Jane Irwin's graphic novel,
Clockwork Game, has just been released. It can be purchased in both trade paperback and pdf editions at
http://www.fierystudios.com/store/. Here is Nisi Shawl's introduction to it:
Into the Canny
Valley
by Nisi Shawl
The truth is right there in a word balloon on page 165.
“People believe stories, not facts,” says
Johann Maelzel, one in a series of owners of “The Turk,” the figure at the
center of the real-life, 85-year conspiracy depicted in
Clockwork Game.
Telling The Turk’s strange story through
expressive drawings and apt words, Jane Irwin makes us believe everything, from
its first appearance before 18th-century Vienna’s royal court up to its blazing
finale in 19th-century Philadelphia.
There’s the supposed chess-playing automaton’s match against Benjamin
Franklin, Napoleon’s pragmatic skepticism when presented with The Turk in the
wake of his Austrian victories, and Edgar Allan Poe’s article debunking the
claim that its prowess was that of a pure machine.
The Turk rubbed elbows with Beethoven and
shared an exhibit hall with P.T. Barnum’s Joice Heth, who the fledgling
impresario said was the 161-year-old former nurse of President George
Washington.
Clockwork Game is true. It’s also, unlike Barnum’s showman’s patter,
mostly facts. Though not entirely.
But to paraphrase Maelzel’s lead-up sentence to the aphorism
above, the story’s telling is what Jane Irwin gets right.
The Ottoman Empire had a long and glorious tradition of engineering
marvels and expanding scientific knowledge.
Irwin makes this tradition concrete in the book’s opening pages with a
charming sequence showing Al-Jazari’s elephant clock in operation, complete
with dragon heads and drummer. In
19th-century Philadelphia, Turkish-American doctor Yusuf bin Ibrahim provides
another lens on the racially-charged lampoon its inventor created in his
ostensible automaton. Again and again
Irwin challenges herself to question comfortable assumptions, looking at The
Turk’s career through the eyes of those so often classified as “others”: workers,
women, people of color, the physically disabled. Again and again she enriches the telling of
this fascinating tale by doing so; Clockwork Game is simultaneously
funnier and more tragic than readers may expect.
In the field of human aesthetics, the “uncanny valley” is
the dip in the graph of our tolerance of human simulacra.
We react with rising positivity to dolls and
robots as they become more and more like us--up to a certain point.
At that point there’s a drop-off in
acceptance, a sinking into revulsion.
Too lifelike, yet not alive, inhabitants of this figurative valley are
uncanny in appearance.
If their
similarity to us is developed further and continues to grow, the positive
reaction reasserts itself and the graph line trends upward again.
Wolfgang von Kempelen, The Turk’s inventor, despised what
he’d created as a fraud, “base trickery.”
Discussing one of his “serious” devices he bemoans the way audiences
focus on the odd appearance of his Speaking Machine, explaining that he’d
frequently begin demonstrations with its wheezing bellow and nostril-simulating
tubes covered by a sheet. He tells a
sympathetic visitor that he hopes eventually to hide the apparatus inside the dummy
of a young girl’s body. I think doing
this would have been a mistake; a human-looking doll that spoke would have been
far too disturbing to people of that time.
The Turk was saved from inhabiting in the uncanny valley by several
factors: the clockwork noises made during its operation; the standing invitation
to inspect its inner workings and thus disregard its outward appearance; and its
likeness to an exoticized other, which allowed the intended viewers to distance
themselves from it rather than identify with it. These dehumanizing elements kept The Turk on
the valley’s far side.
What I call the canny valley--without any experiments or charts
to back my theory up--is the sweet spot authors aim for between data and
whimsy. Clockwork Game sits in the
canny valley’s exact center. Here the
dip represents a fall in resistance to the unfamiliar. Beginning with sheer nonsense, what writers
and artists offer becomes more captivating as it encompasses more verifiable facts--but
not too many. There is a place on this
imaginary graph where, suddenly, facts take on the allure of fantasy and
speculation the weight of certainty. Clockwork
Game’s dramatic framing and quick pace make it easy for the book to fulfill
our innate biological hunger for narratives, and Irwin’s art—particularly her
characters’ enchantingly expressive faces—fleshes out the mere names and dates
that would have comprised her initial research.
And that research was both broad and deep, as can be ascertained by
referring to her twelve pages of notes and four of bibliography. It included books, videos, websites, and consultations
with people knowledgeable in areas such as Turkish culture and the
representation of diversity in fiction.
Composer and comedian Neil Innes once famously said, “I’ve
suffered for my music. Now it’s your
turn.” It was a joke, but other creative
artists have sometimes had to strive to avoid meaning something similar—especially
when they do lots research to support their projects. They’re drawn to the far side of the canny
valley, the dry and tortuously infertile terrain of facts for facts sake. A book filled with nothing but the poorly
presented results of research will beguile very few of us to spend our precious
time struggling through its pages.
Resistance will be high.
Irwin’s motto might well be “I’ve been suffused with
pleasure for my work’s sake. Now it’s
your turn.” Though she carefully
describes when, where, how, and why she departed from what’s known about The
Turk and its many adventures, she keeps these notes out of the story’s way,
confining them to Clockwork Game’s after matter, where they rightfully
belong. This leaves us free to luxuriate
in the delightful greenery where the story proper grows—to speed through it or
linger, to return to the canny valley as often as we like.
