{"id":22757,"date":"2011-10-31T08:00:45","date_gmt":"2011-10-31T12:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=22757"},"modified":"2011-10-31T10:27:41","modified_gmt":"2011-10-31T14:27:41","slug":"%e2%80%98the-phantom-tollbooth%e2%80%99-at-fifty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/10\/31\/%e2%80%98the-phantom-tollbooth%e2%80%99-at-fifty\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Phantom Tollbooth\u2019 at Fifty"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

'The Phantom Tollbooth' by Norton Juster turns fifty.<\/p><\/div>\n

Even the most confident of writers can be excused for wondering if words, mere black-and-white glyphs, can compete in a world filled with ever more animated, flashing, full-color, special-effects-crammed and interactive visual media. At such times, it\u2019s helpful to remember a passage from Norton Juster\u2019s children\u2019s novel, The Phantom Tollbooth<\/em>, describing a visit by the hero, Milo, to the archives of the Soundkeeper in the Lands Beyond.<\/p>\n

The Soundkeeper boasts that her vaults contain \u201cevery sound that\u2019s ever been made in history.\u201d To prove it, she opens a drawer and pulls out \u201ca small brown envelope,\u201d explaining that it contains \u201cthe exact tune George Washington whistled when he crossed the Delaware on that icy night in 1777.\u201d Milo, Juster writes, \u201cpeered into the envelope and, sure enough, that\u2019s exactly what was in it.\u201d The narrative moves briskly on.<\/p>\n

Like much of the best fiction for children, this scene illustrates how writing well consists not only of knowing what to put in, but also of knowing what to leave out. A film version of the scene described above would need to find some way of conveying the truth of the Soundkeeper\u2019s claim. Would that mean simulating the great general\u2019s whistle, wafting out of the envelope as Milo opens it? Or perhaps representing the tune as a physical object, the way that, in a subsequent passage of the book, beats on a bass drum manifest themselves as \u201clarge, wooly, fluffy cotton balls\u201d and a handclap produces \u201ca single sheet of clean white paper\u201d? How does<\/em> Milo perceive the sound, anyway: by seeing it (he \u201cpeers\u201d into the envelope rather than cocking an ear toward it) or by hearing it? And how can he be so sure it was made by George Washington?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Text is less constrained. Juster knows that a description of the sound would be superfluous; in fact, he knows the scene is much better without it. As Leonard Marcus relates, in his introduction to the annotated 50th-anniversary edition of The Phantom Tollbooth<\/em><\/a>, the author had mastered the art of omission while writing the novel\u2019s opening chapters. Milo, a boy of indeterminate age and suffering from near-clinical listlessness (\u201cNothing really interested him\u2014least of all the things that should have\u201d) comes home from another dull day at school to find a large package in his room. The earliest drafts of the book include much business about a doorman receiving the box from a \u201csmall wild eyed little man\u201d and Milo\u2019s parents debating whether or not to open it.<\/p>\n

All that was gone by the time The Phantom Tollbooth<\/em> was published in 1961. The package is just there. When Milo assembles the \u201cGENUINE TURNPIKE TOLLBOOTH\u201d inside and drives past its gate in his electric toy car, he suddenly finds himself cruising along a country highway in the magical, allegorical Lands Beyond. According to Marcus (who has had the good fortune to annotate a volume whose author and illustrator are still living), Juster had a \u201cbreakthrough\u201d when he realized that he didn\u2019t need to explain how any of these marvelous events came to pass; the reader\u2019s desire to believe in the fairy tale is enough to keep it rolling along as indefatigably as Milo\u2019s apparently self-recharging car. That, plus the assurance of the author\u2019s voice, the\u00a0authority<\/em> from which the title \u201cauthor\u201d is derived. We know the right sound was in that envelope because Juster tells us so. \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Phantom Tollbooth<\/em> is a book that revels in the freedom and power of language to mean more than one thing at a time, to make an alternate reality. Arriving in the city of Dictionopolis with his faithful companion, Tock the Watchdog, Milo rides through the streets in a wooden wagon that moves by itself, provided its passengers keep silent\u2014it goes without saying. Later, when a second companion, the craven and loquacious Humbug, remarks \u201cNothing can possibly go wrong now,\u201d he\u2019s propelled from the car onto a little island called Conclusions. In their quest to rescue the exiled princesses Rhyme and Reason, the trio encounters an unpleasant bird called the Everpresent Wordsnatcher, who explains that he comes from the land of Context, although \u201cI spend almost all my time out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Although the book advances a sunny, mid-20th-century message about the virtues of learning, the charm of The Phantom Tollbooth<\/em> hasn\u2019t got much to do with order or common sense. (Besides Juster\u2019s obvious debt to Lewis Carroll, Marcus astutely detects the influence of those agents of chaos, the Marx Brothers.) The need for a resolution to the longstanding feud between the cities of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis\u2014between the mathematical and the aesthetic\u2014is just the sort of moral a young architect like Juster might be expected to endorse, especially in the years following C.P. Snow\u2019s famous 1959 lecture, \u201cThe Two Cultures,\u201d about the growing gulf between science and the humanities. Yet a spirit of mischief runs away with the book\u2014quite literally, it turns out: Among the ogres who pursue the heroes in the climax are \u201cthe Triple Demons of Compromise\u2014one tall and thin, one short and fat, and the third exactly like the other two,\u201d concocted, as Juster told Marcus, for the sole purpose of vexing his illustrator, Jules Feiffer. Behind the book\u2019s homilies about harmony and moderation lies the Word, taunting Pictures with its ability to do whatever it pleases.<\/p>\n

Juster and Feiffer were sharing a Brooklyn Heights row house when the former wrote The Phantom Tollbooth<\/em>, mostly because he\u2019d gotten a Ford Foundation grant to write an entirely different book. The prankish Juster liked to substitute a raw egg for one of the two hardboiled ones Feiffer made every morning, slipping it into the pot when his housemate\u2019s back was turned. Most of what\u2019s great about the annotations in this volume comes directly from the two men: discarded characters and preliminary sketches, a story about a copyeditor at Random House who didn\u2019t get the joke in the five Dictionopolitan ministers who speak in fusillades of synonyms (because \u201cone word is as good as another\u2014why not use them all?\u201d), and helpfully struck out all those needless redundancies. The anxious Feiffer was so unsure of his ability to draw horses that he tried to talk Juster into mounting a line of soldiers on cats instead.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Among the demons the soldiers arrive to fight off at the novel\u2019s conclusion is a creature whose menace seems less pertinent to\u00a0children\u00a0than to\u00a0adults (especially creative adults, like Juster): the Terrible Trivium. I was scared by him as a kid, but only because of Feiffer\u2019s drawing\u2014a gentleman as sharply dressed and snakily hipped as a Bob Fosse dancer, with a featureless blank instead of a face. Even at age nine, I felt, with a thrill, that this was grown-up stuff. The Trivium talks the companions into moving a pile of sand with a pair of tweezers and draining a well with an eye dropper, asking \u201cwhat could be more important than doing unimportant things?\u201d<\/div>\n

For readers of this annotated volume, some of the Trivium\u2019s horror is undermined by Juster\u2019s confession that the novel describing him was itself the product of procrastination. Although Juster went on to write a handful of other books, his primary career remained in architecture. The Phantom Tollbooth<\/em> is a glorious interruption. What makes it great\u2014and surely what children most adore about it\u2014is not its lessons on good judgment and the importance of education, but its gleeful nod to the delights of misrule and the pleasure of paradox. It\u2019s a paean to the realm of story, where you only have to say something to make it so, and if The Phantom Tollbooth<\/em> cautions against the dangers of wasting time, then perhaps its only fitting that it ends up being the very best argument against itself.<\/p>\n

Laura Miller is a journalist and critic living in New York. She is a co-founder of Salon.com<\/a>, where she is currently a staff writer. Her work has appeared in <\/em>The New York Times, <\/em>The New Yorker, <\/em>The Los Angeles Times, <\/em>The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. She is the author of <\/em>The Magician\u2019s Book: A Skeptic\u2019s Adventures in Narnia<\/a> (Little, Brown, 2008) and editor of <\/em>The Salon.com Reader\u2019s Guide to Contemporary Authors<\/a> (Penguin, 2000).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even the most confident of writers can be excused for wondering if words, mere black-and-white glyphs, can compete in a world filled with ever more animated, flashing, full-color, special-effects-crammed and interactive visual media. At such times, it\u2019s helpful to remember a passage from Norton Juster\u2019s children\u2019s novel, The Phantom Tollbooth, describing a visit by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":256,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[4664,4662,4655,4659,4661,4656,594,4654,4657,1265,1241,4653,4660,2372,4663,4658],"class_list":["post-22757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-bob-fosse","tag-brooklyn-heights","tag-george-washington","tag-humbug","tag-jules-feiffer","tag-leonard-marcus","tag-lewis-carroll","tag-milo","tag-norton-juster","tag-procrastination","tag-random-house","tag-soundkeeper","tag-the-marx-brothers","tag-the-phantom-tollbooth","tag-the-terrible-trivium","tag-tock"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u2018The Phantom Tollbooth\u2019 at Fifty by Laura Miller<\/title>\n<meta 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