Words that work: Winnie the Pooh

It's hardly unusual for Helena to like Winnie the Pooh: generations have fallen in love with the little stuffed bear and his motley collection of friends.  I certainly remember my father reading stories from the hundred-acre wood, and words like Heffalump and Woozle come back easily, even after all these years.


What I hadn't remember, though, is the materiality of the words in the stories.  Let me give an example from the 2011 Disney version of Winnie the Pooh: all of the major characters have fallen into a pit, and they can't find a way out.  After much despair and a couple of foolish mistakes (Piglet cuts the rope into six pieces, Tigger falls in dressed as a Backsoon monster...), suddenly the letters from the words on the page fall into the pit, and Pooh and Piglet use them to make a ladder to climb out of the hole.  The words read by the narrator cross the line between text and image, and become part of the story they were supposed to describe.

If we would see this kind of a literary device in a "serious novel" (say, by Italo Calvino or John Barth), and it would be lauded (or jeered) as postmodern metafiction, something bold and innovative (or precious and annoying).  In a kids' movie, on the other hand, it seems like a throw away joke.  Clever, perhaps, and even a bit funny, but hardly worthy of the dozens of doctoral dissertations in comparative literature on Borges and Milan Kundera that gather dust on academic bookshelves.

But here's the issue, whether in the scene with the words that serve as a ladder, or another, earlier in the movie, where Pooh walks along the lines of text across the book's page, only to find the letters falling out from under him (just think about that, you deconstructionist English majors out there!): Children, wizards, animist witch-doctors, and ordinary language philosophers like Wittgenstein and Austin all know that words are powerful things.  European modernism wants to make a rigid break between words (which signify) and things (which are signified), but the truth is that words are things, they are actions: they change the world.  As JL Austin says, when a priest or a judge declares "man and wife", the world itself changes.  These words don't mean anything; they do something.  The same is true for a wizard's spell or a voodoo priest's pins in a doll.  These words do things; they break down the simple division between things and words.

Winnie the Pooh, a commercial movie (by Disney, no less!), conveys this message in a way that's much more fun than the impenetrable prose of Derrida or Paul de Man.  Perhaps I don't remember the message from my own childhood (it is also present in the 1977 "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh", which we just watched with Helena as well) because kids intuitively know that words have power, that they don't just describe.  We only go down that mistaken path after years of school.  As anyone who reads to pull himself out of depression knows, words do pull one out of the pit, they are a ladder to freedom.  Pooh can teach that just as well as Wittgenstein.