A brief introduction: this is an essay I wrote in 2019, for my Masters in Science Fiction & Fantasy at Anglia Ruskin University. It analyses the novel Hexwood* by Diana Wynne Jones as a response to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz* by L Frank Baum. If you like, please feel free to read the novel first, and then come back to this essay. Or – if you feel comfortable just going with the flow and trusting that my words will make sense in their own way – then hop on board and enjoy!
Note: On re-reading the essay, I should stress that there are some phrases/arguments that don’t hold up as well as I would like, and which I would now ideally rewrite. However, time prevents me from doing this, so I hope you will be generous in your understanding of it.
*Disclosure: If you buy books through these links, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.
“There’s no place like… Homeworld?” Reading Diana Wynne Jones’s Hexwood as a response to themes in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
What if…? Jack Zipes has written enthusiastically about the importance of asking this question, specifically in the context of how (and why) we tell stories to children. In his 2016 article ‘Once upon a Time: Changing the World through Storytelling’, he describes a series of workshops he conducted with children, in which they were encouraged to tell and retell mini-stories of their own creation, and see how those stories evolved in the retelling. He states: ‘there was a sense among them that the world could be changed, just as old stories could be altered, to meet their needs and desires’ (p.281). In this we hear echoes of Joseph Campbell, whose seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces (2008) addresses similar issues: there are commonalities to myths over the ages and across ethnicities, but each new cultural grouping will adopt and adapt the old stories to suit their new circumstances.
Julia Kristeva coined the term ‘intertextuality’ (1966) to describe the assimilation of earlier works into new ones, and Diana Wynne Jones is arguably one of the process’s greatest exponents: her work is replete with allusions to and even wholesale reworkings of old texts. A classic example is her reimagining of the stories of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer in her novel Fire and Hemlock; she describes her method in great detail in her article ‘The Heroic Ideal – A Personal Odyssey’ (1989). Her referencing is deliberate: here and elsewhere she makes it very clear that ‘yes, I do know really where I’m getting it from, and it is intentional, and very grateful I am too’ (2012a, p.170). Her novels are premised on the asking of ‘what if?’, and she identifies this as a key component of a good children’s book: ‘Very early on it will say “what if?” and proceed with enjoyment and wonder to run through the possibilities resulting from that’ (2012b, p.65).
Hexwood appears to have been written not only as a conscious illustration of intertextuality, but also to suggest a constructive purpose for it. The novel runs through a multitude of possibilities; storylines overlap and contradict each other as the tale progresses, in a manner directly recalling Barthes’s assertion that ‘a text is… a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’ (1977, p.146). Substitute ‘scenes’ for ‘writings’, and we have Jones’s narrative, which manifests the multiple scenarios being played out by the Bannus within the world of the book. As a machine ‘designed to run through a set of scenes, showing what would happen if you made decision A… and so on’ (Jones, 2000, p.135), it reifies the philosophy behind Zipes’s and Jones’s approach to storytelling, and builds practical utility into Barthes’s observations. Vierran and the others experience, through the Bannus, the same practice at problem solving as we experience through the act of reading, and, at the end, they emerge with a better understanding of themselves, the world and how to navigate it.
In addition to its own self-generated storylines, Hexwood contains numerous allusions to other texts, and it is instructive to interrogate some of Jones’s choices. Susan Ang has teased out the connections with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land via the Fisher King legend (2010), which aligns Hexwood with both the older world of myth and modern poetry. Another text that seems to be just as consciously – if subtly – referenced is L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900): all the more interesting as this, like Hexwood, is a work aimed at young people. Jones has previous form with Oz, having reworked aspects of it (such as the scarecrow and the wicked witch) in Howl’s Moving Castle (1986). Gili Bar-Hillel’s examination of these two texts discerns that: ‘The Wizard of Oz is also a book which was itself written as a response to fairytale tropes in the attempt to renew them’ (2011, p.396). However, given that the narrative arcs of Oz differ substantially from the ones that tend to play out in Jones’s work, it is interesting to consider whether Hexwood has been written as, in its turn, a response to Oz. The multiplicity of connections between the two novels suggests that Jones is deliberately referencing the earlier work, to revisit themes present in it and propose a different agenda. As Butler suggests, ‘you see the problem you’re trying to solve as the one the characters have in their lives rather than your own problem as an artist trying to create a satisfying work of literature’ (2001, pp.168-169). This reflects Barthes’s conclusion that ‘a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’ (1977, p.148). Jones is using intertextuality as a tool to ask: ‘what if… this story played out differently?’
The clues that Hexwood may be reimagining Oz are scattered widely throughout the novel, in its setting, characters and plot. The part of the galaxy in which Earth resides is described as ‘fairly uncivilised’ (Jones, 2000, p.139), just like Oz, which ‘has never been civilized’ (Baum, 1900, p.12). Vierran travels to Earth from what might be considered a fairly sterile existence in the House of Balance on Homeworld, and Dorothy is transported to Oz from the bleak, grey prairies of Kansas. However, rather than merely replicate Baum’s new land, Jones plays with the connotations of its name to deliver something more layered. It is noted that ‘the population of Earth arrived here as deported convicts and exiled malcontents, and so forth’ (2000, p.14), calling to mind the history of the real-world country of Australia – also known informally as ‘Oz’. The implication is that it is not enough simply to create fantasy worlds; we must make connections between the imagined world and our real one. As Brittani Ivan argues: ‘demolishing the notion of borders between the mundane and the fantastic… is the root of fully understanding the world’ (2017, p.65). Jones herself has explicitly stated elsewhere that the value of stories lies not in escapism but in their ability to connect us with real life, through the power of imagination (2012b). In terms of the characters’ experience, it is notable that Dorothy’s two worlds remain separated by a desert, while Vierran brings hers together and makes them one.
This argument is supported by consideration of the two novels’ physical environments. Dorothy is whisked off to her adventures from a farm in Kansas, and Hexwood Farm is the central location from which the Bannus radiates its field in Hexwood. Again, Jones does not simply transplant; she remixes: once Vierran has come to Earth, it is Wood Street that plays the part of Kansas – ‘The whole world was grey’ (p.33) – and the wood that now resembles Oz. Given that the central point of the land of Oz is the Emerald City, it is notable that green is a colour frequently associated with the wood and the Bannus field in Hexwood. Not only does Reigner Four find himself dressed all in green when he is absorbed into the field (the word ‘green’ is mentioned six times on page 167 alone), one description of the wood itself makes it quite clear which particular shade of green we are to imagine: ‘with the bushes and lower branches a bright emerald thickness’ (p.40). Jones’s conscious borrowing of the colours grey and green from Baum accentuates their importance in her text: they are symbols of the sterile and the blossoming, or ‘the mundane and the fantastic’ (Ivan, 2017, p.65). The ease (and frequency) with which Ann enters and leaves the wood, as compared with Dorothy’s single, difficult trip to and from Oz, reinforces Jones’s view that fantasy should be an integral part of our lived experience.
With regard to the characters, a key commonality between the novels is that they feature communities of people who believe that something fake is true. The characters in Hexwood are living in a simulation, and the inhabitants of the Emerald City wear special glasses to distort their vision: the green-tinged ‘reality’ both groups perceive is not as it seems. Their rulers are frauds: Reigner Two is deposited on Earth, and has to ‘take command of the action’ (Jones, 2000, p.137) – just like Oz. Reigner One farms the Earth for flint in the same way that Oz takes advantage of the ‘jewels and precious metals’ (Baum, 1900, p.139) in his new land. And, like Oz, Reigners One to Five do not have real magic power: it must be faked. This is in contrast to pureblood Reigners and Oz’s witches. Reigner Three’s horror at discovering the survival of Martellian’s line – ‘“Four of them, with the Servant!… Orm, that’s damn near a proper Hand of Reigners!”’ (Jones, 2000, p.248) – evokes Oz’s predicament: ‘One of my greatest fears was the Witches… There were four of them in this country’ (Baum, 1900, p.140). Interestingly, in Oz the fakery largely derives from an accident – Oz’s crash landing in the country – whereas in Hexwood it is the result of a deliberate intervention by the Bannus. This ties in with the themes of personal responsibility and agency found throughout Jones’s work. Oz’s opportunism contrasts with the Bannus’s programme: a plan – or, rather, ‘six hundred and ninety-seven plans’ (Jones, 2000, p.364) – a thousand years in the making. This may be why Oz’s ultimate fate is to vanish once more into the skies, while the Bannus returns to Homeworld as a recognised aide to the next government: in Jones, responsibility is rewarded.
It is not just in its villains that Hexwood channels Oz: its heroes too are oddly familiar. The first clue is the presence of a metal man. Yam first appears on page 21, and is described as a robot; there is nothing unusual in this, until we find out later that, in one of the timelines, he is discovered in the grounds of a dilapidated farmhouse, ‘“suffering from neglect and inaction”’ (p.78). This clearly recalls Dorothy and the Scarecrow’s discovery of the Tin Woodman near his cottage in Oz, rusted and immobilised for over a year. Then there is Mordion. Not only is he described as ‘several pieces of a person that did not fit together’ (p.97) and wearing ‘funny clothes’ (p.97), Reigner Four’s reaction to the video of Mordion, Reigner Two and Bedford gives Jones’s game away: ‘“Mordion looks like a scarecrow!”’ (p.128). Once again, of course, Jones is not simply reproducing Baum’s characters but giving them alternative, more complex narrative arcs. Whilst Ann does free Mordion from the stass chamber, echoing Dorothy’s release of the Scarecrow from his pole, it is not long before Ann becomes stuck up a tree (Jones’s equivalent of the pole), and she must free herself as well as him. The ‘what if?’ being played out here hints at the swapping of roles and mingling of storylines to come as the novel progresses. Accident and intention are again contrasted: Baum’s characters pursue their individual goals together out of mere convenience, whereas Jones’s heroes are intimately connected and their fates intertwined.
Ann/Vierran, then, can be seen as a new incarnation of Baum’s Dorothy. She is taken unwillingly from her home and forced into a new world, where she must face many strange new wonders and – importantly – find her way back to her family. It is notable that every time Ann enters the wood to join Mordion, Hume and Yam, her constant refrain is that she has to get home; and when she remembers that she is Vierran, one of her foremost concerns is locating her family, who have also been transported to Earth. However, her journey is very different to Dorothy’s. At Ann’s first encounter with Mordion in the wood, he tells her that the blood from her accidentally cut knee is special as it can ‘“create a hero… who can defeat the Reigners”’ (p.52). This recalls Dorothy’s arrival in Oz, where her inadvertent destruction of the Wicked Witch of the East leads to her being hailed – also unwillingly – as a powerful sorceress. However, whereas Dorothy determines to flee this new expectation by seeking out the Wizard, Ann agrees to Mordion’s request. Not only this: even when she has escaped from the wood, she realises that she cannot shirk her responsibilities, and returns ‘to find Hume and look after him’ (p.69). Similarly, at the end of their respective quests, Dorothy appears to gain no self-knowledge from her experiences and is simply carried back to her old life. Vierran, however, is changed irrevocably: she returns to Homeworld not as a wardrobe assistant but as a ruler.
There are many other correlations between Hexwood and Oz, but more important than identifying the links is to interrogate what Jones has achieved by it: to find the answer to the question ‘what if?’ Charles Butler has pointed out that: ‘[Jones’s] work has always been characterized by an interest in power and its abuse… Insofar as Jones has ever spoken of her work in didactic or utilitarian terms, she has presented it as an instrument of empowerment for children’ (2006, p.267). With this in mind, it is interesting to note that a key theme in Hexwood is that of adults abusing children: specifically, as Ann says to Mordion, ‘“you expect him to do your dirty work for you”’ (Jones, 2000, p.55). Reigner One has raised Mordion to be an assassin, working on behalf of the Reigners; Mordion is replaying a similar scenario with Hume, having created him to defeat the Reigners; and we discover that Hume himself has done the same with Fitela, raising him and other children to slay dragons for him. This calls to mind the Wizard’s actions in Oz, when he instructs Dorothy to kill the Witch of the West: as ruler, this should be his responsibility, but he outsources it to a child. However, the difference in how the two books handle the abuse is striking. In Oz, Dorothy obeys the Wizard, succeeds in her mission and returns to be rewarded; the Wizard suffers no real penalty for his actions, and Dorothy returns to her former existence. In Hexwood, Jones suggests that this kind of harm is perpetuated down the ages, in a cycle that will only stop when lessons are learned. The theme of responsibility is highlighted most strongly here. Mordion regrets his creation of Hume almost immediately and sets about trying to make amends, and Hume breaks his cycle by finally slaying the dragon – which is, of course, Reigner One, who dies as he has not repented. Jones’s multi-layered interpretation of the consequences of this type of abuse is more realistic than Baum’s, yet at the same time provides hope: by reworking the story, she offers her characters an agency and opportunity for growth that was not present in the original.
It is not just the characters in a book who may be affected by change: the reader will be too. When old tales are reimagined, and familiar characters placed in strange situations, new narrative arcs branch off and readers are taken in a whole host of different directions. As noted earlier, this is achieved in part by the use of archetypes. In Hexwood, Jones does not just evoke Baum’s specific characters and events, she also plays with the notion of archetypes themselves, in the sense of generic characters that have no name but merely play a role. Vierran’s four voices are an embodiment of what an archetype represents. At the start of the story, both for us and for Vierran, they are merely known as the Slave, the Prisoner, the King and the Boy; later on we discover that they are in fact Mordion, Hume, Artegal and Martin. They are new variants on old themes, merely nameless voices until context is added and their own story can be told. Vierran herself is known to them as the Girl Child. There is a ‘Girl Child’ in Oz too, but her story is very different: not only does she lose her companions when she returns home, in contrast with Vierran who is accompanied by hers, she also ‘returns to the position of a child and female, doubly oppressed’ (Nikolajeva, 2012, p.53; my italics), whereas Vierran returns a Reigner. As Mendlesohn states: ‘Jones [is] arguing with the insistence that the world is shaped by the monomyth: just because the monomyth is all pervading does not mean one has to acquiesce to it any more than to any other coercive narrative’ (2005, p.47). In other words, we can work with archetypes, but we should use them as inspiration for creating new stories rather than simply repeating what has gone before – or, like Dorothy, following a path others have laid out for us.
This approach to storytelling connects with Jones’s reported aim to empower the child and, interestingly, brings us back to Barthes. A story may be seen almost as a child itself: a new creation, derived from recognisable parents but with its own personality and motivations. Indeed, Barthes describes the author as being ‘in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child’ (1977, p.145). He does not intend this in a good sense, believing that it should not be the author who controls how a story finds its way in the world, but the reader. Jones is in agreement, stating that a writer should not force a story to hammer home a moral (Butler, 2001, p.168) and, in Hexwood, suggesting that an adult should not force a child to fulfil a destiny: both ‘offspring’ should be allowed to follow their own path. Archetypes can give stories a framework, and stories can give us a framework – what Jones refers to as a ‘blueprint of society’ (2012b, p.66) – but we must work out for ourselves how to act within it: ‘the Bannus cannot do everything… Mordion must heal himself’ (Mendlesohn, 2005, p.42). And Mordion does heal himself: he comes to terms with his reality by remembering what has gone before, accepting it – horrors and all – and then consciously choosing a new path. He travels from being an archetypal Slave, to being a named pawn in someone else’s game, to claiming his own identity and finally embracing a new role as First Reigner. This could almost be the journey of a story, as Zipes might see it: from archetypal beginnings, to a retelling of an old tale, to a new tale inspired by the old ones, to the generation of fresh offshoots of its own.
Hexwood, then, both in form and content, can be seen as an illustration of, and apologia for, Jones’s intertextual approach to storytelling. Its novum of the Bannus represents the way stories evolve and adapt with every new cultural change (and challenge) experienced by humans. The novel itself does this by taking an existing story – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – and asking ‘what if… this story played out differently?’ Despite Baum’s stated desire to write tales of ‘wonderment and joy’ (1900, p.2), Oz comes to a static conclusion in an emotional landscape as grey and sterile as the Kansas prairies: the companions are scattered, and Dorothy has returned to her old life. Jones presents a more hopeful picture. Her heroes learn how to take responsibility, to reconcile past with present and fantasy with reality, and to channel the power of their imaginations to achieve mutual understanding, acceptance and growth.
There is one last step to be taken, and that is to take a quick look at the ongoing and future evolution of these stories, and what new narratives may already be branching out into the world. A film of Baum’s tale, The Wizard of Oz, exists and is possibly more well known than the book. The film contains key differences to the text, one of which is the ending: where the novel concludes with Dorothy arriving home in Kansas, the film goes on to have her recognise that the three farmhands look uncannily similar to her friends in Oz. This mirrors Vierran’s own recognition of Mordion, Hume, Artegal and Martin as her four voices, and it is intriguing to wonder whether Jones’s inspiration itself came from multiple versions of the same story.
One further reimagining of the Oz story is the musical Wicked, which asks ‘what if… the wicked witch wasn’t really wicked?’ It is exactly the kind of question Jones might have asked, and as such it is perhaps no surprise to hear, in the song ‘Defying Gravity’, lyrics that could have narrated Vierran’s own story:
Ryan Bunch, in his article ‘Oz and the Musical’, observes: ‘Our ability to rework the story in spontaneous performance suggests much about the ability of spectators and participants to repurpose cultural materials, make them their own, and make new meanings of them’ (2015, p.67). Diana Wynne Jones – and, one suspects, Zipes and Barthes – would have wholeheartedly agreed.
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