The Secret Alchemy of Dr. Seuss

Why am I not surprised that this is from Endicott Studios?

To say that this article seems to be trying to make a silk purse from a Truffula Tree would be, itself, an overstatement, although it's certainly got some fun stuff. The discussion of the secret of Seussess is valuable, if obvious and incomplete: Seuss's rhymes were brilliant, and liberally coated with mental Super Glue, but there's far more to Seuss than his verbal music.

For one thing, there's his intention to liberate:

In later interviews, Seuss was always quite honest about his rhetorical intentions. He referred directly to the influence of writers like Belloc, Swift, and Voltaire, and did not hesitate to refer to his own radical and revolutionary ideas. "I’m subversive as hell!" he once declared. He said of his Cat in the Hat: "It’s revolutionary in that it goes as far as Kerensky and then stops. It doesn’t go quite as far as Lenin." Seuss was a writer fully aware of his political and rhetorical intentions (much like George Orwell, whose Animal Farm is often read in elementary schools), and he crafted his literary tools to most effectively deliver his charged messages.

This subversiveness is another staple of kidlit, but Seuss twins it with an all too rare quality: true whimsy. Further, it's not a cruel subversion, but a liberating one. This liberation doesn't rely on arcane anagrams or esoteric symbolism.

L O R A X is an anagram that breaks down into three symbolic clusters: AO, RX, and L. AO represents Alpha and Omega (O -- Omnicron -- here is a substitute for W -- Omega -- in keeping with the transformation of the Greek to Roman alphabets). These two letters, as we know, symbolize Christ, who said, "I am the Alpha and the Omega." RX (as I discuss in my column on the Caduceus), is usually taken to mean "prescription" as in the pharmacist’s symbol, but it actually comes from another transformation of Greek to Roman alphabets; the R and X represent Rho and Chi, which in the Greek alphabet are P and X. Chi and Rho are the first two letters in Christos, or Christ. The X written over the P is the typical Chiro recognized as the symbol for Christ.

I am reminded of painful high school explorations of Christ symbolism in every piece of literature that appeared in the syllabus. I am also reminded of Alan Sokal's infamous hoaxing of post-modernism.

Seuss's genius is that of the trickster, who is both irresistibly lovable and insanely irritating. Even when there is darkness or destruction, as in The Lorax or The Butter Battle Book or The Sneetches, it is also both funny and aesthetically beautiful. One of the weaknesses of Fenkl's article is that it only attends to Seuss's words, with only occasional acknowledgement of the weird beauties of Seuss's art. I don't think you can separate the two. The Cat in the Hat is every bit as visually iconic as he is in terms of character or action. Seuss's artistic world is weird and beautiful, liberating the viewer from conventional perspective and reality, but without becoming ugly.

At around the same time Seuss was coming up with the Cat, the wacky loons down at Termite Terrace were refining and perfecting the art of American animation. It was in the late forties and fifties that many of the best of the Warner Brothers cartoons were made. Recently, Barbara & I picked up both of the Looney Tunes DVD sets. I had been having a major hankering for some good toons, and so I glutted. I hadn't seen many of them in decades, and it was amazing to me how many of them were so incredibly, beautifully surreal. There's a whole toon where Bugs enters Elmer's dreams, after Elmer decides to give up on hunting Bugs, and tears up his WB contract. It's trippy!

Coincidentally, a friend posted a picture of the "new" Bugs Bunny. Oh, yes ... in an attempt to pump ratings, WB is retooling Bugs, Daffy, Taz, Wile E, the Road Runner, and Lola Bunny, as Dark and Dangerous (tm) superheroes. If The Dark Knight Returns hadn't been so good, I'd want to kill Frank Miller right about now. But I digress.

This caused much outrage among those who saw the pic, and there was much discussion about how the original Looney Tunes characters were gentle icons of childhood & how Bugs never started anything, but just responded to those who were out to get him. These new ones were an abomination against that sweet memory of yore.

Bah.

One of the greatest things about the Looney Tunes is that they don't overly sugar coat; there are strong helpings of both love & cruelty. In that sense, they're more like Grimm's fairy tales than the Disney versions of the same stories (which I generally dislike as painfully flattened, sugar-coated, and overall reduced to the lowest common denominator.)

What I dislike about the Loonatics is that they go in the exact opposite direction as Disney -- in order to be appealing, they are dark rather than light, sharp rather than soft, and generally seem to repudiate any of those gentler qualities. It's the same error in the opposite direction. The best Looney Tunes chart a pitch perfect course between the two poles.

Seuss does the same thing. That's why he's brilliant, not because of some cockamamie Dr. Seuss Code.

[Thanks be to Tim Boucher, Occult Investigator, for the link to The Secret Alchemy of Dr. Seuss. Go read his blog. It's ultraterrestrially good.]