(This is a surprisingly spoiler free discussion of the novel Wicked, with some comparisons to the movie and musical. I don't believe I give away any particular plot points, though).
Recently I went to see the movie Wicked, based on the first half of the Broadway play. I've never seen the play, however I read the novel over a decade ago. Upon watching the movie, I immediately reread the novel, and then went and watched the movie again. Outside of sharing character names, they have little to do with each other. Indeed, I bet there are many people who would hate the movie and musical, but would enjoy the moody, often slow pace, frankly weird novel.
A major part of the contrast for me is that novel pretty much seeks to undermine, sidestep, invert, or call out virtually all the tropes of the movie. (Before we go further I should say I enjoyed the movie. It was visually compelling, the songs are catchy, and the lead actress was quite good. But I enjoy a nice piece of mass entertainment). But the book is strange, the pacing odd. It is quite slow in places, and defies normal fantasy storytelling. Elphaba tells us a few times that she "never believed in child saviors." There is no chosen one in the novel, no one born with fantastical but wild powers. Indeed, the novel itself is a long form critique of the notion of innocence. There is, of course, the obvious targets of the those who believe God is on their side and justify anything, there are those politicians and leaders of state who drap themselves in a mantle of innocence and purity. We are told, “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of." But if it was just this, Wicked would be telling us nothing different than any number of YA dystopian novels. What makes the novel interesting is that those who are outcaste or rendered monstrous by the righteous are not immediately somehow innocent because of these conditions. There is a sort of Adornian pessimism throughout the whole thing, a kind of "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly" as Adorno famously puts it. (the novel's echo here, saying something similar yet so different asks, "Is life worth living in the wrong form?").
In one of the several discussions that are overt meditations of evil, we are told:“You old fools, the Oziad is just a frilly, romantic poem of older, harsher legends. What lives in folk memory is truer than how some artsy poet says it. In folk memory evil always predates good.” Now I think it would be wrong to say this was the argument of the novel, the novel is far too ambiguous to have clear arguments and moralizing messages, but the novel very much wants to hold open the possibility that this true of existence. We are asked to explore what it would mean for evil to be ontologically prior to good. Not to see evil as some sort of deprivation of the good, and not to see evil as some sort of dark side to a light side, but to see evil as foundational.
In the first few pages, the Wicked Witch of the West spies on Dorothy and her companions. The witch was surprised to hear a discussion of her genitals. There are rumors that she is intersexed or trans (those words are not used). And we are told later: "Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents." But back at the beginning of the novel, the Tin Man tells us that the Witch was castrated at birth, to which the Lion responds: “Oh you, you see castration everywhere you look.” What the novel purposes is a non-castrated evil, but rather that evil is part of what Bill Haver always called your "fundamental existential comportment." In other words, what if innocence is foreclosed to all of us? What if we by existing, we become part of some sort of unforgiveable wrong? What if we are all wicked?
***
I was trying to find how the movie in the second part would diverage from the novel, and I came across this article about TikTokers discussing the differences between the novel and the musical. In particular, I was caught by this discussion:
Among “Wicked” fans, the book’s content is divisive. Kieffer, on her end, said that the sexual content “muddles the plot.”
Ribeiro says she loves the “shock value” in the books and that the unexpected parts were her favorite to read — but ultimately took away from what she considered the “point” of the book.
“I think I was so distracted by all of the weird stuff that was going on that the political aspect of it was overshadowed,” she says.
I mean, the weird sex and gender stuff is very much a part of the "political" message of the book. I was reminded here of necessity for projects like Christopher Breu's recent book In Defense of Sex. In the novel, they do not have the OzDust Ballroom, but instead the Philosophy Club. The Philosophy Club is some kind of psychedelic sex club, that seems to explore the limits of selfhood through extreme acts. While some people visit and leave unscathed, other leave, unable to come back to their old ways of being. Indeed, if I told someone who had read the book that it was published in the mid-1990s by a gay, Catholic, professor of children's literature, I believe universally people would respond with, "Yeah, that makes sense."
So yeah, perhaps there is a bit of stereotypical Catholic guilt running throughout the book, but the book pushes against that reductive reading, as well. It asks the same kinds of question about forgiveness that Derrida does in his essay on it, what does forgiveness mean when confronted with the unforgivable? But where Derrida uses this as a way of thinking about forgiveness, in Wicked we are confronted with what does it mean to live in such a way that some things we do cannot be forgiven? Elphaba's father sought forgiveness and was denied it (as Elphaba does, and Dorothy does for killing Elphaba's sister). "I see him shocked: It doesn’t occur in his conception of moral life that some sins are unforgivable." And, a little further on in the book,
Elphaba the girl does not know how to see her father as a broken man. All she knows is that he passes his brokenness on to her. Daily his habits of loathing and self-loathing cripple her. Daily she loves him back because she knows no other way.
I see myself there: the girl witness, wide-eyed as Dorothy. Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing—by dint of ignorance and innocence—that beneath this unbreakable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way. A more ancient precedent of ransom, that we may not always be tormented by our shame.
Even without forgiveness, is there a way to live? I said the book had an Adornian pessimism, and I meant it. Because like Adorno, the novel seeks to still find some way out. Not hope, per se, but something outside of the the dialectics of the "Marriage of the Sacred and the Wicked." Because, we are reminded, "there was much to hate in this world, and too much to love."
But while there is a desire for a way out, nothing is promised, no maps are given. The Witch, as we know, still dies at the end, killed by water and fear (both her own, and fear of her). She is unmade. Perhaps we are all unmaking.
“It’s unbecoming,” she agreed. “A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un."
