Barbara D'Amato - [Cat Marsala 09]

by Hard Road (html)

  9. CAPTIVES OF THE INDIANS

  We don't know what direct experiences Baum had with Native Americans, and we can't know what Baum might have read or what was in his long-vanished personal library. But looking through some of the most widely published frontier texts of the period does yield some striking parallels to his description of the Gargoyles.

  One narrative Baum mentions40 in another of his Dakota columns is "Buffalo Bill" Cody's (largely ghostwritten) Autobiography of 1879. There are several passages in the book that share the tone of Baum's sketch of the Gargoyles, for instance one in which Cody stresses the variegated dress of a division of Pawnee scouts:

  [I]t was very amusing to see them in their full regulation uniform. They had been furnished a regular cavalry uniform and on this parade some of them had their heavy overcoats on, others their large black hats, with all the brass accoutrements attached; some of them were minus pantaloons and only wore a breech-clout. Others wore regulation pantaloons but no shirts and were bare headed; others again had the seat of the pantaloons cut out, leaving only leggins; some of them wore brass spurs, though without boots or moccasins.…41

  Cody's book is also suggestive in other ways, especially in the strange equivalence it suggests between real life and popular art, with Buffalo Bill alternating between portraying his own exploits on stage and returning to the frontier to, as it were, gather more. The perennially stagestruck Baum was undoubtedly impressed by Cody's feats in creating his Wild West Show, plundering specimens of a vanishing world and bringing them to an afterlife in the arena.

  It's also relatively safe to assume that Baum was familiar with the major works of the preeminent American journalist of the time, Mark Twain, whose depictions of Indians were often less than enlightened.42 The following may be a bit of a reach, but because of the similarity of their name to the word "Gargoyles," I couldn't resist including Twain's description of an imaginary tribe in his popular Roughing It (1872):

  Such of the Goshoots as we saw, along the road and hanging about the stations, were small, lean, "scrawny" creatures; in complexion a dull black like the ordinary American negro; their faces and hands bearing dirt which they had been hoarding and accumulating for months, years, and even generations, according to the age of the proprietor; a silent, sneaking, treacherous looking race; taking note of everything, covertly, like all the other "Noble Red Men" that we (do not) read about, and betraying no sign in their countenances.…43

  The description of the Goshoots' skin in turn recalls a snapshot of Syrian tribesmen in Twain's earlier Innocents Abroad (1869): "These people about us had other peculiarities which I had noticed in the noble red man, too: they were infested with vermin, and the dirt had caked on them till it amounted to bark."44

  Many other well-published accounts stress the Indians' varied treatments of hair, headgear, and facial features in ways that recall the carved designs on the Gargoyles' heads:

  Like all other Indians, they were fond of ornaments, which consisted of stones, beads, wampum, porcupine quills, eagles' feathers, beautiful plumes, and ear-rings of various descriptions. The higher classes were often fantastic in their wearing apparel.… the skin was often inscribed with hieroglyphics and representations of the sun, moon, stars and various animals.…45

  The hair of the [Cherokee] male was shaved, except a patch on the back part of the head, which was ornamented with beads and feathers, or with a colored deer's tail. Their ears were slit and stretched to an enormous size.…46

  Most descriptions of Indian life east of the Mississippi also include an account of their all-wooden villages:

  The pillars and walls of the houses of the square abounded with sculptures and caricature paintings, representing men in different ludicrous attitudes; some with the human shape, having the heads of the duck, turkey, bear, fox, wolf and deer. Again, these animals were represented with the human head.…47

  Of course, any number of Old World travelers' tales could have served just as well as a model for the Gargoyle chapters. But it's important to keep in mind that, as Attebery stresses, Oz is a distinctly American fairyland— possibly even an image, in terms of the characteristics of its five regions, of Baum's conception of the United States.48

  When Baum lived in South Dakota, at the height of the Ghost Dance Movement, capture by the Indians was still an ever-present fear, even if actual occurrences had dwindled to close to zero. Accounts of captivity among various groups of Indians were among the most popular genres of frontier literature, and while we again can't know which if any of these Baum read, we can assume he was familiar with the type. One of the most popular captivity narratives, that of Rachael Plummer— reprinted many times since its first appearance in 1838— contains more than a few arguably proto-Ozian details: a cave of glowing crystals, a bear "as red as vermilion," and Indian accounts of a species of "man-Tiger" "eight or nine feet high" and with "huge paws and long claws" instead of hands, which seems to live in symbiosis with a gnomelike tribe of little people "less than three feet high," who dwell in the mountain caves. More suggestively in terms of the Gargoyle episode, Plummer tells us that on the day of her release

  I had dreamed, the night before, that I saw an angel, the same I saw in the cave. He had four wings. He gave them to me, and immediately I was on the wing, and was soon with my father.49

  Dorothy's sojourn among the Gargoyles— small, silent hominoids, with barklike skin and inexpressive faces, like the Goshoots— certainly has the flavor of the frontier captivity tales, in which the narrator and his companions are captured, treated roughly but not permanently harmed, moved far away from their homes, and after that (in many of the narratives) regarded by the Indians as something along the lines of pets or curiosities, often with a certain watchful puzzlement that borders on diffidence.

  After their escape from the wooden land, things go worse for our friends until they are brought to a complete dead end in a place called the Den of the Dragonettes. At this point, Dorothy remembers that Ozma has promised to look at her every day in her Magic Picture— a sort of universal spy machine— and, if Dorothy makes a certain hand gesture, to whisk her to Oz with the teleportive power of Ozma's Magic Belt. At the correct time, Dorothy makes the gesture, and the next moment our travelers are in the Emerald City.

  Why didn't she just do that at the beginning? wonders the frustrated reader. Critics of Baum, even sympathetic ones, have attributed this non-twist in the plot to simple carelessness. But certainly it's of a piece with the absurdist affect of this book in general and evocative of the sense of waking from a dream, which is rarely a feeling of escaping but more one of being pulled unexpectedly to the surface. And while the deus ex magica ending could be read as a type of nihilistic collapse of the narrative— showing, maybe, that there's no necessity behind the sort of evil and suffering our heroes have had to endure— it's also suggestive of the ending of Mrs. Plummer's tale. Unlike those used by Dorothy and her friends, Mrs. Plummer's wings can't help her, but the next day her captors, by chance, encounter a band of Mexican traders, who after some haggling buy her. And so far as I know, this is the pattern in most captivity tales with female authors: instead of evading her captors, or even being part of an assisted escape, the narrator is ransomed out as suddenly as she was captured.

  10. ROUGH PLAY

  In the early Oz books Dorothy and the other non-Ozians are often in mortal danger, and even in the later sequels— when, as residents of Oz, they've ceased to age— Baum makes sure to remind the reader that they are still vulnerable to death by accident or violence. Saying that Baum's world is "sanitized" is talking about nightmare in terms of degree— a self-defeatingly literal way of thinking. To a child, a single new idea, a new metaphor, or a bit of strangeness, can open up a multitude of elaborate paths, some leading to terrifying destinations. And to an imaginative child, even a mild threat can lead to a fearsome conclusion. As Elias Cannetti says in Crowds and Power, any threat, carried to its logical end, is a threat of destruction. The rea
l question is not how violent or literal a nightmare is, but what kind of nightmare it is, what kind of leaping-off point it provides the imagination. If anything is truly utopian about Oz, it's not that there is no danger, but that the characters always conquer danger after a short struggle. I would argue, though, that it's also in this same ease of conquest that Oz's most insidious form of evil resides.

  L. Frank Baum, by character and maybe partly by design, was the sort of person who is often characterized as "an eternal child." Without, apparently, much effort, he got at the heart of what educators then called "make-believe" and what today's educators call "play" —without ever showing the children in his books playing at make-believe or, in fact, playing at anything. It seems to me that if his books have a single overriding subject, it's the special powers of children, the ability, say, to put two sofas together to make a flying carriage. Did Baum see his work as speaking to children who are just beginning to grow out of believing in that power, reassuring them that their fantasies have a place in the book-filled world of adults? Did he feel that it also had a cautionary element, coming so close as it does to the often cruel side of "play," the delight in breaking things and the dreadful experiments sometimes performed even on favorite dolls?50 Are the Gargoyles the result of play? Are they the collection of some rich and overgrown child?

  Putting oneself in a child's frame of mind can be a source of great generative power, but it can also be dangerous to others and to oneself, and Baum, at least on some level, knew this very well. He remembered or understood the child's powers of bricolage, the transformations of scale and the transmutations of substance that kids do automatically. He may have understood them better than any other writer. But these same powers that turn a thing into a being can as easily turn a being into a thing, or, as the authors of the "Apology and Pledge" say, into a concept.

  Real Indians are not made of wood. But it's not going too far to say that most nineteenth-century writing on American Indians, from James Fenimore Cooper (whom Baum mentions in his first editorial) to Twain and beyond, both sympathetic and unsympathetic, stressed the Indians' extreme stoicism, their indifference to pain, and the perception that they would rather die than submit to slavery. Could wood be simply an objectified metaphor for the Indians' alleged combination of superhuman toughness and their extreme vulnerability— figuratively speaking, their combustibility? In the language of the day, they were eternally defiant, and yet they succumbed to disease and displacement-engendered starvation with bewildering speed. Cut from their roots, as it were, the Indians burned out.

  11. THE TROUBLE WITH FANTASY, OR FAKERY UNMASKED

  Over the last hundred years Oz has often had to defend itself against the charges of sentimentality and moralizing. Certainly there are treacly passages, although compared to the general run of late-Victorian children's writing— except for Carroll, Hilaire Belloc, and Edward Lear, as far as anyone I can think of— the Oz books seem positively stark. And although the characters in Oz do talk about what's right and wrong, the talk never seems to be the reason for the story. As in the Alice books, there's no identifiable moral or single overriding lesson to be learned from any of the adventures of Dorothy and her friends, besides, maybe, the vague admonition "don't give up." However, while it's hard to say it's ever the "point" of any of them, each of the Oz books contains at least one implied admonition against deceit or "humbug."

  Baum was said to have difficulty distinguishing the truth from the tall tales he'd make up to amuse his family and friends.51 But a hatred of fakery seems to drive much of his work, from the crooked developers in Tamawaca Folks to the submersible island in his last book, Glinda of Oz. In magical terms, illusion— Attebery's third category— tends to be the province of Oz's villains. Ozma, Glinda, and the other benign, state-approved magic-workers in Oz hardly ever resort to incorporeal projections or disguises, but such things are routinely deployed by the various rogues who try to usurp the rulers' power— for instance Ugu the Shoemaker in The Lost Princess of Oz, whose troops of female soldiers prove to be some sort of hologram avant le lettre. Disillusion, Attebery's fourth term, is, as far as I can find, deployed only by the good characters to puncture the false fronts of the wicked.

  Fakery recurs so often in the Oz books, and is so often humiliatingly unmasked, that it's tempting to comment that Baum's authorial voice may protest a little too much. One hesitates to go fishing for self-reflexivity, but if we did hope to find a representation of Baum himself in the books, we'd obviously have to look carefully at the "swing character" of the series, and the exception to the anti-illusion rule: the Wizard himself.

  Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs, to use the Wizard's real name (the Land of Oz, he says, was named after his first two initials52), is an itinerant showman nearing the end of a long line of semireputable gigs that recalls Baum's own peripatetic career. Baum was an actor, producer, salesman, pitchman, entrepreneur, window-dresser, purveyor of popular but critically ignored stories under a half-dozen different pseudonyms, a loving but never settled family man forever hosting parties for his children and their friends, staging magic-lantern shows and puppet plays and carving wooden geese for his soon-to-be-sold beach house. But it's not just that the Wizard's character and history may reflect those aspects of Baum's own that he had doubts about. The Wizard's favorite turns also recall Baum's characteristic fictional operations. As I've mentioned, Baum only rarely lets us see his process of bricolage in action, but in Dorothy and the Wizard he does show the Wizard performing what turns out to be a sleight-of-hand version, pulling a live piglet apart into two live piglets, and then three, and so on, until he has nine piglets, which he then recombines. As a rather run-of-the-mill bit of close-up that nevertheless impresses Dorothy, the assembled Mangaboos, and even their Sorcerer just as much as the "real" magic all around them, this could be a figuration of writing itself.

  At the end of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, the Wizard is more or less redeemed and comes again to reside permanently in the Emerald City. Eventually, Ozma even allows him to learn a bit of "real magic" to supplement his usual flimflam. But throughout the series, the increasingly kindly and respectable Wizard always retains the hint of something unsavory, a touch of the outcast or even of the sacred executioner. It's clear that he's from a different and more degraded world, and unlike Dorothy and the other children who have been made permanent guests, the Wizard has been worn by it. Certainly he's one of the very few characters in Oz, and the only main character, who is visibly old. And when something unpleasant needs to be done, it's often the black-suited Wizard who for one reason or another ends up with the job— as he does at the end of the encounter with the Gargoyles. Here the Wizard is distinctly less generous than Woot's friends in their escape from the Loons:

  …when Jim finally alighted at the mouth of the cavern the pursuers were still some distance away.

  "But, I'm afraid they'll catch us yet," said Dorothy, greatly excited.

  "No; we must stop them," declared the Wizard. "Quick Zeb, help me pull off these wooden wings!"

  They tore off the wings, for which they had no further use, and the Wizard piled them in a heap just outside the entrance to the cavern. Then he poured over them all the kerosene oil that was left in his oil-can, and lighting a match set fire to the pile.

  The flames leaped up at once and the bonfire began to smoke and roar and crackle just as the great army of wooden Gargoyles arrived. The creatures drew back at once, being filled with fear and horror; for such a dreadful thing as a fire they had never before known in all the history of their wooden land.

  Inside the archway were several doors, leading to different rooms built into the mountain, and Zeb and the Wizard lifted these wooden doors from their hinges and tossed them all on the flames.

  "That will prove a barrier for some time to come," said the little man, smiling pleasantly all over his wrinkled face at the success of their stratagem. "Perhaps the flames will set fire to all that
miserable wooden country, and if it does the loss will be very small and the Gargoyles never will be missed."53

  Does the Wizard's tone in this passage seem quite up to the usual Oz standards? Maybe not. But the sad fact is that Oz is not really so different from the real world. There is, often enough, an "other" in Oz. But after all, isn't it all the fault of the Gargoyles themselves, or rather simply of what they are? The Gargoyles were waiting, long before the book began, for someone from our own world to come along and to eradicate them and their world with the flick of a match.

  Ultimately, then, the issue is not whether the Gargoyles are metaphors for Indians, or even whether they recall Baum's notions of Indians, but rather that the Wizard treats them like Indians, using language that chillingly recalls Baum's statement that "History would forget these latter despicable beings": "[T]he loss will be very small and the Gargoyles never will be missed."

  Oz's "messages" are, broadly speaking, good ones, and as an instance of the standard admonition "don't give up," the Gargoyle episode is as good as any other. But if its message includes the notion that you can take care of all your problems with a can of kerosene, we may have a real problem. So far as we know, the Gargoyles had never harmed anyone before our friends' trespassing visit. It's only the introduction of the Wizard and his band into their world that brings suffering, just as the Wizard's opportunistic fakery in the famous first book took advantage of the innocent citizens of Oz proper. Baum's rather disturbing description of his putative alter ego "smiling pleasantly all over his wrinkled face at the success of their stratagem" suggests that he was aware of this, and that, whether or not he ever thought again about his noxious editorials, he may not have been entirely at ease with his self-image. Is there even a submerged wish here that Indians, like (presumably) the Gargoyles, might truly be incapable of feeling pain? Certainly there is at least a hint that it's just not the occasional instances of malevolence one encounters around Oz, but the solutions to them— technological, magical, or simply a bit too easy— that are truly horrific. The childlike powers of imagination breed both good and bad in such proximity that separating them may not be possible. Humbug is not the Wizard's only sin, and the dark places in his character figure a submerged but ever-present evil in the Land of Oz itself.