The Comic Spirit and Cosmic Order in Children's Literature

. . . So she told him all about Kansas, and how gray everything was there, and how the cyclone had carried her to this queer land of Oz. The Scarecrow listened carefully, and said,

"I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, gray place you call Kansas."

"That is because you have no brains," answered the girl. "No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home."

The Scarecrow sighed.

"Of course I cannot understand it," he said. "If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains."

(The Wizard of Oz, Chapter IV)

L. Frank Baum must have had great fun writing this gentle castigation of what he considered to be the dull, dreary Midwest. It is doubtful that most children grasp the full breadth of this humor in the Scarecrow's remarks, but the splendid irony is not lost on adults. We find these lines amusing not because we find them absolutely true, but rather because, despite the glimmer of truth they possess, we know within us that they do not have to be true. We know that even dull, gray Kansas could become, someday, one of the beautiful places. This hope, this optimism, is the essence of comedy.

James K. Feibleman, in his admirable study of comedy, offers us this definition: "Comedy . . . consists in the indirect affirmation of the ideal logical order by means of the derogation of the limited orders of actuality" (178-79). Or, to put it another way, the comic spirit is the optimistic denial of human limitations. Comedy, Feibleman notes, is revolutionary, whereas tragedy is reactionary. Comedy looks to the "ideal logical order"—the world of possibility—as its guide for living; "tragedy," on the other hand, "leads to a state of contentment with the actual world just as it is found" (Feibleman 200). Perhaps no illustration better explains the tragic view of life than that related by Alfred Stieglitz's explanation of justice:

There are two families, equally fine. They go to a hillside, and there they build their farms. Their houses are equally well built; their situations on the hillside are equally advantageous; their work is equally well done. One day there is a storm which destroys the farm of one of them, leaving the farm of the other standing intact. That is my understanding of the word justice.

(qtd. in Feibleman 198-99)

To the child, of course, this is precisely the opposite of justice. To the child, justice means that the good are rewarded and the wicked punished—anything else is injustice. This view of the world is essentially the comic view and rests in the conviction that, ultimately, the good will prevail. We must note here that there are contradictory views on the nature of comedy. Robert Corrigan has written that comedy "is by nature conservative" and that tragedy deals "with that rebellious spirit in man which resists the limitations of being human." He further notes that "comedy . . . celebrates man's capacity to endure . . ." (6). However, the comic vision, whether it be reactionary or revolutionary, sees the challenge as possible; the tragic vision knows the challenge to be impossible, but admires the effort anyway. Northrop Frye has said that comedy is, in its resolution, "a deliverance from moral bondage" (81).

It is the comic vision that gives childhood its relentless spirit, its revolutionary nature, its irrepressible optimism. The comic spirit looks at limitations as challenges to be overcome; the tragic spirit sees limitations as inevitabilities to be endured. We are often told that tragedy sees humanity at its noblest, suffering "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"; whereas, comedy sees humanity at its worst, exploiting its foibles and shortcomings. Aristotle wrote of comedy that it "is an imitation of bad characters; bad, not with respect...