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Seven Dwarf Essays
- University of Georgia Press
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114 Seven Dwarf Essays 1 Growing up, my son always said that when he grew up he wanted to be a seven dwarf. That was how he said it. “I want to be a seven dwarf.” It was funny, of course, because he wanted the most out of that expressed desire. He wished to be both a dwarf—an interesting aspiration in itself—and all seven of the Disney alternatives at once. And this use of a singular plural could have also meant he also meant he wanted to be a whole new category of dwarf, an eighth dwarf—beyond Sleepy, Grumpy, Sneezy, etc.—while still retaining the magic completeness of the whole tribe, the one and the seven. Part of the gang but separate too. He wanted to be both uncharacteristic and characteristic at the same time. He was learning to sort by sorting . This bent had shown up quite early. In the crib he watched the floating flotilla of four stuffed bears circling above him, suspended from the twirling arms of a wind-up mobile. The bears were identical save for the different colors of their matching overalls. I cut them down when my son was sitting up, and as soon as he could, he sat for hours, it seemed, and arranged the bears in a line—red, blue, green, yellow; green, red, blue, yellow; blue, yellow, red, green. It seemed to be in his blood, this four-letter alphabet like the code in DNA. Later it would be flags—he could recognize all the different state flags—then di- Seven Dwarf Essays 115 nosaurs, Power Rangers, Pokemon. Even now, in the next room while I type this, the teenage version of my son has been at it for hours, arranging the song titles, the artists, the lyrics on the expanding electronic litanies of his iPod. But nothing has ever quite taken him like the Seven Dwarfs did. Not the bears or the flags or the toys or the cards or the songs. “A seven dwarf,” he answered when I asked. 2 When I was growing up my favorite comic book was Adventure Comics, featuring the Legion of Superheroes, kids roughly my age endowed with various powers—strength, speed, smarts. One hero could inflate and bounce. One could grow small. One could grow tall. One turned invisible. One turned into anything at all—chairs, rocks, light poles. The girl who could split into two, once could split into three. But one self had been killed long before I started reading the series. The twins treated their missing sister like a phantom limb. What I liked best was knowing that each hero had a specific weakness. Ultra Boy had ultra powers of strength, speed, etc., but could only use them one at a time. Then there were the cousins from ill-fated Krypton, Superboy and Mon-el. One could be mortally injured by Kryptonite that could be shielded only by lead; the other was vulnerable only to lead. The weaknesses and strengths were interlocking and always exploited by this month’s villain. It was never the whole legion who did battle, only some subset, a team of seven, say, a lineup always shifting. Though they were heroes, those kids were freaks, of course, accurate metaphors for their teenage readers’ sense of strangeness. They came by their powers by accident —swept by cosmic dust, blasted by gamma rays. Or did they simply drink the wrong drink? Issue from the star-crossed combination of parents? And there is that fatalism in their genes, the chromosomes those modern threads spun, stretched, and snipped by the three sisters. We all embody our own ancient tragedy—the very stuff that allows us to thrive as a race might well be the fatal flaw, the circumstance of our own demise. The [35.172.193.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:09 GMT) fourhanded carbons are the little gods that destroy and create. The oxygen-hungry human brain we are so proud of is an accident , and the pride the brain can conjure will be the very thing to cause our extinction. It’s an old message, these fatal flaws. I remember teenage superheroes sitting around their clubhouse (they had a clubhouse!) lamenting their fates, wishing they could be like other normal teenagers of the twenty-fifth century. Or I think I remember them wishing for that. But other “normal” teenagers are never normal. Or the normalness of teenagers never feels normal. The...