[Nettime-bold] Review: _Postmodern_Pooh_

["R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>]

--- begin forwarded text


Status:  U
Date:         Wed, 26 Sep 2001 08:24:50 -0700
Reply-To: hayek-list@home.com
Sender: Hayek Related Research <HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU>
From: Hayek List <hayek-list@home.com>
Subject:      BOOK: Heaps of Politically Correct English Dept. Pooh - Crews
              debunks "Literary Criticism"
To: HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU

Volume 11, No. 7óOctober 2001

How Milne Works by Kate Julian

"'TRACKS,' SAID PIGLET. 'PAW-MARKS.' HE GAVE a little squeak of excitement.
'Oh, Pooh! Do you think it's aóaóa Woozle?' 'It may be,' said Pooh.
'Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. You never can tell with
paw-marks.'"

Winnie-the-Pooh aficionados will recognize the episode. While walking in the
snow, Pooh happens upon some suspicious-looking tracks. Surmising that these
must be Woozle tracks, he and Piglet embark on an out-and-out Woozle hunt.
They walk and walk, but the farther they go, the more sets of paw marks they
see. It is only when Christopher Robin arrives and asks why the two are
walking around and around the same thicket in a loop that they understand
their blunder.

To hear Frederick Crews talk, literary criticism has become one unending
Woozle hunt. And with _Postmodern Pooh_ (North Point Press),
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0865476268/thefriedrhayeksc a
successor to his 1963 best-seller, _The Pooh Perplex_, Crews seems intent on
playing Christopher Robin, exposing the fallacies he believes have deluded
his theory-hunting colleagues.

The Pooh Perplex, Crews's original satire of lit crit's trends and
personalities, was modeled after then-popular freshman casebooks, which
anthologized critical approaches to a given work of literature. Crews, a
young assistant professor in UC-Berkeley's English department at the time,
mimicked his colleagues with a set of articles offering everything from
Marxist to Christian interpretations of Pooh.

Although several Pooh Perplex essays parodied actual scholars, Crews's barbs
were gentle, aimed mostly at strained leaps of logic and overinflated egos.
It is hard, for example, to find much real animosity in his Freudian parody,
"A.A. Milne's Honey-Balloon-Pit-Gun-Tail-Bathtubcomplex." Indeed, with his
1966 book, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes, Crews
himself soon became a prominent Freudian critic.

Things have changed. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Crews did a critical
about-face, disavowing Freud in a series of books and harsh attacks. Before
long, he had also become an outspoken critic of the abstruse theoretical
fads and political sloganeering he feared were overtaking literary
scholarship.

Postmodern Pooh reflects Crews's increasingly combative stance. It is
arranged as a set of outlandish papers from a special Pooh panel of the
annual Modern Language Association conference, with each panelist standing
in for a well-known individual or school of criticism. The presentations are
embellished with detailed references to real scholarship, and their
cumulative effect is far from flattering to contemporary critics.

To the fictitious New Historicist Victor S. Fassell, Pooh's ill-fated visit
to Rabbit's burrowówherein Pooh eats too much honey and becomes
stuckósignals the eternal return of "the body." In a deliriously
wide-ranging presentation, Fassell declares Pooh a virtual "proctological
exhibit protruding into Rabbit's none too capacious dining area." But the
Marxist Carla Gulag believes the episode depicts "inflammatory class
differences between the possessive homeowner Rabbit and the itinerant beggar
Pooh." She proceeds to heap praise on her mentor Fredric Jameson, devotedly
quoting him at length. (Among the choicer tidbits: Jameson's assertion that
Martin Heidegger's "political commitment" to Adolf Hitler was "morally and
aesthetically preferable to apolitical liberalism.")

For his part, the rather Harold Bloom‚like Orpheus Bruno speculates that
Milne's books were actually written by Kafka or Virginia Woolf and describes
a holy trinity of "three exceptional souls": Pooh, Falstaff, and himself.
Other speakers offer postcolonial, feminist, and Derridean perspectives on
Pooh.

As the panel wears on, the critics veer off on more obscure tangents,
introduce progressively more contorted reasoning, and spend increasing
amounts of time impugning one another. The real fighting, however, is left
to the final two panelists: Dudley Cravat III (who bears an unmistakable
resemblance to New Criterion editor, and dissenter from all things P.C.,
Roger Kimball) and the panel's moderator, N. Mack Hobbs (a dead ringer for
Stanley Fish). They share thoughts on Pooh (Cravat considers it a repository
of "Western Values," whereas Hobbs characterizes Milne as "a ruthless,
cynical author"ó"my kind of guy," he says), but most of their sparring
concerns the state of literary criticism. Cravat slams the "Modish Languid
Association," asserting that the papers on Pooh "read like parodies of
academic literary criticism at its worst." An unfazed Hobbs follows, happily
touting himself at length before declaring the panel a smashing success and
thanking his critics for dubbing him "an enemy of reason." "That's celebrity
that money can't buy," he gloats.

Postmodern Pooh is not exactly a gentle satire. But perhaps the scholars
Crews lampoons can take heart from the book's difficult road to publication.
In the mid 1990s, the president of Dutton Children's Books, publisher of
Milne's Pooh stories, encouraged Crews to produce a sequel to his original
parody. "What with structuralism, semiotics, deconstructionism,
postmodernism, feminism, political correctness, etc.," he wrote, "there must
be a number of novel ways the Best Bear of All might bend to the critical
will." Crews replied that such a project would be "a very wild ride indeed,
with hair-raising quotations from critics who shouldn't be sampled before
the age of reason." It would not, in other words, be a children's book.
Dutton's president was undeterred.

But by 2000, when Crews completed Postmodern Pooh, the guard at Dutton had
changed. Dutton's staff rejected the book, explaining that a parody of the
"ideological squabbles and jealousies of the academic world" had "a somewhat
limited audience," and adding that they were particularly troubled by its
"sexual content." (Dutton did not respond to Lingua Franca's request for
comment.)

Ultimately, Farrar, Straus and Giroux's North Point Press accepted Crews's
manuscript. But there were complications yet to come. As originally written,
Postmodern Pooh, like The Pooh Perplex, relied heavily on Ernest H.
Shepard's original Pooh illustrations. But Dutton, which owns the images,
refused to lease them to North Point. North Point appealed the decision to
the Trustees of the Pooh Properties, but they supported Dutton, writing that
they had enjoyed The Pooh Perplex and were "saddened that Professor Crews
ha[d] now produced something which leaves such a nasty taste in the mouth."

Certainly, Postmodern Pooh is no children's book. But neither was The Pooh
Perplexóparticularly not with regard to "sexual content." Why, then, the
hostile response? Leasing the illustrations for inclusion in Postmodern
Pooh, Dutton wrote, would be "disrespectful to A.A. Milne and Ernest H.
Shepard as well as damaging to the brand." Yes, the brand: In 1964óa year
after The Pooh Perplex was first publishedóDisney acquired the film and
merchandising rights to Milne's books and proceeded literally to redraw the
characters. Although the results were decried by some as vulgar corruptions,
lacking the charm or intelligence of Shepard's originals, they have proved
fantastically lucrative. Disney's Pooh is even more successful than Mickey
Mouse, and the company recently paid $350 million to renew its rights
through 2026, when copyright expires.

In denying permission to reprint the Shepard illustrations, the trustees
explained that Disney has contractually prohibited them from doing anything
that "would detract from the reputation which the Pooh books currently
enjoy" and warned that Disney had previously "taken steps against various
uses of the Pooh material which the general public would find distasteful."

Presumably, takeoffs like Dutton's Winnie-the-Pooh on Management qualify as
tasteful, whereas Karen Finley's recent Pooh Unplugged (Smart Art Press),
which portrays a Hundred Acre Wood rife with sexual dysfunction, would
qualify as distasteful. Still, it's hard to see how a spoof of literary
theoryówith its "somewhat limited audience"ómight damage the Pooh brand.
Perhaps Crews should have taken a cue from Finley, whose book comes with a
warning: "Not meant for children or stupid adults."

Kate Julian

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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'


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