The Magic of Oz
– L. Frank Baum
A young Munchkin boy, Kiki Aru, suffers itchy feet. He
longs to walk the wider world but is forbidden to by his sorcerer father. Unhappy,
Kiki Aru becomes resentful, sullen and withdrawn. Refusing to attend a festival
with his parents, he snoops in his father stuff and finds a magic spell. To
transform himself and others into anything he chooses, Kiki utters the magic
word pyrzqxgl [pɪr ‘kwɪks gəl].
Okay, I know what you’re thinking. Don’t even try. You can
exhaust every pronunciation and still not get it right.
With great power comes great responsibility, which cruel
Kiki Aru shirks, unable to control his rotten impulses. When Kiki Aru says, “I
hate good people. I’ve always wanted to be wicked but I didn’t know how,” he is
overheard by the exiled Nome King, Ruggedo, the arch-villain in numerous Oz
books.
Ruggedo and Kiki Aru scheme up an invasion of Oz,
changing people to animals and vice versa to get their way. Later though, Kiki turns on his partner in
crime because Kiki is afraid of looking weak: “You acted as if I was your
slave, and I wanted to show these forest people that I am more powerful than
you." The things bullies, cowards, and sneaks do to look tough, though they
are broken and vulnerable inside, are often featured in Baum’s Oz.
Baum is writing mainly for young girls, what with all the
birthday parties with cake, confectionery, darling animals, flowers, presents,
pretty clothes, and most importantly, nobody left out and everybody getting
along. Once a boy reader in the ever more distant past, I can assert
with confidence that these things have but scant appeal to boy readers. Though
missing what Baum called “bloodcurdling incidents,” such brutes, however,
may be willing to tolerate copious cuteness if a quest is involved, as there is
in nearly all the Oz books.
The second appeal of Oz books is Baum’s wisdom. I think
there are plenty worse messages a kid can draw from a book than feeling
gratitude for what you have:
"There's lots o' things folks
don't 'preciate," replied the sailor-man. "If somethin' would 'most
stop your breath, you'd think breathin' easy was the finest thing in life.
When a person's well, he don't realize how jolly it is, but when he gets sick
he 'members the time he was well, an' wishes that time would come back. Most
folks forget to thank God for givin' 'em two good legs, till they lose one o'
'em, like I did; and then it's too late, 'cept to praise God for leavin'
one."
And here Dorothy dons her Zen Monk Robe:
"Why, I'm not afraid to go
anywhere, if the Cowardly Lion is with me," she said. "I know him
pretty well, and so I can trust him. He's always afraid, when we get into
trouble, and that's why he's cowardly; but he's a terrible fighter, and that's
why he isn't a coward. He doesn't like to fight, you know, but when he HAS to,
there isn't any beast living that can conquer him."
In other words, feeling fright is natural in frightening circumstances but we can
control that fear with thoughts and actions. We don’t have to behave or respond
in a fearful way; we can choose to act bravely even when we are peeing our pants. Call this moral and educational or
preachy. It’s also useful.
The third appeal is that Baum is genuinely funny. One
wonders if he was genially satirizing Edison, another prolific inventor, and
rowdy college students of his day.
But it so happened that
Professor Wogglebug (who had invented so much that he had acquired the habit)
carelessly invented a Square-Meal Tablet, which was no bigger than your little
finger-nail but contained, in condensed form, the equal of a bowl of soup, a
portion of fried fish, a roast, a salad and a dessert, all of which gave the
same nourishment as a square meal.
The Professor was so proud of
these Square-Meal Tablets that he began to feed them to the students at his
college, instead of other food, but the boys and girls objected because they
wanted food that they could enjoy the taste of. It was no fun at all to swallow
a tablet, with a glass of water, and call it a dinner; so they refused to eat
the Square-Meal Tablets. Professor Wogglebug insisted, and the result was that
the Senior Class seized the learned Professor one day and threw him into the
river—clothes and all. Everyone knows that a wogglebug cannot swim, and so the
inventor of the wonderful Square-Meal Tablets lay helpless on the bottom of the
river for three days before a fisherman caught one of his legs on a fishhook
and dragged him out upon the bank.
Like Conan Doyle was trapped by Sherlock Holmes, Baum wanted
to leave Oz be after five books. But public demand was such that he felt
compelled to serve his fans. The Magic of
Oz was the next to last Oz book, published in 1919, but it has no evidence
that Baum was going through the motions as Conan Doyle, only a human
being, was showing in the later Holmes short stories. I recommend this to
general readers; I don’t know enough about fantasy to know if this would measure
up to the exacting standards of fantasy readers. For a good evaluation see
Martin Gardner and Russell B. Nye’s critical appreciation,
a pioneering example of scholars looking a popular literature.
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