ABSTRACT
He needs no introduction. In fact, the trumpeting sound of his motor car does the job all too well, perhaps too often and usually too late. The work in which he stars, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, serves consequently as his perfect context and foil. It both contains, and fails to contain, each poop! an urgent propellant projecting him beyond the text of that children’s book into the realms of what we used to think of as our ‘national’ imagination. In this, of course, Toad is the evident heir of earlier disruptive literary characters with similar commitments to boisterous self-announcement. Sir Toby Belch, Sir John Falstaff and Bully Bottom could all be sure of a welcome at Toad Hall, where the echoes of ‘pooppoop!’ would mingle readily with those of ‘Hem, boys!’ and ‘S’Blood!’. Perhaps Toad’s space-and-time-defying fantasies of rocketing beyond one’s earthly context –
The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today – in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped – always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! . . .1
