Why a cat story with no cats has become an internet sensation
Last weekend, a short story published in The New Yorker went viral. Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person has gone on to become the most talked about short fiction in recent times. It’s also now considered to be the first ever short story to have gone viral in the age of social media.
Several pieces have been written as to why this cultural moment happened. But whatever opinions people might have, what has happened is good for the story form, often considered a step-child in the world of literature, where the novel still rules.
The story, with its themes of consent and modern dating, has been called “relatable”. Sophomore Margot, 20, meets 34-year old Robert at the artsy cinema she works in. There is text-message flirtation between the two, leading up to an awkward date. Robert slut- shames Margot; she fat-shames him.
The character of Margot enables Roupenian to tap into the reality of millennial dating. Robert’s character keeps an older readership in the loop. The current climate of powerful men in Hollywood being finally made accountable and the Me Too movement provided the right context for the story to take off.
With the internet, gratification is instant. Roupenian, an MFA from the University of Michigan, who in the past has done the Peace Corps in Kenya, studied African fiction, and worked as a nanny, saw her Twitter following go up from 200 to 6,000. Another account, Men React to Cat Person, clocked 8,000 followers.
But something else happened. Many readers displayed an illiteracy to do with how to read fiction. They referred to it as a piece or an article, which it is far from. Like all fiction it might have touched on some points of autobiography, but that doesn’t make it an opinion piece.
In fact, that’s what makes fiction an excellent tool to explore ambiguity. There is much to read between the lines and ponder over. Like any good story writer, Roupenian doesn’t delve too much into the back story of her characters. Novelists feel this need, story writers don’t. A good story leaves out a lot and Roupenian ticks this box.
The focus is on a situation—a date in this case, and the sequence of events leading up to the situation. Robert swings between being nice and needy. The story examines the see-saw of emotions one has when meeting a stranger.
How should one read this stranger? Margot feels fear, though nothing really happens. Robert doesn’t come across as desperately evil (until the last sentence), nor does Margot come across as unnecessarily paranoid. Both try and gauge the other. Margot’s roommate is the only one who has clarity about the situation.
As the author told The New Yorker: “For most of the story, I wanted to leave a lot of space for people to sympathise with Robert, or at least, like Margot, to be able to imagine a version of him—clueless, but well-meaning—that they can sympathise with. I wanted that version of Robert to exist alongside the possibility of a much more sinister one.”
In many ways, this is a story about the unsaid pressure on women when it comes to the sexual act. The author again: “So much of dating involves this interplay of empathy and narcissism: you weave an entire narrative out of a tiny amount of information, and then, having created a compelling story about someone, you fall in love with what you’ve created.”
The moment when I feel the most sympathy for Margot is when, after she spends the entire story wondering about Robert—what he’s thinking, feeling, doing—she is left marvelling the most at herself, and at her own decision to have sex with him, “at this person who’d just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing.””
This is a story about bad sex and why Margot doesn’t get out of the situation before she does. It’s about agency. Robert fills her with revulsion. And yet she plays along, to avoid coming across as “spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at the restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.”
So the story can be read as primarily about how young women move through the world, wary of making people angry, accommodating other people’s messy inarticulate emotions, even taking responsibility for them, exhausting oneself trying to keep everyone happy.
There are times when Margot fleetingly feels the sparkly lightness of something approximating love, an “elastic-band snap”. It keeps her interested. She goes to Robert’s house and feels reassured that they share common interests.
She recoils when he undresses: “his belly thick and soft and covered with hair.” She tries to “bludgeon her resistance into submission” by taking a swig of his whisky. The age-gap between the two is also touched upon with skill and deftness.
Some readers have split themselves into sides, as if this wasn’t a work of fiction but a polemical piece. It is not.
As the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman said, Cat Person does not indulge in finger pointing: “It isn’t a story about rape or sexual harassment, but about the fine lines that get drawn in human interaction.”
If anything, it helps begin an honest conversation about heterosexual sex in contemporary times and the power dynamic that underlines it.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)
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