A Close Reading of Dr. Seuss

I know I have been absent from the blog this summer, you poor faithful readers.  Mostly, it's because I've been having a blast, and it's also because I've been working on my reading list, which is a fascinating but depressing slog through the literature of nuclear fear.  I hope you'll forgive me for the indulgence, but it's going to spill out here, probably more and more.  Plus, I can use the blog to muse about things that don't necessarily fit into my thesis.

Like Dr. Seuss.

I have been reading a history book, By the Bomb's Early Light, and while I am deeply grateful to Paul Boyer for putting such an impressive collection of material together, I've had a couple problems with his use of material.  One is his assertion that a really questionable quote lifted from another source was "widely quoted" even though I cannot find the quote anywhere but his book and his source's book, but what really grated was this:

"Having for years been ignored, the issue of nuclear war suddenly seemed in danger of trivialization.  Theodore Gesell ((wrong spelling of the last name is original to the text)) produced a Dr. Seuss book comparing the Cold War and the nuclear arms race to a quarrel over how bread should be buttered."

Silliest arms race ever?

I can't help but find this massively unfair.  I can't pinpoint the exact moment when I realized that the book Boyer doesn't deign to name was about the threat of nuclear war.  For that matter, I can't remember how young I read it first.  But I am certain that The Butter Battle Book does not remotely trivialize the issue.  Sure, it's a book for kids, replete with colorful art and particularly Seussian goofy language.  Sure, there's whimsy.  But like The Lorax and like the story about Sneetches, the point of The Butter Battle Book is to bring a deadly serious topic to young children, to make abstract adult concepts tangible.  Theodore Geisel (gee, I can spell it right!) did more than just write a book for kids with a silly arms race.

For those of you uninitiated, the story is basically the Yooks, who eat their bread butter side up, versus the Zooks, who eat their bread butter side down. 

At first, the war starts with snitch-berry switches and slingshots.  But then the leader of the Yooks assures a disheartened guard that those are old-fashioned, and the stakes are rising:

"All we need is some newfangled kind of gun.
My Boys in the Back Room have already begun
to think up a walloping whizz-zinger one!"

The "Boys in the Back Room" are portrayed as bespectacled, scientific types.  They don't seem sinister, just... terribly eager.  They're inventing and innovating, after all, for the good of the Yooks.

Geisel also addresses the way that popular culture plays a part:

"And our Butter-Up Band
marched up over the hill!
The Chief Yookeroo had sent them to meet me
along with the Right-Side-Up Song Girls to greet me.
They sang:
            "Oh, be faithful!
            Believe in thy butter!"
And they lifted my spirits right out of the gutter!"

Butter propaganda!

Elements like this, and illustrated posters on the wall in between the Yooks and Zooks that urge Yooks to remember that they are different than Zooks and to keep their butter side up combine to show bread-butter propaganda!  Following hot on the heels of this, the soldier gets promoted, and now that he's a general, the futility of the race doesn't seem to sting as much.  Keep in mind, this is for kids.  Sure, it would be far too ham-handed for an older audience, but that these themes are being addressed at all in a book for readers still most comfortable with rhymes and simple words is astonishing to me.

It becomes clear that the race is getting out of hand when the newest weapon comes with a description:

"This machine was so modern, so frightfully new,
no one knew quite exactly just what it would do! "

The part where the book starts to get downright chilling, however, is when the new general races to the office of the Chief Yookeroo, which is in a state of disarray.  The Boys in the Back Room are clearly frazzled, and the Chief announces, while staying safely behind a wall and using a grabber of some kind to drop a device into the general's hands:

"THEY'VE INVENTED   
        THE BITSY
               BIG-BOY BOOMEROO!
You just run to the Wall like a nice little man.
Drop this bomb on the Zooks just as fast as you can.
I have ordered all Yooks to stay safe underground
while the Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo is around."

Oh.  My.  Gosh.  The man who taught me about counting fishes put the atomic bomb in fiction suitable for tiny children.  That is huge.  From the intentional similarity to the names of the earliest bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy, to the grim nod to the Yooks having to go into freaking fallout shelters, the reality of the situation is clear.  Even kids who don't understand the context are getting the picture of how scary this thing is.  The image of a line of grim-faced Yooks heading into an underground tunnel reading "Your Yookery" is not played for laughs.  It's actually a pretty frightening image.  It is also frightening as the focus goes back to the narrator, the grandchild of the guard/soldier/general, who notes:

"That's when Grandfather found me!
He grabbed me. He said,
    "You should be down that hole!
    And you're up here instead!
    But perhaps this is all for the better, somehow.
    You will see me make history!
    RIGHT HERE! AND RIGHT NOW!"
Grandpa leapt up that Wall with a lopulous leap
and he cleared his hoarse throat
with a bopulous beep.
He screamed, "Here's the end of that terrible town
full of Zooks who eat bread with the butter side down!"

Imagine you're a kid, identifying with this narrator.  You're imagining your grandpa, a guy you probably look up to, go crazy like this, screaming about the destruction of an entire group of people.  That's terrifying.  And it's significant too, because it's showing how those we trust, and those who have been trying to do the right thing, can be pushed to these total extremes.  It is not a story with a clearly painted bad guy.  These characters are not engaging in mischief with unintended consequences like the Cat in the Hat.  They know the stakes are high, but neither side can bring themselves to back down, and that's a pretty hefty concept to be bringing into a book for young readers.

Geisel does not pull his punch at the end, either.  As the Zook general appears with his own bomb, there is a standoff at the top of the wall.  The narrator, looking on, is clearly frightened:

"Grandpa!" I shouted. "Be careful! Oh, gee!
Who's going to drop it?
Will you... ? Or will he... ?
"Be patient," said Grandpa. "We'll see.
We will see . . . "

And that's it.  The end.  The Yooks and the Zooks do not see the folly of their violent actions, or the similarity of their cultures.  They don't shake hands and agree it was silly to try to harm each other.  They stand on the brink of mutually assure destruction, and the reader is left with the implicit question of whether the situation can ever be resolved.

The Cold War and the nuclear threat trivialized?

I don't think so, Boyer.