Of course Fox is, as always, a cunning dissembler: we read ‘Chicks with bricks come. Chicks with blocks come.’ As if they were arriving by coincidence! Far from it. Note that it is not rocks or boulders or seas – not natural, unformed matter. No, it is pre-shaped units that Fox provides for the lesson in metaphysics. Fox invites Knox to ‘do tricks with bricks and blocks’ as if their exploration of metaphysics were to be a joint endeavour. He’s lying but he’s right about one thing: it is a trick.

Fox says what he himself will build, then he instructs Knox to build. For himself, Fox builds a stack of blocks and bricks and sits on top of it. Knox is told to build with chicks and clocks. We see him pictured in the box, on top of the stack. What chance did he get? Fox builds with permanent materials and associates himself with what is solid, four-square, reliable and useful for building. Poor Knox only gets to do what he is told – using materials that can do nothing but remind him of his mortality. Life and Time are his lot and we all know that despite the youth and hope (figured in the chicks), the clock will get them in the end. (Moreover, chicks and clocks do not make good stacks.) No wonder Fox looks so pleased on top of his stack of good building materials while Knox looks so alarmed on his wobbly tower of chicks and clocks.

So, Fox has intimidated Knox already by a cunning deployment of superior metaphysical materials. So far Knox has not even reacted to the barrage of tongue-twisting that forms the manifest arena of the battle for supremacy. That comes later. For now, with another trick from Fox, everything is once more rearranged: chicks on fox, on clocks, on bricks and blocks. Well, almost all is re-ordered, but the arrangement is placed on top of Knox, who is lying on the box. Fox adeptly manipulates the stuff of the world to suggest that they are exploring all the options together. But it is always Fox doing the talking and the manipulating, and all the while he reminds Knox of his station, either at the bottom of the heap or resting on a hopeless foundation.

Next, to further drive home the reminder of mortality, Fox introduces bricks and chicks that are sick in bed. What else is being signified is not crystal clear. There is, however, another suggestion of mortality here, the sleep of sickness unto death. By way of conjecture, we could venture a little further and see the connection between bed and sleep, and relate it to the ‘putting to sleep’ of hypnosis (popularly associated with clocks, or at least watches). Under this interpretation we see that by calling up this imagery (i.e. beds) Fox means to induce a somnambulant state. To help weaken Knox’s resistance the chicks and bricks are said to be sick. Fox hopes that his linguistic and philosophical pyrotechnics will have made Knox weak at the knees and keen to relax. Then Fox would simply complete the programme of hypnotic suggestions and enjoy his win.

At last Knox speaks up in protest. It is a polite protest: he says ‘please’. He says he is mixed up. Fox looks disappointed, as well he might, being deprived of a swift victory.

A Fox has more than one trick. This one intends to trump the metaphysics card with his sex and seduction card. He introduces golden-haired Sue, pointing constantly to her clothes and her socks and talking about sewing. The whole episode is to begin with the question of who sees her sew and end with Knox being sewn up – once again constrained, this time by entanglements – in his box.

The themes of voyeurism and bondage are relentlessly pursued with the help of another figure, Slow Joe Crow. Somebody (it must have been a Lacanian) said the allegorical always raises perversion. I think I have to believe it. Anyway, here it is. (Proof that Fox in Socks truly is an allegory?) We see Sue and the enormous-beaked Crow sewing each other’s clothes. There is no other way to read this than to take seriously the sheer obviousness of the symbolism and make light of it. As if we did not already have enough to go on we are treated in the final scene to the introduction of further screamingly obvious elements, a dripping hose sewed onto the Crow’s already prominent nose and, for Sue, a potted rose that appreciates watering.

But there is more to tell about this episode. We discover it by noticing the sequence of events. The symbolism may be obvious but the exact nature of the sexuality being pictured is not. It is complex. More than that, we may find in this episode the secret of the ubiquitous socks.

Britomart redeems Amoret

First, Knox sees Sue. She is sewing her socks. It seems that in the first twenty (or so) pages of this story socks are carrying a message about cleanliness. They signify the distinction between clean and unclean. In Sue’s case this means a question of virginity and chastity. She is Belphoebe with hair ‘crisped like golden wire’. We are reminded of Britomart. Sue is young, virginal and clean. Therefore she has socks. She sews them herself. She is taking care of her own cleanliness. Creating it, in fact. Her eyes are always closed, she is self contained. She displays in this closure upon the world a lack of ordinary emotion and usual human contact. She is in control. (Where did she get the thread from? She ordered it up from Fort Dada while learning about reelationships.) She carries needles. How far away can this possibly be from Belphoebe’s ‘sharp boar spear’ or quiver ‘stuft with steele-headed darts’? Like Belphoebe, she uses these ‘deadly tooles’ to remain impenetrable.

We soon see her engaged in a sewing session with Crow, later climbing all over him. She is, however, climbing over his back. The images will be conflicting. She climbs on his back, his nose is pointing away from her, she is facing away from him. But she is attaching the rose to his back, and the hose – tied to Crow’s nose – is pointing, dripping, towards the rose.

Why is it that Sue and Joe cannot meet face to face? They were content to sew each other’s clothes standing right in front of one another. But now their relationship is transferred to another domain, modulated into the world of hoses and roses: two lovers seeking consummation but only if they can avoid looking at one another.

How can we possibly resist the allusion to Britomart, right down to the needle/spear? Garnished about with all manner signals of chastity she is always discovered in questionable circumstance, with Malecasta, Amoret, even Glauce. How can anyone not be reminded of Dali’s ‘Young virgin auto-sodomised by her own chastity’?

Guilt and shame are at work here? It is clear: Fox is playing at playing, but engaged in a desperate struggle for power, using these images to configure a spectacle dramatising Knox’s own psycho-sexual theatre of libido, desire, ethics, guilt and shame. Sue is a creature of Fox’s, sure enough, but a creature moulded from a rib found in Knox’s psyche. If there is any doubt, let the reader consult the page at the end of this episode and see that Sue, Crow, the rose and the hose are all perched on Knox’s head while Fox looks on happily, needle and thread in hand. Fox has been needling Knox, pulling strings, sewing a tapestry, making sport – but with strings attached, sowing the seeds of discomfort, getting Knox tangled up in the thread of the story, the bonds of love or lust.

Like the Accuser, That Old Serpent, upon whom he models himself, Fox accuses and prosecutes. But it is a frame-up. Knox is framed in his box. (Which is also a witness box, since he was told to ‘see’.) Fox has Knox stitched up.

But we rush ahead. We need to return to put some more flesh on the bones.

When Knox is first told to ‘see’ he sees Sue. She sews her own socks. Immediately, Crow arrives with his beak pointing at Sue. He is a dark figure, representing Knox’s unholy, or at least guilty, desire. An unclean bird. Here is the connection with socks. In the complex of Judaic dietary regulations, what separates the clean from the unclean birds? Is it a question of where they characteristically put their feet. Those that eat corpses, or, more pertinently, stand on them, are unclean.

The crow is unclean, being of the tribe of the ravens. It is the family Corvidae, (Corone, Carrion): Carnivores, intelligent, often destructive. So in Knox here we find deflowering. Old Joe Crow is a dirty old deflowerer, a tenant in Knox’s troubled head.

Fox wears socks, keeping his feet from all things unclean. He also has matching gloves: he does not get his hands dirty. Nobody will be prosecuting him, no fingerprints will be found. We know it is a facade: Fox is the deceiver.

Knox has socks only once, at the very beginning, when Fox is toying with the order of things. The suggestion offered there was that the order of things could be any way at all – Knox could be on top, Knox could have socks, possibly Fox could be the one in a box. But these were just the playful juxtapositions that Fox used as inducements to encourage Knox to play the game at the outset.

At first, Sue and Crow sew each other’s clothes. They are becoming intertwined. Innocent enough perhaps, were it not for one thing: the part of Knox engaging in this grooming with Sue is the predatory, unclean bird. For a brief moment Sue sews Fox’s socks and gloves. It suggests that Fox is luring Knox just a little more into the spirit of the occasion: ‘This is a perfectly legitimate activity. Everyone is doing it.’ It seems to work because in an instant Knox finds Crow sewing him into his box. Knox has let his guard down, the desire that makes him guilty has him ensnared. He is entwined by Crow, who stands on his back while sewing him in. In this way the scene is set for the end of the episode, the scene in which the images of the rose and hose are added to the other elements, all settled on Knox’s head. Fox might have been thinking the day was won at this stage, but once again Knox reacts.

This time Knox’s reaction is less polite. He says that he hates the game. Hardly surprising! Fox must now try another strategy.

The unconscious appears in Fox in Socks. Fox tries twice to unbalance Knox by having Knox enter into a direct, unmediated and dangerous experience of his own unconscious. In the next pages we see the sea of blue goo. Knox is invited to eat it, just as the Goo Goose does. Fox represents this as an experience that will be pleasant, as if anyone could, in a moment, digest the reality of their own unconscious. Fox is inviting Knox to be like a hugely inhibitory personality, who will not defend himself against nauseating emotional and psychic food, but tries to ingest it: it will make him psychically sick to be sure. Knox does not want to chew goo. But why not? Is it because he senses the danger? Probably not, because Fox will later try the same strategy, with more subtlety. The problem here, for Fox, is that the invitation lacks subtlety. He hopes that, simply as a result of enough needling, Knox will open his mouth and swallow.

Fox is getting too big for his socks. He has overplayed his hand in two ways. Firstly, he is not content merely to knock Knox off balance in the attempt to swallow the substance of his unconscious. He wants to also humiliate Knox, make sport of him, by having him play the role of the goose, not an unclean bird, but one that is risible. Knox, however much he seems already bemused, is not so silly as to rush at a chance to identify himself as a goose. Secondly, Fox has simply over-estimated how inhibited Knox is. Knox turns out to possess more defences than Fox bargained for. He managed to break out of the Crow and Sue scene – he did not intend to swalllow that – and he is not prepared to swallow this blue goo either.

Knox has reacted with (repeated) resistance to Fox’s attempts at securing dominion. Fox, despite his failure at the first attempt, remains determined to advance with the tactic of having Knox drown in an unbrooked effusion from his unconscious. But before trying it again Fox returns to the device he used earlier. That is, representing play in order to communicate, deceitfully, that he and Knox are simply sporting together – that nothing is at stake. So Bim and Ben arrive. They look alike. They both have a broom. Their names are alike – as are the names Fox and Knox. They bend each others’ brooms. In this way each toys with the phallic weapon of the other: the brooms break, establishing a kind of truce. So Fox lulls Knox into a false sense of ease about their activities.

Bim’s and Ben’s bands of pigs arrive. What could be more playful than playing music together? The bands are not identical: one bangs and one booms. So although people are not all the same, they can get along together and play together. Evidence of Fox’s underhandedness is in the imagery – again unclean animals are present, since pigs are deemed unclean under Judaic dietary regulations.

The Sixth Battle: Luke Luck

Fox has, he hopes, suggestively reduced Knox’s resistance. He can now revisit his plan to disorient Knox by raising up the stuff of Knox’s unconscious. This time he is more careful than before. The unconscious is represented as a lake. The mode of contact is merely to lick, rather than to chew as before. He does not ask Knox to play the goose. We see two figures happily licking the lake, Luke and his duck. We have to remember the biblical writer, Doctor Luke, the quack. The suggestion here is that whereas earlier the issue was to chew, swallow, digest, this time we will only use the tongue – lick, lingua, langue, language – perhaps we will just talk about the unconscious, just dabble, skim the surface.

This is the connection with Luke the gospel writer – his is a not-too-theological gospel. And there is another clue in the version of Luke in the Knox Bible. Fox is hoping that Knox will be the kind of person to bow down before the miracle of the quack – i.e. the Doctor. (Readers will be aware that Luke was a doctor.)

There is another phenomenon sometimes known as the miracle of the quack: the duck's quack does not echo. What is Fox up to? He presents the duck to Knox in the very process of insisting that Knox echo everything he hears?

In any case Fox is suggesting that Knox can approach the unconscious with language, on the surface, not trying to completely swallow, digest or interiorise it all. But surely the contents of that lake are only fit to be spat out – in the unconscious resides everything and its contradiction – Every thing possible to be believ’d – but from a paradox anything follows (just ask a logician if you will not believe me): it is neither here nor there, neither one thing nor another, neither hot nor cold, Luke warm. Spit it out.

This is interesting, this ‘neither this nor that’ presentation. Because what is Knox? Neither a human being nor an animal. Fox is a fox and a Goo Goose is at least some kind of goose but Knox is neither fish nor fowl.

Knox is one of those Seuss characters that cannot be identified with any living organism. ‘Doctor Seuss’ is inordinately fond of ordering up these creatures, ‘like a prolific deity of individuation’. His work can hardly be seen as an ‘imitation of nature’. To be one of his creations is to occupy a mercurial place of non-identity.

Knox will not take part in it: ‘I can’t blab such blibber-blubber. My tongue isn’t made of rubber.’

Doesn’t it remind us of Shakespeare's Pericles? – especially in the presence of this water imagery. E.g. Pericles says: ‘All love the womb that their first being bred. Then give my tongue like leave to love my head.’

The seventh battle – God Sneezes.

This brings us to the page with the fleas and the cheese trees. It is about religion and it is difficult to understand. The density of the images is the problem.

Having earlier tried to defeat Knox in the domain of metaphysics, Fox now introduces a selection of modulated religious and mythological imagery. The trees, the flying fleas (both trinities), the breeze of the spirit (Knox’s spirit?). Being the Accuser, as always, Fox charges Knox with being an evil personage whose cold, frozen spirit of wickedness has made life and sustenance – in the image of the trees and their cheese – frigid. This has upset God – in the image of the free-flying flea trinity, who sneezes.

The images are not entirely satisfactory: the setting is Edenic, sure enough, but we would not normally expect everything to come in trinities. What about a pair of trees? What about a pair of persons? We might well ask. What about the trees as Mother Nature of the Dripping Nipples and the cheese as a solid frozen coagulation of the primal, maternal somnifacient? What frosty breeze has done this? I see something nasty in the woods ahead.

Why the bloodsuckers? Should we be looking for an articulation of another history? Like parasite Lilith’s being expectorated from the scene as a result of Adam’s cold unbending insistence? She called out God’s secret magical name (could that possibly sound like a sneeze?) and flew away, leaving Adam cold and lonely.

‘Lilith’ seems to be derived from the Sumarian lil, being wind. In Babylonian-Assyrian there is lilitu, a female demon or wind spirit. Fox has spoken of a breeze for good reason. As for the trees, if condensation is at work we should remember that Lilith lived in Inanna’s Hallupu tree (until Gilgamesh threw her out).

The freezing breeze should remind us of condensation: the Lilith story and the Fall could be condensed here. Lilith lives in the Edomite desert according to Isaiah 36. Certain animals and birds are also living there. The list includes carrion birds like Old Joe Crow. (You might think there are suggestions of Lilith in the person of Sue too. Remember – she was on top.) Where we have Sue, Seuss and Sam-I-Am, can Samoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof be far away? Going too far? We shouldn’t ask for too much, it’s only a short book with simple pictures. But it is very obvious that Fox intends to locate Knox at the site of original sin and Seuss figures his elements in trinities. And why not? God knows we’ve had no trouble creating them. We all get three for the price of one. In this manner, cunning Fox-devil tongue-twists scripture to his own purposes.

This turns out to be another false hope for Fox. Knox again resists, calling Fox’s suggestions ‘silly stuff.’

The Last Battle: Civilisation and The Beetles

For Fox’s ultimate attack on Knox’s independence, Fox represents civilisation and world history. It is as if Fox is saying “I see the problem, you need to get a look at the wider picture.” We are reminded of God’s answer to Job with its cosmology – the foundations of the earth, geology and zoology. Cosmology is present here also, the foundations of the earth in an unusual picture, the world as a bottle on a French poodle’s back.

In Fox’s cynical eyes it is a mockery of a world; a French poodle instead of an Atlas, an elephant or a tortoise. The world is a bottle, also reminding us of words from the Book of Job, where the sky is described as spread out like a molten mirror.

Moreover, Knox resembles Job in being harassed, hounded, harangued, and, as we saw before, needled by his companion. It is on a smaller scale than the nagging Job endured: this is a children’s book after all. The comparison stands however, for another reason; because it is a recurring theme in Seuss’ work.

We need to diverge for a moment to look at some other works of the Doctor.

In Green Eggs and Ham there is a character (who doesn’t even get the honour of having a name) who is hounded just like poor Knox. In Green Eggs the adversary is Sam-I-Am. (The connection with YHWH is obvious.) We are also reminded of Uncle Sam. This I-Am-Uncle-Sam-Who-Am badgers and pursues his nameless victim urging him, like Fox urges Knox, to eat, to ingest that which is unwanted. That story is one of brainwashing, an endurance test. In the end the victim succumbs – and likes it. (Very 1984: Oh! Kneel. Poorly Or Well.)

Sam-Who-Am/Uncle Sam, a hound of heaven, or of the state, tells the nameless ones that the powerful know best and the peasants will eat what they are given and like it. There can be no peace for anybody until they taste and see that the green eggs and ham are good. The hounding will never cease.

Evidently Seuss writes out of a fixation on some Job-like harassment. Even in The Cat in the Hat there is hounding and harassment. The children become increasingly concerned as the Cat creates more and more mayhem. The source of the problem is the red spot – already identified by commentators as a menstrual stain. Fear of woman, of blood (can we even say of mercurial nature?) is the theme. Fear of the feminine is the problem. And what is the solution? Letters!

A for Apollo, before red Mercury. (I know – Mercury is only red because we are dying for thermometers.)

Aleph before Apple, beef or mutton, C.B. for the basement. Deferred sentencing, Eve for Zoe, ever falling. Aegis before beauty, I before one self, chafe for joy, café hysteria, alpha random meagre, tea before cake, queue for ages, V for La France, existence precedes essence, why for God’s sake, I can’t imagine: zephyr cheesy breezy winds us up to the building blockheads of language.

The building blocks of metaphysics – nature to be maid of words. Language will clean up the messy business of nature and femininity. In that story the Cat has usurped the powers of fertility and generation, reproducing many more cats from his head, like I am the alphalfa and the Zeugma. Athena springs from Zeus’s head, no mess: the only kind of femininity accepted by programmatic rationalism. Motherless, maid of man – Daddy’s Girl. Fertility on the mental plane.

Each new cat is a letter of the alphabet. Through language the male marches into the control room to work the pedals and levers of reproduction and everything. Just read the old works of philosophy and psychology, look at the kind of language used to discuss femininity and reproduction, and then try to say it is not so.

For the Cat, however, and the children looking on with mounting concern, the mess just gets worse and worse as the cat-letters go about their business. The blood-red matter enlarges, propagates. And what is the problem? Not enough letters. It is only when the furious alphabet is complete – when the Z-cat arrives – that the hysterical blot is eliminated. Language, metaphysics, philosophy, rationality – once they are sufficiently complete – will finally get wild, feminine nature cleaned up and put into order.

But back to Fox and Knox:

Teeming, warring humanity is pictured in the black beetles, never ceasing to battle. All of humanity has undergone the metamorphosis. What does it mean? We take our clue from the French poodle and find the messages in the picture.

Seeing the French word bestiole for insect or bug we know what Fox is saying: humans are beasts. We see the paddles, pagaie, a pun on pas gai, not happy. We see the noodles, nouille, a pun on nuit, night: in both French and English slang noodle can mean head, so Fox says that humans have heads of night, of darkness. “We have the words for this,” Fox implies, “I will tell you what it is, what it is called.” But he has only one real message: we are violent unhappy beasts with heads full of darkness. And we are all in a glass, darkly. Fox is Thomas Hobbes for children – twisty, brutish and short.

The feminine, abysmal, oceanic waters, already seen in the sea of goo and her daughter the lake, are reduced to a puddle. Beetles battle in a puddle. Of course the oceanic is reduced to a puddle. It now has a name (it is captured – bottled), by Fox. ‘…they call this a Tweetle Beetle Bottle Puddle…’ (And by another French/English pun we see that mare, for puddle, is, in English, a female beast.) Then there’s mer, the sea, now in Fox’s hands, trivialised mightily, just a puddle in a piss pot. Holy mare, mother of dog, it cannot end tastefully. (Not so long a I have anything to do with it.)

Another intimation of mortality is present in the noodles: children always call noodles or spaghetti worms. These worms are beneath the earth, in the end they will feast on us. Medusa noodles, tangled locks – but Knox will not accept it. He will no longer listen: he will no longer, by hearing Fox out, agree that Fox’s concatenations of impossible namings are an acceptable or even plausible way to capture, describe, explain or illuminate the world.

Knox will no longer take instruction from Fox. He will no longer dabble with impossible phonetic experiments. Ultimately Knox, like the famous Knoxs before him in ecclesiastical history, is a rebel-hero. The Knoxs both changed their confessions. (Although what you think about the historical Knoxs might be tempered by your religious convictions.) But this is just the point: one went that way, one went this way: it balances out in the end. Is it an economy of sheep-stealing between faiths? What does it amount to? These men did not cease playing their language games: ‘pick a confession’ or ‘pick a religion’. Despite a lack of Enthusiasm Seuss’ Knox is a figure of non-cooperation with what is being foisted on him.

And me and you? None of the above? Do we believe any of it. Most of it must be far too obvious to be true. I shall no longer dabble in nursery tales and catechism – the agenda and analysis is chimerical, hysterical, plain silly. But can you help me? If it can be done, somebody will… Now you, maybe you. You are not an animal, you are not a body, because these are only words, labels, like “Dr.” – a very small unit, word and image.

© 2006 onlinerator.com

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You might like Fox in Socks, Prince of Denmark.

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Photo credits: A Fox: US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Three small Clocks: NASA
All Copyright-free AFAIK.
A beetle, pigs, from Public Domain Images