The Monster at the End of This Essay
17
life, the pages themselves demand to be turned, the book books. And Grover,
fully aware that he is a character in a book, approaches the work as fiction and
nonfiction at the same time. And we follow suit.
The liminal has been at work in this essay as well, as it always must be.
Here, at the end, there is an echo of all that has gone unsaid.
Recall that The Monster at the End of This Book has drawings of its
own pages on its pages—we see in each frame glimpses of the edges of pages
that have passed and the pages that are yet to come. What always intrigued me,
even as a child, was the fact that the next-to-last page of the book, the page that
says ‘The End,” exhibits this same phenomenon, but the drawing in the lower
right-hand comer indicates that there are clearly two more pages still to come.
Physically, we can only turn and reveal one last page—the one where Grover is
embarrassed. There is thus a missing page, a page that is inaccessible to the
reader apart from its specter, its trace, its ghostly drawn sign on the previous
page. It is a page the book itself tells us is there and then denies to us. What
happens on this page? What revelation is meant to occur from which we are now
excluded? What, I have wondered since 1 was a child, is Grover doing on this
page I can never find, I can never read, we can never unconceal?
What if the end is not really the end?
The intriguing moment of the encounter, of the realization that the
monster has always already been within the pages of the essay, of the
Heideggerian acceptance that unconcealing simultaneously conceals and that the
tmth is thus never an end, never an end-in-itself, that there never is a full
conclusion—all of this begs for yet further scholarly analysis. But I fear I would
only end up embarrassing myself further if 1 tried.
Miss Cochrane was right. Sometimes you just gotta dance it out.
DePaul University
H. Peter Steeves
Notes
' This paper is a version o f a talk given at the 19th Annual Far West Popular Cultural
Association and American Culture Association Conference held in Las Vegas in January
2007. 1 am deeply grateful to Felicia Campbell for the invitation— and to all o f those in
attendance who offered their time, their kind words, and their insights.
^ Jon Stone, The Monster at the End o f This Book—Starring Lovable, Funy Old Grover,
illustrations by Michael Smollin (New York: Random House/Little Golden Book, 1971).
^ Sabrina Gschwandtner, “A Brief History o f String,” Cabinet 23 (Fall 2006): 39.
T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1971), 47.
Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of
Deconstruction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 132.
Jacques Derrida, “.... ,” The Work o f Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael
Naas (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 2001), 175.
^ Steven J. Ingeman, personal correspondence with the author, 17 January 2007.
^ Edmond Jabes quoted in The Work o f Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael
Naas (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 2001), 121.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism and Humanism,” Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings,