In his essay “A Short Text about Magic” (British Film Institute, London, 1992), Salman Rushdie remarks about the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz, “Glinda and the Witch of the West are the only two symbols of power in a film which is largely about the powerless, and it’s instructive to ‘unpack’ them. They are both women, and a striking aspect of The Wizard of Oz is its lack of a male hero.… The power of men, it is suggested, is illusory; the power of women is real.” Do the three Oz books republished here concern themselves with differences between illusion and reality, or, more to the point, between the reality of feminine power and the illusion of male power? Is this really Baum’s point, or was it MGM’s point? Or is it merely Rushdie’s point? How do Ozma, Glinda, and Dorothy measure up on these scores?

  When Baum wrote the Oz books, there was little else like them: an extended series of adventures about a fantastic land created by a single artist. Surely there’d be no Chronicles of Narnia without Oz, and perhaps no Middle-earth either, even though Narnia is mapped out with the sextants of Christianity, and Middle-earth with even more arcane instruments of philology. Is it fair to consider Oz in the same breath with Narnia and Middle-earth, Prydain and Earthsea, or does it more reasonably share the shelf with Edward Lear in such works as “The Dong with the Luminous Nose” and Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”? Put otherwise, what might Baum’s inspirations actually be?

  Is there such a thing as too much inventiveness? Does too much zany drollery tend to paralyze the underlying consistency of a land that is presented as a universe unto itself? Think of the nonsense of Mother Goose—“the dish ran away with the spoon”—where every new rhyme posits a new condition of life, just as every new country in Oz seems to have its own laws and to be largely self-contained. Or is Oz an early version of Douglas Adams’s galaxy, the one the hitchhiker so needed a guide for—a place that is characterized by inconsistency, surreal incompatibility?

  In The New Yorker, John Updike once published a consideration of Oz that was called “OZ IS US.” Updike’s critical mind and his poetic sensibility invent a relationship among those words that begin with vowels and end in sibilants: Oz, is, us. Or is that not us but the U.S.? Is Oz the U.S.? Does Oz rely for its essential characteristic on the notion of a land of plenty, of harmony, all personal satisfactions fulfilled, all inequities resolved? In what ways are these Oz narratives derived from how America dreams of itself?

  THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD

  Maya Angelou

  •

  A. S. Byatt

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  Caleb Carr

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  Christopher Cerf

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  Charles Frazier

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  Vartan Gregorian

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  Richard Howard

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  Charles Johnson

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  Jon Krakauer

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  Edmund Morris

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  Azar Nafisi

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  Joyce Carol Oates

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  Elaine Pagels

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  John Richardson

  •

  Salman Rushdie

  •

  Oliver Sacks

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  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  •

  Carolyn See

  •

  William Styron

  •

  Gore Vidal

 

 

  L. Frank Baum, A Wonderful Welcome to Oz

 

 

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