Meow: A Novel: Postmodernity's Crisis of Meaning, by Ali Rashidian

This article was originally published in Farsi via Iran's Rasa News Agency

Meow: A Novel has achieved impressive sales since its 2023 release, despite it containing only repetitions of the word “meow.” Here we explore some possible reasons for its success.

Sam Austen’s “novel” is a conceptual and humorous work wherein “meow,” and only “meow,” is repeated more than 80,000 times, comprising a unique “literary” experience. According to the author, the work is designed to be understood only by cats, which hints at an elaborate joke aimed at the concepts of language and literature. Interesting, despite its very simple content, the work is a bestseller and has attracted audiences around the world. 

How is a book lacking meaning, narrative structure, or traditional content able to become a sought-after cultural product? To answer this question, we need to go beyond traditional literary and cultural criticism, analyzing it in the context of macro-level societal changes: the platformization of culture, the rise of the attention economy, and the secondary role of actual content in the world of contemporary literature. 

In recent years, with social media platforms becoming biopolitical tools, we have seen the emergence of phenomena that appear to be simple, humorous, or worthless, but which actually represent structural changes in the logic of cultural production and consumption. 

The ubiquitous "BookTok shelf" seen in American bookstores. Books have become interactive status symbols.

Consumption and Symbolic Capital: Book as Luxury Object 

Meow: A Novel can be considered an exponent of late capitalism, where consumption patterns no longer respond to material or even psychological needs, but seek tools for representing and stabilizing consumer status. 

In the context of sociology, Meow can be considered a cultural object rich in symbolic value, not because of its textual content (which is virtually nonexistent), but through its formal characteristics, role in discourse, and its dissemination mechanisms. The person who buys and displays it on social media does so to exhibit social capital, implicitly stating: “I’m sui generis, I can enjoy or give a gift of a meaningless book.” This performance is purely exploitative and self-serving. 

In other words, in a society where goods and symbols are in competition for attention and credibility, Meow places its owner above preexisting cultural categories by eliminating traditional content and emphasizing form and humor. Just as classical music or theater once served as status symbols, Meow and its ilk symbolize membership in the milieu of conspicuous and “tasteful” consumption. 

Walter Benjamin

Postmodernity’s Crisis of Meaning

In the postmodern world, where the distinction between high culture and popular culture has collapsed, Meow reflects the crisis of meaning as a recursive mirror, evoking Benjamin’s universe of “mechanical reproducibility” and its reductive effects.The uninterrupted repetition of a single word—an unassuming and unreasonable word like “meow”–debases literature in a cynical manner, condensing Benjamin’s insight into a singular malignancy. 

From the perspective of the philosophy of language and postmodern ontology, Meow can be considered an example of simulation. This work is the pretense of a book; it has all the physical features of a book, but its content is devoid of narrative, analysis, or information. This book is not for reading, but for display, especially on social media; it serves an attention economy, not an economy of knowledge. Those who buy it seek an “absurd experience” or “different gift;” they seek to generate content rather than absorb it. It’s a digital-friendly object that serves as a personal branding tool: posting a picture of it on social media imputes the object’s calculated logic to its owner. It is not a tool of cognition, but a means by which to associate the consumer with the creator’s own cognitive and commercial product. 

An example of an artwork with meaning imputed by the viewer, famously elucidated by Wittgenstein

The Role of Active Imagination 

Meow’s lack of explicit text also enables the consumer to actively participate in its semanticization, placing the entire burden of meaning upon the reader. The cat utters nothing of value; the audience, consciously or unconsciously, imparts narrative to Meow extemporaneously. 

In the context of reader-centered literary theory, meaning is not an inherent feature of any published text, but an interface between the reader and an array of latent psychological content. Under this rubric, the printed text is nothing but a trigger for the imagination. Meow is a book that, pretending to be conversational without actually saying anything, opens an unlimited dialogue within the reader’s mind. 

In the face of empty repetition, each reader has to refer to his own experiences, feelings, mentality, and memory to make a “story.” One who thinks the cat is contemplating its loneliness is themselves lonely. The “meows” are once again a mirror. 

In fact, Meow is pure tabula rasa, waiting to absorb an audience’s inner color. The work is not a narrative, but it is a platform for narrative. And this makes reading it a typical postmodern experience, one in which the audience is forced into an active position. 

The cat's eyes reflect your inner state.

Psychology of Projection

Humans naturally tend to project their inner feelings, concerns and moods onto objects or other living entities, especially animals. This is rooted in man’s unconscious search for meaning. 

The cat depicted on the cover of Meow, with eyes that can be interpreted as sad, curious, or introspective, provides an excellent platform for mental projection. Along with this, the monotonous and neutral repetition of the word “meow” on all pages implies a hypertext between the cover image and the various “meows.” Relying on their inner feelings, memories, and interpretations, the audience imposes their own narrative onto the cat’s incomprehensible behavior; it is as if the cat is alone, seeking a companion to orient it. 

This is clearly a work of interactive art. Instead of a predetermined message, it provides only the possibility of meaning. Meow is not a text, but an interactive literary experience. In this way, it reflects profound developments in the cultural logic of the contemporary world. Meow is an abstraction of several crises and conceptual pivots in the postmodern era and the digital age: from the collapse of the boundaries of meaning and investment in meaninglessness, to the objectification of the cultural mass in the attention economy, to the transformation of the passive audience into the creative engine of meaning. 

What makes Meow a cultural phenomenon is its power to react to and reflect the aesthetic taste of the American middle class. This book is an objective example of the rotation from “literacy for understanding” to “literacy for display”; from meaning to form, from knowledge to attention, from critical viability to virality. Such a phenomenon is perfectly adapted to our present cultural moment while serving as a warning of a totally commoditized intellectual future.