The space not beyond: T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) and their musical adaptations as elemental melodrama of an upper-atmospheric limit

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) and its subsequent musical adaptation, Cats (1981) by Andrew Lloyd Webber, through the lens of elemental melodrama. It begins with Eliot’s envisioned but omitted conclusion, where a poet ascends with Jellicle cats, and explores its revival in the musical’s song ‘Journey to the Heaviside Layer’. This ascent melodramatises the climactic journey to a heaven, an imaginary space beyond Earth’s tangible experiences. The essay contrasts the musical’s alignment of the Heaviside Layer with a ‘heaven’ oriented toward the desires and aspirations of anthropomorphised cats with Joseph Kittinger’s 1960 high-altitude balloon ascent and Maurice Blanchot’s reflections on Yuri Gagarin’s space mission. Both Kittinger’s and Blanchot’s writings reveal the Heaviside Layer as both a real and metaphorical space of death and existential void, contrasting with the musical’s portrayal of it purely in terms of celestial ascent. Drawing on Peter Brooks’s theory of melodrama as a post-sacred mode, the essay highlights how tableau, gesture, heightened emotion and, especially, song in Cats convey a collective yearning for transcendence. Ultimately, it argues that the Heaviside Layer in Cats serves as a zone of elemental melodramatic transcendence. It is in this context that earthly limitations, particularly those relating to embodied differences of race and sex, exist in tension with feline (and, by implication, human) aspirations for an unreachable ‘beyond’.