Democracy in
America: by Dr. Seuss.
Author: Wolosky, Shira, 1954- Source:
Southwest Review
v. 85 no2 (2000) p. 167-83 ISSN: 0038-4712 Number:
BHUM00019439 Copyright: The magazine publisher is the
copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with
permission. Further reproduction of this article in
violation of the copyright is prohibited.
(TABLE)Not one of themIs like another.Don't ask us why.Go
ask your mother. One Fish, Two Fish.
Many Americans are anxiously concerned about the nation's
values and the challenge of passing them on to future
generations. Let them take comfort. There is at least one
powerful resource through which young children become young
Americans. Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel 1904-1991)
produced an extensive body of material after bringing out
And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street in 1937
(having suffered the book's rejection by, reportedly, 43
publishers). This is a canon millions of Americans may be
said to have mastered: and it may be worth thinking through
just what we are reading to our children. What Dr. Seuss's
more than forty books in effect provide is not only a mode
of American poetics, but also a civic instruction closely
associated with it.
Dr. Seuss thus initiates young Americans into their
cultural heritage. But he no less registers tensions lurking
within it. In a most surprising way, Seuss's work expresses
not only classic American liberal individualism, but also a
number of its diverse and potentially contradictory strands.
Call them (variously) liberty and equality; or self-interest
and the common good; or possessive individualism and civic
virtue. Dr. Seuss on the one hand exuberantly endorses the
individual in all his productions. On the other, Seuss
becomes increasingly alarmed at individualism as a
potentially devouring and anomic force. What, his books
ultimately ask, will prevent all the individual pursuits
from disintegrating into contrary and contending
self-interests, where community is not built out of
individual energies but destroyed by them?
Dr. Seuss's work begins in a basic pedagogical project,
such as the back-covers of the books advertise: that even
small children have the right to read without being bored to
death. Here he has distinguished antecedents in Noah Webster
and other founding figures in the early republic, such as
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush, who defined educational
commitments as inseparable from the development of American
democracy. Webster, inventor of the Spelling Bee as American
ritual, produced the Blue-Back Speller, Grammar, and of
course Webster's Dictionary, all of which sold copies in the
multiple thousands. In these works, Webster not only
promoted literacy as an important prerequisite to
responsible participation in democratic life. He also
provided a body of common American lore and exemplary tales
(to be invented if necessary) to instruct in democratic
values. This educational push was to include even little
girls. While voters remained male, they required mothers
able to prepare them for the exercise of republican
duties--a so-called Republican Motherhood.
Dr. Seuss advances these Websterian tasks. He wants to
democratize reading. Most importantly, he wants to invent
lessons in liberal-democratic culture, which would display
and urge the central importance of the individual. This
begins with Dr. Seuss's most outstanding and pervasive
feature: the creation of endless, uniquely individualized
forms. The largest body of Dr. Seuss's works are dedicated
to such creative proliferation. Book after book extols, and
enumerates, more and more and more of some category of
possibility: letters that go On Beyond Zebra; complex recipe
concoctions, as in Scrambled Eggs Super!; new sights, as in
Mulberry Street; open choices, as in Would You Rather Be a
Bullfrog?; new creatures, as in One Fish Two Fish,
McElligot's Pool, If I Ran the Zoo, Happy Birthday to You
through many other interpolated sections of books; new
feats, as in If I Ran the Circus; new experiences, as in
Green Eggs and Ham.
Words themselves wildly proliferate in Dr. Seuss, whether
as the central feature of a work, as in Fox in Socks, or as
an enduring bass, booming through whatever other inventions
a book may pursue. Dr. Seuss is a master-craftsman within
his chosen are of expertise. He commands an extensive
rhetorical arsenal, including puns, hyperbole and deflation,
neologisms, chiasms (reversals of word order: "I meant
what I said and I said what I meant"), polyptotons
(repetitions of word-cores: "no former performer's
performed this performance"), as well as allegory,
parable, fable, and quest romance. Allegory is particularly
central in Oh, the Places You'll Go!, where inner feelings
and states become outward landscapes. One notes that after
graduating from Dartmouth College in 1925, Geisel spent two
years at Oxford studying toward a doctorate in literature.
Seuss's books of proliferation are the ones that threaten
to grow tedious to parents who read them out loud night
after night. Indeed, his work generally raises questions
about the relationship between tedium and the cult of the
imagination. For the good of creative variety derives from
and expresses an even more fundamental commitment--to the
individual imagination as the power that produces it. All
that glory of invention is in fact a consequence and
demonstration of the driven I of the imagination, as product
and projection of the creative self.
In terms of literary tradition, Dr. Seuss is one of the
central inheritors of an Emersonian-Whitmanian poetics.
Seuss's proliferations of ever more and different beings pay
homage to what Emerson calls (in "Circles")
"the sea of beautiful forms." His focus on the
endlessly creative self presumes Emerson's vision of life as
a "self-evolving circle, which, from a ring
imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and
larger circles, and that without end." Additive
sequences of invention in Seuss likewise recall Whitman's
catalogue technique. His writing, like theirs, intends to
celebrate (Whitman's word. "Song of Myself" opens:
"I celebrate myself and sing myself") Selfhood in
all its potential, all its energies and productions.
Emerson, in "Self-Reliance," describes the place
of the self as holy: "Bid the invaders take the shoes
from off their feet, for God is here within." Whitman
writes in "Song of Myself": "I exist as I am,
that is enough" (20). Dr. Seuss writes in Happy
Birthday To You!:.
Today is your birthday! Today you are you! So we'll go to
the top of the toppest blue space ... Come on! Open your
mouth and sound off at the sky! Shout loud at the top of
your voice, "I AM I!" Like God naming Himself to
Moses in Exodus, this self declares its selfhood to be
unique, precious, essentially divine. No extravaganza of
gift and ceremony can exceed the incalculable value of
selfhood.
Selfhood serves as an aesthetic principle. But, as Dr.
Seuss shows, the poetic has moral, social and ultimately
political corollaries. Even the glory of imagination is in
some sense a reflected one. For it in turn presumes, and
represents, individual integrity, sanctity, and
responsibility. A work such as McElligot's Pool makes this
connection. This book features Marco fishing in a pool
which, he is told, contains nothing but junk. Despite this
sober sense, Marco views the circumscribed and pathetic pond
as a pool of potential. Through his imaginative drive, he
converts the limited into the unlimited. He launches an
imaginary procession of multiple fish-forms, which he keeps
heroically marching across incredible distances and
difficulties right to his waiting fish hook and worm. What
this phantasmagoric bigger and better fish-story represents,
however, is ultimately Marco himself: his own perseverance,
commitment, and strong selfhood, pledged in the book's
refrain: "If I wait long enough; if I'm patient and
cool, Who knows what I'll catch in McElligot's Pool!".
Dr. Seuss's heroic individual, faithful and true, lives
in the world of his imagination. But this turns out not to
be a merely private world. Dr. Seuss also has a vision of
society, one made up of just such heroic individuals.
Certain principles then follow. Since every individual has
irreducible value, all are fundamentally equal in a broad
egalitarian vision. Society is itself an association of such
individuals, and must be pledged to uphold and respect the
individual integrity of those who comprise it. But,
conversely, every individual is responsible to and for this
community, is called upon to participate in this common
society and contribute to it. Dr. Seuss's work places him in
the liberal tradition described by Alexis De Toqueville in
his Democracy in America, and elaborated by such historians
as Gordon Wood and Bernard Bailyn. America's social form is
alien to feudal histories, and is opposed to fixed
hierarchies of deference as well as obligation. Pledged to
the protection of individual rights against incursions by a
state power into the authority of the people themselves,
America also relies on the people as the constituting basis
of self-government.
Dr. Seuss's social vision is most fully developed in the
Horton books. The final end of Horton Hatches the Egg is the
birth of a new and unique creature out of Horton's long
labor:.
(TABLE) And the people came shouting, "What's all
this about ...? They looked! And they started with their
eyes popping out! Then they cheered and they cheered and the
CHEERED more and more. They'd never seen anything like it
before! "My goodness! My gracious!" they shouted,
"MY WORD! It's something brand new! It's an
elephant-bird!".
Dr. Seuss here utterly rejects, indeed never so much as
considers any notion that such a strange, unforseen form of
life might be monstrous, or difficult to integrate back into
the jungle to which Horton and his unique offspring (the
gendering of this story is striking) are happily restored.
The invention of the new suffices. It is an intrinsic value.
But the celebration of unique invention in Horton Hatches
the Egg is itself the outcome, and reward, of Horton's own
personal characteristics. The crowd at the circus,
witnessing the production of an amazing new creature, shouts
enthusiastically:.
"And it should be, it should be, it SHOULD be like
that! For Horton was faithful! He sat and he sat. He meant
what he said And he said what he meant ..." And they
sent him home Happy, One hundred per cent!
Horton Hatches the Egg is a parable of devotion. It
dramatizes the importance of keeping your word, of
perseverance, of faithfulness; and particularly of these
virtues as situated within and performed by the responsible
individual, who is true to his own word and his own vision.
The individual is the seat of responsibility, the moral
center; and must be, not least, true to himself.
This conjunction of values is even more evident in Horton
Hears a Who, represented through a mirroring between the
matching characters of Horton and the Whos (as there is also
a mirroring, negatively, in Horton Hatches the Egg: the
morally responsible Horton is cast in opposition to the
irresponsible Mother Bird Lazy Mayzie, who breaks her word
and abandons her egg). Here the implications for society
clearly emerge. In this work, Horton, the faithful
elephant-individual, finds himself in the awkward position
of having to protect an invisible and almost inaudible whole
world of unique creatures. An extremely unpleasant
mother-figure (just why mothers are such objects of
ambivalence in Dr. Seuss is a question we must eventually
ask), the taunting Kangaroo with child in pouch, insists on
proof that this world of creatures exists. Horton must
convince her. He finally accomplishes this, by calling on
every least citizen of the Who world to participate in this
urgent public business. Only when the leastmost least of the
Whos is called to participate, to add his tiniest voice to
the community's total effort: only then can the Whos' world
be rescued. Here Dr. Seuss exercises his allegorical talent,
creating a concrete figure out of a general pronoun to
represent Everywho, in the tradition of the morality play
Everyman. Horton, beaten, mauled, and threatened with
imprisonment, calls out to the Mayor of the Whos:.
Don't give up! I believe in you all! A person's a person,
no matter how small! And you very small persons will not
have to die If you make yourselves heard! So come on, now,
and TRY! ... They don't hear a thing! Are you sure all your
boys ... Are all doing your best? Are they ALL making noise?
Are you sure every Who down in Who-ville is working? Quick!
Look through your town! Is there anyone shirking?
No less than his puritan-elephant forebears, Horton calls
the Whos to a town meeting, each and every least one. And
indeed, when the smallest Who of all is at last enlisted,
his additional tiny cry accomplishes the feat of redemption.
The inaudible world is heard; its existence is attested, and
hence assured:.
Their voices were heard! They rang out clear and clean.
And the elephant smiled. "Do you see what I mean?
They've proved they ARE persons, no matter how small. And
their whole world was saved by the Smallest of ALL!".
With this intervention, the Whos are rescued at last. But
so is Horton. Horton the elephant is large, but he is also
small in the sense of being one individual only. As an
individual, he is also called on to attest his vision with
steadfast courage. He too is a Who, a unique creature. His
integrity requires that he assert this uniqueness, his
individual perception that the Whos do exist. Their survival
depends on him; but his also depends on them. He is
vindicated, saved from ostracism, imprisonment, even the
madness of solitary testimony, by this smallest Who
individual who raised his voice, taking personal
responsibility.
It is of paramount importance that both Horton and the
smallest Who act not only each for himself, but also for the
common good. Every individual is uniquely responsible.
Without the personal and individual acceptance of
responsibility, the very survival of the world is
threatened. Dr. Seuss's is thus a vision not only of
individuals, but of community. It rests upon a faith that
the exercise of individuality will build and strengthen
social life. It will not initiate a dispersion into
irreconcilable diversities but rather will serve as a common
ground for respecting differences and making possible their
expression and appreciation. As a social vision, it pledges
itself to a community of unique, participating individuals,
without which the individuals themselves, with their world,
will perish.
And yet something goes bump. Running through this world
of liberal values are fault lines that threaten to undermine
and destabilize it. Dr. Seuss extols the individual. He does
not, however, wish this to mean the abandonment of
community. He, rather, wishes to found the community in the
integrity and sanctity of the individuals who together make
it up. He would like to see these dual impulses as mutually
supporting rather than contradictory. Nevertheless, there
are dangers. The self-reliant individual may turn out to be
uncomfortably close to the selfish one ("Are they my
poor?" Emerson asks in "Self-Reliance"). Dr.
Seuss, like Emerson and most notably like Whitman, wishes
the pursuit of invention to remain individually creative and
expressive. Also like Emerson and Whitman, he is anxious.
Endless invention may come uncomfortably close to mechanical
reproduction. It may involve exploitation that consumes the
common world, rather than producing new ones. It may
collapse into commercialism, with individual pursuit and
conformity difficult to distinguish from one another.
The Cat in the Hat books already show signs of these
anxious strains. Structured according to the principle of
creative invention, they offer not only the pedagogical
benefit of introducing numbers and letters of the alphabet,
but the more important lesson endorsing imaginative play.
Extensions of experience through imaginative invention may
seem to threaten the discipline, order, and industry of the
home--cleanliness in The Cat in the Hat and household duty
in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. In the end this conflict
is shown to be merely apparent. Mother will return to a
house that is tidy and a walk that is shoveled clear of
snow. The strange is not hostile to the familiar. Daily,
domestic life will not suffer, and indeed will benefit, from
the joys that imaginative production can bring. The Cat
shows that the disciplined household (like the school in On
Beyond Zebra), far from being assaulted by free imaginative
play, can be the scene and stage for launching its salutary
inventions. The destabilizing and even threatening force of
the Cat in the Hat is thus neutralized in a reaffirmation of
bourgeois life. Dr. Seuss's extravagances are careful to
stop short of posing a revolutionary threat to society, and
insist they can be absorbed into its basic frameworks. It is
no accident that the Cat sports a stovepipe hat and bowtie
based in Uncle Sam cartoons, where they in fact originated
in earlier Geisel drawings and ads (can Sam-I-Am, I-Am-Sam,
be another Uncle Sam?).
Horton Hears a Who verges further into problematic areas
hinted at in the Cat books, of tensions between
individualist energies and social interests. Horton the
elephant is eccentric. His odd behavior of speaking to
invisible people in an invisible world is noticed by his
compeers: the Kangaroo Mother and the threatening jungle
monkeys, the Wickersham Brothers. These (mothers repeatedly)
represent a villain in the Dr. Seuss moral world:
conformity. Like Emerson before him, Dr. Seuss wishes to
teach lessons of Self-Reliance. This, however, requires a
certain degree of resistance to the surrounding society,
what Emerson calls aversion:.
Society everywhere is a conspiracy against the manhood
sic of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock
company, in which the members agree, for the better securing
of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty
and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is
conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.
Horton must stand up against the others out of his
independent judgment and in the name of his own conscience.
He must combat conformity, a force that crushes
individuality. But this is to picture society as a threat to
the individual, rather than as a context for and beneficiary
of individual enterprise. This is one source of Seuss's
ambivalence toward mothers (there may of course be other,
psychoanalytic contexts for it). They represent a
socializing force, a limit imposed on the individual's
impulses and energies, confining him (Seuss's heroes are
almost exclusively male) and ultimately threatening to
subdue him into conformity. Like many another male American
writer, Seuss imagines women as constraints to be evaded, as
Huck Finn tries to do when he heads for the territories to
escape "sivilization" in the figure of Aunt Sally.
And yet, when Mayzie the Lazy Bird abandons motherhood she
is even more unforgivable, for this truly threatens betrayal
and abandonment of others in the name of pure self-interest.
Dr. Seuss attempts to counter the threat of unqualified
self-interest by distinguishing glorification of self from
domination over others. In Dr. Seuss (as in Whitman) there
is a strong egalitarian impulse (Whitman continues in the
first lines of "Song of Myself": "And every
atom belonging to me as good belongs to you"). This, in
both writers, takes shape through a pronounced
anti-authoritarian strain. There is a body of Seuss work
which is expressly republican. Kings fare badly in Dr.
Seuss: in The 500 Hats of Batholomew Cubbins, Bartholomew
and the Ooblek and perhaps most vividly in Yertle the Turtle
and Other Stories. The 500 Hats of Batholomew Cubbins is
dedicated to the complete ridiculing of the idea of doffing
hats in deference to the King, something Bartholomew finds
literally impossible to do (each time he takes his cap off,
another one just pops right up, in a sequence of greater and
greater magnificence). As Whitman wrote of the American
people in the Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855: "The
President tak es off his hat to them not they to him."
The opening topography of the text makes the point
graphically. Bartholomew Cubbins lives in a hut down at the
very bottom of the hill whose ascending space marks the
increasing status of its inhabitants. At the topmost top is
the palace of the King, who likes to look "down over
the houses of all his subjects ... It was a mighty view and
it made King Derwin feel mighty important." At the
bottommost bottom, Bartholomew Cubbins saw this view, as Dr.
Seuss puts it, "backward. It was a mighty view, but it
made Bartholomew Cubbins feel mighty small.".
This story's resolution may introduce other difficulties.
Bartholomew is finally rescued from beheading by money. His
hats become so magnificent that the King decides to buy one,
removing Bartholomew's headpiece rather than his head, and
paying handsomely for it. Money is a great equalizer, it
would seem. Yet the hierarchical mountain was one of wealth
no less than of social position. Bartholomew and the Ooblek
begins to probe in this complex direction. The megalomania
of the King endangers the survival of the entire realm. The
King wishes to command the very elements of nature. In an
act of primordial ingratitude and lack of appreciation for
the created world, King Derwin of Didd commands
"something NEW" to "come down from my
sky." The result is disaster. In this case, the new is
not benign, but threatens everything that already exists.
And it is Bartholomew the lowly who finally forces the King
to confront his transgression. The King must humble himself,
not only in acknowledging his fault, but in recognizing the
immorality of absolute power.
This question of illegitimate power, as implied by the
search for the new, points forward to later misgivings by
Seuss about the very fabric of his own ideology.
Hierarchical power he always denounces. Yertle the Turtle
makes the point most vividly, both in its animal fable and
in its explicit assertions. Yertle's illegitimate bid for
power is challenged by Mac, the common turtle on whose back
(as on the backs of the whole common turtle-people) King
Yertle has tried to climb up to an ever more commanding
throne from which he would claim possession of the whole
heaven and the whole earth. At this point, Seuss's
ideological intentions come directly to the surface in what
amounts to a Declaration of Rights. Mac tells the King:.
Your Majesty, please ... I don't like to complain, But
down here below we are feeling great pain. I know, up on top
you are seeing great sights, But down at the bottom we, too,
should have rights.
Finally, the whole tower of turtles collapses and King
Yertle is dethroned when Mac burps. The text then
concludes:.
And today the great Yertle, that Marvelous he, Is King of
the Mud. That is all he can see. And the turtles, of course
... all the turtles are free As turtles and, maybe, all
creatures should be.
But the lesson does not require kings. Among the Other
Stories in the Yertle the Turtle volume is "The Great
Brag," where the desire of the Rabbit and the Bear each
to claim to be better than the other is exposed by an old
worm who sees best of all, and what he sees are:.
The two biggest fools that have ever been seen. And the
fools that I saw were none other than you, Who seem to have
nothing else better to do Than sit here and argue who's
better than who!
The point is that all men are created equal and have
inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.
Rather than conflicting with individual identity, Dr.
Seuss would insist that egalitarianism is consistent with
the sacred worth of each individual. And yet, at some point
the pursuit of individual happiness may become a mode of
self-assertion in conflict with others; while self-assertion
may generate pursuits that are finally destructive of
others, of the world, and ultimately of the self itself. The
self has the right to stand up for itself and defend itself
against others. This remains a basic commitment. Thidwick
the Big-Hearted Moose makes a strong case here. The
altrustic Thidwick is willing to offer his antlers to house
other creatures. But they soon become intrusive, threatening
his autonomy. Then altruism becomes self-destructive and
Thidwick has the right to evict them (by shedding his horns
and leaving his tenants for hunters to stuff as decorations
for the Harvard Club). The book thus poses self defensively
against self. One person's assertion may be another person's
coercion.
Self may be opposed against self. But self may also
succumb to self, not through hostile imposition, but rather
subversive conformity. De Toqueville observed in Democracy
in America: "I know of no country in which there is so
little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion
as in America." This "tyranny of the
majority," as De Toqueville calls it, disturbs Dr.
Seuss. We are all individual; we all wish to strive to
assert this individuality; but instead of producing unique
expressions, we instead obsessively compare and copy. This
results not in original creations, but slavish imitation,
commercialism, and endless consumption.
Dr. Seuss offers a series of sobering works on this
predicament. His concern with commercialism surfaces in How
the Grinch Stole Christmas (produced, however, in time for
the 1957 Christmas season). The Grinch's plot to confiscate
all the food and presents, in the guise of an inverse Santy
Claus, fails. Despite the lack of paraphernalia, the Whos of
Who-ville still joyously greet the Christmas morn,
challenging the Grinch to wonder whether Christmas
"doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas ... perhaps
... means a little bit more.".
Commercialism has been a matter of American bad
conscience since the Puritan landing, alongside the no less
foundational pursuit of wealth. Already worrisome to such
founders as John Adams, by the time of Emerson and Thoreau,
commercialism had become a cause of positive alarm.
"Property," Emerson concludes in his essay on the
subject, "is the want of self-reliance." "The
economical use of things" is the opposite of their
poetic use; and the principle of good can barely penetrate
"into every chink and hole that selfishness has left
open" ("Circles"). Thoreau questions whether
what his neighbors make through their obsessive industry can
truly be called a living. Yet how exactly to reconcile these
impulses of the American self pursuing the American dream
remains unclear.
The pressures of conformity take shape in Dr. Seuss in
the usual manner: fashion and humiliation, with interesting
gestures toward cosmetic surgery. In Dr. Seuss's story of
"Gertrude McFuzz" Gertrude is mortified that Lolla-Lee-Lou
bird has more tail feathers than she does. She begs her
Uncle-doctor for remedy, and through him gains access to a
berry that will grow her more feathers too. In an orgy of
acquisitional competitiveness, she wildly consumes them,
growing so many feathers she can neither fly nor run nor
walk. Assertion becomes competition becomes consumption
becomes self-destruction.
The cosmetic note returns in The Sneetches. The rivalry
between Sneetches is such that one group, the Star-Bellies,
ostracizes and condescends to the other group, the
Plain-Bellies. While it is tempting to read this story as
concerning foolish nationalisms, it is significant that the
difference between the two groups is absurdly negligible:
except for the star the two groups are identical, belonging
to the same fundamental kind within a given society. The
story is then about egalitarian value, and about group
pressures as they deny this value through what Freud called
"narcissism with respect to minor differences" and
what advertisers call "product differentiation."
These result in destructive mutual competition and arbitrary
social division. But then Sylvester McMonkey McBean arrives.
He is essentially a cosmetic surgeon:.
I've heard of your troubles. I've heard you're unhappy.
But I can fix that. I'm the Fix-it-Up Chappie. I've come
here to help you. I have what you need. And my prices are
low. And I work at great speed. And my work is one hundred
percent guaranteed!
Each group begins to whirl through a cosmetic machine
that alternatively installs and removes stars on bellies, at
higher and higher fees. This activity is totally frenetic,
and continues until the monies run out. At this point the
exploitative Monkey drives away.
The Sneetches manages on the last page to pull out a
happy ending. The Sneetches, utterly confused as to their
identities after so much manipulation, discover that "Sneetches
are Sneetches" regardless of stars on bellies. But the
lesson of human dignity and value seems contrived and
imposed, failing truly to address or counter the forces of
commercialism and competition unleashed in the story. Dr.
Seuss seems here to be working hope against hope; and this
starts to show thin in some of his later works. I Can Lick
30 Tigers Today offers a series of tales that chasten
self-assertion. The title story, featuring a shrunken
Cat-in-the-Hat figure, exposes empty brag. "King Louie
Katz" admonishes monarchical privilege (the whole
country becomes "more demo-catic"). As to the
final story, it is The Cat in the Hat turned nightmare.
"The Glunk that got Thunk" is an imaginary figure
who intrudes into the home in ways that are monstrous and
threatening (especially financially). Having been thought
up, it needs to be "unthunk," to be exorcized.
The next book, The Lorax, is a work of ecological
disaster. It recounts the cutting down of Truffula Trees and
the manufacture from their soft tuft-leaves of a product
called a Thneed, under the advertising slogan
"That-All-People-Need!" This starves the bearlike
creatures who lived on the tree's fruit, smogs up the air so
the birds fly away, and poisons the pond, destroying the
Humming-fish who lived there. The Lorax, as the ghost of
trees-past, tries to protest. He is issued another
Declaration of Rights, delivered this time by the
entrepreneur:.
I yelled at the Lorax, "Now listen here, Dad! All
you do is yap-yap and say, 'Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad! Well, I have
my rights, sir, and I'm telling you I intend to go on doing
just what I do! And for your information, you Lorax, I'm
figgering on biggering and Biggering and BIGGERING and
BIGGERING turning MORE Truffula Trees into Thneeds which
everyone, Everyone, EVERYONE needs!".
Necessity may be the mother of invention; but invention
becomes here the mother of necessity. Seuss has grown
alarmed at his own Principle of the More. Freedom at this
point seems self-defeating, a mode of its own undoing rather
than a ground of creative individuality. In the process, the
world is under the shadow of apocalyptic consumption.
The Butter Battle Book, one of Seuss's last works,
focusses this ominous vision. Again two groups, arbitrarily
distinguishable (according to how they butter their bread),
conduct an escalating competition of mutual threat and
weaponry until, on the last page, the two sides stand poised
with identical bombs either of which could destroy
everybody. The very energies of invention that Dr. Seuss
extols may also, as he shows, unleash forces that can
threaten to become disruptive and destructive. This work
ends in irresolution. There they stand, the
indistinguishable enemies, threatening each other and the
world with immolation.
Is this the promised end? In these works, the free,
autonomous self has somehow become deformed by the
commercial pressure and threatened by the competitive
striving which were supposed to realize his free
self-expression and potential. As De Toqueville remarks,
"It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the
American pursues his own welfare ... This fills him with
anxiety, fear, and regret and keeps his mind in ceaseless
trepidation." Dr. Seuss remains a committed exponent of
classic American liberalism. He is pledged to believe that
liberal individualism can absorb its own potential ruptures.
He wants to affirm free individual vision, even
eccentricity, and certainly individual conscience. But he
wants these to remain within certain bounds that will not
explode social norms. He wants to confirm liberal
individualism and community both. In this vision, the common
good would not ultimately be threatened by self-assertion
and production. The new would be a value for enrichment,
rather than either challenging or exploiting the basic
fabric of society.
Dr. Seuss's work uncannily reflects on arguments between
libertarian and communitarian versions of American
liberalism, as these weigh claims of individual rights and
personal freedom on the one hand, and obligations to public
life and a common good on the other. Dr. Seuss's own
position seems, again, close to Whitman's. Whitman writes in
Democratic Vistas:.
I say the mission of government, henceforth, in civilized
lands, is not repression alone, and not authority alone nor
the rule of the best men, the born heroes and captains of
the race ... but higher than the highest arbitrary rule, to
train communities through all their grades, beginning with
individuals and ending there again, to rule themselves.
Whitman's is not a pure vision of individual autonomy,
but rather a liberal vision of individual integrity as the
basis for communal commitment; and so is Dr. Seuss's. If
individualism poses certain problems, it also, for Dr.
Seuss, finally remains the only viable resource against the
very dangers it may generate.
In the end, Seuss's qualms about the disruptive forces
within the individualist creed turn back to the individual
for remedy. The conclusion of The Lorax is pivotal. The
Lorax, driven from the world by men, left behind.
(TABLE) in this mess a small pile of rocks, with the one
word ... "UNLESS." Whatever that meant, well, I
just couldn't guess.
Guessing the meaning of the word is the main point.
Responsibility returns to the individual, to the reader, as
it does in Whitman and in many Seuss works. The individual
is the solution to the riddle. "Unless" each one
takes up his (and her) responsibility, the world we inhabit
will indeed perish. The individual remains the moral center.
His willingness to be accountable, to answer to others and
for himself in mutual respect, is the offered antidote
against the self as devouring, as aggressive, as reductive.
But this is not merely an autonomous self, self-reliant
as self-made. The Seussian individual, while remaining
prior, is not merely self-sufficient, nor alone, nor is
selfhood its own self-enclosed purpose. And the self is not
unlimited. Even the talent for invention, however glorious,
is always also hemmed in by the deflations of Seuss's humor.
Dr. Seuss's is finally a cultivated self, situated,
committed, requiring education to respect for others as
others would respect the self.
The educational project that fully launched Dr. Seuss's
writing career thus remains a fundamental commitment and
frame. (He wrote The Cat in the Hat out of alarm at a 1954
report in Life concerning illiteracy in children, even as he
cut his ideological teeth doing Oscar-winning war
documentaries called Hitler Lives and Design for Death.) The
socialization that may first seem to impose itself on the
individual instead is a foremost resource for his (and her)
creation. The parent, the mother, who seemed to threaten
free individual growth instead fosters and teaches it,
including the dangers of its destructive and truly
self-contradictory potential--and not least when reading Dr.
Seuss books to children. Dr. Seuss's work questions whether
stark oppositions between individual and community even make
sense in a liberal society. He wishes to offer them as
mutual resources, guarding against the hostile excesses of
either, while awakening each reader to his and her
individuality and individual responsibility.
And yet: the engine of production, the assertion of the
self, the compulsion of the More grind voraciously on,
without being finally contained. Individual energy is
unleashed; and the status of the individual remains formally
equal and protected. But the forms of imagination, so
seductive and joyful, prove also to be consuming,
competitive, and, in some late works, violent. Without ever
renouncing his commitment to the individual as America's
founding stone, Dr. Seuss's work finally instructs in the
limits of each one's consuming drive, as a threat to their
coming together in positive and mutual community.
Added material.
SHIRA WOLOSKY has taught Comparative Literature at the
Hebrew University since 1985. She has written assorted
articles on poetry and poetics, and is author of Emily
Dickinson: A Voice of War (Yale University Press) and The
Art of Poetry, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. |