Postmodern Pooh by Frederick Crews
North Point Press, New York Xvi+175 pages. $22. By M. L. Raina There is a scene in Kingsley Amis’s novel, ‘That Uncertain Feeling’, in which two characters are discussing a performance. They are intrigued by expressions like ‘in the Word was the beginning’. Finally they decide ‘dear! dear! the thing must be symbolical all right’. That was when symbolism was the badge of literary sophistication. I was reminded of this scene on reading Federick Crews’s sequel to his 1963 send-up of the period’s critical practice titled ‘The Pooh Perplex’. Just as the earlier book parodied the then prevalent critical trends, ‘Postmodern Pooh’ takes on the currently fashionable schools of critical theory that take postmodernism as their rallying slogan and go off at a tangent in its name. The wilful obfuscation of critical intelligence is the target of Crews’s parody, done in a gutsy, funny and hugely tonic fashion. If parody is a variety of exaggeration by confusing categories of actuality, Crews’s ...