Hard Road (28 page)

The Emerald City of Oz
, where Dorothy finds herself in a principality ruled by a King Kleaver and peopled entirely by living kitchen implements, each with a personality appropriate to its original function. In his descriptions of these and many other vivified articles, Baum always pays attention to where their faces are, what aperture they speak out of, and how they move or hop about— just as when children turn tools or other objects into characters in their games or playlets, they tend to first identify a face or at least a pair of eyes. All this is aided immensely by the clever illustrations of John R. Neill, who not only worked out just where King Kleaver's mouth ought to be, but gave recognizable eyes and noses to the buildings of Oz and many other props throughout the series, to an extent that can remind one of the multiplying faces-within-faces of Northwest Coast sculpture. Children playing with inanimate household objects find they have different personalities, and the objects take appropriate roles in their scenarios. Baum, unlike most adults, remained attuned to this process. Either he paid great attention to the ways children played and imagined, or else he remembered what he had thought and felt as a child.

 

 

But he also remembered that childhood has the defects of its strengths. The same power that brings cutlery to life also hatches goblins out of a wrinkled pillow. In Oz, objects often surprise you by being alive and sentient, like the famous talking trees of the first book, which were used to great effect in the Oz musical film. Sometimes Baum recreates the process of a landscape slowly anthropomorphizing around the nervous traveler:

 

 

At first the scene was wild enough, but gradually it grew more and more awful in appearance. All the rocks had the shapes of frightful beings and even the tree trunks were gnarled and twisted like serpents. (
The
Emerald City of Oz
, p. 117)

 

 

Leonardo wrote about this mental state in his famous passage on how to "wake up the wit": "If you stare at some dirty and stained wall, or variegated stones… you will be able to see there diverse things, images of many landscapes… and the gestures of strange figures, impressions of faces and clothes and infinite things.…"
²⁷
Children may be more apt to slip into this frame of mind, but I imagine that most people also have had adult moments— and not just during fevers or under the influence of hallucinogens— when anything with roughly two dots above and one below looks like a face.
²⁸

 

 

But although animation operates on the border between whimsy and dread, it doesn't explain why the Gargoyles are what they are. They are animated, but unlike the citizens of Utensia, they aren't objects you'd find anywhere else. How did they get there? Were they originally something different? Why did Baum choose wood and not some other substance? Is the combination intentionally an arbitrary one, a bit of Carrollian "nonsense"? Or is it somehow significant?

 

 

Transformation, Attebery's second category, is the most drastic of his magical operations. Turning something, or usually someone, into something completely different is asking a lot from the reader, and Baum tends to use outright transformation sparingly. When he does, he makes sure that the subject is changed into something contrasting enough to be a surprise, but still somehow fitting. In
Ozma of Oz,
the evil Nome King maintains a sort of prison-cum-salon where his enemies are stored as luxury tchotchkes. In it, the Prince of Ev is transformed into an ornamental purple kitten, and Princess Ozma becomes a grasshopper carved out of a single emerald. In
The Tin Woodman of Oz,
the giantess Mrs. Yoop transforms the Woot, the Tin Woodman, and the Scarecrow into, respectively, a green monkey, a tin owl, and a small brown bear stuffed with straw. When I was little, at least, there seemed to me to be some sort of mysterious logic at work here, something I'd now describe as a sort of Lautréamontean "encounter" between the transformation and the transformed.

 

 

The most dramatic transformation in the books comes at the end of
The Land of Oz
, when the boy protagonist, Tip, is returned to his original identity as Ozma, Princess of Oz. Lurie, Vidal, and others have discussed the subversiveness of this episode— certainly a nightmare for mainstream librarians and PTAs, if not for children— as well as how the twist might relate to a stage version with an actress playing the first acts as a breeches role. Personally, I've always felt this was one of Baum's most Carrollian moments in that it recalls the promotion of a pawn to a queen toward the end of a chess game— a theme suggested by other characters in the book, for instance General Jinjur of the Army of Revolt as the opposing queen, the Scarecrow as an ineffectual king, and the living wooden Saw-horse and hastily animated Gump as knights. But in this case— unlike that of the Gargoyles— even though Tip's first transformation took place long before the start of the current book, Baum provides an explanatory backstory. One safe generalization about Baum's style is that it's invariably matter-of-fact, never deliberately murky.
Dorothy and the Wizard
may be his most Dantesque book, but if Baum had meant for us to interpret the Gargoyles as, say, condemned souls transmuted to wood, like Pier della Vigna and his fellows in the Forest of the Suicides, one thinks he would have at least hinted at it. The Gargoyles are more blank than that, more sui generis.

 

 

None of Attebery's other categories— illusion, disillusion, transportation, protection, and luck— have much to tell us about the Gargoyles. There are other things, or procedures, going on here. Maybe we need to add another operation or two to Baum's magical toolkit.

 

 

6. BRICOLAGE

Like many of Oz's distinctive creatures, the Gargoyles seem to be cobbled together a bit loosely. Dorothy, the Wizard, Zeb, and their animal companions manage to escape from their wooden tower prison after they discover that when the Gargoyles sleep, they remove their wings, in which, as the Wizard says, their power of flight seems to reside. Managing to filch a few, our friends lash the wings onto Zeb's cart-horse and flap their way to another hollow mountain that appears to lead to the surface of the earth. The whole episode recalls an earlier one in
The Land of Oz,
when Tip and his semihuman companions similarly escape lockup in a tower of the Palace of Oz by lashing together a flying creature called the Gump out of two sofas, an elk-like taxidermy head, a broom, and a bunch of palm fronds for wings. The Gump reluctantly serves its purpose, but it's incompletely animated— the sofas' legs don't move— and always in danger of falling apart. At the end of the book, it is mercifully dismantled.

 

 

There seems to be a tradition in Oz of disassembling and reassembling living beings. The most extreme example is from
The Tin Woodman of Oz
. Before the book begins we learn that our hero, whose real name is Nick Chopper, was originally a flesh-and-blood woodcutter. The Witch of the East became angry with him and enchanted his ax, which kept twisting in his hands and chopping off parts of his body. Each time this happened Nick went to a tinsmith, who replaced the original part with a tin prosthesis. Eventually there was none of the original Nick Chopper left. In the book named after him, the Tin Woodman goes on a quest for his origins and confronts the tinsmith, who explains how, after he'd finished the Woodman (as well as another tin man, a soldier), he happened to create a third man out of their cast-off parts:

 

 

"I thought it would be a clever idea to put to some practical use the scraps of Nick Chopper and Captain Fyter.… First, I pieced together a body, gluing it with the Witch's Magic Glue, which worked perfectly. That was the hardest part of my job, however, because the bodies didn't match up well and some parts were missing. But by using a piece of Captain Fyter here and a piece of Nick Chopper there, I finally got together a very decent body, with heart and all the trimmings complete."
²⁹

 

 

In a famous scene the Woodman later confronts his own former head, in a paradox of identity that ultimately derives from the well-known philosophical problem of Theseus's Ship. Baum is, it seems, persistently fascinated with decapitation: Jack Pumpkinhead keeps replacing his heads with new pumpkins, which he grows himself; as soon as the current one starts to rot, he buries it in a little graveyard next to his pumpkin-shaped house. In
Ozma of Oz
(1907), the Princess Langwidere keeps a whole wardrobe of heads taken from other beautiful women, to which she hopes to add Dorothy's. When the Princess dons a new head she remains herself, but her personality changes to something closer to that of the head's original owner.

 

 

Other creatures in Oz, like
Ozma of Oz
's wheel-limbed Wheelers or the ostrich-like Ork of
The Scarecrow of Oz,
with its propeller tail and Ping-Pong-paddle-like flipper-wings, combine animal and mechanical elements in ways reminiscent of one of the sculptures of Duchamp-Villon or the early work of Francis Picabia. One thinks of the famous Surrealist game of the "Exquisite Corpse," in which a strip of paper was folded in thirds. One artist would sketch the legs and feet of a figure, fold them under and out of sight, and let the next artist draw the torso without seeing the first part of the drawing, and so on.

 

 

Judging by the extent of its use, it might be fair to say that this is Oz's signature magical process: not transformation per se but rather collage, or maybe more accurately what Jean Dubuffet called
bricolage
, a type of outsider-art assemblage using ready-to-hand found objects. It's a destructive as well as generative process, and the pasted-together results always carry a hint of violence, even though, in Oz, the earlier cutting-out phase of the operation is usually only implicit. The result, too, is often disturbing in itself. At least since Leonardo's instructions on how to create an imaginary animal, people have recognized that the fear a monster inspires doesn't come only from whatever frightful powers it might have, but from the disjunction of its components. Simply put, there's something creepy about a Gump. I wonder whether Leonardo, or Baum, would have felt the same queasy feeling I did reading about the Nexia Biotechnologies Corporation's recent announcement that they'd bred a population of genetically-altered goats that incorporated DNA from spiders, which were already producing, instead of milk, long strands of protein-rich web that would presumably revolutionize the high-strength fiber industry. One could argue that something like even this deep-level melding of characteristics occurs in several Oz characters, for instance in the Patchwork Girl, whose brains are an ad hoc mixture of mental qualities in powder form— Obedience, Cleverness, Poesy, and so on.

 

 

Bricolage could also be said to be the master paranormality of Oz because its technique carries over into the structures of the books. Several critics have complained that the Oz books don't hang together. It's hard to refute this, since internal inconsistencies and occasional repetitions do show that some of the books were indeed hurriedly written. But either because of Baum's offhanded writing practices or despite them, the disjunctive progressions of many of the books— combined with a feeling of constant forward motion also characteristic of dreams— help create a sense of what the sleep researcher J. Allan Hobson calls "plot incongruity," the pre-logical narrative flow that is "far and away the most common peculiarity of… all dreams."
³⁰

 

 

And questioning the overall structure of an Oz book feels like trying to interpret a dream. What esoteric relationship exists between the Mangaboos, the invisible bears, and the Gargoyles? What are the pneumatic Loon people doing in the same book with the Tin Woodman's crisis of identity? Maybe nothing in particular, but when I was little and so many of the world's purposes were so mysterious, it certainly seemed they had
something
to do with each other, maybe something important. Oz felt, I suppose, like the way a myth feels to someone who believes in it, and like a myth a big part of its power lay not in its "universality" but in its most unexpected and disjunctive moments, in the feeling that "you couldn't possibly make that up," and hence the sense that it must have come directly from another world. The trick in creating beings and events with this quality would seem to be like that of writing a good simile or metaphor: the juxtaposed elements have to be disparate enough to combine to something distinctive, but not so far-flung that their combination doesn't seem somehow necessary once it's achieved. The new thing has to feel "right."

 

 

7. TRANSMUTATION

The combination of "Gargoyles" and "wood" may well count as an absurdist juxtaposition of disparate elements. But the fact that their entire
country
is made of wood, with wooden birds and cows and wood shavings instead of dirt, goes a bit farther, in a direction one associates with Surrealist compositions like Magritte's still lifes of granite fruit and flowers. Maybe we need one more term, one to describe this specific sort of universal transformation.

 

 

Suzanne Rahn comes the closest of anyone I've read when she introduces the term "theming":

 

 

…at the turn of the century, color theming was the latest trend… a fashionable hostess might give a "Snow Luncheon" in which everything was white…. and color theming was only the beginning. Hostesses vied with each other to create original party themes.
Entertainment for all Seasons
(1904) informs its readers how to give a Butterfly Party, a Lemon Party, a Peanut Party.… This popular trend and the unaffected pleasure Baum found in it helps explain one of the most distinctive features of his imaginary world— the existence within Oz of innumerable small towns and countries, each based on a single concept logically developed— in fact, a theme. The first of these was the China Country in