In ‘The Garden of Stubborn Cats’, the author reflected the competition and use of land rights in the urban crazy expansion, but Calvino creatively adopts the perspective of cat, a kind of animal close to the ground, which makes the whole story romantic, flexible, light and unconventional. At the beginning of the story, Calvino chooses to cut in from the urban space that he is good at and continues to be interested in. He describes two versions of urban space - cat's and human's, the latter plunders, oppresses and nibbles the former with a kind of crazy attack. This leads to an extreme situation in which cat's social space and human's social space are extremely incompatible, and there is a clear separation between them.
Calvino sets the protagonist Marco Valdo as the connecter between human society and cat secret society. His curiosity about the cat society drives him to put aside the perspective of human beings, choose to walk close to the ground, and re-examine the landscape and urban space from the perspective of cats, which is also a reflection of arrogant anthropocentrism. It also reminds people of Levi Strauss's classic passage of bending down to look at a cat in the opening of the famous melancholy tropics. Marco Valdo is such a poetic man.
Under the guidance of the cat, Marco Valdo gradually approached the cat's secret society, a small deserted garden, which was in sharp contrast to the surrounding crazy expansion of tall buildings. Calvino also highlights this contrast. In his novel, he wrote: "there are tall buildings around, hundreds of windows of skyscrapers like many disapproving eyes, staring at a small area of land with two trees, sparse tiles covered with yellow leaves, lingering in the middle of the busy community." The existence of this wasteland itself constitutes a resistance to the capitalist logic of crazy expansion. But here, this kind of resistance is not Marx's ferocious capitalist image with blood flowing in every pore, but a poetic green color composed of animals and plants, like a enclave, or a heterotopian existence.
Here, the relationship between human and animal is reversed. The owner of the enclave is the Marquis lady, who has become the "most powerful nail house". She .
lives in the center of the city and resists a batch of businessmen and construction companies who attempt to develop the land. In Marcovaldo's later face-to-face meeting with her, the Marquis told her own version of the story: it was these cats that occupied her house and garden, and her life was dominated by cats, "they followed me, blocked my steps, tripped my feet They are afraid that I will sell the land Don't let me go Not allowed When builders come to determine contracts, you should look at them, the cats! They get involved, stick out their nails, and scare off a notary! Once I had a contract here. Just about to sign it, they rushed in through the window, overturned the ink bottle and tore all the paper... " Animals have become the masters of space, they have the ability to defend their own space, and even have the power to dominate the space of human life. Calvino did not portray the lonely woman as the only courageous hero in the city who resisted the logic of capital. On the contrary, she, like others, had to submit to the logic. The role of resistors is essentially assumed by cats. They are the defenders of space and the real revolutionaries.
With the urban renewal and development, the original ecological balance may be broken, and the original habitat of animals and plants may be deprived. Cats, frogs, ladybugs, pigeons flying in the air, crisscross and crisscross waterways, mushrooms growing wantonly after the rain - their living space has also been squeezed and occupied to varying degrees. Compared with the deprivation of human beings, the deprivation of animals and plants is more hidden. This is the combination of the bottom and the bottom. It's the sympathy of the marginal figures and the marginal animals and plants. In the process of rapid urban development, only those abandoned, insulted and damaged lives huddle together to keep warm and rely on each other, which may be the cruelest and most real part of Calvino's romantic and poetic urban fables.
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