Reimagining Oz Today

Today is the official publication date of Oz Reimagined, an anthology edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen. As io9 reported last month, the individual stories in this collection will also be on sale as Kindle Singles.

Among the contributors, Jane Yolen wrote “Blown Away,” which has the sell line: “What if Toto was dead and stuffed, Ozma was a circus freak, and everything you thought you knew as Oz was really right here in Kansas?” Way to sell the magic, Jane!

Dale Bailey’s “City So Bright” is summarized as “Marxism comes to the Emerald City.” Didn’t it already?

More controversial, perhaps, is Orson Scott Card’s “Off to See the Emperor.” Not because of its approach to reimagining Oz—“Frank Baum’s son has the real experiences that his father later fictionalized.”—but because Card has become increasingly notorious for his homophobic writing and activism. Some Superman fans are dismayed that he’s scripting a story for DC Comics. Will Oz fans want to buy a book that includes Card’s work?

Judging MGM’s Wizard of Oz as an Adaptation

Last week I quoted a Salon article collecting thoughts by a bunch of writers about their favorite and least favorite adaptations of children’s books. Several had interesting (and varied) things to say about the most famous Oz movies.

Gregory Maguire, author lately of Out of Oz:

I would insist that the 1939 film of “The Wizard of Oz” is better constructed than the 1900 novel on which it is based, and that “Return to Oz” is an overlooked masterpiece much better than the several Baum novels upon which it is based.

(More to come on the contrast between Baum’s and Maguire’s approaches to Oz. I need to get my notes together.)

Jane Yolen, author of so much:

I think the Judy Garland “Wizard of Oz” is better than the book, which, while wildly inventive, has such flat affect and overly simplistic prose that it makes my teeth ache.

(More of Yolen’s thoughts on the book, and my response to that assessment, back here.)

Daniel Nayeri, editor and author:

I don’t think “The Wizard of Oz” can rightly be called a “good” adaptation. It might be a good movie, but it didn’t do the world of Oz any favors (aside from keeping it in print for so long).

While the MGM Wizard of Oz does a lot of things right, it also gets a lot about Oz wrong. The need to add a valuable lesson about life to the story—“She had to learn it for herself”—both brings absolute jibberjabber out of Judy Garland’s mouth and turns her whole trip to Oz into a punishment. I think that’s even more off the mark than making Dorothy a wimp and making Oz a dream.

Ruth Berman’s Quest for Bradamant

I’m pleased to post this interview with Ruth Berman, author of Bradamant’s Quest. This is a new novel about an old character, originally created in the late Middle Ages. Yet Bradamant is also the forerunner of the many female knights in fiction today, so this tale can speak to modern readers.

Bradamant’s Quest is set in a fantasy world that was immensely popular for centuries, but which we don’t visit much anymore: the “Matter of France,” or romances of Charlemagne. How did you decide to add to that saga? What does it offer that we don’t find in other great myths of the western world?

When I read the stories in the Incompleat Enchanter series by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, many years back, their treatments of the worlds that Harold the I.E. visits made me interested in looking up and reading the books involved. That eventually led me to reading a translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and I thought Ariosto’s Bradamant was a fascinating character, sure of herself and resourceful in going after her true love (a warrior in the enemy army’s forces? — no reason to give up, is her feeling).

Bradamant gets treated rather poorly in modern stories, being presented as a too-big, beefy, well-meaning-but-clumsy type in deCamp/Pratt, and as a rigidly military fighting machine in Italo Calvino’s The Non-Existent Knight. I thought there ought to be more adventures for Bradamant as strong without being therefore laughable or unpleasant, and eventually decided to do something about that.

Oberon also makes an appearance in Bradamant’s Quest. I know he’s got roots in the Middle Ages, but has he played a role in Carolingian romances before? Would we recognize him from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (or would he recognize himself)?

Oberon the Fairy King is a major character in the 12th century Huon of Bordeaux, Huon being one of Charlemagne’s knights. The 1534 translation of it into English is where Shakespeare got his Oberon. The name is equivalent to Auberon, which is equivalent to the German Alberich, meaning elf-lord, although Oberon would not recognize himself in the Alberich of the stories of the Volsung Saga/Ring of the Nibelungs. Huon’s Oberon is enough like Shakespeare’s to make them recognizable, for instance, in their power and in their inclination to befriend mortals, although Shakespare made important changes, such as introducing Titania and Robin Goodfellow into Oberon’s court.

The romance authors of medieval Europe freely added to each other’s work, as when Ariosto wrote Orlando Furioso to finish Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato. These days, many people would call that plagiarism, or fanfiction (and which is more respectable?). What are your thoughts on this sort of collective fiction-making? Should we revise our ideas of originality and look at it differently today?

No one seems to object to modern Arthurian adventures. Jane Yolen likes to say that King-Arthur-and-his-knights make up one of the earliest shared-world settings, although by no means the earliest. Tennyson, when he was doing his retellings of stories from Greek mythology (and the same applies to his Arthurian adventures in his Idylls of the King) remarked in a letter to a friend that he did not like to re-tell a story if he thought it was simply a rechaufée, re-heated leftovers, but if he felt he had something to say that was more than could be found in the original, then he felt that his version was worth doing. And, as T.S. Eliot said: only bad poets borrow — good poets steal.

You’re a charter member of the Int’l Wizard of Oz Club, and you’ve been writing articles about fantasy literature and resurrecting lost stories for many years, as well as writing short stories. How does it feel to be publishing your first novel?

I’m delighted to have it in print. I remember some years back I was on a panel at a science-fiction convention about writing stories based on legends/myths. I tried to say something about Bradamant, and the moderator kept shutting me up, I think because she thought an unpublished novel could not be worth talking about. I take a good deal of satisfaction in thinking that now I can tell people about it, and if they think it sounds interesting, it’s possible for them to get it.

Bradamant’s Quest comes to us from FTL Publications of Minnesota, which offers a free peek at the first chapter.

Jane Yolen: “The children don’t care about the politicians”

The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, just ran an interview with author Jane Yolen, prompted by her response to news that Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) had read a picture book she wrote at a public appearance. She expressed a hope that politicians like him would do more than just read to children while the cameras are on—that they would recognize the value and virtue of funding libraries, for instance.

Though Yolen is quite clear on her dislike and distrust of the “Tea Party” movement that (with his employer’s money) helped elect Johnson over Russ Feingold, I think it’s notable that she avoids easy potshots at the man’s approach to children’s literature:

CT: Did he seem to understand the moral of your story about the dinosaur correctly? (In my article I quote him telling children that they will make their parents very happy by following the "lessons" the dinosaur teaches them about cleaning up after themselves, putting their toys in neat rows, and not shoving dirty laundry to the back of drawers.)

JY: It is a book that is not just about manners, but as they say in Britain is also taking the micky out of regular manners books. The dinos in the books are really children who can be naughty and natural and charming at one and the same time. And their parents who still love them even when they have their moments of outrageousness.

CT: Is it exciting when celebrities or politicians read your books like this? Which others have done so?

JY: Not exciting at all. I'd rather the parents were reading to the children. Or the librarian. The children don't care about the politicians. . . .

CT: The senator said that he read "Curious George" books to his three children except that when his son [Johnson’s first two children were daughters] was four or five he started reading him the Wall Street Journal. Any comment about what could happen to a four-or five-year-old child raised on the Wall Street Journal?

JY: My youngest child's favorite book at that age was "Peterson's Bird Guide." Bird-watching with his father was his most passionate interest at the time. If you have a struggling reader, you go where the child is, not push books on them in which they have no interest. He's still a passionate birder and now an award-winning nature photographer.

Of course, that generous perspective was lost on some in the right wing, who can’t abide any criticism.

A Different Standard for the Dust Bowl?

Matt Phelan’s The Storm in the Barn is set in the Dust Bowl of the late 1920s and 1930s. It does a fine job of evoking that environmental catastrophe. I wasn’t so impressed with how the book’s plot was resolved, with a jump into the supernatural. The young hero appears to end the drought and fix his personal troubles in a way that the laws of nature made impossible for real children of that time and place.

Would reviewers be as quick to praise an equally fantastic treatment of other historic tragedies? In particular, I wonder about depictions of the Nazi Holocaust. Would critics, librarians, and teachers be as comfortable with a novel about that history that offers such an unreal resolution?

In The Devil’s Arithmetic, Jane Yolen used the fantastic element of time travel to introduce a modern girl (and, through her, modern readers) to the horrors of the Nazi death camps. At the end, the heroine escapes being killed by traveling forward through time to her home. And that produced some objections.

In an editorial for the Bulletin of the Center of Children’s Books in 1988, Roger Sutton praised aspects of The Devil’s Arithmetic but, as he’s acknowledged, “took issue with the fantasy aspect of the plot.” Specifically, he felt that ending undercut the historical reality:

Time-travel fantasy can be an honorable form of historical fiction, but how effective is it as an introduction to the Holocaust? . . .

Jane Yolen has written a powerful, not easily forgotten, story, but is it a story about the Holocaust? The horror—and the history—are betrayed by the essentially comforting vision of the story and its time-travel form. . . .

This optimistic, neatly rounded lesson fits comfortably into children’s literature, a genre that, despite well-known exceptions, demands a hopeful conclusion. How much hope can be extracted from the Holocaust?

I saw something similar in The Storm in the Barn. It offers hope for young Jack, and a sense of accomplishment he badly needs. But that comes about entirely at the fantasy level: Jack defeats the personification of the rain (who’s a rather easily defeated personification, as these things go) in a physical tussle atop a windmill.

More recently, many people objected to John Boyne’s fabulistic treatment of the Holocaust, The Boy in Striped Pajamas, because it, too, offered historically impossible hope. (Others loved the book for the same reason.) As of tonight the novel’s entry on Wikipedia argues:

it is not historical fiction. The very premise of the book - that there would be a child of Shmuel’s age - is, according to critics, an unacceptable fabrication that does not reflect the reality of life in the camps.

The Storm in the Barn is also a fabrication, even more obviously since one doesn’t need to look up histories to see the unreal elements. But no one has called Phelan’s book “unacceptable.” Indeed, it just received the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction.

The Dust Bowl and the Nazi Holocaust are separated by a decade at most, so I don’t think our different attitudes toward those events are based on how fresh their memories are. Instead, I can think of several other reasons for the difference, including:

• The lack of human villains in the Dust Bowl, meaning that the personification of the storm doesn’t absolve anyone of responsibility.
• The lack of any small or vocal groups denying the severity of the Dust Bowl.
• America’s powerful agricultural and economic recovery after the Dust Bowl.

But what happens if climate change becomes a major problem in daily life? In that case, treating an environmental catastrophe as fodder for a fantastic fable might raise as many objections as those fantastic treatments of the Holocaust.

Why The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Is Not a Good Literary Novel

Back in June, Newsweek interviewed Jane Yolen about her five most important books. The interchange ended with a request for "A classic you revisited with disappointment," and Jane answered:

L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. All I could see were the repetitions, the unvarying sentences and the paper-thin characters.

And indeed, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not a good literary novel.

Nor do I think that it belongs in that category. We've come to see all book-length fiction through the model of the character-driven novel, but I think Wizard's novelistic qualities are mixed equally with Augustan satire and oral poetry.

Most of the book's characters aren't individuals. Many appear in groups: Winkies, Fighting Trees, Hammerheads, wolves. In the whole story, there are only ten characters with proper names. Of those, five are the book's Americans--Dorothy, Toto, Uncle Henry, Aunt Em, and Oz--and none of those has a surname. Only later, as the Oz books became more novelistic, did Baum disclose that Dorothy's family is named Gale and the Wizard's original last name was Diggs.

Of the other five named characters, only one--Glinda--plays a role in the plot. The other four are incidental, in three cases appearing in episodes that seem to have been late additions to the story. There's a Munchkin landowner named Boq; Gayelette and Quelala, a couple mentioned in the story of the Magic Cap; and a china figurine named Mr. Joker.

All the other individual characters are identified not by name but by a descriptive label: the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the soldier with the green whiskers, the queen of the field mice, the king of the winged monkeys, and so on. Sometimes those identifiers tell us the characters' most important traits straight away: the Good Witch of the North, the Cowardly Lion, the Wicked Witch of the West. Again, in later writing Baum went back and named some of these characters: the Tin Woodman became Nick Chopper, the soldier Omby Amby.

In sum, the characters in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz aren't rounded characters but types, often representing concepts: "I wish I had a heart (though I am actually already kind)"; "I represent the power of the state in the Emerald City"; "I am a wicked witch." In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (another Augustan satire which people try to read as a novel), the king of Lilliput shows little depth or growth as a character. In the same way, Wizard's characters are two-dimensional and unchanging.

As for oral poetry, we know that Baum created The Wonderful Wizard of Oz first as a series of bedtime tales for his sons. Only later did he put the saga on paper. In contrast, he composed the rest of his Oz stories on paper first, usually as novels and occasionally as scripts for stage or screen.

I posit that the "repetitions" and "unvarying sentences" that Jane noted are the remnant of the story's roots in being told aloud. Those repetitions are formulas, like the "wine-dark sea" in The Odyssey. At many moments each of Dorothy's three companions comments on events in turn, each speaking from the perspective he represents. The prose is very spare. Depending on one's literary states and bedtime, those repeated patterns could be soothing or grating.

Baum was never a terrific literary stylist, and his plots were haphazard. His genius lay in characterization. Only when he started to write Oz novels did he color in the characters from Wizard. Those later books show us the Scarecrow's playful side, the Tin Woodman's dignified ego, Dorothy's risk-taking confidence, and so on. And those are the characters that fans of the Oz books remember.