"Rabbit is the capitalist manager par excellence, the 'captain of industry who...having deceitfully offered Pooh admittance to his overstocked larder, artfully traps his victim in the doorway and exploits him as an unsalaried towel rack for an entire week....The united efforts of a Marxist-Leninist band of workers succeed in extricating Pooh from his servitude."
"Scarcely less central as ymbolic character than Rabbit is Own, the pedantic plutocrat who resides at "The Chestnuts, an old world residence of great charm, which was grander than anybody else's." A spelling champion and a master of flowery, empty rhetoric, owl is the necessary handservant 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 bourgeois-industrial society..."
posted
from the essay "Winnie and the Cultural Stream"
"...Al's book came out in 1926...once you've let that sink in, you see that you've got to look at this thing as part of the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Postwar Disillusion, Flappers and philosophers, Malcom and Cowley, and so on. Otherwise a lot of good dope is going to slip right by you. Like, take this donkey Eeyore. He's really sad, know what I mean. He's worse of than one of you guys when your date from Vassar sends you a flushogram for the Princeton weekend. Well, if you just remember that this was 1926, you see how it all adds up with Hemingway, Faulkner, Dave Lawrence, and other big ones. This Eeyore is a dead ringer for Jake Barnes-the one I told you about, with the very serious problem. Or like popeye in Sanctuary; he's just out in the left field when it comes to really basic points. Well, you see, he isn't just any old donkey, but a spokesman for a whole generation-the guys that got a little gassed in the War, the ones who lost their jobs to civilians, the little squirts that got pushed around by the operators, the fellas that came home and found their girls shacked up with somebody else. "History's a nightmare I've been trying to wake from." That was Joyce, right around the time of Winnie, more or less, and it sums up the whole idea I'm trying to get across. That's J-o-y-c-e, James. His baby Tookums has nothing on Pooh when it comes to really key significance--that's straight from the shoulder!"
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