A-N-Y-O-N-E who reads or writes literary criticism (eSPESHly those with the initials G.C.) should, IMFFHO, initiate sustained textuocular engagement with two v. funny, v. clever and v. acute books by Frederick Crews, The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh. Here's a review of the latter:

A book review by Danny Yee © 2002 [dannyreviews.com]

Purporting to be the proceedings of a December 2000 Modern Language Association seminar on Winnie-the-Pooh, Postmodern Pooh is a biting and wickedly funny parody of the whole spectrum of modern literary theory. It ranges from the absurd and near-slapstick to more subtle allusions which may only be fully appreciated by those "in the business", but anyone who has touched on recent literary theory should enjoy Crews' ambitious conceit.
Crews clearly understands the theories and theoreticians he is parodying, capturing both their style and substance. The setting and contextual elements are also nicely done: the preface and the biographical notes that precede each piece, the footnotes that reference real publications, and the way the contributors attack one another and drift away from Pooh when something too good to leave out comes along (Derrida's analysis of apartheid, for example, or psycho-sexual studies of Henry James). The brief summaries and excerpts that follow can give a feel only for the more local humour.

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Felicia Marronnez, "Sea & Ski Professor of English at the University of California at Irvine", opens proceedings with a demonstration of "how the ethically serious Derrideanism of the Yale school illuminates the subtleties of the Pooh books", complete with puns and wordplay.

Then there is a New Historian (calling himself a "Negotiationist") with a penchant for obscure historical connections.

"We have shown that works such as Pooh don't drift towards a banal meaninglessness; they become active historical players in their own right, shaping the public's illusions about the important issues of the day, such as conquistadorial predation, witch trials, ius primae noctis, and the castration of pre-adolescent counter-tenors."

"The immediate issue here is whether the Pooh animals realise they constitute a de facto nudist colony."

A hero-worshipper of Frederic Jameson situates Pooh in the context of late-capitalist metanarrative, suggesting that Christopher Robin prefigures Jameson, in whose form the Dialectic may have "suspended its usual tortuous course and intervened directly in human affairs".

Sisera Catheter provides a gynocritical perspective.

"Seeing himself castrated and thus ineluctably "female", Eeyore bends his head between and behind his forepaws, evidently attempting an acrobatic autoerotic feat that, if successful, will not only restore his depleted narcissistic libido and give him something to chew on that's nicer than thistles but also exchange his former adult self for a polymorphous perversity whereby the oral, anal, and genital stages can merge in an endless pre-oedipal, non-phallic loop. In short, he is so unsure of his maleness that he now hopes to transform himself into an unborn baby woman."

Orpheus Bruno (a parody of Harold Bloom) compares Pooh to Falstaff and argues that the Pooh books are too good to have been written by A.A. Milne and were probably written by Virginia Woolf.

Das Nuffa Dat, with whose appointment as professor it was announced that "marginality now takes center stage at Emory", applies postmodern postcolonial theory to Pooh, concluding

"If the ravages of imperialism are ever to end — if the colonising Heffalump one day lies down with the formerly colonised lamb — history may record that the first tremor of productive change was felt here, today, as we dear friends and scholars re-contextualised a mere space of interrogation as a veritable site of intervention and, dare I say it, of contestation as well."

Renee Francis, who has "specialized in the application of scientific rigor to the study of children's literature", deploys sociobiology and biopoetics in a piece "Gene/Meme Covariation in Ashdown Forest: Pooh and the Consilience of Knowledge".

In "The Courage to Squeal" a repressed memory theorist argues that there is evidence in Pooh for Christopher Robin having been abused as a child. "And it's suggestive, to say the least, that the record of satanic cult activity in Milne's England of the twenties appears to have been very carefully and completely effaced."

A speaker who has changed his name to BIGGLORIA3 offers a piece "Virtual Bear", the presentation of which was accompanied by "taped, surround-sound, MIDI-generated white noise".

"So — is fanfiction, including P/P (Pooh/Piglet), a sure bet to be the future of writing? I thought so for a while, but then something bigger came along in the nineties: online social games. All of a sudden, it looked like you could forget about tender romance between Tigger and Rabbit or Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn, because now we were going straight for what everybody really wants, flat-out interactive sex with lots of strangers."

Right-wing journalist Dudley Cravat III spends most of his paper attacking the other contributors, and indeed the whole MLA, but finds room to present some of his own ideas.

"... the immortal Pooh series. We know these books to be classics because they have withstood the test of time. Admittedly, less time has rolled by since Pooh's publication than since the appearance, say, of the late-Roman author Theodosius Macrobius's lively Commentary on the Dream of Scipio."

"Children are, after all, not a breed apart but merely very short people whose self-control and range of allusion still want improving."

And to close proceedings seminar organiser N. Mack Hobbs (apparently a parody of Stanley Fish) explains how much cleverer he is than everyone else in a paper "You Don't Know What Pooh Studies Are About, Do You, And Even If You Did, Do You Think Anyone Would Be Impressed?"

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It is true that most of this stuff is self-parodying, that Crews could just as easily have pulled apart real papers to make his points. Postmodern Pooh, however, is vastly more entertaining and probably more effective than direct attacks on the abuses of literary theory: it will be read by students and academics who would never touch the latter. Most of the ideas targeted are relatively harmless and just need their pretensions pricked, some are positively dangerous — but in either case humour is a valuable tool for making people think.

Postmodern Pooh is the successor to a 1963 work The Pooh Perplex. Looking back at that, the foibles of mid-century critical theory now seem positively benign — and indeed the more recent work is far darker and harsher.

May 2002

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“The true independent is he who dwells detached and remote from the little herds as well as from the big herd. Affiliating with no group or cabal of mice or monkeys, he is of course universally suspect.” — The Black Book of Gore Vidal.

This sounds priceless; I'll definitely be on the lookout for it. Callaghan should pay especial attention to "Sisera Catheter's" contribution.

And thank you for reminding me why I declined to continue in my program for the Ph.D. in English, so many years ago.

Absquatch wrote:

> This sounds priceless; I'll definitely be on the
> lookout for it. Callaghan should pay especial
> attention to "Sisera Catheter's" contribution.

Yes, my thoughts, also. Crews is most famous as an anti-Fraudean, IIRC -- see also Karl Anschauung's "A.A. Milne's Honey-Balloon-Pit-Gun-Tail-Bathtubcomplex" in The Pooh Perplex (vide infra).

> And thank you for reminding me why I declined to
> continue in my program for the Ph.D. in English,
> so many years ago.

A frightening thought... Will reply to t'other lit-crit thread ASAP.

The Pooh Perplex: A Student Casebook, Frederick Crews, Robin Clark 1979

A book review by Danny Yee © 1993 [dannyreviews.com]

Anyone who enjoys literary criticism but has their doubts about some of it will find The Pooh Perplex hilariously funny. It is a collection of parodies of different schools of criticism, cast in the form of a student casebook on Winnie the Pooh. The volume as a whole, with bibliographic notes at the beginning and study questions at the end of each essay, is a parody of student study guides in general. Frederick Crews knows his stuff, and is equally at home lampooning Freudian, Marxist, or Leavisite theory (to mention just a few). I don't understand why it took so long for me to discover Crew's delicious volume; just go out and buy a copy now; you won't regret it!

The essays:

Paradoxical Persona: The Hierarchy of Heroism in Winnie-the-Pooh (Harvey C. Windrow)
A Bourgeois Writer's Proletarian Fables (Martin Tempralis)
The Theory and Practice of Bardic Verse: Notations on the Hums of Pooh (P.R. Honeycomb)
Poisoned Paradise: The Underside of Pooh (Myron Masterson)
O Felix Culpa! The Sacramental Meaning of Winnie-the-Pooh (C.J.L. Culpepper, D.Litt,, Oxon)
Winnie and the Cultural Stream (Murphy A. Sweat)
A la recherche du Pooh perdu (Woodbine Meadowlark)
A Complete Analsis of Winnie-the-Pooh (Duns C. Penwiper)
Another Book to Cross Off Your List (Simon Lacerous)
The Style of Pooh: Sources, Analogues, and Influences (Benjamin Thumb)
A.A. Milne's Honey-Balloon-Pit-Gun-Tail-Bathtubcomplex (Karl Anschauung, M.D.)
Prolegomena to Any Future Study of Winnie-the-Pooh (Smedley Force)

Of course The Pooh Perplex is now out of date — someone needs to produce a second edition that covers structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstructionist approaches. [Note: In 2001 Frederick Crews did just that with Postmodern Pooh.]

October 1993

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“The true independent is he who dwells detached and remote from the little herds as well as from the big herd. Affiliating with no group or cabal of mice or monkeys, he is of course universally suspect.” — The Black Book of Gore Vidal.

Now that I dig deeper into memory, I must have read bits of The Pooh Perplex when I was in high school. A teacher lent a copy to me. I focused on the Freudian material, and what gave me the biggest laugh was the query as to why Tigger felt compelled to "bounce" upon his male friends.

Crews really is dead on the money, and I am delighted that he has updated his earlier work.

AnOTHer and, in some ways, BETter review:

Metaparody

Postmodern Pooh, by Frederick Crews, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York), 175pp, $22.00 cloth, 2001.

Bruce S. Thornton

Frederick Crews has set himself a daunting task: to parody a postmodern criticism that is already itself a parody of real writing and thinking. Crews, a professor emeritus of English from the University of California at Berkeley, has long been one of the most trenchant critics of various academic fads and fashions; particularly enjoyable is his collection of essays Skeptical Engagements (Oxford, 1986). The wounds Crews inflicted there on the postmodern/post-structuralist beast should have killed it, but the ensuing years have seen the creature flourish as never before, fed by tenure, astronomically rising tuition costs, foundation lucre, and the sheer unaccountability built into the academic Lilliput.

Reasoned analysis having failed, perhaps satire will have more luck. After all, Freudian/psychoanalytical criticism was once the rage, and Crews’s earlier parody, The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook (New York, 1963), surely contributed to the demise of this sort of reductive criticism, which now seems as quaint as phrenology. One hopes Postmodern Pooh can have the same effect, though I doubt it will. Postmodernism has an advantage that Freudian-inspired criticism lacked: a camouflage of liberationist pretensions and the institutional cover of identity-politics multiculturalism, not to mention the sheer ignorance of the badly educated who have flocked to graduate programs in the humanities.

Crews presents his parodic essays as the fruit of an MLA conference, and that is where the difficulty of “metaparody” begins, for the titles of Crews’s talks would not be particularly noticeable in any MLA conference program from the last twenty years; in fact, they are tame compared to some of the titles that invariably make it into the local paper at convention time. The satiric essays themselves likewise contain statements that are indistinguishable from postmodern cant. Consider the following pairs of phrases, and see if you can determine which is Crews’s, and which comes from an actual text:

Everything in our bildopedic culture . . . in our telematicometaphysical archives . . . is constructed on the protocalary charter of an axiom.

Graphemically aleatory and semioclastic, it is a sign without meaning.

The rememoration of the “present” as space is the possibility of the utopian imperative of no-(particular)-place.

[Foucault’s] paradigmatic European prison and asylum cannot begin to explain how a despised indigeneity gets catachrestically imbricated in a dominant.

Give up? The second and fourth are Crews’s. The first is from Derrida, the third from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Such parody is difficult because it needs to exaggerate some peculiar feature in order to reveal the emptiness behind the awful prose. But when the target of the parody is already absurdly exaggerated and meaningless, what’s the point?

Despite this drawback, Crews is still able economically to capture the inherent silliness of each of the critical approaches he skewers. New Historicism, for example, is a flashy approach that links a work of literature to some (usually) obscure contemporary cultural production or event, the link justified by taking for granted an unproven reductive determinism that asserts everything in society is generated by the same power-engine of exclusion and domination. Thus Crews’s new historicist, the aptly named Victor Fassel (i.e. “facile”) pontificates: “A court pageant sank the Spanish Armada; . . . Macbeth prompted the introduction of sanitary controls over soup ingredients; . . . the outcome of the Battle of Antietam was determined by martial themes in Emily Dickinson; and . . . Wordsworth’s poems brought about a speculative boom in daffodil futures.” As silly as these causal links are, they are no more unbelievable than the well-known New Historicist links of Caliban to colonialism or Mansfield Park to slavery.

Crews gives each current postmodern fad its just desserts, from deconstructionists and lesbian feminists to post-colonialists and neo-Marxists. In every case, Crews quotes generously from real-life critics, as if to remind us that it’s worse than we might think if we should accuse Crews of unfair exaggeration. In the neo-Marxist parody, by the appropriately named Carla Gulag, the “Joe Camel Professor of Child Development at Duke,” we are treated to loony statements by the sublimely creepy Frederic Jameson, such as his claim that Mao’s doctrine was “the richest of all the great new ideologies of the 60s,” this murderer of millions faulted only for stopping too soon. Then there is Jameson’s take on Martin Heidegger, whose support for Hitler was “morally and aesthetically preferable to apolitical liberalism.” Crews captures beautifully the totalitarian essence of Jameson’s thought when he has Gulag opine, re Jameson’s belief that criticism “liquidates the experience in question,” “We aren’t fully participating in Marx’s tradition until this liquidation has occurred.”

In addition to satirizing the various critical approaches, Crews delivers some well-deserved hits on Harold Bloom and Stanley Fish. The former appears as Orpheus Bruno, whose ascendancy began with his study The Breaking of the Wind, and whose gaseous egotism matches that of his model: “I see three exceptional souls—Falstaff, Pooh, Bruno!—standing together and towering over their respective epochs like the triple pillars of the world.” And Crews captures neatly, in N. Mack Hobbs, the “Trustees’ Portfolio Tracking Stock Professor of English at Princeton University,” Stanley Fish’s Hobbesian careerism and Snopesian opportunism: “I myself am all for multiculturalism, affirmative action, and the rest of the progressive agenda, which has never posed much of a threat to my career.”

My only uncertainty in reading Postmodern Pooh is how to take what is obviously a satire on Roger Kimball, who appears as Dudley Cravat III, managing editor of the monthly magazine Fundament, whose motto is “They shall not pass.” Crews in his Introduction tells us that he demanded that Cravat, “a social and cultural critic I especially admire,” be included on the panel to provide a traditional perspective, but of course the “Crews” of the Introduction is clearly a character too, a satire on the well-meaning but ultimately flabby old-style liberal of the sort partly responsible for postmodern barbarism in the first place. Be that as it may, Cravat-Kimball is presented as a constipated conservative and a shrill snob still angry over discovering that there is no university market for traditionalist scholars, and that theory has destroyed the character-improving, hence conservative, role of great literature. Kimball may deserve tweaking for his occasional de haut en bas pomposity, but at least he is honest about his elitism, unlike the postmodern snobs who hide theirs behind liberationist rhetoric. But more important, Kimball is mostly right, and the comments Crews puts in Cravat’s mouth are also accurate and reprise most of the criticisms implied by Crews’s satire.

Postmodern Pooh is a fun read, but only if one has some familiarity with the various species and sub-species of nonsense that have corrupted literary study in most Western universities. For those (such as graduate students) needing a guide to the intellectual crimes and misdemeanors of the postmodern thugs, Graham Good’s Humanism Betrayed. Theory, Ideology, and Culture in the Contemporary University (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001) offers a concise, well-argued critical examination of the anti-liberalism and anti-humanism not just of postmodernism, but of identity politics as well, linking both to the bureaucratized university. Good reminds us of the high stakes not always evident in Crews’s satire—the hard-won Western ideals of the autonomous individual, free inquiry, and aesthetic appreciation, ideals defaced by the postmodern vandals and philistines.

Bruce S. Thornton is professor of classics and humanities in the department of Foreign Languages at California State University in Fresno, and is the author of several books, including Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter, 2000), and Plagues of the Mind (ISI Books, 2000).

Posted: March 27, 2007

The Kirk Center, Volume 42, Number 4 (Winter 2003)

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“The true independent is he who dwells detached and remote from the little herds as well as from the big herd. Affiliating with no group or cabal of mice or monkeys, he is of course universally suspect.” — The Black Book of Gore Vidal.