The Tragic Thread in Science Fiction by Waugh Robert H

Author:Waugh, Robert H.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Published: 2019-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

II

It is time to admit that the predatory cat Cheeta stalks the second half of the novel as Juno had presided as a good angel over the first half. Titus had arrived at the city wet from the river, his clothes clinging to him “like seaweed” (18); in the second half of the novel he arrives at the house of Cheeta in her outhouse, “his clothing [. . .] drenched” (161). This outhouse may act as a parody of the Night Sea Journey, but this fecal imagery suggests that this Night Sea Journey is more profound than that in the first part of the novel. We should keep in mind the story of Osiris, which Eliot found useful in conceiving The Waste Land; the god is sealed in a coffer and cast into the Nile, finding its way down the Nile and out into the Mediterranean sea to wash up in Syria (Frazer 385–86). This myth reminds us that the Night Sea Journey extends so far down in the human being that it goes down into death; in Titus Alone Titus dies at least two times, but probably more often.

Cheeta has a remarkable beauty, carefully described in a long paragraph; but it is not a classic beauty like Juno’s, but contemporary. It is “a new kind of beauty,” her features misplaced, quizzical, and chameleon-like (160). She is dangerous, however, as Juno never was, for Cheeta is “the scientist’s daughter” (159), as the narrator often reminds us. He does not seem to be a part of the group that had exterminated Muzzlehatch’s animals; he is too wispy to take part in such violence. The chimneys of his factory, however, suggest a different kind of violence, one that is devoted to ashes. Remembering this attempt not to remember, the Goat and the Hyena whisper to each other, “not realizing that the merest breath was sucked into the great flues and chimneys and so down to the central areas where they turned and twisted” (163).

But to return to Cheeta: the cheetah is the fastest animal on land and thereby the being much given to transformation, with such cousins as the tiger, the emblem of the Terrible Mother (Neumann 149), and the cat. To balance Cheeta two wild cats appear (215), inspecting the work that has been done to the Black House in order to make an arena for the spectacle that Cheeta is preparing in which she will mock and insult and destroy Titus. These two cats have the gift of being motionless, “sitting upright, hidden by a wealth of ferns’ (216). When they do move “it seemed they ran on oil, those loveless heads, so fluidly they turned from side to side” (216). The arena is still their arena, despite the changes that Cheeta is at work on. Though they are as loveless as she is, they possess a natural elegance. In addition, they are possessed by a natural perversity. “For a moment their eyes met,” the narrator comments. “It was a glance of such exquisite subtlety that a shudder of chill pleasure ran down their spines” (216).

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