Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories (1958)
On the far-away island of Sala-ma-Sond, a king decides that the stretch of territory he can see is not enough territory, and sets about building a throne out of the living bodies of his own subjects so that he can sit higher and see more. That is the plot of a picture book published in 1958, and I would like to argue that it belongs on a shelf with Zamyatin and Orwell.
I should admit the motive. I wanted a Dr. Seuss book in the collection, and the collection is dystopian fiction. So I set out to build the case for a decision I had already made.
Yertle starts as king of a good pond. The water is warm, the food is plentiful, and the turtles, in Seuss’s phrase, have everything turtles need. This is the part people forget. The story does not open in misery. It opens in a working little commonwealth, and the ruin is something Yertle talks the pond into from there. The trouble starts the moment he looks at what he has and finds it too small. He wants to rule more, and he understands that to rule more he must see more, and to see more he must sit higher. So he orders nine turtles to stack into a throne and climbs on top. His refrain, delivered from the summit, is that he is “ruler of all that I see.” The problem he is solving is not comfort. It is sightline. His dominion ends where his vision ends, so the kingdom can only grow if the throne does. And the throne is not stone or gold. It is other turtles, stacked and standing on one another’s backs, holding the king up with their bodies. The regime is built on the literal backs of the people.
Mack
At the very bottom, bearing the whole weight, is a plain little turtle named Mack, and Mack is the political argument of the book folded into one character. He is the lowest turtle on the stack, which is to say the foundation of the state, which is to say the one holding everyone up and getting nothing for it. He is also the only one who speaks. He speaks three times, and the complaints escalate. First he is simply in pain, and asks, politely, how long they must stand like this. Then he reaches the real grievance: that the turtles at the bottom “too, should have rights,” that their shells are cracking, that they are starving. Yertle’s reply is to tell him to be silent, that he has no right to address the world’s highest turtle, and to call for more turtles. Two hundred, then five thousand six hundred and seven. They come. Seuss is exact about why. They are afraid. They tremble and they shake, and they obey.
What Seuss was doing
None of this is a reading imposed from outside. Seuss put it there deliberately, and said so.
Yertle is Hitler. Not Yertle “can be read as,” not Yertle “evokes.” Theodor Geisel stated plainly that the turtle king was a portrait of Adolf Hitler, the swallowing of the pond and the land beyond it standing in for the annexation of Europe. He nearly gave Yertle a mustache and thought better of it. He had drawn the image once already, in a political cartoon during the war, a dictator raised up on a stack of others. By 1958 he gave the dictator a name and a rhyme and a pond and handed the whole thing to children.
So the dystopian reading is not something laid over the book. It is what the book is. The sightline logic, the throne of bodies, the silenced and starving foundation, the obedience out of fear, these are not accidents dressed up as allegory.
The burp
Which brings us to the ending, and to the best fact about the book. The regime does not fall to an army. There is no rival king, no uprising, no war. It falls because Mack, the turtle at the bottom, the one holding up the whole apparatus, finally decides he has had enough and does the smallest and least dignified thing a creature can do. He burps. The burp shakes the throne, and the king of all he could see slides off his stack of bodies and lands in the mud.
That the weapon is a burp is not a throwaway. Seuss’s publisher balked at it, a burp being thought too crude for a children’s book in the 1950s, and Geisel fought to keep it. He was right to. The burp is the thesis. The tyrant is not undone by a hero or a sword or a better king. He is undone by the refusal of the lowest member of the system, the one everyone was standing on, who stops holding still. The most undignified act in the book is the only act of freedom in it. And the last lines open it further. Yertle ends as king of the mud, which is now all he can see, the turtles are free, and Seuss widens it past the pond in the final breath, to the thought that maybe all creatures should be. It is a children’s book that closes on a proposition about liberty.
The book fair
Did I want this book on the shelf badly enough to convince myself of the argument? Yes. But the case I built turned out to be the prosecution’s own evidence. I never had to argue Yertle into the collection. It was a dystopia when it arrived.
As for how it arrived. I was at the Boston Book Fair telling a few people I was thinking of adding a Dr. Seuss book to the collection, half as a joke, and then I turned a corner and there was a signed first edition. I would like to report that I showed some restraint. I did not. It did not help that I had been circling the fair for a while without finding anything else to buy, which has a way of making a book you came in joking about look more like a serious candidate. The book, it seems, had already decided where it belonged, and was only waiting for me to catch up.
The book carries two other stories. “Gertrude McFuzz” follows a bird who nearly ruins herself chasing a fancier tail, and “The Big Brag” sets two animals arguing over who is the greatest until a worm ends the contest. Both are small fables about vanity, which makes the whole collection, Yertle included, one sustained argument against the swollen head. The other two simply leave out the part about invading Europe.
