My source is a letter written by my mother to my father, on onion-skin airmail paper (my father was in Europe organizing a concert tour). My mother wrote:

When I found this letter among my father’s old papers a couple of years ago, I was just as puzzled as my mother had been. Why would I have asked my father, from across the ocean, to put me in the zoo? “Private and very eruditely constructed code” indeed: even the maker of the code, that is, me, couldn’t decipher it any longer.

The fact that I couldn’t make sense of it didn’t hinder me from reading the episode. It depicts a many-sided struggle with the signifier, an enterprise that still dominates my life.

You might note that the young H Saussy, beginning his writing career, is inscribing the traces of O, I and H in imitation of some archetype, either the printed book or the airmail communication, “but he doesn’t know” how to make this writing connected and valid. The mimesis of writing has not yet become writing, or its materiality forbids its sublimation into the “content,” the “message,” the “idea,” a blockage which has the effect of estrangement, of restoring the physicality of signs. The letter indicates a further problem with metalanguage: the statement “put me in the zoo” is given first in oblique discourse (“H says… to tell you to put him in the zoo”), and then, in a retraction, restated as a quotation of sorts (“Now he says he didn’t ask me to say ‘put me in the zoo’ but for you to put the little tiger that is a moose… in the zoo”). The self-styled secretary protests that her role as intermediary is transparent and self-effacing—“he insisted that I say just that,” “it is exactly what he told me to say”—but even at that the message is incomprehensible. It would be surprising if it could have been understood: language seems to be undermining itself here in a host of ways.

I was left with my puzzlement until a flicker of literary memory became a flash and the flash became a footnote, and the long-ago scene was saved by the intervention of the intertext. The ambiguity of quotation and indirect discourse surrounding the phrase “put me in the zoo” resolves into a quotation, and the impossible “tiger that is a moose” can now at least be identified, if not captured in the wild. Robert Lopshire’s Put Me in the Zoo (1960) presents the dialogue of two children and a spotted animal, tiger-like in some regards (feline paws, long tail) and moose-like in others (chiefly its bulk). The discursive status of the utterance is ambiguous, as the animal is presented in the printed text as speaker (later alternating in that role with zookeepers and children) and in the visual text as object of his own narration; no speech bubbles intervene to resolve this ambiguity. A parent reading the book out loud would probably want to play the different roles—a further ambiguity.

Here's what happens in the book. The unclassifiable tiger-moose visits the zoo, observes the quality of services rendered there to the animals in their cages (the lion is receiving a haircut and manicure by specialists, a smiling official is dropping fish into a seal’s mouth), and says: “I would like to live this way. This is where I want to stay.” But for some reason left unspecified, the zookeepers refuse to accept him as an inmate and trundle the frustrated animal to the curb. The two children, at first espousing the skepticism of the zookeepers, ask: “Why should they put you in the zoo? What good are you? What can you do?” The tiger-moose responds by showing his extraordinary abilities: he can change his red spots to blue, to orange, to green, to violet, and to a tutti-frutti assortment of colors; he can detach the spots from his body and project them on various surfaces, combine them, juggle them, cover the visible universe with them. The tiger-moose summarizes the case: “Yes, they should put me in the zoo. The things my spots and I can do!” The little boy takes a stern attitude in response: “No. You should NOT be in the zoo,” and the illustration gives the largest-yet image of the tiger-moose’s disappointed face. Change to the major key: “With all the things that you can do,” says the boy, “the circus is the place for you!” And the story ends happily, with the tiger-moose and two children high on a stage, performing tricks with spots for an enraptured public of older adults among whom are visible one of the zookeepers, the Cat in the Hat, and Charlie Brown. “Yes, this is where I want to be. The circus is the place for me!”—the closing statement might be assigned to any of the three main speakers.

So the crisis of the first part of the book, the rejection of the tiger-moose by the zookeepers, was not definitive; it did not portend a negative answer to the question, “What good are you?” but hinged on a misunderstanding of the function of the zoo. The zoo is the place for normal animals, tigers that are merely tigers and moose that are merely moose. It has no place to put shape-shifting virtuosi; its animals are not performers. Such freaks and geniuses find their home in the circus, where what is on display is exceptional and monstrous. Put Me in the Zoo disobeys its own title; far from putting the “me” of the narration into the zoo, it rejects the order, predictability and comfort of zoo life in favor of the hurly-burly and category slippage of artistic life. It initiates the reader—the Beginner, to cite the work’s series title, “Beginner Books”—into a system of categories to which is added a non-category or hyper-category of the uncategorizable. There are lions, seals, and so forth; and there is “the little tiger that is a moose with all different color spots.” The book gives access to zoo and anti-zoo.

Obviously interpellated, at the age of three and a half, by the figure of the tiger-moose, I took his speech for my own, his pronoun as my pronoun, saying all at once “put me in the zoo,” “put the creature in the zoo,” “put him/me in the circus which is where he/I really belong,” and “repeat with me the experience of reading that is Put Me in the Zoo.” To be able to say all these things at once is confusing; but it’s the confusion that literary language has in common with dreams. The displacement and condensation of this language offer both access to the Symbolic and escape from it. There is a realm where lions are lions, where things are what they are, self-consistent, predictable, and speakable, the realm to which Descartes assigned machines and animals; and there is a further realm where I exert will and imagination to transform things as I choose, where realities are only the appearances of the spirit. As an initiation into reading, it offers a whole program: rejection followed by exaltation into a better realm, tiger-moose as Uebermensch, spotlights, greasepaint and glory.