A Harmless Necessary Cat

What is nature?

For Garfield, nature is an illusion. The cat perpetually flaunts established rules of propriety. He is a "bad cat" who, by refusing to play along with the normative cultural and social expectations imposed on his kind, effectively "queers" established binaries of natural and unnatural behavior throughout the animal kingdom.

It is accepted that cats will hunt mice in order to kill and devour them - this is the behavior we associate with felines of all species. Cats are hunters, according to the stereotype, whose instincts have not been dulled by thousands of years of domestication. Garfield, on the other hand, rejects the tyranny of "instinctive" behavior: he refuses to play down to expectations placed on him by convention and propriety.

Examine his posture in this strip: he sits up on his haunches (how like man he is!), placidly leaning over an ottoman, unwilling to express so much as a flicker of interest in the prospect of hunting and killing the cat's supposed natural prey, the common mouse. He dispassionately observes the mouse, responding only to the voice of his supposed "master" and "owner" who upbraids him for failing to fulfill his "duty" of ridding the master's house of vermin. His disapproval at Jon's voice is manifest in the second panel. (We might assume from context that it is Jon, even if we are given precious little corroboration of this fact - what if the voice is not Jon, what if the voice instead of Garfield's internal conscience, constantly admonishing the cat to resume his "natural" role as a cis-feline?) It is only in the third panel that we are finally allowed to see Garfield smile: he has successfully stymied the presumption of programmed biological "destiny" that undergirds the extant master / slave relationship between owner and pet. It is not in his interest to hunt mice because he has made the rational decision to reject his servitude in absolute terms.

A Harmless Necessary Cat

The premise of Garfield is simple: Garfield the cat suffers from severe depression, a condition which he self-medicates through eating. He cannot be at peace, he always finds fault in his environment, in those around him, in the very constraints of the three-panel universe in which he resides.

In these earliest strips, before Garfield slimmed down, he is enormous, a giant wedge of orange fat. He is more than an animal: he is pure mass, exerting a powerful gravitational pull on everything around him. His owner Jon, the dog Odie, all the food - falls to him, falls into him irresistibly.

He is appetite incarnate: from the root word carnis, Latin for "meat," incarnated means literally to be placed into meat, to be animated in flesh. The risen Christ is a manifestation of God incarnated, the spirit made to animate a hollow shell of gristle and bone. Garfield is the force of appetite. He cannot be sated. He cannot be placated. He will never be satisfied - the moment of relief from his hunger never arrives.

In his world he is both God and damned: every element of reality bends inexorably to him, but even given this he can never be fulfilled. The more he eats, the more he desires to eat. Imagine an eternity of everything you ever wanted without the moment of release granted by satiation - and then imagine Garfield, supreme monarch of a realm of endless suffering.

A Harmless Necessary Cat

Imagine for one second a world wherein Garfield is the greatest comic strip in history.

Hold this world in your mind, cherish it, caress it. Upon returning to the so-called "real" world, you will find yourself unable to shake this idea.

The idea consumes you. It becomes a fixation. You want, you desperately need to look away, to think of something else - but your momentary glimpse of this strange alternate Earth has warped your perception.

You are trapped.

You now know the truth which has been unconcealed by this thought experiment: this alternate world, with Garfield poised at the pinnacle of achievement in the history of comics, is not a fantasy. It's not an imaginary story. You see through the facade of dreams and petty illusions and you realize that this world is our world.

This is the real world.

This is Garfield's world.