Edward Gorey's The Utter Zoo is arguably the most purely creaturely of all of Gorey’s works (all images are from the Meredith Press, 1967 edition unless otherwise noted). I love creatures of all kinds, and always have. Besotted with dinosaurs and muppets as well as all manner of real, extant animals as a little kid, I soon graduated to monsters and read every book about them I could find in my elementary school library. Whether they were about legendary cryptids, mythical beasts, or movie monsters, I was after pictures and facts. In the same way that a stegosaurus had plates on its back and ate a vegetarian diet, for example, a werewolf transformed in the full moon and could be killed by a silver bullet. This all felt important to know.
The Utter Zoo is a bestiary as well as an abecedarium. It informs us, in rhyming couplets of eight syllables per line, of the behavior and ecology of 26 creatures ranging from the Ampoo to the Zote. Each is depicted in a drawing inside a scratchy hand-drawn frame. Originally published as a standalone book in 1967, I first encountered it in Amphigorey Also, the third of Gorey’s omnibuses, first published in 1983. Like most of Gorey’s works, it resembles a children’s book, and no doubt it continues to be enjoyed by precocious children everywhere; but some of the deeper chords that make up its off-kilter harmonies may require more extensive living to hear. The brief song of the Neapse—whose “sufferings are chronic; it lives exclusively on tonic”—is, for example, one of experience rather than innocence.
The title is a pun hinging on two meanings of each word: “utter,” a verb meaning to express in words and an adjective meaning to the highest degree; and “zoo,” a place where animals are kept as well as a situation marked by confusion or unrestrained behavior. The pun is a little awkward, and therefore of a piece with the little, awkward creatures inside. These are not noble, necessary monsters as in Borges’s formulation in his Book of Imaginary Beings, but rather even more ephemeral or accidental (and certainly less fearsome) than the chimera 1.
Early editions have a high contrast cover printed in black on cream cardstock, with tiger-like creatures subtly highlighted in white bearing the words of the title as markings on their coats. Their stripes are barely distinguishable from the pattern of filigree leaves that fill out the design, suggesting a kind of camouflage. The design gives close-to-equal weight to image, text, and pattern, which is conceptually consonant with the contents inside. Befitting its 1960s origin, the design creates a figure-ground flicker worthy of contemporaneous work by Bridget Riley or Victor Moscoco, and is a bit more mod than is typical for Gorey. The most recent standalone edition (Pomegranate Communications, 2010) makes the tigers orange and adds gradient shadows to their bodies, and the leaves are printed in a medium kelly green. The figures are subsequently more visually dominant than the surrounding pattern, removing the element of camouflage as well as the modish flicker of the original. These feel like marketing decisions made without regard to intention of the author, and together weaken the integrity of the book as a unified art object. Additionally, this edition inexplicably replaces Gorey’s italic hand-lettering with a roman typeface made to resemble his handwritings—a kind of Gorey Comic Sans, as awful as that sounds.
The first creature we meet inside is the Ampoo, shown balanced on a finial and drawn with a handful of contours that are the exact weight of the framing line, which perfectly bisects two more finials—suggesting a world beyond the frame, however sparsely populated. The negative spaces between the two half-finials suggest proportions similar to those of the Ampoo itself, an arrangement that is itself “intensely neat.” The drawing is characteristic of much of The Utter Zoo— extraordinarily economical, with delicate counterpoints of black and white, positive and negative.
Gorey biographer Mark Dery likens these compositions to abstractions by Kline and Rothko, admitting that the comparison may seem strained2. For what it’s worth I think he’s on the right track—but rather than Abstract Expressionists, I suggest that we look to painters working in post-painterly or graphic abstract styles closer to the time The Utter Zoo was written, as well as further back to Bauhaus artists like Paul Klee (whom Gorey admired and collected), whose pedagogical work exploring the pictorial forces of composition were further codified in postwar America by gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim.
Whatever their inspiration, these carefully calibrated arrangements tend to give the humor of the vignettes an extra-dry flavor. The Boggersloth is a nearly featureless lozenge of black fur concealed, barely, behind bottles. We see very little of it directly, just a glimpse inside a sliver of negative space. Otherwise its coarse black fur is subject to some slight distortion from the transparent containers it’s hiding behind; we see it through glass, darkly. It’s the first of a few furry obloids here—its relatives might include the the Hunglum (aspiring to unheard rather than unseen while it crawls between some large sharp rocks) and the Yawfel (staring endlessly and unnervingly from a corner of another sparsely limned room).
The Fidknop is a small birdlike demon in another characteristically spare interior; what would otherwise be negative space is transformed into a ceiling by way of two strips of wallpaper trim meeting at a corner in unfussy two-point perspective. The feathery wraith lingers like a half-deflated helium balloon “devoid of feeling,” suggesting that a sociopathic monster might be entertaining as long as it were small, funny-looking, and mostly out of the way. In contrast, the vastness of the Ombledroom can be inferred visually from the way it nearly fills the black space of its environment. Without the small illustrative details at its extremities, it could be an abstract figure on a flat ground like those painted by Ellsworth Kelly.
The Ippagoggy’s presumably fiendish face is hidden behind a flurry of paper. This page demonstrates the way a single-panel cartoon can imply sequentiality without satisfying its attendant expectations, like a melody without a resolving note. Are the sheets of paper rising or falling? Have they been set in motion by of the voracious Ippagoggy, or is the Ippagoggy a passive recipient of a feast of paper and the sweet, sweet glue it contains? The absence of movement lines freezes the moment absolutely, leaving us to guess at the direction of the arrow of time flowing through it.
Meanwhile, the Quingawaga is a rare exception to the spare renderings found throughout the rest of the book: a scaled, winged monster in a dark, wet, rainy landscape, all meticulously drawn with a dense fabric of lines reminiscent of the Victorian engravings that formed the raw materials of Max Ernst’s collage novels. Here again, though, the tone of the humor follows the form of the drawing, becoming more dark than dry.
After introducing us to several more congenially ridiculous beasts, The Utter Zoo ends in death—which, in classical dramatic terms, makes it a tragedy rather than a comedy—with the funeral of the Zote. The proceedings are somehow both ceremonial and unceremonious: the mournful staging of heavy curtains, black table cloth, and two long candles in tall candlesticks (all arranged in formal symmetry) surround a plain, too-small box with the Zote’s rigid legs sticking out the top.
Does this ludicrous procession, too wry and melancholy to qualify as sound and fury, signify nothing? The Utter Zoo was first published in 1967, the same year Roland Barthes’ famous essay “The Death of the Author” first appeared in English in the multimedia magazine Aspen. That’s surely a coincidence—the issue appeared too late in the year to have been read by Gorey before the proofs of his book were due to the publisher—but the degree to which Barthe’s concerns echo themes suggested by The Utter Zoo is striking. Barthes follows a thread in modernist literature from Mallarmé to Surrealism, noting the way facts can be narrated outside of any function other than that of the practice of a symbol, how authors blur the relationships between themselves and their characters, and the way avant-garde artists tend to disappoint expectations of meaning3. Dery notes that many of the Zoo creatures share personality traits with the Gorey himself: affectlessness, acquisitiveness, and, perhaps most importantly, a tendency to hide4. Is the author dead—as Barthes announces—like the Zote, or just playing hide-and-seek among his maladapted menagerie? Is Gorey, an admirer and collector of Surrealist art, making meaning out of frustrating our desire for meaning?
Certainly there’s a strain of aestheticism here, as the book is largely engaged with questions of form and lacks an obvious moral or didactic purpose. Vladimir Nabokov, a strident defender of art-for-art’s sake, found a manifestation in an unlikely place: the defensive camouflage of insects he observed in his work as an entomologist. “The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. … I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.” A similar magic is conjured by the camouflaged creatures on the cover and courses through the pages of The Utter Zoo, celebrating moments in the lives of creatures neurotically defended against life—but not, ultimately, against death. The monster-loving kid in me laughs in delight; the near-fifty-year-old adult shudders in recognition.
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