Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [143]
Nel on Dr. Seuss, the Cultural Critic
Nel’s cultural studies approach is the third and last aesthetic theory I would like to discuss. Unlike Beardsley and Danto, who are philosophers of art, Nel is a scholar of children’s literature and American studies who has written a book-length study on Seuss, Dr. Seuss: American Icon. In that book, Nel incorporates several different analytical methods into his approach, including formalism, historicism, art history, and biographical criticism. After all, Seuss’s artistic career cannot be described exhaustively by any single analytical method. His artistic career is too multifaceted for such a reductionist approach. Imagine describing the artistic career of someone who was, among other things, a satirist, a cartoonist, a documentary filmmaker who won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1948, a script writer for two films and two television programs on art and museums for the Ford Foundation in the forties and fifties, a children’s writer, and winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 using just one analytical method. Something of his artistic career would be excluded.
We should admit that this section is not meant to explore Dr. Seuss the artist in all his complexity. Rather, this section is meant to introduce how Seuss’s work comes out when we view it using Nel’s cultural criticism approach to aesthetic theory. For our purposes we can limit our application of Nel’s approach to an examination of how Seuss’s concerns about communism, fascism, racism, environmental pollution, and U.S. policies in the Cold War “inspired him to write activist books like Horton Hears a Who!, ‘The Sneetches,’ The Lorax, and The Butter Battle Book.”17 I regard The Lorax and The Butter Battle Book as being the two books where Seuss engaged in cultural criticism most effectively—with The Lorax being a compelling critique of crass U.S. consumerism and its blind desire to maximize profit at all costs,18 and The Butter Battle Book being a thoughtful critique of the Reagan administration’s nuclear deterrence policy.
The Lorax is an explicitly polemical work. Seuss wrote it desiring to awaken people from their indifference to impending environmental disasters, but not by argument and statistics. Rather, he has them imagine that they are witnessing the telling of a tale about a once idyllic, beautiful land; a land whose natural bounty and biodiversity was to be envied. It once had green grass, a blue pond, clean clouds, Truffula Trees and Truffula Fruit, Brown Bar-ba-loots, and the Lorax. The Once-ler recounts how he contributed to the devastation of the environment in his desire to earn ever more money producing and selling Thneeds. Chopping down the Truffula Trees was no problem. Polluting the pond and sky with toxic smoke from the factory was no problem. Whatever it took for the Once-ler to maximize profits was fine until all that was left was an ecological wasteland.
After reading The Lorax, one gets a sense that the Once-ler is a parody of the salesperson who sacrifices himself and everything around him for momentary wealth and only acquires a conscience when it’s apparently too late. As for the polemical stance taken by Seuss in The Lorax, I think the Newsweek review of the television version of The Lorax sums it up well: The Lorax was “a hard-sell ecological allegory, stabbing mainly at big business through a deceptively gentle blend of gorgeous colors, superb animation, and a rippling imagery of words and pictures.”19 The same could be said about the original picture book. It is not surprising that The Lorax became associated with the environmentalist movement, and it still fits well within the contemporary sustainability movement.
The Butter Battle Book is Seuss’s allegory of the arms race between the United States and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. It’s also a cautionary tale of