A portion of Lileks’ latest bleat is devoted to the detailed interpretation of “Ten Apples on Top,” a story Lileks suggests is “Dr. Seuss’s leanist narrative,” an “economic parable of staggering complexity.” Not surprisingly, though, the reliably political Lilek’s — even while invoking a powerfully materialistic interpretative paradigm — chooses instead to privilege the story’s ideological arc (which inhabits but one layer of the allegorical text), in order that he may argue the story is an “open” narrative — a Barthean exemplar of textual “pleasure” played out by readers in those imaginary spaces beyond the visible grapheme of Seuss’s (Geisel’s?) suggestive iconography. Not coincidentally, this imaginative clearing is the very place where personal politics themselves take intellectual shape, so (for Lileks, at least) reading the text becomes a performative for the moment of personal politicalization. And though such a moment is seldom amenable to complete prefiguration (indoctrination doesn’t always take, for example, and Seuss, Lileks will argue, is careful to distance himself from studied didacticism), nevertheless it is rather heavily influenced by the series of con(textual) indicators immediately preceding the epiphanous moment of allegiance.

And so, in referring to the moment of climax, for instance — the collision of competing ideologies (represented in turn by a monarchical lion, a liberal dog, an aggressively nationalistic tiger, and the communist bear) with an ever looming pragmatic materialism (embodied in the solid, insentient, wheeled commodities wagon) — Lileks is able to ratiocinate:

At this point something extraordinary happens: the entire cast collides with a gigantic apple cart, spewing apples everywhere — and when the smoke clears, everyone has ten apples up on top. We can disagree on what this means –perhaps the big apple cart represents labor, and the collision represents the breaking of trusts that concentrate wealth. Or perhaps the collision represents the creative destruction of capitalism that spreads wealth to the greatest possible number. You could read it either way, and indeed the fact that this salutary distribution comes from the persecution of the Three Apple Balancers makes me a little nervous; it would seem to reward violence. The book ends there, and we do not see what happens next — those who cannot keep ten apples up on top pass laws banning apple-stacks greater than three, and mandate that only organic Macintosh apples be used, etc [my emphasis].

Lileks takes advantage of the narrative’s open-ness [“the book ends there, and we do not see…”] to suggest a particular narrativized arc for the story’s extratextual play. Seizing on the political emblems outlined in only the broadest strokes by Seuss, Lileks works to convince us that the unseen resolution — the creation of a “political order” to replace the apple-mash chaos — will devolve into a leftish perversion of Fukuyama’s historical end-game: liberal democracy, yes…but a liberal democracy lorded over by middling egalocrats who fail to question both their own complicity in the unfolding historical drama (a drama both sweeping and proscriptive — a fact made clear by the allegorical mode of telling), as well as the very nested narratives (environmental catastrophism, the efficacy of a limited centralized bureaucratic regulation) that — though spread nodally on the vast grid of cultural dialogics — will nevertheless dicate their every (potent)ial action and re(action).

Which is not to say Lileks is correct, of course — either in his assertions or in his conclusions. In fact, the liminal denouement Lileks posits may differ substantially from the one Seuss himself wished to intimate. As Eric Blair has suggested, for instance, one of Seuss’s journal entries from the period of the story’s composition indicates that Seuss was far more interested in the story’s “moral” level of allegory than with its poltical one. Writes Seuss, “No one is good, But everyone should, and wish and wish and wish and would.” Blair notes: “The pun on ‘would’ should not be construed as a self-deconstructive flash of “material” embeddedness [“wood”] in the realm of the speculatively idealistic [“would”], as critics like Mr. Lileks, et al., [would] have us believe; rather, the word should be accepted for just what it is: a powerful reinforcement of the trope of wish fulfillment courtesy of the almost talismanic powers of particularly intended signifiers in a signifying chain.”

Interesting stuff.

Me, I’m not taking sides. Because to tell you the truth, I’ve never even read the Seuss book.

I’m more of a Curious George fan.