Us birders love owls, and in folklore they are widely symbolised as "wise" in all the four corners of the globe. The "Owl" in the "Pooh" books is a central symbolic character ( only a close second to the "bossy bighead" Rabbit.) BUT ..... Owl is in fact a pedantic plutocrat who resides at " The Chestnuts", an old-world residence of great charm, which was grander than anyone else's. A spelling champion and a master of flowery, empty rhetoric, Owl is the necessary hand-servant to the raw acquisitive passion of Rabbit, which badly needs to be cloaked in grandiosities. The friendship of these two intellectual thugs is a perfect representation of the true role of " scholarship" in borgeois-industrial society: the end purpose of Owl's obscure learning is to spread a veil of confusion over the doings of the fat cats, to cow the humble into submission before the graven idols of " objective truth" and "the Western tradition" and to rob the proletariat of its power to protest. What could be more meaningful than the fact that Owl has stolen the very tail from the back of Eeyore, the most downcast, bounced-upon member of society, and has converted it to his doorbell ? When Pooh comes to retrieve it he is not so much offered a lick of honey. Rabbit, the industrial manager, at least understood that one must give a subsistence in exchange for the worker's largely unpaid toil, but Owl, the "pure" scholar who professes to be innocent of the ways of the world, excuses himself even this much elementary compassion. The trahison des clercs is the correct name for " this sort of thing." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Well readers, I've nicked that ( with a few bits missed out and a few bits put in) from a truly remarkable "casebook" in which each chapter is written by a "high-up" in Literary Criticism .... when I first read it, as a gullible 14-year-old Widnesian, I had got half-way through it before I realised that it was all a big joke ! It is truly one of the funniest books I have ever read...... you'll see what it is after the music ..... when you'll be a few minutes older and sensibl-er .... Here's that wonderful book that you'll want to rush out and buy ... I'm sure you all want to know that I've read WTP in French/German/Spanish/English and Latin.
Unfortunately, it is not available in Welsh. Bah.
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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