LOADED FOR BEAR

by Rob Lopresti

Today’s sermon has nothing to do with mysteries, or short stories. But it is all about literature. In fact, it is about one of my favorite old books and a newish sequel I just got around to reading.

Way back in 1963 Frederick C. Crews was an up-and-coming young scholar at the University of California. And like a lot of such scholars he produced a casebook.

Some of you may remember casebooks from your college days. In English class you would read some classic novel and then you would be told to go through a book of essays about it. This served two purposes: to teach you about the novel, but also to expose you to the many different ways of looking at a piece of literature, the different schools of criticism.

And that’s exactly what Crews did. But two things made his book unusual. First, The Pooh Perplex was about Winnie-The-Pooh, and A.A. Milne’s other children’s books. And second, all of the essays, no matter who the ostensible authors were, were written by Crews himself.

In other words, he was satirizing criticism (which was clear from the start; by the way; the book was not a hoax). And it was hilarious.

My favorite essayist in the book is Simon Lacerous who, in the clearly titled “Another Book To Cross Off Your List,” explains the simple, obvious fact that all great novels are about British coal mines. Clearly Pooh doesn’t qualify. This may make you wonder why so many critics claim to like the book and Lacerous is happy to explain: “every critic, while pretending to praise A.A. Milne, was in reality attacking me!”

Another favorite is C. J. L. Culpepper who sees the Fall of Man in Pooh’s tumble from the honey tree. If this is a religious allegory then there must be a Christ figure, and Culpepper has no trouble finding one. Remember the picture of Eeyore having his tail nailed back on?

If you have read a significant amount of literary criticism you may find yourself nodding in agreement at parts of the book, thinking that’s a very interesting point. Then you wake up with a start and remember that this is satire.

One way to look at The Pooh Perplex is as an epistolary novel with twelve characters: the essayists, one translator, and the editor, who is a rather fussy, falsely avuncular fellow named Frederick C. Crews. (One of my favorite passages is a helpful study question the editor provides after a left-wing essay: “Do you feel that Tempralis was entitled to his 1939 opinions about Pooh? Why not?”)

Revenge of the critics

Crews went on to a very interesting career, becoming most famous, perhaps, for his criticism of psychoanalysis. (He was not a big fan of Dr. Freud.) But, after many years of pleading from fans and colleagues, he finally consented to take another swipe at the honey jar, to bring us up-to-date on the latest thinking in literary criticism.

Postmodern Pooh, published in 2001, takes the form of a symposium at a meeting of the Modern Language Association, which enables each speaker to critique the previous papers. And so, the first author cites deconstructionist critic Paul De Man in support of her arguments, while the next writer gleefully reminds us of De Man’s support for Nazis during World War II.

One of my favorite pieces in this book is by Das Nuffa Dat, the “Classic Coke Professor of Subaltern Studies” at Emory University. Dat sees Pooh’s attempt to steal the bee’s honey (while disguised in black mud, no less) as a typical imperialist theft of natural resources.

There are also essays with feminist, Marxist, and biopoetic viewpoints, plus a techno dude named BigGloria3 who urges people to stop trying to force whatever meaning they want into the text and instead write fan fiction, such as Pooh/Piglet slash stories (and if you don’t know what slash means in this context, I ain’t gonna be the one to tell you).

One of the final speakers loathes the postmodern regime and recites some of the more bizarre titles of other (real) MLA presentations. Of course, he censors the naughty words in the titles because “ladies, or at any rate people shaped like them, are present in the room.” Hilarious.

A word of warning

I recommend The Pooh Perplex wholehearted, but I have to issue a warning about the sequel. The essay written as by Dolores Malatesta parodies the recovered memory movement, which is a fair target for satire, I’m sure. But the Milnes, father and son, were real people and her accusations, even written to mock the accuser, are out of my comfort zone. I didn’t finish that chapter.

Read either book and I’m sure you will agree with editor Crews that, now more than ever, the humanities “have become full of Pooh.”