Seriality and Texts for Young People

The Compulsion to Repeat

M. Reimer,N. Ali,D. England,M. Dennis Unrau,Kenneth A. Loparo

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137356000
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Criticism

Seriality and Texts for Young People is a collection of thirteen scholarly essays about series and serial texts directed to children and youth, each of which begins from the premise that a basic principle of seriality is repetition.

1

Off to See the Wizard Again and Again

Laurie Langbauer

I

This paper focuses on L. Frank Baum’s character the Tin Woodman. It considers repetition in children’s series fiction by reading the Oz series through some well-known theorists of repetition and serial production – Walter Benjamin on mechanical reproduction, Sigmund Freud on the uncanny – along with work on the uncanny by Ernst Jentsch and Masahiro Mori. It locates series fiction in relation to other popular forms of the early twentieth century that work through repetition: dime novels and comic strips. These different forms of seriality were widely read and enormously popular. That was their threat. Children’s series fiction during the machine age was also scapegoated as debased because it was popular. For the first sixty years or so of its reception, various social critics, educators, and librarians dismissed the Oz series in particular as cheap, repetitive, perfunctory, too accessible and common. That response arose from a cultural ambivalence throughout the industrialized twentieth century about art in general as increasingly technologically produced and mechanically delivered.

As a character, the Tin Woodman cuts to the heart of that response and exposes children’s series fiction as working within a complex cultural register. The Oz series captures the ambivalence that led to its own dismissal, but it also counters that dismissal by emphasizing the potential of mechanical reproduction. The emphasis on mechanization and repetition in Oz at one and the same time reflects its serial impulse and advances series fiction as the epitome of modern literary possibilities.

The theorists I cite wrote at different moments during the twentieth century: in 1936, Benjamin responds retroactively to changes in print technology in the nineteenth century that established newspapers and periodicals as central modes of technological production. Mori, in 1970, turns to robotics rather than print technology to reflect on contemporary mechanical means of representation. Yet both are connected by an interest in mechanical reproduction as part of an industrial (rather than an informational) understanding of technology.¹ Freud and Jentsch offer the uncanny as a tool to register the ambivalence within the suspicion that industrialism turned people into machines: a simultaneous dis-ease about and inescapable familiarity with mechanization as the route to modern identity.

The Oz series is rich in representing not just the horrors but also the generative nature of modern identity. The Tin Man is an apt symbol for the complications of art and identity, which, at the time Baum wrote, were increasingly understood as mechanically reproduced.² He is apt because he is himself (in part) a mechanical man and also one whom Baum could not stop reproducing, repeating again and again in various avatars. The Tin Man has remained a generative source of artistic responses to mechanization, an iconic figure spinning off references to technology in movies, television, comic books, and sculpture, including the question of whether depicting technology as heartless tells the whole story.³

Late twentieth-century theorists of the visual emphasize the representational potential of mechanized reproduction. The rise of the newspaper comic strip at the beginning of the twentieth century, for instance, testifies to how mechanical repetition translates into modern “sequential form.”⁴ The art critic Craig Owens sees Allan McCollum’s oeuvre (various series of nearly identical objects) as reflecting the serial impulse of twentieth-century visual culture. Owens argues that it demonstrates that a “serial mode of production” is not simply an element of mass-produced forms, but “the dominant model for art” in general within late capitalist consumer society (118). Seriality reflects on mass production by providing only “the illusion of choice”: it promises that the “next” it is always about to offer is meaningfully unlike what has come before (that is, it progresses through sequence), but it actually proffers only a “limited gamut of differences,” Owens claims, not sequence so much as recurrence or replication (119). Yet Owens finds that foregrounding such iterations exposes their productive character: rather than being “melancholic” or “diminished,” McCollum’s foregrounding of assembly-line production “restores to repetition its critical – even revolutionary – power” (120). Seriality is revolutionary not just in de-privileging the individual, but in revalidating the repetition that also underlies the popular.

Mechanical reproduction is a strategy of art in the modern machine age to which some fine artists tie their products, but many also reflect on that element within popular forms. In fact, “serial production does not recognize the fine art/mass culture distinction (and is partly responsible for its dissolution)” (Owens 119). In Owens’s analysis, when revealing its own machinery, the series’ self-referentiality transforms the loss of meaningful difference into its most significant distinguishing characteristic. Likewise, the Tin Man reflects on Oz’s serial character, asserting the mass cultural identity of children’s series fiction as one important arena for complicating the supposed certainties that underlie value and meaning.

As a reflection of industrial times, seriality constitutes rather than diminishes artistic possibility. To the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the repeated visual images that make up another modern twentieth-century form, moving pictures, provide a “strategic” metadiscourse about mechanized repetition (313). The modern image “is no longer something immobile” (314) but repeats, Agamben asserts, and from that repetition takes its “force” and “grace” (315): “Repetition restores the possibility of what was, renders it anew; it’s almost a paradox. To repeat something is to make it possible anew” (316). Standardization, the loss of difference, becomes a structural element rather than a liability. Precisely because each instalment calls up what has gone before – the previous always gesturing to the next iteration, the next always recalling the prior – this linkage “opens up a zone of undecidability between the real and the possible,” in which “you understand that yes, everything is possible” (316), including the horrific but also exceeding it (“everything is possible” is Hannah Arendt’s phrase about the horrors of the Holocaust). Repeated images keep possibilities ongoing and open. Defining serial publication as “a single work distributed incrementally in time,” art critic Victor Brand captures this potentiality in a nutshell: as a modern principle of art, serial publication relies upon “the notion of futurity” (28). What defines the series is the constant promise of “the next one” (29).

In the Oz series, those meta-images are characteristically images of mechanical men. They stand for automatic repetition and they explicitly gesture to the future. Benjamin, Freud, Jentsch, and Mori explore how mechanical men provide an illusion of choice that actually enables new possibilities; they look like people, but not quite, unsettling boundaries between the animate and inanimate, the human and mechanical. By simultaneously defamiliarizing the category of art and the identity of people, they point to how meaning is made. Comics scholar Tim Blackmore, writing about the early comics of Winsor McCay, observes that Baum’s world is “full of polished surfaces which cover complex gear mechanisms” (34). Popular forms such as comics and series fiction not only depend upon such clockwork; they let the gears show through.

Art, in its inventiveness and gadgetry, makes the familiar strange but also the uncanny pleasurable. During the first half of the twentieth century, pundits in venues such as the New York Times, North American Review, or Bookman often denied the value and often the pleasure of forms associated with seriality: how could anyone enjoy something so repetitive and rote as dime novels, comic strips, and juvenile series fiction? Only seldom did the debate consider these forms as sophisticated, self-aware, and self-questioning. And, if a supposedly bankrupt form “admits of this doubt,” Freud writes about what seems comic, “the reason can only be that it has a façade – in these instances a comic one – in the contemplation of which one person is satiated while another may try to peer behind it. A suspicion may arise, moreover, that this façade is intended to dazzle the examining eye and that these stories have therefore something to conceal” (“Jokes” 105–6). The significance they conceal may lie in what seems most apparent – the form in which they were conducted, the rote repetitions that, writing in 1924, both Ernest Brennecke and Gilbert Seldes admired as sophisticated analysis encoded into their very form. To these critics, and (they argued) more to the point to their artists, the value of comics was their winking self-knowledge.

In comics, in dime novels, in series fiction like Oz, the queasy ambiguity of mechanical doppelgängers and the luridness of pulp illustrations engage the eye and direct it to what is right in front of it – not some hidden content but the open secret of form itself. Oz seems to be about mechanical men – and it is – but it is also about itself as a series, about seriality itself. Mechanical men are part of the story, but they also embody the machinery that makes the story work. Benjamin claims that new approaches such as psychoanalysis discover new ways to see, and his observations might apply to new mass forms like series fiction as well. Each helped “isolat[e] and ma[k]e analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception” (235). Like Baum’s green-coloured spectacles, as a new apparatus through which to perceive, optics like seriality change the character of what has been before our eyes all along, revealing the ways we bring meaning to it.⁵ Mechanical men in Oz supply the instrument that reveals seriality as fundamental to the meaning of art in the modern age.

II

Repetition and ongoingness seem to be the hallmark of the cultural presence of Oz. Baum strung out the first book (1900) into a series of 14. After Baum’s death, the series was extended to a total of 40 books produced by different writers. It continues still in seemingly endless unauthorized sequels and modern avatars. Oz’s character was defined as much by its look as its content. William Wallace Denslow illustrated only the first Oz book, but he determined how we would continue to see Oz by influencing subsequent illustrators – John R. Neill the most long-standing – and by designing the costumes for the wildly successful musical spin-off (1902), which was just the first of Oz’s multimedia reproductions, including early movie travelogues and a series of silent films. The 1939 MGM movie, indebted to Denslow’s earlier costumes, is the best known in this series of ongoing visual stagings.

Enduringly popular with readers, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was initially heralded by reviewers as charming and original, but “as the series continued,” Suzanne Rahn writes in her summary of Oz’s reception, “and began to seem repetitious, reviews became few and perfunctory … [and] no longer bothered to distinguish between one Oz book and another” (xi). Anne Carroll Moore, the influential children’s librarian at the New York Public Library from 1906–41, notoriously swept all the Oz books off her shelves in the 1930s, and librarians throughout the country followed suit. They thought that series fiction (mass-produced, commercial, interminable, formulaic, and repetitive) had no redeeming value and would harm any children exposed to it. In 1948, South Carolina libraries put Oz at the top of a list of “books not to be purchased, not to be accepted as gifts, not to be processed and not to be circulated”: “These ‘series type’ books are … unwholesome for the children” (“Books” 3) and their presence “indicates … lack of interest in [children’s] welfare” (4).⁶

By Oz’s centenary in 2000, Rahn observes, critics had generally come to see Oz in particular and series fiction in general as deserving of analysis, because the critical climate had changed to recognize how popular literature revealed the ways in which changing historical context determines changing value. But that did not necessarily mean a revaluation of the popular. In a 1996 essay, Richard Flynn still finds in Oz’s serial identity the destructive by-product of mechanical reproduction: it stimulates ongoing avidity for endless new instalments, enforcing the logic of planned obsolescence. Rereading (Flynn cites Roland Barthes) should radically refuse consumerist logic (125), but, by selling new instalments that take over its logic, “the purveyors of child-culture … condition the marginalized desire for repetition (rereading) into the more acceptable desire for serial commodities (the sequel)” (125).

Flynn’s essay is a modern statement of a persistent condemnation of Oz and series fiction: the worry that its purveyors corrupt children into benighted consumers by recycling the same empty product. When it comes to their profits, those purveyors cynically believe that “[s]erial consumption is a small price to pay for [children’s] ‘real happiness’ – a small trouble, and well worth taking” (125). “[T]he window-dresser had deliberately aroused the cupidity of the child consumers” (124), Flynn accuses Baum, converting children’s desire not into “real” happiness but “a kind of brand loyalty” that perpetuates Oz’s line of goods (124). Oz’s critics indict it for the logic of modern advertising that delivers nothing more than its own self-perpetuating greed.

That seriality capitalizes on and exploits children remains a criticism that, if anything, relies on evidence of children’s ongoing desire for serial fiction as confirmation. But focusing on the symbolic range of the mechanical reproduction within such new forms points to another way entirely to read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the series form. Freud, in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” for instance, supplies a different perspective by highlighting images of the mechanical.⁷ E. T. A. Hoffman’s 1814 story “The Sandman,” in which the hero’s love for the clockwork puppet Olympia reveals his repressed childhood terrors, demonstrates why we feel horror at involuntary repetition. The jerky wind-up deformities of clockwork figures – like but disturbingly different from us – point adults to our childhoods – like but disturbingly different from what we have become. Automata, machines that look like people, represent the return of the familiar made st...