your Playthings

So the virtuously witty person should joke, but how to avoid the extreme of joking too much? The buffoon makes jokes that are harmful and drive others away. How can we be witty and not a buffoon? The Cat himself provides a clue. After making the huge mess in the house, the Cat brings in his deus ex machina—a machine that fixes everything—and cleans up the mess. The page is worth quoting in full:

The lesson about play is the rule “I always pick up all my playthings.” The other lines on this page are short with several rhymes, but the rule is set aside from the rest of the text as a longer prose line that doesn’t rhyme with any other line. Geisel said in an interview that breaking up the pace and meter with a line of prose is one of his stylistic tricks.^[10] I know from my own experience reading this aloud to children that the line “I always pick up all my playthings” gets a slower and more intoned reading.

The reader learns a valuable lesson: play all you want but pick up your playthings afterward. That means you can’t break stuff because you can’t unbreak it afterward. That means you can’t endanger the lives of others because if you really hurt them, you won’t be able to unhurt them afterward. By contrast, it’s appropriately funny to make a house out of wooden blocks and then pretend to be a monster destroying it because it’s easy to pick up your wooden blocks afterward. It’s a good beginner’s rule of appropriate play: make sure that everything can be cleaned up afterward, and don’t do anything that is permanently damaging to yourself or to others. Aristotle writes that “a joke is a type of abuse” and that the “cultivated and civilized person, as a sort of law to himself,” will use self-control to be funny without thoughtlessly harming others.^[11]

Would You Tell?

But the Cat in the Hat does clean it up. He uses his many-handed machine to pick up the cake, the rake, the gown, the milk, the strings, the books, the dish, the fan, the cup, the ship, and even the fish in the pot. Mother returns on the last pages. Her face is not shown; only her hand and foot enter the door. She asks the central question of The Cat in the Hat: “Did you have any fun?” (Cat). If the book is a lesson in how to have “fun that is funny,” and if the rule is “I always pick up all my playthings,” then the kids were successful: they had fun that is funny and everything was picked up. Since they followed the rule of appropriate play, they should joyfully tell their mother about this strange cat who barged into the house and damaged their belongings and endangered the fish and let loose two wild things from a box that made it worse, and then, when they saw that she was coming home, the wild things were caught and the uninvited cat put everything back where it was as if nothing had ever happened using a big machine with lots of hands! But they can’t admit to all that, can they?

The implication seems to be, obviously, NO! Don’t tell Mother because you got away with it!, which is a pretty subversive statement to leave for a beginner reader who might very well be reading that very book with their own parents or other adult authorities. Here’s Geisel himself on The Cat in the Hat and subverting adult authority:

Theodor Geisel is able to raise issues of subversion and authority with a vocabulary of less than three hundred words and in a context that makes the beginning reader laugh. Why do that? Why do we continue to read The Cat in the Hat decades after its 1957 publication? Al Gini provides an answer.

Gini writes that jokes seem to serve three main purposes: pleasure, relationships, and defense. The pleasure of jokes is obvious, and the importance of relationships is discussed above. Regarding defense, Gini suggests that jokes can work as a way of dealing with hardships. The pleasure of a joke can help ease the pain of a bad situation. But jokes can do more: they can help illuminate difficult topics. By making jokes about scary issues we are trying to get a handle on a situation we don’t really understand. Gini writes:

The Cat in the Hat makes a joke out of obedience to authority. By doing so, it creates a safe space in which the beginning reader can discuss important issues regarding obedience, authority, truth telling, and so on. As Aristotle reminds us, this is good practice. The real world contains situations in which it is legitimate to ask whether you should tell the truth, when to be subversive, and when to obey authority, and reading The Cat in the Hat provides the practice to do it “at the right times, about the right things, towards the right people, for the right end, and in the right way.”^[14]

Notes

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated, with introduction, notes, and glossary, by Terence Irwin (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1999), 1128a, 65.

In Geisel’s own words, “It’s the book I’m proudest of . . . because it had something to do with the death of the Dick and Jane primers. In 1954 John Hersey wrote an article in Life that suggested something to the effect that we should get rid of the boredom of Dick and Jane and Spot and hand the educational system over to Dr. Seuss! William Spaulding, who was then the textbook chief at Houghton Mifflin, read the article and asked me if I’d like to try to do a primer, and he sent me a list of about three hundred words and told me to make a book out of them. At first I thought it was impossible and ridiculous, and I was about to get out of the whole thing; then decided to look at the list one more time and to use the first two words that rhymed as the title of the book—cat and hat were the ones my eyes lighted on. I worked on the book for nine months—throwing it across the room and letting it hang for a while—but I finally got it done. Houghton Mifflin, however, had trouble selling it to the schools; there were a lot of Dick and Jane devotees, and my book was considered too fresh and irreverent. But Bennett Cerf at Random House had asked for trade rights, and it just took off in the bookstores.” Originally published by Jonathan Cott in Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983). Republished as chapter 12, “The Good Dr. Seuss,” in Of Sneetches and Whos and the Good Dr. Seuss: Essays on the Writings and Life of Theodor Geisel, ed. Thomas Fensch (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), 115.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1106b21, 24.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1128a5, 65.

Fensch, Of Sneetches and Whos and the Good Dr. Seuss, 116.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1128a8, 65.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1128b2, 66.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 115a5, 119.

Al Gini, The Importance of Being Funny: Why We Need More Jokes in Our Lives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 42.

10.

Fensch, Of Sneetches and Whos and the Good Dr. Seuss, 112.

11.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1128a30, 66.

12.

Fensch, Of Sneetches and Whos and the Good Dr. Seuss, 117.

13.

Gini, The Importance of Being Funny, 51.

14.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1106b21, 24.

Welcome!

On Beyond Reason

The Kantian (Proto-Romantic) Imagination

The Romantic Imagination

The Seussian Imagination: Waking Up the Brain Cells

The Ever-Evolving Seussian Imagination

Imagination Unbound, or My Alphabet Starts Where Your Alphabet Ends

Notes

Aristotle and the Cat on Fun That Is Funny

The Things That Went on There That Day

An Ancient Lesson in Fun That Is Funny

The Buffoon in the Hat

Things Go Too Far

The Fish in the Pot Is a Boor

Always Pick Up Your Playthings

Would You Tell?

Notes

The Seussian Imagination:
Waking Up the Brain Cells