news & notes
Reprint from Quest 89 (January-February): 30.
Because the year 2000 was the centennial of the publication of L. FrankBaum's modern fairy tale The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the book and its author received a great deal of attention (see for example the interpretive and review articles in the last issue of the Quest). Most of the periodical-press hoopla was superficial, but a partial exception was an article by the novelist and man of letters John Updike, "Oz Is Us: Celebrating the Wizard's Centennial" (NewYorker, Sept. 25, 2000, 84-88).
Updike's critical essay is one of the few recent treatments of Baum and Oz to cover not just the surface events of his life and the warm and fuzzy popular appeal of the story, but to touch upon the intellectual aspects of Oz. Those aspects have been neglected by both the popular press and Oz fans, but on an unconscious level they may be factors that have helped to ensure the survival of the Oz myth. Updike thinks enthusiasts have overrated the Oz story, but he acknowledges the cultural dimensions of Baum's work. Updike's knowledge ofTheosophy is far from deep, but he is aware of its influence on Baum, observing:
American Theosophy, to which Baum had been introduced by his formidable mother-in-law [Matilda Joslyn Gage], mixed spiritualism and Buddhistand Hindu beliefs with a meliorism that rejected the darker, Devil-acknowledging side of Christianity. "God is Nature, and Nature God," Baum said; yet he also professed an animistic vision in which
every bit of wood, every drop of liquid, every grain of sand or portion of rock has its myriad of inhabitants. . . . These invisible and vapory beings are known as Elementals. . . . They are soulless, but immortal,frequently possessed of extraordinary intelligence, and again remarkably stupid.
Madame H. P. Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, in her book"Isis Unveiled" (1878 [sic, correctly 1877]) wrote of these Elementals as "the creatures evolved in the four kingdoms of earth, air, fire, and water, and called by the kabalists gnomes, sylphs, salamanders, and undines." This giddying, virtually bacterial multitudinousness came to characterize Oz as sequels multiplied its regions and its strange and magical tribes; but the"Wizard" itself presents an uncluttered cosmogony, drawn in bright blunt tints.According to Theosophy, our astral bodies come in distinct colors, and so do the regions of Oz, with their inhabitants.