Frederick Crews
New York: North Point Press, 2001
175 pp., $22.00 hc
O. Alan Weltzien
English
UM-Western
Now retired, Frederick Crews has bookended his career by returning to academic satire and Winnie the Pooh, updating and darkening in his new book his earlier The Pooh Perplex (1963), which skewered then-current fashions in literary criticism with great mimicry, wit, and good humor.
In the intervening decades, literary criticism has undergone many transmutations and increasingly assumed the status of a metaliterature. For many, it has muscled aside the older business of interpreting and aesthetically assessing literary texts. Since at least the 1970s, new critical schools have appeared every few years, broadcasting their claims to the detriment of other schools. The claims have grown increasingly ideological, overtly political, and too often the conversations have grown strident and inhumane.
The net result of the sometimes cacophonous, public debate--recounted in many books, Alvin Kernan's The Death of Literature among the best--has been, for some English professors and many students and others, a loss of disciplinary purpose and focus.
The stakes for other disciplines marked by such visible contention and infighting are high, because I haven't noticed English enrollments increasing; quite the contrary. If anything, I see fewer majors and less general interest among college students in literature than I did twenty years ago. Of course, other factors also explain this trend, but the English profession has not helped itself. By the 1980s, it became a graduate school commonplace for English professors-in-training to have digested Jacques Derrida or Paul de Man, yet read scantily in, for example, nineteenth-century Realistic novels. Literary criticism often nudged out primary texts, becoming an end in itself and marked by increasingly obscure jargon. My impression is that, among critical schools, conversation grows noisier as it involves fewer, with the result that among the general public, English as an academic discipline is regarded as increasingly confused, annoying, or irrelevant.
I probably overstate the case, but too often the study of literature--reading and writing about literary texts of all genres, assessing them and their relations to our lives--recedes to the edges of some classrooms and syllabi. To the extent this is true, English poses a cautionary tale for other academic disciplines stamped by competing ideologies and neglecting, at their peril, older emphases in their scholarship and teaching. To the extent we have replaced aesthetics with ideology rather than integrating them or controlling the latter, we run a risky business; our embrace of pluralism and canon-busting has come with an inflated cost.
Perhaps as a result of these trends, the 1990s saw a resurgence of academic satire, some of it directed at English professors or departments, as the examples of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury were taken up by Richard Russo and many others. We can scrutinize Crews's Postmodern Pooh in light of recent academic satire. His earlier spirit of indulgent play has disappeared, and while I miss it, I equally enjoy the savage energy of Postmodern Pooh. Looking back on the changes in English across his career, Crews, an old man, pulls no punches; he has nothing to lose and disdains the tone and substance of most literary theory of the past generation. If the earlier book mocks, the present one goes for the jugular, and the caricatures possess the same ferocity as the grotesque, demeaning cartoons of a Goya or Daumier.
The new Pooh resonates with the same precise parody as the oldBCrews uncannily shoots bull's eye after bull's eye--but the puns work more sarcastically. His laughter is derisive rather than sympathetic, and I can only speculate about the marked shift. There is something new here, as Crews scorns the wrongheaded directions he believes the discipline has taken; he wants to shake the foolishness and perverse excesses out of literary criticism, in the process restoring the discipline to a healthier, more respected status. Obviously Crews dislikes literary postmodernism, particularly the stridency of many of its manifestations which, like special interest political groups, shout only their single vision.
Crews's mischief making begins in his Preface when he asserts, "Another sprightly methodological survey, focusing on the same classic fiction as before, might be just what the doctor ordered to get us all up to speed with the ever-accelerating march of knowledge in our discipline" (xi). "Ever-accelerating," right. Like an eighteenth-century British novelist, he assumes the position of "editor of record" of the text he claims not to have seen in its entirety before. For his ruse, Crews castigates literary critic Gerald Graff and the 1990s "teaching the conflicts" fashion; according to his book's ostensible organizer, "the very disputes that cause professors of literature to defame one another as sexists, fascists, and idiots can become the organized heart of the major" (xiii).
Crews's disdain grows noisier. He also glances at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) to complete his plot, crediting N. Mack Hobbs, the collection's final contributor, with convening the new round of Pooh essayists at the December 2000 MLA Convention in Washington, D.C., which engenders the book. Though Crews admits he didn't "make the scene," his parting pun forecasts his derision: "The bright critics assembled in this volume will doubtless show, in their sophisticated and ingenious new ways, that just as Pooh is suffused with humanism, our humanism itself, by this late date, has become full of Pooh" (xvi). Indeed.
Generations of parents and young children confirm Crews's conviction that "Pooh is full of humanism"; Postmodern Pooh suggests "our humanism...has become full of Pooh" by providing eleven variations on this theme. I certainly agree that the militancy of special interest critical agendas has obscured if not emasculated older, liberal traditions of humanism in the academy. For example, while cultural studies brings valuable new insights into the business of interpretation, it damages the profession of English to the extent that it denounces aesthetics while aggressively pursuing ideology and a facile advocacy. Insofar as a novel or poem or memoir becomes primarily a soapbox for a particular political position, it has been stripped of its fullness as a vehicle for aesthetic, psychological, and philosophical understanding. For a Crews, there is something way wrong with trends in English which eclipse its humanism, a condition that requires a caustic antidote.
The array of footnotes sprinkled through the eleven chapters attests to Crews's knowledge of the various literary critical positions he savages. The longer quotations in the text reveal their impenetrability; no sunlight penetrates these occasional verbal thickets. Through them Crews sarcastically belittles the excesses of such jargon--an inherent danger in academic disciplines and many other professions--which reduce rather than improve communication and which flaunt their own exclusivity and pomposity. Against them, the occasional quotations from Milne's stories shine simply and happily. Around the time of the MLA convention, occasional newspaper writers gleefully quote titles and topics that strike them as particularly preposterous. English types make model eggheads through their verbal preciosity. Crews knows the game far better, and his masterful mimicry of eleven critical voices strips away their various bids for profundity. They come across as not only silly, stupid, and misguided, posturing arcanely and stupidly as they lob hand grenades at one another, but harmful: harmful in their obfuscation and commitment to their own agendas rather than the literary texts they ostensibly interpret.
Crews's ear is so fine that his titles and academic biographies alone give away his game. Consider his first "contributor," a Deconstructionist named Felicia Marronnez whose essay title is "Why? Wherefore? Inasmuch as Which?" We learn "Felicia Marronnez is Sea & Ski Professor of English at the University of California at Irvine"; that she is dedicated to "helping to narrow the sophistication gap between our two coasts"; that her "prizewinning dissertation" is Heidegger Reading Pooh Reading Hegel Reading Husserl: Or, Isn't It Punny How a Hun Likes Beary?; and that her "subsequent monograph" is (P)ooh La La! Kiddie Lit Gets the Jacques of Its Life (Yale University Press, 1992) (3). In this send-up, Crews quotes Derrida to steer us towards this climax: "Now it seems to be generally accepted that while fictions--including Pooh, of course--all mean pretty much the same thing, deconstructive criticism can be infinitely various and creative. It can also be wild and freakish fun":
We Derridadaists are behind the whee-I now, swerving with verve to avoid the pedestrian. If a Woozle can Wizzle, so can I. This little Piglet went to mark it; will he Roo the day? "Seriature of seriature: antherection, colpos, signature, stewke, betweens, colossos." Cottleston, Cottleston, Pie in your eye. HIPYPAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY! (16-17)
The fun doesn't let up, as the other bios read similarly, and the essays themselves careen through passages of pseudo-erudite nonsense and deflating puns, eventually imploding. It's all about Exclusively Finding Deep Meaning. Through the tour, we are treated to exposures of Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, a species of biological criticism, and cultural and Queer studies, among others. The question is always how such critical schools enlarge our understanding and appreciation of a literary text; however, rather than this, the school buries and replaces the text with some celebratory reiteration of itself. This is not about the value of literature nor related traditions of humanism as they manifest themselves in journals, conversations, and classrooms; it is about a species of solipsism. Much is at stake.
Personal favorites include "The Fissured Subtext: Historical Problematics, the Absolute Cause, Transcoded Contradictions, and Late-Capitalist Metanarrative (in Pooh)" by one Carla Gulag; "Just Lack a Woman," by Sisera Catheter; and "Resident Aliens," by Das Nuffa Dat. Readers are also treated to specific parodies of two megacritics who have thrown long shadows over the past generation and more, and these alone are worth the book.
Harold Bloom appears as Orpheus Bruno, who has penned "The Importance of Being Portly," and Stanley Fish appears as N. Mack Hobbs, who is invoked in Crews's Preface plot and who closes the volume with "You Don't Know What Pooh Studies Are About, Do You, and Even If You Did, Do You Think Anybody Would Be Impressed?" Bloom and Fish have positioned themselves as arch-literary critics for a long time, self-appointed spokesmen of the literary canon and profession, respectively. It's hard to think of two more self-assured, arrogant laborers in the vineyard of literary criticism, both of whom oracularly pronounce what and how we should read and write and teach literature. Their sheer influence over literary criticism warrants their special treatment in Postmodern Pooh, reminding us that any discipline is always far more than such individuals claim to embody.
The Preface leads me to believe that Crews regards more sympathetically one Dudley Cravat III, "a social and cultural critic whom I especially admire," a "nonmember" of MLA but "the man to steer the assembled company back to a duly literary atmosphere" (xiv-xv). Poor Cravat's name paints him as a hidebound traditionalist, kindred spirit of E.D. Hirsch and the late Allan Bloom, for instance. Cravat is presented as an outsider, a "monthly journalist" whose "most pungent" essays have been collected in two books, Malignant Boomers (1992) and The Triumph of the Shrill (1999). I suspect Crews endorses Cravat's second title and lets Cravat speak for him at times:
The even partisan Professor Hobbs could not have meant to arm a cultural watchdog [i.e., Cravat] with drafts of your papers, but he evidently forgot to "forget" to do so. The result is that, despite his contrary intention, the incriminating documents have fallen into [my possession]. In all candor, they read like parodies of academic literary criticism at its worst. Nearly all of them are exactly alike: uncivil, adversarial, monotonous, and redundant. And this is a damning indicator of how "English" has lost its way....(157)
Maybe this is too easy, as it's hard not to read Cravat's statement as a summary indictment and, for some, a measure of the book's bias. Postmodern Pooh dishes up tasty "parodies of academic literary criticism at its worst." Of course English, like any discipline, changes and new paradigms replace old, but it represents a cautionary tale insofar as it "has lost its way": a conviction held by some practitioners and outsiders. I'm not sure it's "lost its way" anyway, but I don't inhabit a cutting edge critical community. To the extent that an academic discipline's health includes exuberant self-parody, Crews is to be thanked for reminding literary critics to laugh more frequently at their reflections in the mirror. Such sarcastic humor provides one way for a discipline to re-examine its premises and purposes and, ideally, better integrate newer agendas with older so that when we talk and write about literature, we honor its fullness.