Pooh
This is an 'unpublished book review' from late 1964?? It would have been something to submit it to the Carleton Miscellany that year, but … Isn't my imagination a wonderful thing!
We are about to confront a student text. Let me quote from the Preface:
"Winnie-the-Pooh is, as practically everyone knows, one of the greatest books ever written, but it is also one of the most controversial. Nobody can quite agree as to what it means. This is why it will be an ideal book around which to organize all your work in Freshman English this semester. Like the other casebooks, such as those on Harper's Ferry, Edith Wharton, and the personality adjustment difficulties of Poe and Ezra Pound, this one is frankly designed to keep you in confusion. Try as you may, you will find it impossible to decide which of the critics represented has 'the word' about Pooh …"
Fortunately, we have Frederick C Crews, from the University of California, Berkeley, to guide us, with his insightful collection of papers written by such major critics as Harvey C Window (University of Pennsylvania, author of Paradoxical Persona), Martin Tempralis (Publisher and editor of the Jackson White Democrat), Woodbine Meadowlark (perpetual student at Harvard), Benjamin Thumb (Assistant Professor Emeritus at Oregon State), and Karl Anschauung (ex-Freud's circle of followers), among others. Enough by way of introduction: it is time to get serious, and review some of the critical insights set out in The Pooh Perplex.
Harvey Window's analysis of Paradoxical Persona is the first essay, and a most important one. As he observes "The heart of the matter is revealed in the opening chapter, 'We Are Introduced' – the 'We, I take it, referring to four personages, the Milnean voice, the Christophoric ear, Christopher Robin and Pooh. I guess that is obvious, but Window soon gets into the critical details: "The Milnean voice, however, in its didactic-paternal role, is unprepared simply to feed the self-love of the Christophoric ear; it (the voice) must also see that it (the ear) is properly edified in a moral sense" (emphasis in the original). Most helpful is his later rejection of Wart's theory; Wart was writing in Mandala I, on 'Myth, Symbol, Ritual and Archetype, where he mistakenly (obviously mistakenly) suggested that Pooh is an "Orphic deity with seasonal-sacrificial-redemptive crop-growing characteristics. I mean, really!! However, it was disappointing to see Window gave little space to analysing Alexander Beetle's role in the story.
It is followed by Martin Tempralis on A Bourgeois Writer's Proletarian Fables, an essay which addresses the hidden socio-political implications of Milne's work. As Tempralis notes, Milne was 'thoroughly bourgeois'. Brilliantly, Tempralis examines all the characters, and I think his view of Owl (the 'pedantic plutocrat who resides at The Chestnuts) is especially insightful:
"A spelling champion and a master of flowery, empty rhetoric, Owl is the necessary handservant to the raw acquisitive passion of Rabbit, which badly needs to be cloaked in grandiosities. The friendship of these two intellectual thugs is a perfect representation of the true role of 'scholarship' in bourgeois-industrial society: the end purpose of Owl's obscure learning is to spread a veil of confusion over the doings of the fat cats, to cow the humble into submission before the graven idols of 'objective truth' and 'the Western Tradition', and to rob the proletariat of its power to protest. What could be more meaningful than the fact Owl has stolen the very tail from the back of Eeyore, the most downcast and bounced-upon member of society, and converted it into his doorbell."
Martin has hit his head on the nail, and we are all the better for it. [Editor: please check this remark – I think I have it right.]
Myron Masterton provides an extremely insightful analysis of the salacious underside to Pooh [Editor: please check this sentence, as it may not be the best expression of my thoughts]. Masterton reminds us that concern was already evident when When We Were Very Young was published, observing
"my youngest son, Charlie, stopped me and asked to hear these lines from 'The Mirror' again:
And there I saw a white swan make
Another white swan in the lake
'God, how did they let that one through', lisped Trudy. And little Stephen said 'That's nothing. Read that real wild couple from 'Vespers''. With mingled misgivings and interest I allowed Billy and Jane to fumble their tiny fingers through the pages until they came upon these lines, which they recited in gleeful unison:
God bless Mummy. I know that's right.
Wasn't it fun in the bath tonight?
Oh, my! As Masterton adds, it is clear from the text that Christopher Robin had recently suffered from the destruction and repression of his Oedipus Complex, a process that "provides a key" to the whole of Winnie-the-Pooh. Later, you'll member, Pooh is found by a river looking for 'Poles', clearly a phallic reference since Pooh admits he wants to avoid mentioning the East Pole for a while, since "people don't like talking about them".
So much for the opening essays. Once we get to Woodbine Meadowlark, we are into even more compelling territory. A la recherche du Pooh perdu is amazing, eye-opening stuff. Woodbine asks a key question early in her analysis (I think Woodbine is a 'she'): in her opinion, the core issue the Pooh address is "a debate over wisdom, and an attempt to arrest the clock at the wisdom of childhood". Just so,
Do you recall that key passage when Pooh and Piglet are debating issues underpinning maturity and wisdom:
'Rabbit's clever,' said Pooh thoughtfully.
'Yes,' said Piglet, 'Rabbit's clever.'
'And he has a brain.'
'Yes,' said Piglet, Rabbit has a brain.'
There was a long silence.
'I suppose,' said Pooh, 'that's why he never understands anything.'
As Woodbine Meadowlark alerts us, this is a key moment in alternative philosophies, the world of innocence and indolence contrasted with the assault of time, sweeping everything and everyone towards atrophy and death. She also reminds us of "the heart rending close" of The House at Pooh Corner, where Christopher Robin is still able to assert his belief in doing "Nothing". What is this 'Nothing'? it is "just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."
This isn't about nostalgia, returning to past delights. This is what Woodbine warns us is the "inexorable pull of temporality … dashing Christopher Robin away from us forever". It is something unbearable in Woodbine Meadowlark's' appreciation, a view which reminds her, forcibly, of the last lines of Now We Are Six:
"But now I am six, I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever."
Words to make anyone except the most callous weep. We are being asked to confront the end of access to true wisdom as the horrors of formal education sweep down to seize the innocents, taking them into the sterile world of formal learning. Weep, weep indeed.
There's more, of course. For example we have the insightful analysis of plot in Winnie-the-Pooh, a detailed study by Professor Duns C Penwiper. He introduces us to a typical plot situation in Winnie the Pooh:
"If we let A stand for one of the characters, B for a second, and C (following out the established pattern of consecutive form) for a third [As an aside it is obvious why Penwiper was offered a chair] we see that there are various situations in Winnie-the-Pooh employing some of the most complicated devices of plot known to criticism. A's relationship to B is often such that C, who had hoped to establish a certain contact with B, finds himself constrained instead to deal with A. Or again, C may initiate an action against A; A replies by appealing to B; B thinks the matter over to himself, decides not to act, and departs; C and A are thus left on the scene to resolve their differences, either by C reconciling himself to A, A's reconciling himself to C, of A's (or C's) undertaking a decisive finishing action against the other. [Italic emphasis is in the original]. Still more intricate are the plot situations in which A, B, and C have nothing to say to each other, but are obliged to remain together on barest amicable terms until the end of the episode. This we call the 'Jamesian' situation, which draws its complexity from the subtleties of appeal, criticism, muted disrespect, and barbed repartee among the characters involved."
Astonishingly complex, and Penwiper goes on to examine some almost unbelievably complex situation where other characters intervene, including D, E and F, later G, H, and I, and unbelievably J, K, and L and more. Penwiper's structural analysis, which he modestly describes as having "some small degree of success" is masterly.
Is that all? Of course not. Emeritus Professor Benjamin Thumb, at the end of forty years of service at Oregon State, and prior to his retirement to " pass his remaining days visiting with his grandchildren and caring for his garden", gave a most important analysis of The Style of Pooh. An assiduous scholar, he has uncovered much that others have missed.
For example, he has alerted us to the fact that Winnie-the-Pooh was written, in 1926, just at the time there was an (unfortunate – his word) revolution against Victorian poetry. He suggests that his would have made it likely that Milne would have shown some 'metaphysical' elements in his style, and cites one pertinent example:
"'One upon a time, a very long time ago, about last Friday …' says Milne in an opening chapter. This is suspiciously close to Donne's
Now thou hast lov'd me one whole day
Tomorrow when thous leavest, what wilt thou say?"
Moreover, Thumb has noticed many references to Shakespeare's style, as in this passage from the chapter introducing Kanga and Roo:
"'You ought to look at that tree right over there,' said Rabbit …
'I can see a bird in it from here,' said Pooh. 'Or is it a fish?'
'You ought to see that bird from here,' said Rabbit. 'Unless it's a fish.'
'It isn't a fish, it's a bird, ' said Piglet
'So it is, ' said Rabbit.
'Is it a starling or a blackbird?', said Pooh
'That's the whole question,' said Rabbit. 'Is it a blackbird or a starling?'
I feel sorry for any reader who might be so ignorant as t fail to recognise this exchange as a replica of Hamlet's 'Yes, very like a whale' conversation with Polonius."
[In the interests of full disclosure, I had forgotten that important Shakespearean exchange.]
Thum's essay is packed with more examples. However, of them all, the most important might be his analysis of that extraordinary point when Happy Birthday comes out as "HIPY PAPYBTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY". How astute of Thumb to discern this must have come from Milne's appreciation of James Joyce. It's tricky territory. As he remarks:
"I cannot, in good conscience, seriously propose to myself that Milne may have read Joyce; surely his imagination was ever too pure to take nourishment from the compost heap. But since deep similarities exist in word play, I think a reasonable compromise would be to say that Pooh is analogous to Ulysses and is an influence on Finnegan's Wake. This, I trust, settles the matter …"
Much as I would like to avoid it, there is an essay by Karl Anschauung, on A A Milne's Honey-Balloon-Pit-Tail-Bathtubcompex that must be referenced. His Freudian analysis is persuasive, especially on such topics a bear phobia. As Anschauung notes, the bear phobia is interesting, but more to the point is the sequence of events in his early childhood that led to this phobia. There are several key clues. We are reminded that in Milne's Introduction to Winnie-the-Pooh there is a note explaining how Christopher Robin goes to the Zoo, where doors are unlocked, dark passages and stairs traversed, a cage unlocked and from which Winnie emerges.
This Anschauung makes clear is an "understanding of the underlying Pooh's meaning . Freud's Interpretation of Dreams shows us unequivocally that 'To wander through dark passages and up steep stairs' can only a coitus equivalent signify … The friendly male bear Pooh is meant, the unfriendly female organ to represent." I would like to quote more on this key moment in understanding Pooh and Christopher Robin, especially its overtones of "fear of abandonment … various simulation of racial memory traces, and, of course, total repression and 'forgetting' of the entire scene." Anschauung's analysis is complex, deep and satisfying, and requires reading the original rather than relying on my superficial summary.
Finally, I feel obliged to briefly mention Simon Lacerous and his disappointing essay Another Book to Cross Off You List. Lacerous seems to view the whole collection of essays as an attack on himself, and adds to his rather puerile commentary the observation that "Not one character is from the Midlands; not one is of working-class origin; and there is not even a coal mine on the ideal landscape where they play." At the end of the book, Lacerous imagines Christopher Robin is being "spruced up, fitted for his revolting little public school uniform, and drilled in all the 'graces' of the would-be aristocracy". It was bold of Crews to allow this intemperate essay to be included.
Fortunately the last essay, by Smedley Force, reflecting on the various critical essays, ends with the words "biographically and scientifically speaking, we are on the threshold of the Golden Age of POOH". Even Smedley could not have foreseen that this 'Goden Age' would continue into the 21st Century. There is good reason that it did, and I am confident that will remain the case for decades to come. Almost all these essays make it clear why this was inevitable. Let us join together and say: long live Winnie-the-Pooh!!
