Customer Reviews

Postmodern Pooh

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

To be fair, let me say at the outset that the author has been my friend and colleague for many years. I am sure, however, that I would feel exactly as I do about this book if I had never laid eyes on Fred Crews. Thirty-eight years ago, when The Pooh Perplex was published, literary criticism was a harmless activity produced largely by academics with one intellectual obsession or another (such as Freudian analysis or Marxist world-views), or by followers of easily parodied methodologies such as the self-styled New Criticsm. In the years since much has changed. The study of literature occupies a much smaller place in the colleges and universities than it did, but paradoxically, rather than banding together to save the humanities in a world less interested in their subject, academic critics have all too often split into warring camps of Taliban-like true believers, each coterie proclaiming its own often unintelligible, jargon-ridden, and preposterous ideology. What most of such schools of criticism share, under the name of what they agree to call "Theory," is a new sense that you can say anything you want if it is outrageous and pretentious enough. Many of these writers argue that there is no real world anyway, just what one perceives, so the old limits are gone.

An outraged sense of the culture-destroying impact of such nonsense underlies the parodies in Postmodern Pooh. The essays are--though it's almost impossible to believe anything could be--funnier than those in The Pooh Perplex. An example is Chapter Three, "The Fissured Subtext: Historical Problematics, the Absolute Cause, Transcoded Contradictions, and Late-Capitalist Metanarrative (in Pooh)", by a fire-eating revolutionary who holds "the cross-departmental chair. . . at Duke as Joe Camel Professor of Child Development." The persona of the ridiculous Ms. Gulag gives Crews the opportunity to quote highly respected and successful academics who still see Stalin and Mao as gentle forces for good, even for good sex. And here, as throughout the book, the footnotes citing real publications are astonishing, sometimes almost too horrible to be funny: a fictitious analyst of a passage in Pooh will make a dumb claim, and Crews will pretend to support it in a footnote by quoting an even dumber comment by a real critic, with chapter and verse identified. Another politically oriented writer, a Calcutta native wonderfully named Das Nuffa Dat, provides parodies of other involuted critics whose methods, applied to interpreting the toy bear, give us hours of laughter as the emperors' clothes disappear. And so it goes with such eminences as Stanley Fish and Harold Bloom, with hardline feminists, nonsensical Derrideans and Lacanians, semioticians, and many more. Begin with the first presentation, "Why? Wherefore? Inasmuch as Which?" by the Sea and Ski Professor of English at the University of California at Irvine (her prizewinning dissertation was on "Heidegger Reading Pooh Reading Hegel Reading Husserl: Or, Isn't it Punny How a Hun Likes Beary") and you won't be able to stop. Crews's humor is Rabelaisian: the bawdy puns are frequently side-splitting, (and of course they parody the self-involved style of named and revered critics), and the wordplay reminds one of Joyce. But for all the laughs, ultimately the message is dead serious: Crews obviously wants to show us that the loss of standards that allows such junk to dominate the intellectual world is helping our culture to do itself in. Postmodern Pooh is a comic masterpiece; it is also an indispensable warning. You can't afford not to read it.

Literary Criticism so long ago slipped over the edge into self parody that when I first found an old dog-eared copy of The Pooh Perplex at a book sale many years ago it took me more than a few pages to figure out whether it was meant to be serious or not. In a series of essays, various critics, of dubious but seemingly impressive pedigree, read the Pooh stories through the distorted lenses of their own literary/political/philosophical/psychological perspectives. It turned out of course that the book, published in 1964, had been the work of a young English professor at Berkeley (of all places) and was a parody, skewering several of the then current schools of criticism. Now, nearly forty years later, retired from academia, Professor Crews gives today's critics the satirical drubbing they so richly deserve in this manufactured set of lectures to the Modern Language Association convention. Happily, this second effort is just as funny as the first, though it is somewhat depressing to realize that his targets have become even easier to poke fun at because, one shudders at the thought, their theories are even more ridiculous than those of their predecessors.

I'll not pretend to understand all the nuances of what Professor Crews has written; heck, I don't even recognize all the schools of thought he's sending up, nor all the specific people he seems to have targeted. Everyone will discern Harold Bloom in the person of Orpheus Bruno, whose lecture is titled The Importance of Being Portly, and whose last three books are titled : My Vico, My Shakespeare, My God!; What You Don't Know Hurts Me; and Read These Books. And one assumes that Dudley Cravat III, whose contribution, Twilight of the Dogs, is one long bellow against the "sickness unto death" of the modern university, must incorporate at least a significant touch of William Bennett. Knowing who the victims are in these instances definitely adds to the enjoyment. Unfortunately (no, make that fortunately) most of the other models for these characters will be so obscure to anyone outside academia that the reader, at least this reader, won't know recognize them.

You can figure out, without too much trouble, that specific lectures are aimed at Deconstruction, Marxism, Feminism, Queer Theory, Postcolonialism, Evolutionary Psychology and so forth. Much of the enjoyment of the book lies in the way Crews can make the Pooh stories fit these absurd theories. He'll leave you half convinced that the Hundred Acre Wood is alternately a seething pit of repressed homosexual longings or pedophiliac torture; the oppressed colony of a brutal imperialist master; and a laboratory of Darwinism. The very capacity of these simple children's stories to bear the weight of each of these ideologies only serves to undermine them all. Such infinitely plastic criticisms must ultimately be about the theories themselves, not about the text that is supposedly under consideration.

One final feature of the book is particularly amusing, and especially frightening. Though the lectures are obviously made up, the footnotes appear to all refer to genuine sources, with titles like "The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination" and "The Vestal and the Fasces: Hegel, Lacan, Property, and the Feminine". I suppose someone trying to complete a doctoral thesis will write just about anything, but, please God, tell me no one has actually ever read them.

It all makes for very funny reading, but with a serious subtext. This is the kind of garbage that kids are being taught, with a straight face, in our schools today. That scares the heck out of me. Hopefully Professor Crews will keep that skewer pointy. We need someone to puncture the pretensions of these self-important intellectual nitwits.

GRADE : A

38 years is a long time to pass between publication of a successful book and that of its sequel, and lovers of The Pooh Perplex must have feared that it would be last they would read of Frederick Crews's parodies of different styles of literary criticism as applied to the works of A. A. Milne. Nonetheless, the book written in the early years of his career at Berkeley has been followed with another written when he was on the verge of retirement.

Postmodernism did not exist in the early 1960s, nor did radical feminism; even ordinary sane feminism was not much heard of. On the other hand Freudian psychoanalysis was much more prominent then than it is now. The targets of Crews's parodies have accordingly changed over the years, but the accuracy of his shots has not, and the new series of articles is as brilliant as the first. They are less amusing to read, however, probably because some of the modern fads threaten a wider public. The victims of psychoanalysis were for the most part willing victims, but the victims of therapists who claim to recover lost memories of childhood abuse can include almost anyone.

Crews is careful to document the fashionable nonsense that he attributes to his lightly fictionalized authors. For readers who doubt, for example, whether Jacques Derrida and his followers could seriously have proposed that apartheid in South Africa was a consequence of phonetic writing which, "by isolating and hypostasizing being, ... corrupts it into a quasi-ontological segregation", he supplies a reference to the original article. Likewise for many other examples.

Excellent skewering of a branch of academia that seems to set itself up for it. Crews put a lot of work into these essays, which are clever, intelligent, and extremely funny. He isn't nearly so vicious in his satire as many of his speakers (and their real-life counterparts) are in their literary-political maneuvering, but he exposes the void at the heart of much modern literary criticism where the work itself used to live. Pooh is as good as any other subject when the theory drives the criticism, which is why this book works so well.

You need to have some familiarity with the exciting, contemporary, cutting-edge American literary intellectual scene to get the very best out of this. Being a simple foreigner like Pooh, and a scientist to boot, I don't. That hasn't bothered me much in the past, but now I'm not Saussure.

The question is how much theoretical overkill the poor old bear can take. The answer is, while theory is its own justification and the printer ink holds out, the sky's the limit. A galaxy of thinkers is here to enlighten us courtesy of Prof. Crews: the Derridean, replete with deeply stunning insights and theoretical rigor verging on mortis; the neo-Marxist, living embodiment of Dr. Johnson's wise remark on hope and experience; the barking second-generation feminist; the Lacanian-Deleuzoguattarian (they won't lie down, you know); last but very far from least, the Vicar of Bray type, author of 'The Last Theory Book You'll Ever Need' and several sequels in the same vein.

The footnotes - genuine quotations from distinguished theorists - should be studied with the attention they deserve. These are the guardians of the culture. Go on, give yourself a fright.

For me the best-realized figure is the Roger Kimball clone, Dudley Cravat III, who by some extraordinary oversight has been invited to contribute to this panel. I suspect the author has most sympathy with, or anyway least antipathy to, this character, but that doesn't save him from a ribbing. "Much has changed, and all of it for the worse, since we ourself, nearing completion of our Harvard dissertation, attended the MLA convention of 1976 and discovered that once-abundant assistant professorships for tradition-minded young scholars had vanished overnight."

Many of these theories can be applied with equally gratifying success to subjects as diverse as anthropology, historiography, even literary criticism (not to mention fundamental physics, but that's another story). The names may change, the fads certainly, but forty years on this crew will still be transgressing importantly, if they haven't disappeared up their own discourse: Felicia Marronnez peering myopically at the world through the lenses of a new theory of everything (or nothing, depending on how you look at it); Carla Gulag fixated on some new Jameson and panting for the revolution; N. Mack Hobbs, America's highest-paid (and therefore indisputably best) humanities professor; and Dudley Cravat III harking back to a lost golden age when French theory with an American accent ruled the world.

An acquired taste, perhaps, but an interesting and very clever concoction.

Full disclosure: As far as Winnie the Pooh is concerned, I'm in Dorothy Parker's camp. I think it's nauseatingly cutesy dreck that condescends to children. But that's neither here nor there, because the target in "Postmodern Pooh" is not Pooh. In this sequel to his earlier book, "The Pooh Perplex", Crews instead takes aim at various current fads in academic literary criticism, using Pooh as a vehicle. This is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, but the results are hilarious.

The book purports to be the proceedings of a forum on Winnie-the-Pooh at the Modern Language Association's annual convention. Crews takes devastating aim at the whole bunch, including, but not limited to:

Deconstructionism
Poststructuralist Marxism
Radical Feminism (gynocritical theory)
New Historicism
Postcolonialism
Sociobiological Analysis
QueerCultStudLitCrit
the Woolf wrote Milne school

Crews gets the different factions dead to rights:

"As for 'the reader', spare me! The term elides difference, attempts to inscribe on a bubbling bouillabaisse of potentialities one model of a stolid, passive, tabula rasa receptor."

"As you've seen, the Colonized Unconscious has already had its way with both Pooh and Milne, turning their backbones to Yorkshire pudding."

"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."

The book will probably be funniest (or most tragic) to academics who actually have to navigate the sordid back alleys of lit crit to ensure their professional survival. But there is plenty to amuse the general reader as well.

...yet shockingly frightening. It took me a while to 'get' the meaning of the pieces in this book because at first I thought they were real! The pieces are excellent. For example, after reading the 'feminist' perspective on Milne, I could have sworn that he was a misogynist.

Yet it soon became apparent that these essays provide brilliant exposes of our postmodern intellectual traditions.

Just as Will Rogers and Dick Gregory would read straight from the newspapers without commentary and would be met with laughs at the absurdity of the pieces read, so too did I find myself doing the same with these pieces.

Not only do they present in clear fashion the 'truths' espoused in the various philosophies of our day but by reading these very philosophies into the Pooh stories, the hubris of humanity glares from between the lines. I walked away not only educated and humored but humbled.

It became apparent that we can read whatever we like not only into the Pooh stories but into pretty much anything we so desire.

I enjoyed this one, though the first one, The Pooh Perplex, is much more light-hearted and fun to read. Beware, some people might not understand that this is a farce and that you're supposed to be laughing at all the wacky ways we humans have devised to dissect, examine, and critique the universe in our isolated academic ivory towers. But as long as you don't mind people looking at you strangely as you laugh out loud on the bus, you'll be just fine.

"Postmodern Pooh" is even funnier than Crews' earlier spoof, "The Pooh Perplex." As a graduate student, I especially enjoyed it as an antidote to some of the drivel I've been assigned to read. This is smart, serious parody -- exaggerated, but not much. The lousy puns and random coincidences tarted up as profound insights are absolutely typical of postmodern academic writing. The spoof of "Body Theory" especially tickled me, as that line of theory is alive and kicking currently in academia. And in addition to the satire on postmodernism there is the hilarious spoof of Harold Bloom, who really is as arrogant and bullying as he is portrayed here under the disguise of "Orlando Bruno." Sadly, the preposterous quotations by which the fictional writers in this book appeal to academic authority are REAL and are published by the university presses of Yale, Duke, Oxford, etc., and these real quotations are, if anything, sillier than the made-up writings of the made-up authors.

Any graduate student who hates "theory" will love this book.

Correct me if I'm wrong. Chapter 1: FELICIA MARRONNEZ = Derrida; Chapter 2: VICTOR S. FASSELL = Foucault; Chapter 3: CARLA GULAG: Fredric Jameson; Chapter 4: SISERA CATHETER = radical feminism (Brownmiller?); Chapter 5: ORPHEUS BRUNO = the one and only Harold Bloom; Chapter 6: DAT NUFFA DAT = Edward Said; Chapter 7: RENEE FRANCIS = envionmental criticism; DOLORES MALATESTA = pop psychology; Chapter 9: BIGGLORIA3 = studies in popular culture; Chaper 10 DUDLEY CRAVAT III = a cross between Roger Kimball and William F. Buckley; Chapter 11: N. MACK HOBBS = Richard Rorty???

Simply the best piece of satire since ... well, since The Pooh Perplex.

Sid Cundiff
s.cundiff@att.net