Eat Cats! with Litotes

In Turlington today a woman dressed as a chicken passed out vegetarianism propaganda.


We must infer that the "me" of her sign refers to the general population of chickens, not to the woman in the costume herself. Apparently the woman considers herself similar enough in nature to chickens to imply that eating one is linguistically equivalent to eating a person. Who's "me"? We're all "me"! Only this "me" knows how to read and write and stand in Turlington because the "me"s who walk by are the ones with power to change circumstances and the "me"s that go cluck cluck aren't capable of embracing any kind of ideology.

I haven't taken any literary theory courses, but I think that's deconstruction: using the "text" to show how the text undermines itself. The woman wears a costume for solidarity but in doing so necessarily shows disparity.

Well, the chicken let me take her picture, so I felt obligated to take the card she handed out. On the front, there was a cat's cute head facing a pig's cute head. In large letters, the postcard questioned, "Which do you pet? Which do you eat? Why?"

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--I took the one less traveled by. See, I think propaganda relies on politeness. Hear an entire argument before you respond, politeness requests, and then don't be nit-picky if you must criticize it. The problem is that propaganda tiptoes and politeness only tackles runaways. I pet cats and eat pigs because society has conditioned me that way? Because cats catch mice and pigs don't? Because pig fur is coarse? Because I don't like snorting or mud? Because there's more edible meat per pound on a pig than on a cat?

Politeness, if I had taken that road, would absorb the intended effect of the argument: we are inconsistent with which animals we decide to eat. We should be consistent.

But you have to go further than that to find the meaning. Consistency isn't inherently good! In between the flier's conclusion and the flier's logic is a gap. The implication is that we shouldn't eat pigs because we don't eat cats, but one could just as logically reply, "You're right. I should add cats to my diet."

In literature, there's a technique called litotes that has the same gap between what it says and what it means. "Litotes" (pronounced lye-toh-teez, with the emphasis on the first or second syllable) sounds like a kind of legume to me, to be served with lentils, cous-cous, and cats, but in fact it's a name for understatement. More specifically, "understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary." For example, you see Florida demolish the Citadel in football last Saturday 70-19, and you say, "Not bad." That's litotes.

In Anglo-Saxon poetry this rhetorical device was "not uncommon" (to quote from my translated copy of Beowulf--I hope the translator consciously used litotes to describe litotes). One king in Beowulf was found as a baby abandoned at sea, and when he died years later they set his body off to sea, loaded in a boat with all their tribe's treasures.

With no fewer gifts did they furnish him there,
the wealth of nations, than those did who
at his beginning first sent him forth
alone over the waves while still a small child.

Logically, this is a tautology. "His gifts were greater than or equal to the gifts he had at the beginning--that is, none." Duh! The use of litotes adds an element of irony, which is the knowing distance between what is meant and what is said.

What I find fascinating about the Eat Cats card and the Anglo-Saxon use of litotes is that in order to understand what is meant, you have to already know what is meant. In another situation, the statements could have the opposite meaning. In South China, for example, they eat cats and dogs, so if I got the flier from them, I'd think they were trying to win me over. The dead man's treasures are a harder example, but if I didn't understand the poet was doing it on purpose, I might think it was just a stupid line to fill up space.

What are we reading when we come across phrases like these? Devoid of content, these strategies, I think, give us a chance to practice the point of view of the author. We have to think like a vegetarian to read arguments about why we should think like a vegetarian. It's enticing. Next thing you know, I'll be out in Turlington dressed as a chicken myself.