Return of the Dapper Men

I like it! The new Jim McCann authered/Janet Lee illustrated graphic … well, it’s too short to be a novel, Return of the Dapper Men [amazon]. Use ‘search inside’ to read the first pages, or view a slightly different selection at the publisher’s site. In the land of Anorev, time has stopped. Living below the surface are children, with no conception of adulthood. Above are machines, with no conception of why they function. (Which makes it sound like some Eloi/Morlock time-machine fable, but that isn’t it at all. Also, how are people doing things if time has ceased? Well, I don’t know. A sort of eternal present. There is only now, no tomorrow, no yesterdays.) Ayden, the boy who asks, and Zoe, the robot-girl who says nothing at all, are friends, and the key. Then time starts again, and 314 Dapper Men descend from the sky, like a Magritte painting. It is all very charming and surreal and doesn’t make any sense, except in an advantages and disadvantages of vermiculation for life, in a space-time worm sort of sense, sense.

As the introduction by Tim “Project Runway” Gunn makes clear, it’s in a fairytale line that includes Alice, The Wizard of Oz, Pinnochio. I would add: Hans Christian Andersen, E.T.A. Hoffman. This bit from Andersen’s “The Ice Queen”, for example, in which Gerda is uselessly interrogating the solipsistic and surreal-minded flowers about where Kay might be:

But every flower stood in the sunshine, and dreamed its own fairy tale or its own story: and they all told her very many things, but not one knew anything of Kay.

Well, what did the Tiger-Lily say?

“Hearest thou not the drum? Bum! Bum! Those are the only two tones. Always bum! Bum! Hark to the plaintive song of the old woman, to the call of the priests! The Hindoo woman in her long robe stands upon the funeral pile; the flames rise around her and her dead husband, but the Hindoo woman thinks on the living one in the surrounding circle; on him whose eyes burn hotter than the flames—on him, the fire of whose eyes pierces her heart more than the flames which soon will burn her body to ashes. Can the heart’s flame die in the flame of the funeral pile?”

“I don’t understand that at all,” said little Gerda.

“That is my story,” said the Lily.

What did the Convolvulus say?

“Projecting over a narrow mountain-path there hangs an old feudal castle. Thick evergreens grow on the dilapidated walls, and around the altar, where a lovely maiden is standing: she bends over the railing and looks out upon the rose. No fresher rose hangs on the branches than she; no appleblossom carried away by the wind is more buoyant! How her silken robe is rustling!

“‘Is he not yet come?'”

“Is it Kay that you mean?” asked little Gerda.

“I am speaking about my story—about my dream,” answered the Convolvulus.

What did the Snowdrops say?

“Between the trees a long board is hanging—it is a swing. Two little girls are sitting in it, and swing themselves backwards and forwards; their frocks are as white as snow, and long green silk ribands flutter from their bonnets. Their brother, who is older than they are, stands up in the swing; he twines his arms round the cords to hold himself fast, for in one hand he has a little cup, and in the other a clay-pipe. He is blowing soap-bubbles. The swing moves, and the bubbles float in charming changing colors: the last is still hanging to the end of the pipe, and rocks in the breeze. The swing moves. The little black dog, as light as a soap-bubble, jumps up on his hind legs to try to get into the swing. It moves, the dog falls down, barks, and is angry. They tease him; the bubble bursts! A swing, a bursting bubble—such is my song!”

“What you relate may be very pretty, but you tell it in so melancholy a manner, and do not mention Kay.”

What do the Hyacinths say?

“There were once upon a time three sisters, quite transparent, and very beautiful. The robe of the one was red, that of the second blue, and that of the third white. They danced hand in hand beside the calm lake in the clear moonshine. They were not elfin maidens, but mortal children. A sweet fragrance was smelt, and the maidens vanished in the wood; the fragrance grew stronger—three coffins, and in them three lovely maidens, glided out of the forest and across the lake: the shining glow-worms flew around like little floating lights. Do the dancing maidens sleep, or are they dead? The odour of the flowers says they are corpses; the evening bell tolls for the dead!”

“You make me quite sad,” said little Gerda. “I cannot help thinking of the dead maidens. Oh! is little Kay really dead? The Roses have been in the earth, and they say no.”

“Ding, dong!” sounded the Hyacinth bells. “We do not toll for little Kay; we do not know him. That is our way of singing, the only one we have.”

And Gerda went to the Ranunculuses, that looked forth from among the shining green leaves.

“You are a little bright sun!” said Gerda. “Tell me if you know where I can find my playfellow.”

And the Ranunculus shone brightly, and looked again at Gerda. What song could the Ranunculus sing? It was one that said nothing about Kay either.

“In a small court the bright sun was shining in the first days of spring. The beams glided down the white walls of a neighbor’s house, and close by the fresh yellow flowers were growing, shining like gold in the warm sun-rays. An old grandmother was sitting in the air; her grand-daughter, the poor and lovely servant just come for a short visit. She knows her grandmother. There was gold, pure virgin gold in that blessed kiss. There, that is my little story,” said the Ranunculus.

“My poor old grandmother!” sighed Gerda. “Yes, she is longing for me, no doubt: she is sorrowing for me, as she did for little Kay. But I will soon come home, and then I will bring Kay with me. It is of no use asking the flowers; they only know their own old rhymes, and can tell me nothing.” And she tucked up her frock, to enable her to run quicker; but the Narcissus gave her a knock on the leg, just as she was going to jump over it. So she stood still, looked at the long yellow flower, and asked, “You perhaps know something?” and she bent down to the Narcissus. And what did it say?

“I can see myself—I can see myself! Oh, how odorous I am! Up in the little garret there stands, half-dressed, a little Dancer. She stands now on one leg, now on both; she despises the whole world; yet she lives only in imagination. She pours water out of the teapot over a piece of stuff which she holds in her hand; it is the bodice; cleanliness is a fine thing. The white dress is hanging on the hook; it was washed in the teapot, and dried on the roof. She puts it on, ties a saffron-colored kerchief round her neck, and then the gown looks whiter. I can see myself—I can see myself!”

“That’s nothing to me,” said little Gerda. “That does not concern me.” And then off she ran to the further end of the garden.

When Hans Christian Andersen gets retold or adapted, this sort of material tends to get cut. Which is ok, but sort of a shame all the same. Return of the Dapper Men is pretty much the reverse procedure.

Final thought. It’s a ‘how can robots and humans live together in peace and harmony story’ which would seem to make it sf. But really there is no reason why fairy tales shouldn’t be about robots – machines, wind-up dolls. Which just goes to show that, although there is an intuitive sf-fantasy divide, there is no intuitive sf-fairy tale divide, even though fairy-tales seem like a sub-set of fantasy. Which is a sort of paradox. But the explanation might be this. There was a time in the 30’s when fantasy and sf were ideologically divided. You’ve got Tolkien and other inklings – C.S. Lewis – who really want to write ‘feudal’, pre-modern fantasy. This doesn’t seem such a departure because fairy tales are standardly about kings and princesses and castles and all nostalgic jazz. But it is in fact rather novel, at this stage, to insist that fantasy to steer clear of ‘science’, rather than thematizing it, along with everything else, in some dreamy way. On the other hand you’ve got the likes of Hugo Gernsback, advocating ‘scientifiction’ or ‘science fiction’, and emphasizing that it needs to be plausible and all that. Making a play for ‘seriousness’ in that way. Neither attitude is sound. On the one hand, refusing science (technology, modernity) is, in fact, a way of engaging with science. Turning your back on someone is a way of saying something to, about about, them. And obviously none of that Gernsback stuff was really scientific.

There are lots of points in artistic/literary history where allegedly unbridgeable divides open up that, in retrospect, look humorously easy to step across: if you like Brahms, you can’t like Wagner. If you like The Sex Pistols, you can’t like The Who. You get these eruptions of authenticity as sectarianism, sytlistic balkanization, or generation gaps – anxiety of influence – lots of ways it can happen. Mostly it just burns itself out after a while and a more pan-appreciative tolerance reasserts itself. I’m tempted to say that something of the sort happened with fantasy and science fiction, and that gradually the two have grown back together. There is the following difference: it’s not that fantasy fans and sf fans were at each others’ throats in the 30’s and 40’s and now they get along. It’s more that people got in the habit of reading both but still putting them in carefully separated boxes.

Also, one reason why the dispute burns out is that, due to other shifts, the basis for the original division becomes intuitively not just implausible but totally unrecoverable. Brahms and Wagner, for example. Brahms was the ‘conservative’ and Wagner was the ‘progressive’, so they just couldn’t get along, allegedly. But we just don’t hear that anymore. Hell, Brahms sounds more ‘modern’, whereas Wagner is more ‘conservative’, if someone held a gun to your head and forced you to pick. Likewise, in the whole fantasy-sf split, there was a time when – thanks to Tolkien and Gernsback and others – fantasy was definitely the ‘conservative’ option, and sf the more ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ line (to anyone who cared). But gradually that sense has been effaced or actually reversed. If anything, these Dapper Men of fantasy seem more ‘modern’ (to anyone who cares).