OH, BOTHER

-EXCERPT: from Postmodern Pooh: Resistance is useless, honey: Apply a healthy dose of Derrida to 'AA Milne' and his classic has new significance (Felicia Marronnez, The Guardian)

"Well," said Pooh, we keep looking for Home and not finding it, so I thought that if we looked for this Pit, we'd be sure not to find it, which would be a Good Thing, because then we might find something that we weren't looking for, which might be just what we were looking for, really."

One might say that the reader who has grasped the full significance of this passage has seen to the bottom of both Winnie-the-Pooh and its author. Yes, one might say that. But "one" would thereby be branded a simpleton, a theory-starved dunce. "Grasped the full significance"? "Seen to the bottom"? Not very likely.

Pooh, it's true, manages, through byzantine byways that I will track below, to body forth the key principles of Deconstruction with uncanny fidelity. And that fact, given the apparent temporal priority of Milne over Derrida, would seem to prove the timeless pertinence of the latter's approach to textuality. Yet what is the le?on of Derrida, that consummate rhetor of the iterable and the dehiscent, if not that clear sight, the grasping of significance, and even historical precedence (to say nothing of timeless truth) are all illusions, effects of that very diff?rance that constitutes the only legitimate object of critical scrutiny?

I wonder how many of you went for my feint that we might learn something here about the author of Winnie-the-Pooh. C'est pour rire. Pooh Bear, at least, knows better: "I sometimes wonder if it's true/ That who is what and what is who."

After all, J Hillis Miller has pointed out that "there is not any 'Shakespeare himself'," and Derrida once observed that "there is not, strictly speaking, a text whose author or subject is Jean-Jacques Rousseau". It's fairly clear, then, that Miller is right when he characterises every author as merely "an effect of the text."

"AA Milne" himself or itself concedes the point in the preface to When We Were Very Young : "You may wonder sometimes who is supposed to be saying the verses. Is it the Author, that strange but uninteresting person, or is it Christopher Robin, or some other boy or girl, or Nurse, or Hoo?... you will have to decide for yourselves."

As for "the reader", spare me! The term elides difference, at-tempts to inscribe on a bubbling bouillabaisse of potentialities one model of a stolid, passive, tabula rasa receptor. Grant yourself a "reader" and you automatically become a writer - worse, a communicator with a plain message that "the reader" will supposedly open like some ersatz telegram announcing that he has been declared a finalist in the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes.

Now that we've dispensed with both author and reader, you will be interested to learn that I'm going to go right on discussing them.

Stumbled into this characteristically funny excerpt (if you follow the link the whole thing is reprinted) from the excellent Postmodern Pooh by Frederick Crews. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 1, 2003 9:03 AM