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  • The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats
  • Megan Lambert (bio)
The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats. Introduction and Annotations by Philip Nel. New York: Random House, 2007.

There is a certain appropriate air of scholarly mischief in the undertaking of an annotated version of Theodor Seuss Geisel's two groundbreaking beginning reader books about the Cat in the Hat, which seem at first blush to be surprising candidates for annotation. After all, annotated books are designed to provide interpretive context by creating layers of back story, analysis, and expansion around the central text, and the central texts in this case, The Cat in the Hat and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, are ones designed with controlled vocabulary, brevity, and accessibility as their defining elements. One might ask, "What is there to annotate?" By pursuing this somewhat surprising project, Nel positions himself as a maverick worthy of the subversive feline object of his [End Page 213] study as he responds with "a variety of contexts in which we might interpret the books—biographical, historical, political, cultural, formal, aesthetic and others" (17).

What is there to annotate? Plenty. To paraphrase another Seuss classic: Nel can annotate here. Nel can annotate there. Nel can annotate anywhere. Acknowledging the interdependent nature of art and text in the beginning reader form, Nel appropriately attends to the Cat books' illustrations and words in his work and thereby provides insight into Geisel's creative process as both a writer and illustrator. Ultimately, Geisel's spare, controlled texts get an exhaustive, line-by-line analysis, though at times the annotations read as mere rephrasing of the Seuss texts. Happily, Nel usually moves well beyond this to provide engaging insights and expansions on the stories, and the notes frequently delve into the realm of adaptation studies as Nel analyzes how the original beginning reader texts were molded into scripts for stage, film, and animated productions. In a note reflecting on an opposite progression, Nel draws a connection between the controlled vocabulary Geisel used in his beginning reader books and the work he developed while employed by the U.S. Army's Information and Education Division, during which he created educational films about a character named Private SNAFU, who taught troops by negative example.

Nel writes:

Since many U.S. troops were not well educated or even literate, these cartoons had to get their message across in plain English. As Technical Fairy, First Class—a masculine Tinker Bell with a five o'clock shadow—tells SNAFU at the end of the "Gripes" episode (July 1943), "The moral, SNAFU, is the harder you woik, the sooner we're gonna beat Hitler, that joik." This sentence has the same meterical emphasis as "'You should not be here / When our mother is not. / You get out of this house!'/ Said the fish in the pot." The presence of these anapests suggests that in writing the SNAFU cartoons, Seuss developed skills he would use in writing the Beginner Books series. In a sense, Private SNAFU is an uncle (or father) of the 236-word The Cat in the Hat (54).

Ultimately, the book's greatest strength is its wealth of visual material, which includes process pieces alongside finished art and ample connections to Geisel's illustration work in advertising and in his other books. (There is even a depiction of the aforementioned Technical Fairy, First Class, complete with his five o'clock shadow.) This allows the reader insight into Geisel's broader life as an artist who worked and reworked his compositions in order to achieve their comic brilliance and whose work outside of the children's book world shows remarkable connections with work within this realm.

For example, Nel refers the reader to Charles Cohen's suggestion that the Wild Tones from Seuss's 1937 advertisements for Stromberg-Carlson radios might be antecedents for the Things in The Cat in the Hat. Nel quotes Cohen's assessment that the Wild Tones "'bear a bushy resemblance to the equally untamable' Things One and Two" and continues, "Just as the [End Page 214] Wild Tones 'made such a ruckus and ruined radio...

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