Parodies Deftly Deconstruct Wisdom of Winnie-the-Pooh

Of the making of books there is no end and, it would also seem, no end to the making of books, movies, records and toys inspired by Winnie-the-Pooh, the lovable “Bear of Very Little Brain” created by the English author and playwright A.A. Milne. In 1963, Berkeley professor Frederick Crews published an entertaining little book called “The Pooh Perplex,” which purported to contain essays by high-powered literary critics offering their various tortuous exegeses of Pooh’s hidden meanings.

Crews’ high-spirited and ingenious spoof of the pretensions of his profession was right on target and soon found its way onto the bestseller lists. But although Crews may have gotten a lot of people to laugh at the follies of mid-century academic literary criticism, this did not stop the profession from becoming even more ridiculous as time went by. Indeed, to judge from Crews’ latest book, “The Postmodern Pooh,” the excesses of “postmodern” literary criticism have become so grotesque, they are almost a different kind of animal. Insofar as satire relies on caricature and exaggeration, it is hard to satirize something that is so bizarre in the first place.

Once again, Crews invents a collection of preposterous papers supposedly delivered at a conference on “Pooh Studies.” Among the panelists are Deconstructionist Felicia Marronnez (“As Pooh shows in numerous ways, we cannot do otherwise than yearn for unwobbling transcendence, especially when we see it dissolving into linguistic supplement and remainder”), Marxist Carla Gulag (“By caking himself in dirt, Piglet is reasserting his class identity”); anti-imperialist Das Nuffa Dat (who likens Pooh’s attempt to take honey from a beehive to “an agent of the East India Company hoping to trade pence-apiece spools of yarn for precious spices”) and recovered memory specialist Dolores Malatesta, who sees Piglet as a child abuse victim with “The Courage to Squeal”: “When he sees a river overflowing its banks, he wonders ‘whether it would be coming into his bed soon.’ Not his house, mind you, but his bed.”

Victor Fassell’s “A Bellyful of Pooh” examines the hapless bear in the context of contemporary attitudes toward digestion and defecation. Radical feminist Sisera Catheter is pleased to find evidence that Pooh and Piglet are contemplating a “gay marriage” (“What would you do, if your house was blown down?” “He’d come and live with me,” said Pooh, “wouldn’t you, Piglet?”). But she is still “less than thrilled by the backhanded tribute that gay marriage pays to the most pernicious of all institutions, straight matrimony.” And from the world of cultural studies, cyberpunk scholar BigGloria3 proposes dispensing with the actual text of Pooh and inventing your own pornographic version, incorporating whatever fetishes turn you on: “You’ll be writing a better story than Milne’s, and while you’re at it you’ll get your rocks off...”

On a mellower note, we hear from the eminent Orpheus Bruno, who roundly lambastes his fellow panelists, those “Rolex revolutionaries,” for failing to grasp the simple truth: “Centuries after your clamorous ‘isms’ have faded into silence,” predicts Bruno, “the boy and the Bear will be playing yet.” Bruno, unmistakably, is the critic Harold Bloom, whose manner and style Crews evokes very deftly and amusingly. Having first compared the relationship between Christopher Robin and Pooh with that between Prince Hal and Falstaff, the ebullient Bruno goes somewhat over the top by suggesting that the Pooh books are so good, they just might possibly have been penned by a greater talent than A.A. Milne: Virginia Woolf!

Another dissenting voice raised in defense of traditional standards belongs to conservative journalist Dudley Cravat III, who has little to say about Pooh, but a lot to say about academe: “Woe betide the incautious freshman who raises his hand to hazard a once incontrovertible truism such as ‘Columbus discovered America’ or a patriotic sentiment like ‘Remember the Alamo.’ According to the anti-anti-Communist rainbow coalition now dictating the mono/multiculturalist line, our Pilgrim fathers were mere powwow crashers; San Antonio is a suburb of Mexico City; and the rest of our native land ought to be signed over forthwith to aborigines...” Cravat acknowledges that Professor Bruno and another panelist “ventured to express misgivings about party-line doctrine,” but rather than make common cause with them, he dismisses them for having ignored his own “voice-in-the-wilderness animadversions.”

Who, if anyone, among this motley crew speaks for Crews? In his preface, he claims, tongue-in-cheek, that it was he who insisted to the conference organizer, N. Mack Hobbs, that Dudley Cravat be invited. I would venture to suggest that, although Cravat and Bruno are both lampooned, the tone in which they are satirized is more playful, closer to the fun-loving mockery of “The Pooh Perplex.” Far fiercer in tone is Crews’ take on the other conferees, including the egregious Hobbs, the ultimate academic gamester who declares that the true function of academic studies is pursuing the highest possible salary, whatever the cost to scholarship, teaching or common decency.

Despite the sparkling wit and brilliant parodies that make this a funny book, “Postmodern Pooh” is also an angry book, certainly angrier than “The Pooh Perplex.” The reason can be found in the footnotes to the papers delivered by Crews’ demented panelists. Though the papers are Crews’ clever parodies, the footnotes include actual quotes from real-life academic writing. What some of these academicians have said in print is even more outrageous than Crews’ inventions.