A Gathering of Angels: Angels in Jewish Life and Literature Book

Not that many years ago, the "case method" was employed on hapless college freshmen in their English classes, to try to give them a handle on the classics. Scholars would publish learned essays about a work of literature as a means to examining it from different angles. The "great classic" under study here? A.A. Milne's WINNIE THE POOH. The year? 1963. The notable scholars? All twelve of them sprang from the fertile imagination of Frederick Crews, all "essays" satirize this-or-that school of criticism at large in the country at that time, and as satire, all are wildly funny.

For example, in a warmed-over essay from 1939, "A Bourgeois Writer's Proletarian Fables," aging lefty "Martin Tempralis" singles out Pooh's bossy buddy Rabbit as the epitome of the capitalist managerial class, leaving Pooh the ultimate member of the Proletariat. Not so, avers the dyed-in-the-wool Freudian of the bunch, "Karl Anschauung," in his "A.A. Milne's Honey-Balloon-Pit-Gun-Tail-Bathtubcomplex," who believes that an understanding of the Pooh books hinges entirely on the fact that all artists, even Milne, are neurotic. Milne in fact is deeply phobic of bears!

In "O Felix Culpa! The Sacramental Meaning of Winnie-the-Pooh" by a certain Dr. Culpepper, obviously a Leavisite, the Pooh and his pals are made to fit a model of Christianity that makes sense to the author if no one else. Playing to the gallery, and occupying he last card in this show, traditionalist Smedley Force insists in his "Prologomena to Any Future Study of Winnie-the-Pooh" that the silly old bear is un-critiqueable: in fact, no literature in English can yet be critiqued at all.

Although the schools of criticism under fire have had their day, Dr. Crews came back many years later with another hilarious send-up of critical preening, POSTMODERN POOH (2001), whose essays this time were delivered during a (phony) MLA conference. In both books, Dr. Crews has a very firm understanding of the foibles of the academic community, which so often seems to be speaking to itself and not the poor undergraduates, or taking pot-shots at rival scholars. I recommend both of these books.