BOOKS
1 S1
The Scarlet Letter
or
King Lear, Heart of Darkness
or
The Turn of the
Screw-carne
with the territory, as did the dreary papers that brisk intro–
ductions to "approaches" (Freudian symbol-hunting, myth criticism,
source studies) tended to generate. The freshmen under our care soon
learned that the most ingenious literary criticism could "take on" virtu–
ally anything, including A. A. Milne's bear of "Very Little Brain." Crews
collected the best and brightest critics of those halcyon days, gave them
appropriately fictitious names, and sat back as they set about exposing
Pooh's hidden meanings. Given Crews's sharp wit, it is hardly surprising
that
The Pooh Perplex
became a bestseller, livening up the discussions
wherever graduate students, and their professors, congregated.
For better or worse, my undergraduate experience with literature was
limited to close readings of the "canon," although I cannot recall any of
my professors using that word. I soon figured out that one of them was
a die-hard Freudian, while another set his cap on Jungian archetypes,
but most simply focused on the novels, stories, poems, and plays at
hand without bothering to tell us that they were, in truth, latter-day
New Critics. In such matters I was, thank goodness, an innocent-that
is, until I enrolled in a graduate course in contemporary criticism and
was exposed to the likes of William Empson,
F.
R. Leavis, Cleanth
Brooks, Northrop Frye, and a handful of others.
As the late Irving Howe liked to point out, in those days there may
have been a certain amount of mutual suspicion between the New York
intellectuals and the Southern agrarians, but at least they conducted
their quarrels in plain English. That is only one of the differences
between the literary criticism Crews parodies in
The Pooh Perplex
and
the theory-heavy jargon he scours in
Postmodern Pooh.
Another is the
way that our contemporary fascination with "teaching the conflicts"
has steadily replaced the teaching of individual works. As Crews points
out, tongue firmly in his cheek,
A Teaching-the-conflicts department says in effect to expectant
nineteen-year-olds ... : "Here is Husserlian phenomenology, here
are the Jungian archetypes, here a Jakobsonian structuralist, here a
Zurkian Lacanian-ism, here a counterhegemonic Post-Gramscian
Marxism, and here is the Deleuzoguattarian Anti-Oedipus, now you
decide which hermeneutic should prevail." Thus a newly minted
B.A. can step confidently into the greater world, not knowing Mil–
ton and Gray, perhaps, but knowing exactly how he would want
to
account for the magic of their art, should the occasion ever arise.
