BOOKS
1 S3
to show how it stands to the left of all the others, we Marxists have the
advantage of actually being, not just posing as, authentic radicals." But
tell that to Das Nuffa Dat (another deliciously crafted name) who insists
that Milne's colonial unconscious is racist to its teeth. Citing Edward
Said, former president of the MLA, as an authority beyond challenge
("every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was ... a
racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric"), Oat goes on to
show how the accusations fit Milne to a "tea"-yet another word pre–
sumably dripping with cultural imperialism, whether it appears in a
novel by Jane Austen or in
House at Pooh Corner.
For critics who pride themselves above all else on the independence
of their minds, the bows to theory mavens are everywhere to be seen,
even if they are, in truth, so jargon-riddled as to be unintelligible. Here,
for example, is a snippet from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak that, as Oat
puts it, explains "what we're all here for":
The rememoration of the "present" as space is the possibility of the
utopian imperative of no-(particular} place, the metropolitan pro–
ject that can supplement the post-colonial attempt at the impossi–
ble cathexis of place-bound history as the lost time of the spectator.
The result makes for mind-numbing language and lots of contentious–
ness (post-structuralists beat up on structuralists, deconstructionists
square off against radical feminists, Marxists, and post-colonialists–
while a cyberpunk cultural studies person pooh-poohs on all of them),
but none of the verbal fireworks tell us a whit about A. A. Milne, his age,
or his work. Indeed, as the pun in Crews's title suggests, what we have
here is so much "pooh," which is to say, so much shit.
Crews had his work cut out for him when he set about writing paro–
dies of cutting edge theory because it is difficult, if not downright
impossible, to exaggerate what is already an exaggeration. That's why I
found myself equally divided between laughter and tears as each mock–
MLA paper droned on to its dreary, absolutely predictable conclusion.
In my better moods, I try to convince myself that
Postmodern Pooh
marks the end of the arrant foolishness that has turned literary studies
into a laughingstock; in my darker moments, however, I fear that there
are other, even more outrageous would-be celebrities hoping to cash in
on whatever post-postmodernism turns out to be.
Sanford Pinsker
