"Soft Filters": Some Sunshine on "Cat in the Rain".(Critical Essay)

David Herman introduces his collection Narratologies with a citation from David Lodge's essay on Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain." Lodge's essay posed a question of continuing relevance, namely, can narratology help readers achieve more refined interpretations? Contemporary narratology, as represented in Herman's book, seems to reverse the issue, arguing that interpretations, variable as they may be, play an important role in narrative analysis, not only in determining plots, characters, and setting, but also in shaping our understanding of the discourse itself. When we say, for example, that character X is focal, we have opted for one interpretation rather than another. And since interpretations vary, it is possible that another reader might weight the narrative discourse in a different way. Or because different readers conceive the theme of a story differently, there might be a difference of opinion about whether the plot "resolves" questions (Barthes's risques) or only "reveals" a state of affairs. (On the distinction between plots of resolution and plots of revelation, see Chatman, Story 48). In saying that the critical decision to attribute a certain narrative feature presupposes an interpretation, however, I do not mean to deny that such a feature has an independent theoretical existence identifiable across narrative texts.

The entity I wish to discuss is character point of view, or what I prefer to call "filter" (rather than "focalization"), distinguishing it from the narrator's point of view, which I call "slant" (Chatman, Coming to Terms, ch. 9). Clearly, the nature and placement of filter are subject to individual and collective differences in interpretation. Without relinquishing gains in understanding of how structures operate with some uniformity across the universe of narrative texts, narratologists must pay more attention to the role and influence of interpretation.

One source of change in reader input results from general cultural presuppositions. Most contemporary readers would share the view of Lodge and previous inter preters Carlos Baker and John Hagopian about the general point of Hemingway's story, namely that it recounts how a bored and lonely young American wife is dragged around Europe by her husband, George, a bookish chap, who neglects her emotional needs. However, few today would agree with Baker's patriarchal suggestion that the wife's longings are irrational, or with Hagopian's psychoanalytic view that the man in the cape (in the twelfth paragraph) symbolizes a sheathed penis--Freud's hand, and that of symbolism generally, falls less heavily these days.

These are simple and obvious illustrations of how readings change with the intellectual climate. Whether Hemingway's own views were closer to Baker's than to ours, of course, is irrelevant, as is the extratextual evidence that George is Hemingway and that the wife is Hadley (who was pregnant at the time he wrote the story). Contemporary criticism might argue that the story retains its power because it is open enough to accommodate new social attitudes about gender. In addition to these general attitudes, of course, every reader brings to bear unique intellectual and emotional baggage, feelings for instance, about cuddling cats, about traveling as opposed to being a homebody, about hotel management, and so on.

But, like Herman, what I find most useful is Lodge's nuanced approach to the different perspectives--narrator's and characters'--to explain the story's dynamics. Lodge's description is mostly accurate and certainly comprehensive, and my own ac count of the filtration in the story is only meant as a supplement. But I wish to emphasize an important aspect of filtration that figures largely in this story. That is what can be called "shading" or "blending" or "softening" of filters. A character's filter is rarely an unmixed or homogenous phenomenon. Often it mingles with another character's filter and/or the narrator's slant. And it may oscillate among perceptual, cognitive, and what I've called interest aspects, that is, the reader's inference about a character's general welfare. To put it in other terms, filter does not always "toggle," that is, operate in an on-off manner, like an electrical switch. It seems rather a question of dosage or nuance, or in Lodge's term "degree." In this story, for example (I shall assume that the reader has it in front of her), the fifteen sentences after the first seem descriptions by the narrator, but also contain a touch of the collective filter of the couple, more particularly its interest aspect. In sentence two ("They did not know ..."), their interest is invoked precisely because they don't know any of the other guests. In the rest of the paragraph, it is the perceptual aspect of their filter that seems blended with the narrator's description. Sentence five ("There were big palms ..."), for example, could read indeterminately "I, the narrator, tell you, the narratee, that there were big palms" or "The couple could see the big palms." On the other hand, the narrator's slant predominates in sentence six ("In the good weather ..."): the couple, after all, may only have arrived after the rain started. And surely sentence seven belongs to the narrator because it entails an entry into some unidentified painters' minds, knowledge quite unavailable to George and his wife.

The husband's share in the filter drops out in sentence sixteen ("The American wife stood at the window...."), and we are left in the wife's consciousness, specifically in her perception. But again it seems indeterminately what the wife sees and what the narrator describes. The object of her gaze appears in sentence seventeen ("Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables"). Here the simple contiguity of the sentences is sufficient to communicate that the cat under the table is what she sees, on the contextual principle that film scholars refer to as the "eyeline match"--shot 1, the character glances in a certain direction, shot 2, the object of gaze is shown at an appropriate angle and distance. Prose economy often dictates that tags like "she saw" or "she realized" need occur only at the beginning of a character's inner view; thereafter, a kind of inertia instructs us to remain in that character's filter for sentences, paragraphs, and even whole chapters. This inertia usually persists until some overt marker intervenes--say a shift to a setting which the character cannot possibly see, or some judgment that could only be the narrator's or some other character's.

For most of the rest of the story, except for bursts of quoted dialogue, we remain in a blend of the wife's filter and the narrator's description. But the dosage of the blends continues to vary. In sentence eighteen, for example, the wife's filter is made more prominent by her reference to the cat as female. A cat is often called "she" regardless of its actual sex, especially if it is small. "Kitty"--her word, surely--also implies "small," whereas the narrator uniformly uses only "cat." Small is more cuddly than big, and female cats tend to be smaller than male. It's hard to imagine the tough Hemingway narrator caring one way or another about the cat's sex, so, in sentences referring to "kitty" and "she," I assume that the narrator's slant is attenuated. (Inferences about the toughness of the narrator rest, of course, on one's prior experience with Hemingway's other fiction: this is not recourse to biography but to what Wayne Booth has called the "career author" that is, the sum of common attitudes inferable from the implied authors of Hemingway's other works.) [1] Contrarily, a sentence like twenty-six--"His desk was at the far end of the office" --contains little of the wife's filter, since she has no reason to remind herself of the desk's location at this story moment.