Last month I laid down some track about how odd the Pooh books are and what this oddness has to do with the character of Eeyore. This month, I want focus on why I think Eeyore is in the books and in our lives.
Of all the characters in the two books, Eeyore is the only contrarian: he sees rain when it's sunny, he predicts calamity when success looms. He is the only character who gets angry (at the end of Chapter 5 of Pooh Corner, about the letter A and learning) -- not just peeved or irritated but enraged. He admires Christopher Robin but also fears what education will do to the lad (note Chapter 10 in Winnie the Pooh when Eeyore says that writing is over-rated).
All of this takes a bit of the piss out of the sentimentality of life in the Wood, making sure that the story does not become over-sweetened.
Milne also makes Eeyore hungry for the kind of recognition that so easily falls into Pooh's lap (which Eeyore resents, thinking very little of Pooh and feeling that Pooh is undeserving of the honors) -- recognition for his learning, for his intentions and his deeds (such as on the expedition to the North Pole, when he sits with his tale in the water to save Roo) -- and Milne has no one satisfy or even notice this hunger (except for perhaps Christopher Robin) and skews Eeyore's spirit toward the curmudgeonly and distrustful.
Why does Milne have such a character on his roster? What is he trying to tell his readers through such a presentation, especially when that presentation is so at odds with the rest of the books' timbre? And why would someone finger me as an Eeyore?
Perhaps another way to go at this is to ask the question this way: Everyone in the Pooh books has lessons to teach, or has had lessons assigned to them (Benjamin Hoff wrote two books about such lessoning, The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet). What lessons does Eeyore have to offer?
Let's start with Hoff's rendition of Eeyore -- call it the usual picture of the grey donkey. He calls it "The Eeyore Effect" (in the chapter of the same name in his The Te of Piglet). Here is his central description of the Effect (all the capitalized words are original):
Eeyores, in other words, are Whiners. They believe the negative but not the positive and are so obsessed with What's Wrong that the Good Things in Life pass them by unnoticed. Are they the ones, then, to give us an accurate account of what life is about? If the universe were governed by the Eeyore Attitude, the whole thing would have collapsed ages ago. Everything in creation, from migrating hummingbirds to spinning planets, operates on the belief that It Can Be Done....Therefore, no society that wants to last is going to be guided by Eeyores. For Eeyores sneer at the very things that are needed most for survival and prosperity. (59-60)
Well.
Hoff goes on to associate Eeyore and his supposed Attitude with negative-reporting media, the Puritans, Critics (yes, the capitalized ones), a horrible education system (the Education Eeyores), and, weirdly enough, people he calls the Eeyore Amazons, hyper-feminists who perversely act from a hyper-masculinity rather than from a true femininity.
In Hoff's bipolarish world of the East and West, of the natural vs. the inorganic, Norman Vincent Peale vs. Arthur Schopenhauer, the lessons that Eeyore offers are not worth learning because, in his view, all Eeyore ever does is "make others feel small, especially if they're smaller than he is [which] makes him look big..." (53) Eeyore is a passive-aggressive bully, a buzz-kill, a Tao damper. He acts how we shouldn't.
Is this the reason, then, Milne includes him in the Pooh menagerie?
Not exactly, I don't think, because Milne has him behave in ways that are not just counter or contrary to the other residents, or as a commentary upon their actions. Eeyore's actions are more complicated than that, in part because, except for Christopher Robin, he's the only one who goes through any changes in his behavior.
Let's take Piglet's assessment that Eeyore is "gloomy." That's not entirely true in the book. In at least two instances, Eeyore moves from anger and disappointment to genuine happiness: when Pooh and Piglet give him an empty honey pot and broken balloon as his birthday presents, and when Eeyore plays Poohsticks (after being bounced into the water by Tigger). Eeyore responds to kindness and attention, as we all do, and his seemingly perpetual gloominess may be a sign that while characters in the books often visit each other and do kindnesses for each other, not much of it feels genuine -- a practiced politeness, a civilized "should." His gloominess could be seen as a barometer of insincerity -- the effort to stay engaged in a society that is, beneath its veneer, disengaged.
Eeyore is the only character that Milne gives fullness to because he is unsettled, unsettling, contrary, polite but not obsequious, snarly in his humility, purposefully cranky, intelligent, unillusioned. Everyone else in the Wood is somewhat monotone, which makes them easier to "love" (as many generations have): Pooh's artful cluelessness masking as innocence, Piglet's perpetual timorousness, Tigger's goofiness, Kanga and Roo's mothering act, Owl's predictable wrong-headedness -- like characters in a sitcom, they must retain an unconfusing personality resistant to change. Never will Pooh turn to the others and say, "My life feels suddenly very empty -- and honey will do nothing to change that feeling."
With Eeyore, on the other hand, Milne presents his readers with a challenge, a specifically Christian challenge. It is easy to love the loveable character -- anyone can practice Christian charity with someone who doesn't talk back and requires no sweat-equity.
Eeyore is the prickly character that requires one to be a real Christian because he is not willing to play the game. To love Eeyore means working to gain his respect, since he won't give it to you without you making the effort to win it. To love Eeyore means accepting him as he is and foregoing any impulse to change or "improve" him. To love Eeyore means accepting the possibility that he will not love you back -- no quid for the quo. (It's no coincidence that Eeyore's food is the thistle, with its nettles and beautiful blossom.)
So I think the characterizing of me as an Eeyore is not quite right -- that is, the common Eeyore, Piglet's gloomy one. Yes, there is that about me, but not just that. I am also one with thistles, who will be polite and courteous but is also rageful underneath, who distrusts learning's ability to teach us anything yet who never stops hungering to learn, who always thinks life gives us less than what it promises, that sentimentality is both comforting and untruthful, that life is dry rather than moist, cool rather than warm -- that we are all fragile blusters of pain always on the cusp of annihilation who mythmake to soften this condition and gain some respite (because who can live for any length of time on the cusp? but that is where all good art gets made, so someone needs to live there). Eeyore's life is not easy, but it is actual.
If what I've said about Eeyore is right, then I'm glad to be Eeyore.