The Monster at the End of This Essay
What did that say?! On the title up there, what did that say? Did that
say that there will be a monster at the end of this essay? I am so scared of
monsters! But no, it’s impossible. Academic decorum would not allow it. There
is nothing to fear.'
I was in kindergarten when The Momter at the End of this Boole was
released. Those were, in retrospect, the finest days of school. I haven’t left
school for thirty-five years, really, but I think I miss my early public school days
the most. Kindergarten was school the way school should always be done. We
only had to go for half of the day. We were read to. We were given snacks by
charming women in 1970s-print mini-dresses who were all named “Miss”something and hadn’t yet become bitter about anything. We had recess—even
with two feet of snow outside. Naps were part of the curriculum—not an
intrusion, not an affront to the teacher or a sign of disrespect, but a scheduled
part of the pedagogy. (I am thinking about reinstituting naps in my graduate
seminars these days, especially when we have to read Hegel.) We sang, we ate,
we slept, and we learned. In fact there was no apparent distinction between
playing and learning. We came to love books. And when we were too excited or
too sad or too afraid or too rambunctious or too anything, we were told to dance.
‘"You gotta dance it out,” Miss Cochran would say, running her fingers through
her Marlo-Thomas-777i7/-G//V bangs, smiling her Goldie-Hawn-L^zz/g/?-/^ smile
as she walked to the record player. And she would have us stand up at our desks
and start gyrating to the music. “Sometimes you just gotta dance it out.” Miss
Cochran was, in some respects, a Kantian. Distrustful of emotions of any kind,
willing to do anything at all to curb them if they started to take us over. And
although dancing is not really comparable to taking recourse to the categorical
imperative or the synthetic a priori stmetures of the mind—and Miss Cochrane,
at least in my middle-aged recollections, was much lovelier in a mini-dress than
I ever picture Kant being—it was strangely joyflil and cerebral back then.
Sometimes you Just gotta dance it out.
The Momter at the End of this Book is strange, joyful, and cerebral as
well. And—let me just state it here at the front—I take it to be one of the finest
psychoanalytic, existential, postmodern texts ever written. To call this twentyfour paged children’s book one of the finest works of literature of the last
century is no small claim, and one I do not make lightly. I want to make a case
for it, then, striving to see the ways in which the book stands beside Joyce and
Kafka, Beckett and Sartre, Freud and Derrida—and stands thus on its own
merits.
The book’s narrative begins with Grover noticing the title of the work
and recoiling in fear at the possibility that a monster lurks at the conclusion of
the narrative in which he seems to be the protagonist. On each page Grover tries