Imagining Feline Consciousness: Embodied Cognition in Poe and Montaigne

Abstract

This article investigates how Poe’s reported preoccupation with observing his cat open a kitchen door latch serves as a vehicle for exploring embodied cognition and for entertaining the “shadowy nature” of “the boundary between instinct and reason.” While the verisimilitude of Poe’s narration about his clever “puss” opening a thumb latch cannot be doubted any more than the veracity of Montaigne’s famously amusing himself with his cat, important questions about cognitive embodiment, anthropomorphism, and interspecies communication are raised in both instances. Poe draws on a cluster of examples of “non-reasoning” members of the animal kingdom to speculate on and offer a critique of the porous precincts of reason, such that “Instinct vs Reason—A Black Cat” becomes a subtle study in pareidolia writ large. Poe’s creative use of the device here, whereby a familiar pattern or supposed meaning is perceived in some random stimulus, impels readers to consider the limits and liberties of their own self-conscious subjectivity, especially when “non-reasoning” creatures are brought into the picture.