Getting to Solla Sollew: The Existential Politics of Dr. Seuss

Vol. 2, No. 2. 1987.

Dr. seuss … employed the form that has over the past fifty years made him one of the most successful writers of children’s literature in the history of the English language, ranking him with such as Lewis Carroll or Beatrix Potter. He has sold more than one hundred million books. …

Seuss is a smasher of conventional boundaries. He invents his own words, defying the language/nonsense boundary; he invents his own creatures, defying the human/animal boundary; he is unceasingly sarcastic and satirical yet profoundly serious, ultimately defying the boundary between what is serious and what is absurd.

This form reaches the powerless, such as small children and old people, who are expected to be passive and are objectified through their nonconsensual submission to authority. For such readers (or, listeners, in the case of the children), the books offer a discourse of resistance; they are accessible, easily consumed, and utterly irreverent. Their suggestion that categories need not be taken for granted is empowering to those who are told they have no choice, that that’s the way things are, that “life is like that.” …

Empowerment is the core theme in Dr. Seuss, for with all of his irreverent nonsense he offers readers a space within which they can search for both identity and virtue, free from the oppressive force of authority and orthodoxy. Seuss develops this theme with surprising richness and complexity. Described thematically (rather than chronologically), he starts by exploring the child’s struggle to achieve identity in the family, with its conventional norms of behavior and its demand for passive compliance with authority. Seuss moves from there to a description of the need for authentic, existential struggle in the world generally. He then explores quite specific forms of oppression in the modern world—hierarchy, racism, environmental devastation, and militarism—and all the suffocating ideological forms which are used to justify them. Finally, Seuss suggests the possibility of moral and political transformation. This transformation requires the creation of new selves, liberated from orthodox assumptions about scientific truth, gender, and the limited range of moral choice in the world. So transformed, we might even become open to the experience of forming an authentic community, in which virtue and authority arc no longer at odds with each other, but reunited in new conditions of freedom. …

In The Cat in the Hat, with the simple elegance of a 220-word vocabulary, Seuss depicts in powerful symbolic form the core childhood dilemma of identity and authority within the family. The (nameless) narrator is a boy—the archetypal male child seeking to define himself in relation to his mother and also in relation to both conventional morality and his own chaotic, anarchic impulses. …

At the start of the book the narrator and his sister, Sally, are alone and bored at home on a cold, rainy day, accompanied only by their fish in a bowl, when a loud bump suddenly announces the unexpected arrival of the slyly grinning Cat in the Hat. This cat promises “lots of good fun that is funny,” and quickly dismisses the fish’s strident objection that the children must not let the cat in when their mother is away:

But our fish said, “No! No! Make that cat go away!Tell that Cat in the Hat you do NOT want to play.He should not be here. He should not be about.He should not be here when your mother is out!”

The cat insists that the children should “Have no fear!” and repeats his promise that “we can have lots of good fun…” This he then demonstrates with his first game, a complex juggling trick that begins with the fish being tossed high in the air. After this balancing act collapses, the fish once again scolds the cat and orders him out. The cat refuses to leave, instead summoning two nameless things from a red box, thing one and thing two, who are strange, soulless, golem-like creatures resplendent in their perfect amorality. Once released, the things enter into a chaotic frenzy of unrestrained play. Like...