"Soup!" they all shouted, as if with one voice.
"Goodness me!" said Dorothy, trembling a little; "the Scoodlers must be reg'lar cannibals."
"Don't want to be soup," protested Button-Bright, beginning to cry.
"Hush, dear," said the little girl, trying to comfort him; "we don't any of us want to be soup. But don't worry; the Shaggy Man will take care of us."
"Will he?" asked Polychrome, who did not like the Scoodlers at all, and kept close to Dorothy.
"I'll try," promised the Shaggy Man; but he looked worried. Happening just then to feel the Love Magnet in his pocket, he said to the creatures, with more confidence:
"Don't you love me?"
"Yes!" they shouted, all together.
"Then you mustn't harm me, or my friends," said the Shaggy Man, firmly.
"We love you in soup!" they yelled, and in a flash turned their white sides to the front.23
After some trouble, our friends escape the Scoodlers and then destroy them: the Shaggy Man catches their detachable heads and hurls them down a gorge "with right good will," laughing as the Scoodlers' helpless bodies stumble blindly about.
Each book in the series contains at least one or two scenes that are equally unsettling, but I think many Ozians would agree the most unnerving title is the fourth, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908). Gardner says "an atmosphere of violence and gloom hangs over the tale"24 and more than one critic has pointed out its affinities to Dante's Inferno.25 But the book is also so purely bizarre that one is tempted to wonder whether it reflects a collision of Baum's numerous chronic illnesses with the even more varied patent medicines of the period. At the beginning of the story, Dorothy, a farm boy named Zeb, Zeb's horse Jim, Dorothy's kitten Eureka (Toto has been left at home), and the Wizard— who, since his exile from Oz in the first book, has returned to his vocation as a carnival showman— are caught in an earthquake near San Francisco and tumble through a fault line to the underground kingdom of the Mangaboos, a society of vegetable people. The Wizard gets into a magic contest with Gwig, their great "thorny Sorcerer," and when he wins greater applause for his sleight-of-hand multiplying-piglets trick than Gwig does for his own authentic magic, the Sorcerer begins to cast a spell on him:
"He will not be a wonderful Wizard long," remarked Gwig.
"Why not?" enquired the Wizard.
"I am going to stop your breath," was the reply. "I perceive that you are curiously constructed, and that if you cannot breathe you cannot keep alive."
The little man looked troubled.
"How long will it take you to stop my breath?" he asked.
"About five minutes. I'm going to begin now. Watch me carefully."
He began making queer signs and passes toward the Wizard; but the little man did not watch him long. Instead, he drew a leathern case from his pocket and took from it several sharp knives, which he joined together, one after another, until they made a long sword. By the time he had attached a handle to this sword he was having much trouble to breathe, as the charm of the Sorcerer was beginning to take effect.
So the Wizard lost no more time, but leaping forward he raised the sharp sword, whirled it once or twice around his head, and then gave a mighty stroke that cut the body of the Sorcerer exactly in two.
Dorothy screamed and expected to see a terrible sight; but as the two halves of the Sorcerer fell apart on the floor she saw that he had no bones or blood inside of him at all, and that the place where he was cut looked much like a sliced turnip or potato. (p. 37)
Fleeing from the Mangaboos, our little band is attacked by invisible bears:
The horse was plunging madly about, and two or three deep gashes appeared upon its flanks, from which the blood flowed freely.… As the little Wizard turned to follow them he felt a hot breath against his cheek and heard a low, fierce growl. At once he began stabbing at the air with his sword, and he knew that he had struck some substance because when he drew back the blade it was dripping with blood. The third time that he thrust out the weapon there was a loud roar and a fall, and suddenly at his feet appeared the form of a great red bear, which was nearly as big as the horse and much stronger and fiercer. (p. 95)
This sort of thing keys into nightmares and wonderings that strike me as endemic to young children: waking up in the night unable to breathe, imagining what might be inside your body, or feeling there are creatures about that can't be seen.
After they elude the invisible bears, Dorothy and her friends follow a path toward the surface of the earth that leads up an underground mountain, through a high tunnel in that mountain, and out through a series of archways to an ominous land:
"The Country of the Gargoyles is all wooden!" exclaimed Zeb; and so it was. The ground was sawdust and the pebbles scattered around were hard knots from trees, worn smooth in the course of time. There were odd wooden houses, with carved wooden flowers in the front yards. The tree-trunks were of course wood, but the leaves of the trees were shavings. The patches of grass were splinters of wood, and where neither grass nor sawdust showed was a solid wooden flooring. Wooden birds fluttered among the trees and wooden cows were browsing upon the wooden grass; but the most amazing things of all were the wooden people— the creatures known as Gargoyles.
These were very numerous, for the place was thickly inhabited, and a large group of the queer people clustered near, gazing sharply upon the strangers who had emerged from the long spiral stairway.
The Gargoyles were very small of stature, being less than three feet in height. Their bodies were round, their legs short and thick and their arms extraordinarily long and stout. Their heads were too big for their bodies and their faces were decidedly ugly to look upon. Some had long, curved noses and chins, small eyes and wide, grinning mouths. Others had flat noses, protruding eyes, and ears that were shaped like those of an elephant. There were many types, indeed, scarcely two being alike; but all were equally disagreeable in appearance. The tops of their heads had no hair, but were carved into a variety of fantastic shapes, some having a row of points or balls around the top, others designs resembling flowers or vegetables, and still others having squares that looked like waffles cut criss-cross on their heads. They all wore short wooden wings which were fastened to their wooden bodies by means of wooden hinges with wooden screws, and with these wings they flew swiftly and noiselessly here and there, their legs being of little use to them.
This noiseless motion was one of the most peculiar things about the Gargoyles. They made no sounds at all, either in flying or trying to speak, and they conversed mainly by means of quick signals made with their wooden fingers or lips. Neither was there any sound to be heard anywhere throughout the wooden country. The birds did not sing, nor did the cows moo; yet there was more than ordinary activity everywhere. (pp. 113–15)
The Gargoyles then abduct our heroes, carrying them "far away, over miles and miles of wooden country" until they come to a wooden city, and leave them in a doorless, windowless tower room.
There's something singular about this episode, something that seems inexplicable, a nugget of otherness that has always preyed on my mind. Why wooden gargoyles? In Baum's day the word "gargoyle" (related to "gurgle," which is also Dorothy's pronunciation) referred only to sculpted rainwater spouts on cathedrals and other buildings, not to the hobgoblins or succubi they were carved to resemble. Even a living gargoyle would be a new construction, let alone one made out of wood. But if the gargoyles had been simply stone ones come to life, I doubt that I would even have remembered the episode. What is it that's so frightening about their silent wooden world? And is this sort of nightmarishness an anomaly in Oz, or a key component of Baum's vision?
5. MAGIC
For nearly a century, readers and critics have tried to explain what makes Oz so powerful. The short answer, of course, would be "magic." But what is magic, or specifically, what is the characteristic magic of Oz? How were the Gargoyles created, both in Baum's literally magic fantasy world and in the magical operations o
f his mind? What sort of magic is most essential to Baum's vision?
In The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature, Brian Attebery answers this question by positing a set of "magical operations," which Baum employs to shape his world: "animation, transformation, illusion, disillusion, transportation, protection, and luck."26 This list is a good place to start, but in addition it might be helpful to focus on exactly how Baum's use of each of these types of magic differs from that of other fantasy writers. Regarding animation, for instance, one would want to mention Baum's sensitivity to the personalities of objects before they are animated, and how they retain them after they come to life. One easy example is the Patchwork Girl, who speaks in a sort of unfocused, free-associative homespun doggerel that figures, or is figured by, the patchwork quilts she is made of. Another is the Utensia episode in 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.
Barbara D'Amato - [Cat Marsala 09] Page 21
