December 5, 2007
INTRODUCTION: A FORGIN’ AW RA SCOTS
| HAL DUNCAN |
When I first began approaching the writers involved in this special Scottish issue of Behind the Wainscot, the most common response I received was, to be honest, “What the fuck is Farrago’s Wainscot?” A webzine, I explained, of sorts. “Yes, but… Farrago’s . . . Wainscot? What the hell does that mean?” My mumbled misdirections and vague references to the site’s self-definition as a “compendium of weirds” met with arched eyebrows and folded arms. “OK. But . . . come on . . . Farrago’s Wainscot?” In my inability to answer, my own curiosity piqued, I began to do my own research into the significance of the term.
According to the Gallagher & Michaels Bumper Book of Extraordinary Fabrications (1932), Farraggio’s Wainscot was a magic trick performed in the 1920s by Farraggio the Magnificent, involving his disappearance behind a seemingly ordinary section of wood paneling such as one would find in any stately home of the day. From Jess Nevins’s The Encyclopaedia of Fantastic Victoriana (Revised Edition, 2009), “The Far Ago Waistcoat”, I learned, was a short story by the otherwise unknown writer, Henry Greenborough Smythe, published in The Strand (1897) and featuring a magical waistcoat of oriental patterning that transported the wearer to the Baghdad of Burton’s One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. For feminist historian, Suzon Ledoyen, in her Le lambris de la virago (1971), the Virago’s Wainscot refers to a gruesome medieval practice of disposing of an overly willful wife by walling her up alive, this practice being adopted by Ledoyen as a metaphor for patriarchal subjugation of women throughout history. And this was just the start. Farraggio, Virago, Far Ago, Fargot. Wainscot, Waistcoat, Wean’s Cot, Wine-sot. The deeper we look for a singular origin, it seems, the more variant potential roots we find for the inscrutable idiom selected by our hosts as a title for their “cabinet of curios”—Farrago’s Wainscot.
I was, as we say in Scotland, scunnnered.
In the end, then, I simply challenged the writers contained within (some from the Glasgow SF Writer’s Circle, others from the Edinburgh-based Writer’s Bloc) to find out for themselves. You tell me, I said. I’m fucked if I know.
What you see before you, then, is the result of the intensive research of some dozen or more individuals, culled from sources around the world and across the media. For the most part these are found texts, with only a few tweaks and flourishes added for the sake of style, a little poetic license taken to make this sentence or that phrase more elegant, more ergonomic. The reader may doubt their authenticity at times given the content, but I can assure you, having seen all the clippings and cribbings first-hand, that these are no mere inventions. I am still not sure whether, between them, these writers have fully answered the question set to them, “Just what is Farrago’s Wainscot?”, but somewhere in the strange congruities and contradictions they have unearthed, I do believe there is an . . . approach to that question. There is no doubt in my mind at least that they have risen to the challenge, made a superlative effort, and that the result is both entertaining and educational. I hope that others will agree.
So, if the question is, “What is Farrago’s Wainscot?”, what is the answer?
Well here are some of the answers:
—A WEE DRAM O’ LEARNING
Jim Steel
—ABCD
Mark Harding
—BRIC-A-BRAC FROM THE BARGAIN BIN
Neil Williamson
—RAÇÃO DE WAINSCOT
Harvey Welles & Philip Raines
—BEHIND FARRAGO’S WAINSCOT
Andrew Ferguson
—BEWILDERNESS
Andrew J. Wilson