There is a legend that intertwined rats' tails can fuse together, producing a many-headed monster known as a rat-king. The largest mummified specimen of this phenomenon, whose tails were probably tied together after death, is displayed in the science museum in Altenburg, Germany. As a collective fantasy, the rat-king provides an apt analogy for the tangle of cultural anxieties represented by the rat in modernism. This chapter attempts to unravel these strands while stressing their knotted interdependence. Foremost among them is the notion of excess, whether negatively figured in the form of waste, or positively in the form of plenty. Other strands connect the atavistic to the futuristic, the savage to the citified, the bestial to the human, the mechanical to the organic, the polluted to the sterilized, the superstitious to the scientific, the foreign to the inbred, the heterogeneous to the homogenized, the chaotic to the systematic.

The modernist rat provokes such oppositions only to confound them. Popping up irrepressibly in modernist texts, the rat signals the breakdown of boundaries, at once calamitous and liberating. Traditionally feared as a parasite on literature, a bibliophagous menace to the authority of the book, the rat represents the forces of decomposition endemic to the work of composition. As we shall see, the recurrence of the rat in modernist texts intimates that writing is riddled with erasure, and that literature is a self-gnawing artefact.