This is a transcript of my talk at the recent Friends of Freddy convention--Kevin W. Parker

Semiotic Density and Jungian Archetypes in the Freddy the Pig Books

is not the title of this talk. I realize that many of you will be disappointed in this, having waited for years for this groundbreaking monograph. Well, you're going to have to wait a little longer. Instead, I decided to work on something with more mass-market appeal. I went to my local bookstore to check out the possibilities and came up with several.

Chicken Soup for the Freddyite Soul? Kind of an awkward title, plus I'm sure Charles and Henrietta would squawk.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Freddy the Pig? I've been wondering what sort of person would cheerfully march up to the checkout counter with a bunch of books whose titles start with "The Complete Idiot's Guide." I don't want to find out.

Finally, I did come up with a title that was both appropriate and had mass-market appeal. Therefore, without any further ado, I would like to read to you some passages and notes from the current draft of what I'm sure will be a New York Times bestseller: Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Freddy the Pig.

I had to start by thinking about Freddy for a bit, which was really remarkably tough. I mean, I've known Freddy since I was eight years old. How can you start to describe someone you've known that long? It's like trying to describe your parents. Hey, they're your parents. They're kind of, you know, parentish. They're the standard you go by.

I can say that certain people are like Freddy, and all of you would know what I mean. But what is Freddy like?

So let's go to the books and see what we can find out.

(Let me just say parenthetically that I had a heck of a time with this. Writing the book reviews for the newsletter is one thing, but actually trying to analyze the books and pick out particular aspects is very, very difficult, at least for me. I'll sit down with my notepad and one of the books, and I will very diligently open it up and start reading. I'll make about half-a-dozen notes on the first chapter, a couple on the second, and one on the thirdif I'm lucky. At that point I'm caught up in the story and am not paying attention to what I was supposed to have been paying attention to. It's taken me two or three readings, usually, to tease out what I was looking for in the first place. So one of the reasons that this talk is going to sound as if I'm reading notes to myself is because I only started on this about a month ago and that's as far as I've gotten. I finally got into my stride Thursday night, but by then it was time to pack up and get ready to do.)

But anyhow let us move on. Our first experience with Freddy is in Florida, when we are told that he is "the smallest and cleverest of the pigs." My impression is that only half this description holds for the rest of the series, and that's the clever part. And we all know that: he comes up with ideas, he writes poetry, he does a creditable imitation of Sherlock Holmes, and so on.

And of course he's not only clever, he's resourceful: he can always, it seems, come up with an idea to get himself out of whatever trouble he's gotten into, and it's frequently a pretty imaginative idea. I think my all-time favorite is the climax of Freddy the Cowboy, when he rouges himself up to lookmore or lesslike a salesgirl before blasting Mr. Flint with the cheap perfume. Talk about necessity being the mother of invention!

We're also repeatedly told he's lazy, but I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. I think the best concept for Freddy is that of inertia in the Newtonian sense: objects at rest tend to remain at rest, and objects in motion continue in motion. There's a great passage from Pilot that reflects the same idea:

Freddy always admitted frankly that he was lazy. And yet the more he had to do, the more he seemed to accomplish. He explained it this way: He said that when a lazy person once really gets started doing things, it's easier to keep on than it is to stop. He said it was as much of an effort to stop working and sit down as it was to get up and start working in the first place.

Freddy is not really terribly brave, or maybe it's really better to say that he's not fearless. He'll do what he has to do in order to keep his promises, save face, or help his friends, but he has to be forced into a corner in order to do something dangerous. If he doesn't have to do it, he won't, and even if he's being forced into a corner he'll try to squirm his way out of it. Witness his reluctance to ride his bicycle in Wiggins for President: he comes up with all manner of other things that need doing beforehand. And how many of us have done the same? Isn't it amazing how messy your house becomes right before you have to fill out your tax return? Heck, how could you possibly concentrate with that mess staring you in the face? Better clean it up first.

He's a bit egotistical, and he'll cover up his faults. He'll claim to be thinking when he was actually sleeping. He'll claim to have an idea when he actually doesn't. But he always seems to come through with an idea in the end.

He has a perpetual conflict between the way he thinks of himself and how he actually appears:

"You don't know what it is to be fat. I can dance well, and I can swim, too, but everybody laughs when I do it. I want to look romantic--like Jacob, here--sort of dark and dangerous-looking. And I am romanticI'm just full of romance inside."

I think one way of summing all this up is to say that Freddy is a commensurate hero. I apologize for using such an Ollie Groper word, but it's the best one I can think of. What I mean is that we can identify with Freddy, and we can compare ourselves with Freddy. We can imagine being like Freddy.

Compare that with, say, James Bond, who is--for me, anyway--an incommensurate hero. I know if I jump out of an airplane with no parachute, it's just going to be splat, goodbye Kevin. Likewise, if Freddy jumps out of an airplane with no parachute, it's going to be splat, goodbye Freddy. And Freddy knows it. But James Bond, you know, he's going to get the parachute off the bad guy, or he's going to have a fountain pen that turns into a hang-glider when you twist the cap just right. So he's not going to go splat. And he knows it. But as much as I enjoy watching James Bond, I know I'm never going to be him.

I don't know what it says about me that I can identify more with a talking pig than with a suave British gentleman, but I'm not going to go there.

So, since Freddy is a commensurable hero, we really ought to be able to learn some lessons from him. Let's see if we can.

1. (To paraphrase Loretta Lynn). Stand by your friends. You had to know that one was coming. If there's one lesson in the Freddy books, it's the power and worth of friendship. And it's really pretty neat. You think of the key triumvirate: Freddy, Jinx, and Mrs. Wiggins. They're really very different people, with all they have in common is that they are basically decent people. But they're fast friends, and they'll stick together no matter what happens. The best single example may be Freddy defending Jinx in Freddy the Detective even though the evidence appears to be very much against him.

In fact, he even goes a bit further in standing by his friends than I'm comfortable with. The particular example that bothers me is in Pilot, when Freddy would apparently rather have the Army buy a defective bombsight to the US Army than betray his friend, Uncle Ben. I kind of hope that he was expecting Uncle Ben to fix the bombsight and was just temporizing until he could. But obviously he is extremely loyal.

2. True bravery is going on even when you're scared. How brave is James Bond, really? How much courage do you need if you know you're going to win, or if you don't have the imagination to realize what might really happen to you? Freddy has that imagination, and I think I maligned him when I said he wasn't all that brave. Freddy can imagine all the perils that he's facing in painful detail. In fact, he's got so much imagination that he can make the perils seem far worse than they are, as in this example when he's walking in the Big Woods and imagining the Ignormus:

But up here in the queer gloomy silence of the Big Woods it was easy to believe almost anything. He began to wonder what the Ignormus could be like. It would be big, and it would be ferocious, he thought, and it would have sharp claws and narrow yellow eyes. The longer he imagined it, the more awful it got. He added horns and tails and wings until he had an animal beside with a Bengal tiger would look as gentle and harmless as a pussy cat. And of course he got more and more scared. He tiptoed along, being very careful to make as little noise and to keep as well hid as possible, for undoubtedly the Ignormus, besides being very sharp of hearing, would have a very short temper.

Later on, he and Charles have started rallying the animals, when he realizes that he has painted himself into a corner:

Freddy had started something, and he wasn't at all sure that he could finish it. He thought of the enormous which shape that had floated down towards them in the darkness, and he shivered. he thought of that shotgun pointing at him from the window of the Grimby house, and he shuddered. He thought of the big family of Simon's kin, lurking under the Ignormus's protection in the gloom of the Big Woods, and he shook.

But then he pulled himself together. These animals, no one of whom would have stepped a foot inside the Big Woods an hour ago; many of whom were even leaving their homes for fear of the Ignormus,they would follow him right up to the door of the Grimby house. Their fighting spirit was aroused; they were in a mood to tackle twenty Ignormuses. Some in the crowd had already raised the Marching Song of the F.A.R.

And Freddy then returns to the Grimby house with only Randolph the beetle for company, to disarm the shotgun there so none of the animals so primed for the assault will get shot. Frankly, I think it may help that he's so concentrated on this mission that he doesn't have much time to think about the dangers involved. But let's have no more talk of Freddy not being brave. He doesn't take foolish chances or unnecessary risks, but you can count on him when you need him. He's as brave as he needs to be. We can give Brooks the last word on this (from Cowboy):

He was really quite a courageous pig. I don't mean that he wasn't scared; he was so scared thinking about it sometimes that his teeth chattered and his tail came completely uncurled. But he didn't propose to let being scared interfere with what he intended to do.

3. Serious matters must be treated seriously. I am thinking of Freddy calling for the meeting of the First Animal Republic toward the beginning of Ignormus. He laboriously writes a formal petition. Why?

Of course Freddy could just have gone over to the cowbarn and said:

"Simon's back. How about a meeting tonight?" But affairs of state are not conducted in such an offhand manner. Mrs. Wiggins as a friend who had just knocked him into a barberry bush, and Mrs. Wiggins as president of the F.A.R. were two very different people. Freddy might, and probably would, talk the matter over with her as between friends later, but now he was addressing her as president of a sovereign state of which he was a citizen. He had to put on a lot of dignity, because if he didn't, none of the others would either, and pretty soon when Mrs. Wiggins gave an order no one would pay any attention to it.

4. (Which seems somewhat related). Take your responsibilities seriously. Freddy actually has to learn this lesson himself. You might remember in Wiggins for President that he sees a pig running a bank as something of a lark. Then he almost loses control of the bank to the woodpeckers before regaining it. By the time of Ignormus, he has taken the role to heart, as in this passage just after the bank is robbed by the minions of the Ignormus:

Freddy didn't sleep very well that night. The faces of all those trusting little animals who had brought their treasures into his bank for safekeeping crowded reproachfully into his dreams. For a poet to be president of the bank had always seemed to him something of a joke. For the first time he realized that it was a serious matter to be responsible for other people's property. But if he didn't catch the robbers, he'd make it gooddown to the last kernel of corn.

5. On the other hand, have fun. Freddy has the advantage of being a gentlepig of leisure. I think there's some phrase about the pigs only job was to be pigs, which doesn't seem terribly onerous. (We'll gloss over the usual fate of pigs on farms, as Brooks does.)

Anyhow, Freddy certainly does enjoy himself for the most part. It's worth noting that the first two adventures are instigated by the animals looking for something interesting and enjoyable to do.

6. Anything worth doing is worth doing right. When Freddy gets into one of his hobbies, he really gets into it. He doesn't just play at being a detective, he goes into business. And of course when he gets a horse, he doesn't just learn to ride, he becomes a cowboy with all rights and privileges thereunto pertaining:

When Freddy set out to do something, he was never satisfied with just halfway doing it. To have a horse and a cowboy suit and a gun belt with two guns in it would have been enough for some people. But not for him. He was determined to learn how to ride and shoot and handle a rope as well as any real cowboy. And because he wanted to learn, he learned quickly. He had a good teacher in Cy, and within a few days he could stick tight to the saddle while the pony whirled and crow-hopped and bucked and reared.

Freddy also takes out Mr. Bean's guitar and tries to learn how to play it.

7. Be careful of what sort of reputation you develop because you'll have to live up to it ever after. Again from Freddy the Cowboy:

Freddy had no intention of getting into a fight if he could help it, but he had a reputation to keep up. That is the trouble with a reputation. You go and build up a reputation for bravery, and then the first thing you know, there's a fight on your hands. And maybe you don't feel specially brave that morning. But you've got to act as if you did.

Or Perilous Adventure, when Freddy's bravery is impugned in front of the sheriff:

The sheriff said with a laugh, "Afraid? My friend Freddy afraid? I guess, Golcher, you don't know much about this pig's record." And he went on to make a list of Freddy's brave deeds for the benefit of the balloonist.

And as Freddy listened he began to perk up. It's true, he said to himself; I really have done all these courageous things. I guess I can't just back down now. That's the trouble with a reputation for bravery: you have to live up to it. Oh dear, I wish I wasn't such a fearless character!

8. Appearance counts. This entry was inspired by Freddy "suiting up" before boarding the balloon in Perilous Adventure.

Of course pigs don't wear regular clothes [at least not usually], so all Freddy had to put on was an expression when he got up in the morning. And on important mornings it often took him longer to dress than it would you or me. For he had a good many different expressions. When he went down to the First Animal Bank, of which he was president, he wore the "serious-pig-with-grave-responsibilities-on-his-shoulders" expression. When he was doing detective work, he wore the "keen-eyed-pig-who-misses-nothing" expression. And when he was writing poetry the one he put on was the "dreamy-poetic-pig." This morning he hesitated between the "intrepid-pig-who-scoffs-at-peril" and the "pig-who-is-about-to-go-up-in-a-balloon-and-thinks-nothing-of-it." They were a good deal alike, so he combined the two and wore them both.

The resulting expression was one of such iron determination that it greatly impressed the animals with whom he talked that morning. "Why you aren't scared at all, Freddy" said Mrs. Wiggins, the cow. "Land sakes, you wouldn't get me to go up in one of those contraptions."

"Pooh, you wouldn't be any more scared than I am," said Freddy truthfully.

(Now we're getting to some of my sketchier notes.)

9. Putting something in writing makes it more believable. I am thinking, of course, of Freddy writing himself a note that reads "There isn't any Ignormus" and taking it out at key moments when he approaches the Big Woods.

10. You can be honest and misleading at the same time. I've always been impressed by the mottoes that Freddy comes up with for his detective agency and the bank, with the former being particularly impressive:

"Not a loss to a client in more than a century."

Mrs. Wiggins objected at first to the last sentence. "We haven't been in business but a week," she said.

"What difference does it make?" asked Freddy. "It's true isn't it?"

She had to admit that it was. "But, don't you see, it sounds as if we'd been detectives for a long time."

"That's just the way I want it to sound," replied the pig.

So Mrs. Wiggins didn't say any more.

11. Poetry is better after a good meal. Or maybe it's easier to write poetry after a good meal. It's easier to do a lot of things after a good meal. We're really winding down here.

12. There really ought to be some sort of conclusion that can be drawn from Freddy's assortment of disguises, but I haven't come up with anything yet. Suggestions are welcome.

Well, I think that's enough about Freddy for now. But there are other characters of interest as well. I figured if I did this for real I'd have a couple of chapters for Freddy, a chapter for Jinx, a chapter for Mrs. Wiggins, and then a chapter or two for a couple of the minor characters. For example, I think there are a few things we could learn from the ducks, Alice and Emma. And maybe the owls, Hank You can probably suggest a few others.

One character, however, really surprised me. I really did not expect to be able to learn anything from that "silly rooster" Charles. ButbutCharles makes things happen. He begins the very first adventure in the entire series by coming up with the idea of the animals going to Florida. He singlehandedly gets the animals ready to lynch Aaron Doty in Freddy Plays Football. And, in what may be the darkest hour in the entire series, when the animals are actually leaving the Bean Farm because of their fear of the Ignormus, he not only stops the exodus but inspires them to join in an attack into the very heart of the Big Woods.

So what is it about Charles that makes things happen? He gives speeches, and maybe his speeches aren't quite as empty as they are usually described. In short, I think we can learn one big lesson from Charles, and it's a very appropriate lesson for a literary society, and that is this: words really do matter.

And I think I've had my share of words for now. Thank you.