Postmodern Pooh (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Postmodern Pooh Paula T. Connolly (bio) Postmodern Pooh. By Frederick Crews. New York: North Point, 2001 In 1963, while an assistant professor at UC-Berkeley, Frederick Crews wrote what he called a "freshman casebook," offering different critical readings of children's books. The books were Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. The critical readings, ranging from Marxist to Freudian, were proffered by twelve fictional critics whose names often hinted at their perspectives. And the freshman casebook, of course, was The Pooh Perplex. There, among others, the fictional Simon Lacerous asserts that "everything Milne wrote . . . is a vast betrayal of life" (104); C.J.L. Culpepper, D. Litt., Oxon. reads the chapter "Eeyore Has a Birthday" as "a charming parallel to the coming of the Magi" (59); and Myron Masterson in "Poisoned Paradise: The Underside of Pooh" does things with Roo and Tigger you don't want to tell your children about. Through misreadings and overreadings, foibles in logic and insularity of viewpoint, The Pooh Perplex satirizes both literary theory and academia. It was pointed, funny, and a best-seller—yet its effect on children's literature was not as propitious. As real-life critic Alison Lurie has pointed out, "writing about the Pooh books . . . has been awkward (if not impossible) since . . . The Pooh Perplex . . . . [Crews] was not able to laugh into silence any of the dozen varieties of current literary criticism he so brilliantly parodied; but he did manage to stifle almost all critical comment on Winnie-the-Pooh for a decade" (11).1 In the end, Winnie-the-Pooh has survived Crews (although Pooh and his friends are currently embroiled in identity battles with their Disney counterparts). Nearly forty years since that first book, Frederick Crews—now professor emeritus at UC-Berkeley—has created a new batch of pseudo-scholars to offer an "updated Perplex": Postmodern Pooh. Here, Crews has moved on to more current critical theories. Yet despite new paradigms of thought, we learn that some things in academia remain ever the same. Postmodern Pooh contains much of the same type of wordplay as the first book, particularly in names such as academic Victor S. Fassell, Indian scholar of Postcolonial Studies Das Nuffa Dat, and the conservative Dudley Cravat III. Satirizing the current ubiquitous use of subtitles, Crews treats readers to a litany of playful titles, such as "(P)ooh La La! Kiddie Lit Gets the Jacques of Its Life." Updated to include female critics, Postmodern Pooh shows how texts are quickly appropriated as fodder for ideological agendas and overweening egos. In Das Nuffa Dat's hands, Pooh becomes an agent of the East India Company and complicit in racist oppression, for, as Nuffa Dat explains, since Pooh covers himself in mud to trick the bees, "we can infer that the bees themselves are black" (91). To Orpheus Bruno, Pooh is variously defined as Lear, then as Falstaff to Christopher Robin's Prince Hal—though the critic soon metamorphosizes Christopher Robin into a Christ figure. To Renee Francis, the books are embedded with math problems, and she provides a graph which will help her audience factor "total distance plummeted and total time of transit from highest branch to touchdown at gorse bush" (101). Dolores Malatesta offers a reading (partly induced by long years of therapy) in which she finds signs of sexual abuse in Piglet's continued fears of Heffalumps, charging that it is "conceivable that jMilne] wasn't just an abuser but a satanic ritual abuser" (129). From gynocriticism to meme studies, psychoanalysis to postcolonialism, Crews repeatedly quotes "real" critics and then juxtaposes his fictional ones in a responsive interplay that satirizes critical excess, insularity, and labyrinthine rhetoric. At the core is a scathing critique of academic egotism. The difference in fictional form between The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh only [End Page 108] serves to heighten this. While the earlier book was presented as a collection of essays, the occasion of the second book is a fictional MLA session entitled, of course, "Postmodern Pooh." Here, literary theory becomes a weapon as Crews' critics, all assembled on the same stage, enact an inane and sometimes vicious competition, each vying for perceived intellectual...