Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Page 28
animal protagonists.48 Even playful essays about one’s favorite cat could lead to trouble. When the modern painter Feng Zikai (1898–1975) in 1962 sketched himself with a kitten on his head and also wrote an essay in which he stated that “nowadays cats ( mao) are loved more than people,” both the sketch and the essay were later interpreted as a defamation of Mao Zedong.49 During
the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), talking animals even disappeared from
animation. This situation changed only as a result of the liberalization of the This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:43 UTC
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1980s and 1990s.50 In the twenty-first century, authors of fiction, too, have rediscovered the potential of talking animals. One of the most conspicuous
examples is Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (Shengsi pilao) of 2006. This novel provides a wide-ranging panorama of the history of the first fifty years of the People’s Republic of China as observed through the eyes of a donkey, an ox, a boar, a dog, and a monkey, all reincarnations of a landlord who was summarily executed during the land reform of 1950.51 Talkative as
these animals may be when confronting other members of their species as
they pursue their own needs and comment on the human world around them,
they cannot speak to humans.
Equally eloquent is the rodent protagonist of Shan Bei’s I’m a Mouse (Wo shi laoshu) of 2009, in which we follow twelve months in the life of a mouse that moves from the countryside to the city, where it joins a colony of mice below three villas in a new development on the outskirt of the town. This
allows our mouse to observe the goings-on in three human families and judge their actions from the standpoint of the mice. More interesting is perhaps
the description of its own life: as a proper cadre, the mouse busies itself with meetings and plans and fact-finding missions, always fearful of the jealousy of others cadres.52 Cats hardly play a role in this novel: one mouse enjoys a legendary reputation because it once castrated a cat in a fight, and in the only confrontation between mice and cats that is described at length in this novel, the cat suffers an ignominious defeat and drowns.
Fang Hao in his Empire of Cats (Mao diguo) of 2010 followed the career of a little stray kitten, Greenear (Lü’er), who works his way up to the highest position in the society of cats within the walls of a hospital compound. These fish-fed cats only very rarely feel a need to catch a mouse.53 Greenear kills a highly respected fellow cat and then unites the cats inside the compound
under his leadership, instilling in them a fear of the cats outside the compound by blaming them for that murder. Doing so, he relies on the superior
sophistication of one of the house cats (Mimi), who, once appointed as head of propaganda, turns out to be an even more cunning master of lies and decep-tion than Greenear. Together they isolate and kill the only cat that dares
speak out against them. Following that elimination, Mimi appoints himself
second in command when he orchestrates Greenear’s installation as supreme
leader, causing a now fearful Greenear to concoct an elaborate scheme in
which Mimi defects to the enemy, only to be killed on the spot. Once Greenear has become the absolute leader after eliminating all his rivals, he realizes that
“men of talents will always be each other’s enemies, hiding a dagger in their This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:43 UTC
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smiles, so the favorite assistants of a strongman can only be weaklings, while the trusted friends of a man of talent can only be fools.”54
In late-imperial society, the law court was where citizens and government
interacted. Many of the traditional popular adaptations of the underworld
court case of the mouse against the cat parodied the proceedings of a traditional court session and criticized the many forms of graft and corruption.
The modern texts on mice and cats do not focus on a law case anymore but
focus on the leading classes in society, as the government has become far
more pervasive in the daily life of citizens. Bao Youfu lashed out against the degeneration of traditional society, but provided a moral regeneration as a happy end. Zhu Xiang made fun of the ineffectual (traditional and modern)
intellectuals of his day. Shan Bei and Fang Hao looked back at the first fifty years of the People’s Republic. If the former appears to focus on the failed dream of a new society, the latter is fascinated by the power struggles that ripped China apart. The publishers of both Shan Bei and Fang Hao described
their works as “allegorical,” thus inviting readers to try to identify the protagonists in these dystopian novels with social types or perhaps even with
China’s leaders. Interestingly, while Shan Bei and Fang Hao occasionally
refer to traditional mouse lore and cat lore, they do not hold out the vision of final justice that prevailed in most tales of the underworld court case of the mouse against the cat.
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Epilogue
Cats and Mice in Love and War from East to West
In view of the early Egyptian domestication and veneration of the cat, it
should come as no surprise that our earliest information on stories about the antagonistic relation between felines and rodents is provided by ancient
Egypt. Pictures from the fifteenth century BCE and later show cats and mice at war: a massive attack of rats on a fortification defended by cats; individual engagements of rodents and cats; the submission of the cat to the rats, and the final submission of the rats to the cats.1 These pictures may be arranged in a series that would recount a complex story of the war between the cats
and the mice, in which the mice after an initial victory enslave the cats, until these rise in revolt and subdue the mice. It is not clear whether the many
pictures of cats as servants of rats are part of the same story (the enslavement of the cats before their final revolt?), or whether these should be seen as unre-lated sketches of a world turned upside down.2 In the absence of texts, however, the reconstruction of any tale of the war between the rats and the cats from ancient Egypt is very much based on the long tradition of stories on
the conflicts between rodents and their predators in the Middle East as it is known from texts in Greek, Persian, Arabic, and Turkish from later centuries, the origin of which has occasionally been traced back to this reconstructed Egyptian tradition.3
In the ancient fable literature in Greek and Latin, we encounter various
accounts of the war between the mice and the weasels, their main predators
north of the Mediterranean for most of antiquity.4 This story was apparently widely known and popular in paintings: according to a fable by Phaedrus,
the war of the mice against the weasels was depicted on the walls of every
tavern! The best-known fable on the war between the mice and the cat prob-
ably is the tale in which the assembled mice agree on the proposal to bell the cat so they will be warned in advance of its approach, but then find none of them is brave enough to accomplish this task. In another fable,
the emphasis 175
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e pi l ogu e
is on the vainglorious behavior of the commanders in the army of the mice,
who affix horns to their heads to be more visible. When the mice are defeated by the weasels, the common soldiers flee into their holes, but the routed
officers are slaughtered because their horns make it impossible to slip away.
In Hellenistic times there also circulated a mock epic in Greek hexameters
on the war between the mice and the weasels, the composition of which may
have predated that of the Batrachomyomachia, but unfortunately only fragments have been preserved of this “Galeomyomachia” on a single papyrus.5
Other papyri contain a dispute between a weasel and a mouse.6
Among the corpus of Aesopian fables, we also encounter a version of the
well-known tale of the feigning cat. In this fable the cat tries to lure the mice from their hole by pretending to be dead and hanging himself from a nail.
The mice are not fooled and stay safely inside their hole. The story of the feigning cat would appear to have enjoyed considerable popularity in ancient India, and we encounter a much more developed version of this motif in “The Cat’s Judgment” in the Panchatantra. This story starts with a description of the conflict between the partridge and the hare. When the partridge after a long absence finds that its former nest has been occupied by a hare that refuses to return it, the two animals decide to appeal to a judge and agree to abide by the judgment of a cat that lives as an ascetic on the banks of the Ganges.
When they meet with the cat, the hare and the partridge, still afraid, keep their distance, but the cat urges them to come closer, as it has developed
hearing problems. As soon as the two animals are foolish enough to approach, the cat grabs them both and swallows them.7 In later versions of this tale, it is the mice that become the victims of the cat that claims to have adopted a pious lifestyle. An ascetic cat standing on one leg and surrounded by mice is depicted in the famous Descent of the Ganges rock carving of the seventh century, and around that time the monk Yixing recorded a Buddhist version
of the tale in China.8 Later, this fable would become widely popular among
Buddhists of Central Asia, such as the Tibetans.9
The story of the war of the mice against their predators, now the cats,
enjoyed widespread popularity throughout Europe and the Near East during
the second millennium. In Europe, the story continued to be a popular sub-
ject in paintings. A copy of a twelfth-century fresco from a church in Pürgg (Austria), showing cats attacking a castle defended by mice (or rats), has been preserved.10 Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) claims in his Decamerone that the Florentine painter Bruno once painted a large fresco of the war of the
cats against the mice in one night, and in 1468 the Florentine merchant Benedetto Dei while in Paris bought “a great storied painted paper, about twelve This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:45 UTC
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feet or so, which had the battle of the mice and the cats, a pleasant thing to see, and a bargain.”11 But extended texts on the war of the rodents against the cat are lacking from these centuries, as the most popular beast epics of medieval western Europe assigned their main role to the fox. The Italian humanist Andrea Dazzi (Andreas Dactius; 1473–1548), however, at the age of seventeen authored a Neo-Latin mock epic in three books titled Aeluromyomachia, on the battle between the cats and the mice.12 After the mice have twice defeated the cats in battle, the final battle ends in a definitive victory of the cats.13 This was followed by an anonymous epic in Italian titled La Grande Battaglia del i gatti e dei sorci that was published in Venice.14 The theme of the war of the cats and the mice continued to be popular in the visual arts of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Europe, especially in prints.15 In 1775, the Polish bishop Ignacy Krasicki (1735–1801) published his Myszeis (Mousiad), a mock-heroic poem in ottava rima in ten short books, on the rebellion of the mice against the cats during the legendary reign of King Popiel II, which ends with the cruel monarch being devoured by the mice.16 This work also
appeared in a German translation (a French translation was made but never
published).
From the Near East we have numerous texts on the war between the mice
and the cats in various languages. The earliest of these is the Katomyomachia by the twelfth-century Byzantine author Theodoros Prodromos. Prodromos
(ca. 1100–ca. 1170) left a large and varied oeuvre, including a number of satiric works. Among these, his Katomyomachia parodies the form of classical Greek drama. After the king of the mice has decided to go to war against the cat
despite the advice to the contrary of his adviser, the scene shifts to his queen, who first hears from a messenger that her eldest son has died in battle, but later learns that the mice have been victorious because a rotten rafter of the barn in which the battle took place had fallen down and killed the cat.17 In medieval Persia, the well-known fourteenth-century poet Obeyd Zakani is
credited with a narrative poem on the war between the mice and the cat.
Here the cruel cat feigns to be a devout Muslim and so convinces the mice
to submit themselves to his authority; when the mice cannot stand his cruelty any longer, they rise in rebellion and with their massed troops even capture the cat, but the animal soon breaks his bonds to inflict a devastating defeat on the rodents. This poem has remained popular through the ages and is
available in illustrated manuscripts and printed versions.18 The cat in Zakani’s poem has been identified with several cruel rulers in Persia’s history, but as the original poet was smart enough not to be too precise, none of these identifications has become generally accepted in the scholarly community, which This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:45 UTC
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also continues to debate the original date of composition and to question
Zakani’s authorship. In the case of Prodromos’s Katomyomachia, too, some scholars have tried to pinpoint the allegorical identity of the cat, focusing on Venice, a major opponent of Byzantium.19
The war between the mice and the cats is also encountered in popular
Turkish literature: a poem on the subject circulated widely at the turn of the twentieth century.20 This version appears to derive from the Persian. In Arabic, a number of versions are found that were composed independently of the medieval Persian version and of each other, and most likely derive from the oral milieu of professional storytellers.21 In one of these, the hungry tomcat presents himself to a mouse as a holy fakir and promises him his daughter
in marriage, only to eat the gullible animal as soon as the mouse comes out of his hole.22 When the rodents assemble in revenge, they defeat the cats, but when they kill and devour the cat that comes with gifts of peace, the cats take revenge. In Ethiopia, the legend of the war between the cats and the mice
also starts with a fake wedding promise: when the cat prince and mouse
princess are about to meet, the cats attack the wedding party, scattering the gathered mice.23 Alongside adaptations of the war between the mice and the
cat in Arabic and Persian, one also encounters adaptations of the dispute
between the mouse and the cat before a third party,
but this dispute does not have the character of a formal court case.24
While the texts from the Middle East predate the Chinese texts on the
wedding, the war, and the court case of the cat and the mouse that are dis-
cussed in this volume, it does not seem that they exerted any direct impact on these Chinese materials. The theme of the wedding of the mouse has a
long tradition in Chinese culture. If, as we saw, some places in China came to associate the annual custom with the Indian tale of the selection of the groom, such would appear to have happened only at a relatively late date. The Near Eastern traditions (with the exception of Ethiopia) do not give much
prominence to the theme of the wedding of the mouse and the cat, if it is
encountered at all. The Indian motif of the feigning cat made its way to China, but is not encountered in the tales on the wedding, the war, and the court
case of the mouse and the cat. The motif of the war between the mice and the cat is indeed encountered in China (and it also is found in Japan), but in
general it is difficult to prove that the literary treatments we have encountered crossed language boundaries: in almost every locality the theme was independently adapted to a local genre.
Whereas Chinese scholars to the best of my knowledge have paid little
attention to Middle Eastern parallels to Chinese tales on cats and mice, they, This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:45 UTC
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and their Japanese colleagues, have repeatedly discussed the parallels
between the Chinese and the Japanese versions of the originally Indian tale of the selection of a groom by the mice for their daughter.25 In Korea, this story was already recorded by Yu Mong-in (1559–1623), but in Japan (as in
China) written sources for this story date from a later period.26 The Japanese illustrated children’s books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the so-called akahon) on the wedding of the mice ( nezumi no yomeiri) feature a happy narrative of an engagement between mice, the subsequent wedding,