Barbara D'Amato - [Cat Marsala 09]

by Hard Road (html)

  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 The Wizard, which Dorothy and her friends discover on the way to Glinda's Castle. Here, surrounded by a high wall, is a land whose people and animals are china figurines come to life; even the ground is "as smooth and shining and white as the bottom of a big platter" …Dorothy's bedroom in the Emerald City, with its green silk sheets, green books full of green pictures, and wardrobe of green dresses, exactly satisfies children's uninhibited delight in theming.31

  For entire societies and countrysides made of one substance, though, "theming" may not be a strong enough word. "Transmutation" might be a closer fit.

  8. WHITE CITY

  At the end of the nineteenth century, the trend Rahn describes went beyond decoration toward a folk craft many people today might consider downright obsessive. Several writers have pointed to the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 as a key to many of Baum's signature themes. Better known as the World's Columbian Exposition, it was the most lavish Fair up to that time, and possibly the most extravagant ever produced. Its main zone, popularly known as "White City," was a vast and ornate Beaux-Arts fantasy of a Venice that never was, with networks of broad canals flowing between courts, fountains, and sprawling domed pavilions, each dedicated to a different category of art, science, or industry. Besides its exhibits of almost every conceivable type of product or livestock, the Exposition featured the first Ferris wheel (its size unequaled until recently), launches of hot-air balloons, and an aquarium that included a tank for demonstrations of submarine diving. At night, White City was dramatically lit with then-futuristic multicolored electric floodlights and thousands of tiny electric bulbs. Outside the main zone, the Fair's "Midway Plaisance" —conceived as a series of re-creations of town squares from many lands— seems to have evolved into something more like a late-colonialist human zoo, featuring pygmies, midgets, families of various tribes of American Indians cooking venison over open fires, and, of course, dubiously authentic "Moroccan" dancing girls. According to Hubert Howe Bancroft in The Book of the Fair, the Exposition's leading independent guidebook, the Midway,

  with its stir and tumult, its faces of every type and hue, its picturesque buildings, figures, and costumes, is the most graphic and varied ethnological display that was ever presented to the world. All the continents are here represented, and many nations of each continent, civilized, semi-civilized, and barbarous.…32

  The Exposition's effect on its visitors, especially those who had never been abroad, must have been overwhelming to an extent that's difficult for us to imagine. Even opponents of the Fair described it with awe.

  Baum encountered all this almost as soon as he moved to Chicago, right after his "lean years" in South Dakota and the failure of his newspaper, and the Exposition has been interpreted as having inspired a number of his creations. Certainly White City was one inspiration for the Emerald City. The swift creation of such extravagant splendor out of "nothing," not in Europe or even the East but in the heart of the Plains, on a site that had been a "desolate" prairie fifty years before and which still bore scars of the Great Fire of 1871, might have set one thinking about modern-day magic. The fact that the Fair's imposing-looking buildings were made of wooden frames and plaster of Paris (not only weren't they meant to last, but several of them burned down even before the close of the Exposition) may have informed Baum's recurring "humbug" theme. Several writers have also noted that the Land of Oz, unlike conventionally archaizing fairylands, mixes the exotic, the homespun, the antique, and the breathlessly futuristic in a way that recalls the Exposition. Rahn even sees an echo of Mrs. Potter Palmer, the Exposition's presiding genius, in Baum's matriarchal sorceress Glinda the Good.

  But if we twenty-first-century people were actually able to visit the Fair, I think one of t
he things that would strike us as most unfamiliar is the extent of the transmutational approach in many of the displays themselves. The Forestry Building, to take an obvious example, was

  500 by 200 feet, and with its main facade fronting on the Lake; in style of architecture it is of the rustic order, its roof thatched with bark, its sides of wooden slabs from which the bark has been removed, and its entrances fashioned in various kinds of wood. But the most unique and attractive feature in this temple of Forestry is the colonnade which supports the roof of the spacious veranda: formed of the trunks of trees twenty-five feet in height its sides are composed of slabs, the frames of doors and windows being sections of logs with the bark removed. From the roofs of the verandas depend borders, or cornices, fashioned from limbs and saplings into simple geometric figures. Bark covers the roofs of both verandas and main structure, a rustic fence surrounding the latter. In the erection of the building wooden pins were substituted for nails and iron bolts.33

  This pales, though, next to a glance at the contents of the Agricultural Pavilion. There were ziggurats of maple sugar, towers and log huts carved from Wisconsin cheese, and assemblies of mannequins dressed in evening gowns woven of grasses and willow fronds. The headquarters of a Detroit brewing firm was "fashioned entirely of bottles" and the Illinois beekeeping industry contributed a beeswax house. California products were "displayed in the form of pavilions fashioned entirely of canned fruits, towers of almonds and walnuts, and tier upon tier of boxes filled with prunes and raisins."34 The pavilion of the Stollwerck brothers of Cologne was

  fashioned of chocolate in the form of a temple of the Renaissance period. It is 38 feet in height, and in its construction were used 30,000 pounds of chocolate and cocoa butter, the latter giving to the structure the semblance of marble. Blocks of chocolate form the foundation, upon which rest fluted columns crowned, above the architrave, by the emblematic eagles of Germany, and surmounted by a dome, with the imperial crown as apex. In the midst of the temple is a heroic statue of Germania, modeled after the figure on the Niederwald monument, and sculptured from a solid mass of chocolate.35

  Other exhibits evidenced a more macabre whimsy:

  One group contains a stuffed animal [a pig] in a gilded chariot, with shoats in place of steeds; in another is a huge hog made of lard, with spectacles on his snout, and pen and inkstand beside him.36

  This genre of folly is rare today, although it survives in a few relics like the well-preserved Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, and in some seasonal events like ice-palace competitions or the petal-covered floats in the Tournament of Roses Parade. These may seem quaint to us, but Baum— who at this time was starting his first successful publishing enterprise, a trade magazine for window dressers— would have been delighted by such things. In Macatawa, he decorated "The Sign of the Goose" with friezes and murals of geese, gooseneck railing uprights, and a goose-shaped rocking chair. Even the upholstery tacks were specially made with heads in the shape of a goose's profile. Baum's cottage may not have been a masterpiece of naive architecture like Ferdinand Cheval's famous Palais Idéal in Lyon, but it was certainly in the same genre, and, as André Breton and his friends were quick to point out about the Palais, such sites can turn menacing quickly. What did the wooden geese look like at night to Baum's young children? Did the empty goose chair rock in the lake wind? Did his son ever say he'd seen the geese looking at him, rustling their wooden wings? Baum paid attention to childhood fears, and more than that, to the fact that the line between fascination and fear is often thin. He knew what it was to imagine as a child imagines, and I believe he knew how this imagining can breed violence and terror.

  There's an apparently primal fascination with transmutation, or, one might say more simply, with having a bunch of things all made out of the same stuff. There's something miraculous about it, virtuose even when it occurs naturally, as in a group of pyritized fossil sea creatures. But there's also a unique hellishness to the monotony of everything in sight's being of one material. Many people have described extreme depression as variations on the image of a world where everything, including one's own body, seems to be made out of damp corrugated cardboard. Are the Gargoyles under some sort of curse?

  Did Baum imagine the Gargoyles as victims of some process of taxidermy or mummification? Were they once flesh-and-blood creatures, now turned to wood by the touch of some craftsman-class Midas or the stare of some unknown species of Gorgon— but, unlike the victims of Medusa and her sisters, still able to live, in fact, as far as we can tell, condemned like the Cumaean Sibyl to live forever?

  But if so, wouldn't their substance be something other than wood? Wood can't be cast, which is essentially what goes on in fossilization. It has to be carved, and Baum describes the Gargoyles several times as carved or crafted. By whom?

  A child sits on the floor in the center of a room, looks around at the varied forms of the furniture surrounding him, and wonders: What are these things for? Are any of them alive? Who made all this?

  Who made the Gargoyles, besides Baum himself? And did he have a reason? Was it some demented human, an itinerant carver of cigar-store Indians, maybe, who somehow wandered down into this Tartarean world? Was their wooden land once a vast underground forest? The mute Gargoyles can't tell us. Are they some sort of stringless marionettes manipulated by a puppeteer high above their country on the surface of the earth? Do the Gargoyles count as illusion or fakery and not as "real" magic?

  Or could it be their substance that has brought itself to mobile life? Could the choice of wood relate to the Frazerian magical properties of holly or mistletoe, or the broomsticks ridden by witches?

  Could it have something to do with the mysterious expression "wicker wings"? The Oxford English Dictionary says this feature is "attributed to various sinister creatures," but that "the source of the allusion is unascertained," and quotes Dryden's Aeneis:

  The Fury on her wicker Wings, sublime through Night,

  She to the Latian Palace took her Flight.37

  Or could the choice of wood have to do with properties of wood itself, properties that are much loved, but also sometimes disturbing? Certainly there's something ominous, as well as something reassuring, about an all-wooden room, with its sound-muffling and its overpowering sweet scent of cell rot. Wood exists between the living and the dead, cut from an organism that bridges the gap between animate life and the earth. And a wooden creature in a wooden land calls into question the distinction between the body and the world around it, prefiguring the time when the body will be reduced to the same class of substance as the soil, as "rocks and stones and trees." Earlier in his career, in one of his pre-Oz fantasies, Baum wrote about a more conventional fairy country called Merryland where the living inhabitants as well as the landscape and buildings are made entirely out of candy. But Baum makes this Land-of-Cockaigne/Rock-Candy-Mountain fantasy his own by mentioning, almost in passing, that the inhabitants also eat the candy, and that although they're immortal, if one of them is broken beyond repair he is eaten by the others. Did Baum think of worlds of this sort as autophagous organisms, like the pig sculpted out of its own reduced fat?

  Or should we look for a simpler explanation? Had Baum simply seen something he might have described as a wooden gargoyle?

  In Baum's day, it was said that if you'd seen the World's Columbian Exposition, you'd pretty much seen everything. But not everything was good, and there were several dark aspects to the Fair. Twenty-first-century folk would probably identify these as the innumerable monuments to colonialism and environmental rape. However, people at the time— or at least the majority of white people— located the "problems" of the Fair either in the seedy carnival come-ons of the Midway Plaisance or in its displays of the less-enriching customs of less-enlightened nations. The pioneering anthropologist Stewart Cullin singled out a "torture dance" performed in the Algerian and Tunisian Village, where a dancer "ate live scorpions and broken glass, grasped red-hot irons, and drew needles through his flesh, w
hile apparently under the influence of some drug."38 This sounds even worse than the Scoodlers' Soup Gavotte.

  Even some of the more "respectable" exhibits weren't to everyone's taste. The usually voluble and indulgent Mr. Bancroft can barely bring himself to describe the pre-Columbian display in the courtyard of the Ethnographical Building— which included E. H. Thompson's casts of Maya friezes from the ruins of Uxmal, in the Yucatán, and of zoomorphs and stelae from the Highland Maya site of Quiriguá— and turns away with a shudder: "For those who care not for these strange weird forms and faces, there is a gallery of forty large photographs.…"39

  Did Baum tour this pavilion, which also included full-scale replicas of Northwest Coast villages, with their huge "carved posts, fashioned by the Haidas into shapes of beast, bird, and man"? How would Baum have described a totem pole to a child?

  Did Baum consciously or unconsciously identify the Gargoyles with American Indians?

  Speculating on the experiences that inspire fantasy can be an imaginative dead end. It doesn't tell you what makes fantasy great, and even assuming you've identified the right bit of inspiration, it doesn't explain why the author chose it and not some other. But considering Baum's genocide editorials is investigating a fairly serious charge. Linking them to his Oz work should entail making, at least, a convincing circumstantial case.