Category: Week 11 – Asterios Polyp

While Greek and Roman themes are heavily referenced throughout this book, the most whimsical mythic icon appears to the left.  It is a section of the Cyclopean walls, still extant in Greece and Italy.  While not the circular face with two cut -out arcs of Asterios, the center stone in the middle column, middle row does mimic in style and ‘humanity’ the protagonists’ image and demeanor.

Almost top-heavy with dualities, Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp presents both Greek and Roman mythology (Polyp’s Greek father and Italian mother), the yin and yang of relationships (Asterios and Hana curled in bed together), and the contemporary paper verses scissors bilarity (cerebral architect and actual designer/builder).

Here’s the dichotomy of the plot:  In 1927, E.M. Forester wrote in Aspects of the Novel that the central suspense depends on the difference between flat and round characters and the believability that round characters must embody to produce tension, and hence, a book worth reading.  We have the story of an architect (with one effective eye) who never built any structures compared to  the Cyclopes race and members of a Tracian tribe of skillful architects who built the Cyclopean walls of “unhewn polygons, sometimes 20 or 30 feet in breadth”  (Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology).

Unnerving me further, after the Cyclopes were hurled into Tartarus, a prison of the underworld, they became followers of Zeus and made lightning bolts for him.

Here’s the punch line:  Forester also believes the protagonist often has to be sacrificed in order to end the book on the proper note of released tension.

The nuances and depths of this novel are many and the complicated layers provide a rich quest and odyssey.

Being complete is such a weird notion. It has eleven different definitions, some referring to grammar and others mathematics. But when someone says it in reference to themselves, it’s a little harder to quantify. Does it mean they want to feel satisfied? Content? Happy? Or is it as simple as just feeling whole? As if they really lack nothing.

I just found it interesting how this story played with different themes of being complete. Like being born a pair, but not really. Before Asterios even realized that he was born a twin, he recognized a lack. Always looking over his shoulder and expecting…just something to be there. The knowledge that he was supposed to have an identical brother, rather than creating a sense of closure, only made an opening. Thoughts like, “Would he have been just like me? Better than me, worse than me” crowded in and he could never feel truly satisfied with anything he did.

I find it interesting that that writer introduced the Aristophanes treatise in Plato’s “Symposium”, although Mazzucchelli kind of left out that it is a speech about romantic love. Basically, Aristophanes put forth the idea that there is a special type of love that connects people, a soul mate. He goes on to say that there were once three genders: male, female and a combination of the two.  That these sexes in truth represented one’s soul and when the third gender split in half it created a mirror image of each. He thought that love was the search for the other half of one’s soul. Aristophanes also believed that this search for love showed a certain “lack”, as if being separated meant one was fated to die incomplete. Although, Mazzucchelli related through drawings of man’s drive to complete himself <Asterios in different modes of copulation> it can’t only be implied that his completion would be felt through a female. Maybe he was a fourth gender, his twin and the lives that would have played out had he been born alive.

This lack of completion follows through on a romantic level as well, with his wife Hana. The writer even has a blatant reason for why they were attracted to each other and why it didn’t work. At one point he even positions them in the extremely recognizable symbol of yin and yang. This Chinese philosophy explains how polar or seemingly opposite forces are interconnected but also interdependent. Asterios even comments about how well they fit together, how their lives just folded together so neatly.  But this “fit” couldn’t override the fact that the could barely communicate on the same level.

When the marriage breaks up Asterios is left floundering again, completely lost and still searching.

Duality and completion just kept battling each other right to the end.

Picking up on Jay’s excellent post, I was struck by the form vs. function argument made by Ignazio/Mazzucchelli.  It appear that Asterios = function and Hana = form or Asterios = Apollo and Hana = Dionysus.  Asterios is the practical one, as we see when he purchases the “essences of shoeness” in the “abstractions” section that begins the chapter (What happened to the functionality of numbers!!) mentioned by Jay. But Hana, as we see from Mazzucchelli’s drawings of her sculpture, is not necessarily so. She’s about form in her art.

You get the feeling that this is a doomed marriage, not because their differences which as the book begins, it is not certain they will be able to overcome, but because of randomness.  The section of the book that begins with an image of a clock and a screwdriver, presumably the clock he dismantled as a child, gives Ignazio’s thoughts on Asterios’ views on the Clockmaker theory of evolution as a grand design and Asterio’s preference for Greek deities because of the “random events of joy and tragedy that befall human beings.”

But his arguments that form vs. function is a duality rooted in nature (“abstractions” chapter) fails to take into account the utter randomness of everything in his life, including the asteroid that seals his relationship with Hana. He doesn’t hear the counter argument that randomness can create “superficial similarities that appear dualistic because we define them that way.”  For a man so skeptical about a supreme force in nature, his argument contradicts itself.

While opposites attract, it is surprising that they marry, but not surprising when she files for divorce.  They curl up as yin and yang on the bed, complementary opposites that interact to form a greater whole, after he tells her about the cameras he has installed to document if he is his Ignazio or if he is Asterio. While Asterio’s yin is about function, he has never built anything other than a tree house; Hana’s yang is always creating tangibles. The groundwork for friction is there if Astrios fails to acknowledge that the two halves of duality are equal, which he fails to do.

In one of my favorite passages from the book, he flashes back to when the essence of shoeness has left a blister on his foot. His memories of Hana, in all of her imperfect randomness, play across the top and bottom of the pages, while he pulls a puff of cotton from her ear with one of the three possessions he will save when his apartment catches fire – tweezers from a Swiss army knife, the ultimate functional item.  This is the scene that marks the beginning of his return to her, as he realizes that randomness has created a near perfect duality.

In Asterios Polyp, Mazzuchelli uses visual motifs to characterize individuals. We have  seen similar devices used by other authors/artists but not to this extent.

Mazzuchelli uses  changes in dialogue boxes and in how characters are drawn to create visual identities. This is part of the.larger theme of the novel: that reality is in some ways an extension of the self. Hence each character is completely unique visually.

The other day, I was riding the bus with a friend and the conversation turned to Wes Anderson. “I loved The Life Aquatic–at least, until the end,” my friend shared.

I was mildly shocked at this disavowal of one of my favorite movies. “How come?”

“It just ruined it for me,” she sniffed. “The movie should have ended five minutes earlier. It was just too over the top, too flashy, too loud…too unexpected.”

“Oh.” I thought over what she had said. “I used to agree with what you’re saying now, but the more I’ve thought about the film, the more I’ve realized how integral the end is to Anderson’s plot and what he’s exploring re. the framework of how we identify ourselves, the search for meaning and purpose, the cost of that search…I guess I think the ending is bittersweet, but not out of place in the slightest.”

That very same night, back in my apartment, I finished Asterios Polyp. As I processed the final pages, I swiftly realized my thoughts toward its ending were rather similar to my processing of Anderson’s comedy.

When that asteroid plummets towards earth, at first I was a bit shocked. Then I was amused–this is precisely how I used to finish off the stories I wrote in elementary school: with a bang, a flash, a conveniently placed atomic bomb–The End. Laziness aside, I was actually tapping into a long and respected literary convention. After all, similarly dire conclusions repeatedly seem to be the penultimate conclusions to all the problems of humanity’s own existence, regardless whether it’s a believer or a nonbeliever predicting the future (delusional utopian idealists aside, that is). I digress: the more I think about it, the more I think it would be a mistake to simply write off that asteroid in Asterios Polyp simply as a way to tie up loose plot threads.

Nor is it meant to be merely an ironic twist at the end of the narrative. “There are times when a beautiful image makes sense as good storytelling in ways that are not easily explained,” commented the author in an interview re. his artistic process. No, irony is too convenient, too cheap.

After all, this isn’t an unprecedented element in the plot. There is the slight matter of the titular character’s name, for starters. Just as importantly, and a bit like Steve Zissou’s opening encounter with the Giant Jaguar Shark, it takes a force of nature to shock Asterios (pun intended) into fresh action, early on in the story. That action is so very important throughout what happens next. And at least in my opinion, the action matters more than the causation (must be the humanist in me!) even as it is amplified and complicated through Mazzucchelli playing with huge meta-themes of freewill vs predestination via a long-lost twin, grecian myth, etc.

According to another friend of mine, Asterios Polyp is all about how we “order our lives according to particular structures,” certain frameworks of belief, different worldviews… I would agree; Mazzucchelli overtly plays with this by creating Asterios as an architect (more meta self awareness, of course!) And by the end, Asterios has engaged in a dramatic (perhaps even redemptive?) re-appraisal of the structures of his life. The resulting character growth is all the more poignant for its conclusion.

Yes, there are events that Asterios encounters that are far above and beyond his control. Call it fate, call it supernatural, call it nature–it matters not; in the end, “man knows not his days.” What does matter how Asterios conducts himself in the meantime–and it matters all the more for the uncertainty.

And yes, Mazzucchelli seems to think that we all have a choice in such conduct. Asterios is no Jimmy Corrigan–he is vastly more sympathetic and endowed with a great deal more agency.

Throughout the work, I think that Mazzucchelli posits that Asterios’ actions/structures do matter, both to himself and to the characters around him. I cannot help reading a very real sincerity–one that is, yes, bittersweet–in the character arc and in the ending.

Am I alone in this?

I was going to write this post about Asterios Polyp’s confused approach when it comes to philosophy. He sometimes subscribes to a structuralist/deconstructionist approach (dualisms prevade, to understand one thing “in a better light, understand the opposite”). Other times he admits things are more complicated, and goes with the sliding scale of situations and ideas that tend to dominate postmodern philosophy. While trying to figure out where Asterios discusses these things (a difficult task given the lack of page numbers, which make notes general guidelines), I noticed something pretty cool–Mazzucchelli (who I will refer to as “Maz” from here on out) puts a lot of work into drawing philisophical ideas.

I came onto this as I was trying to find specific pages and noticed it was easier to look for the image tied to the idea that passages themselves. For example, in one example our dead narrator writes “This desire to view the world through a filter–to superimpose a rational system on to its seeming randomness–is revealed in his own favorite ideation.” The images then take up most of the page. First an image of Asterios then one of him split into a mirrored two with internal and external on one side and factual and fictional on the other. This is followed two pages later by a similar image of him talking to a woman friend. The image is split in two as he discusses male vs female, positive and negative currents, right and left hemispheres of the brain. On the next page Asterios admits “…/that things/ aren’t so black and white-/-that in actuality/ possibilities exist/ along a continuum/ between the extremes.”   These images also highlight the idea of the philosophy. He begins lightly shaded and ends up darkly shaded, along a continuum, as he says each part of this sentence. Later when he dreams of it being more like a sphere, an image of a sphere appears.

In another instance Usrsala Major describes astrology, and some of the evidence she has to support it, and as John pointed out on the twitter, we have to turn the page, like reading the stars or a star chart.

Over and over, Maz uses images to actually illustrate philosophy. I know in some of the other books we could tie actions to the pictures that represent them, but this seems like something new. Maz’s constant attention to detail here helps bring us into the pages of the text by illustrating the complicated ideas people discuss. I’m no architecture student, but I’ve also noticed he tends to illustrate a lot of the architecture concepts, and I’m willing to bet the experience would be similar for someone better versed in architecture theory than critical and cultural studies theory.

Did anyone else notice places where the drawing of complex ideas takes place? Thoughts?

When I figuratively walk away from Asterios Polyp and ask myself what is the first thing I remember, I answer color, and lack thereof. My first tweets about this graphic novel were along the lines of “Does anyone else feel calm reading this work? Maybe it’s something about the colors…” Looking back at the book, I see so much white space, and what is colored is colored in faded yellows, purples, and washed out blues. It’s like I was looking at the story through a muted lens, and for whatever reason, this made me feel calmer about the work, even when meteors were crashing down in the pages.

Before I looked back at the work, I would have said that the all of the book was colored in the manner of muted hues. I would have said that every page was done in a similar palette to the next, nothing too jarring, nothing too saturated. But when I actually do look back at the pages, I find that that assessment is wrong. There are several portions of the book where the pages are drenched in color. Pages into the graphic novel, we have wall to wall purple as Asterios and others run down the stairs and as yellow fire trucks fight back yellow flames. No, there’s not the eye-gouging red and dripping blue, but color dominates the page in a way that I didn’t immediately call to mind.

The next saturated segment tells us Hana’s story. The pages are soaked in red, with the exceptions of the page literally being folded back to show us Asterios and Hana talking in the present, against the background of her past. I like Lindsay’s assessment of Hana and Asterios as complimentary colors, red and blue respectively, and I do believe that works in regards to these pages as well.

Hana’s often colored with red. From glimpses into her life story (as shown mostly by the red pages), we know that Hana is quiet, if not shy, and prone to avoid the spotlight either by it literally not being shined on her by her family or by choice as we see her avoid speaking engagements. As her “flower” name implies, Hana still has a thirst for life and in enjoyment for it, while Asterios is shown as seeing the world in dichotomies.

At first I thought where Hana can see the world saturated with color (like red), Asterios would have more binary color choices, which makes me first literally think of black and white. But, as the graphic novel (and the beginning of my post) shows you, the graphic novel operates in muted colors, seemingly negating my neatly packaged color metaphor. However, I still think it could apply because instead of trying to look for the world through Asterios as being just black and white, I see it rather as being pages of white and color, the absence of color and then the presence. Much of the graphic novel operates in colors portioned against consuming white space.

An example of this can be seen early on, following the “Here’s your coffee, Professor” panels. Hana is shown at the bottom of this page awash in red shadow. She’s etched onto the background, her portion of the panel blending into the page with no clear ending between her and the white of the page. Contrasting her is Asterios, shown in hard lines of blue. His portion of the panel is clearly defined; not blending into the page, although Hana’s red encroaches on his neat lines. While Hana is saturated with red, Asterios is still a practice in binaries, defined by the areas where his harsh blue lines take up space and the white areas where the lines do not.

~Kelley

Like Fun Home, Asterios Polyp is chock full of allusions, but here they vary a lot more in subtlety.  For instance, in the second chapter you have a frame of Asterios as a boy in his bedroom.  The titles of two books on his shelves are explicit: The Prince and the Pauper and The Man in the Iron Mask.  However, the reader must bring in outside knowledge to grasp the connection to twins and duality.  The two posters on the wall present an opposite sort of allusion: the reference to twins and duality is apparent in the image, but you have to work backwards to get put them in context—one is of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, the other from the myth of Romulus and Remus.  Of course, the latter instance is particularly relevant, because on the next page we learn that Asterios’s twin brother died in the womb, and when Asterios confides this to Hana, he speculates as to whether he “somehow suffocated the poor bastard,” as Romulus killed his own twin.

As an aside, in this panel we also have the DNA on the bed (related to the genetic equivalence of twins) contrasted with the molecular pattern on the curtains, we have the black and white duality in the chessboard, and we have in the window the little airplane that appears in the dream sequences with Ignatius.  Apparently, there’s a lot of Freudian stuff going on with a kid who has this stuff in his room and doesn’t yet know he has a dead twin brother.

Perhaps owing to Asterios’s heritage, we get a lot of Greek myth.  Maybe the most important is the dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus, which comes up explicitly, with a Greek vase contrasted with an amorphous blob, in Ignatius’s chapter beginning “ABSTRACTIONS.”  On the next page, we see Asterios give several of his own interpretations of this famous binary pair, and then with the tipping of the scale we see his clear predilection for the Apollonian—the logical, the functional, the ordered—over Dionysian decoration, passion, and chaos.  This is cemented by allusions shortly after to Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund and Calvino’s Cloven Viscount (and references to the titles of other pertinent works, including those the two from Asterios’s childhood bedroom) that Ignatius follows with the metafictional quip, “Some might argue that such simplification is best suited to children’s stories, or comic books.”  Asterios, attached to his “convenient organizing principle” of duality, disagrees.

Also, his full surname, bastardized at Ellis Island, must have been Polyphemus—later on, he loses his eye and has to wear a patch, effectively making him a Cyclops.  I found this interesting, because it hints at his one-sided, narrow approach to logically reducing everything down to polarity—but at this point in the story, he’s near the end of his transformative journey, and he’s changed.  And Ignatius tells us his brother always preferred the Greek gods to an solitary, omniscient god because “by giving them human personalities, the ancient Greeks could feel that the world made sense.”  Then we see Zeus cavalierly frying some poor guy with a lightning bolt, saying to his buddies, “watch this.”  This section I found particularly powerful because it relates to the chaotic events that jar Asterios’s well constructed, functional life: the lightning bolt setting his building on fire, the random violence that costs him his eye, the car crash, and of course, the meteor.  As if, the only way to make sense of life is to attribute human capriciousness to fate.

I’ve hardly touched on most of the allusions in the book (Orpheus, anyone?  That’s a whole new post), but going back, it’s amazing how interconnected and thematically consistent they are.

Amidst the beautiful images, grandiose metaphors, exquisite story, and full characters, Asterios Polyp quietly, ever-so quietly tosses out a small theme that I would like to shine some light on.  The Shadow. The Doppelganger.

Asterios Polyp calls upon a wide breadth of characters to portray a fair story chronicling a slice in the life of the protagonist, however, the protagonist is not the narrator.  Mazzucchelli presents the discourse through the unseeing (in a literal sense) of Asterios’ identical twin.  This is no small decision.  Identical twins have often been the subject of discussions; if not for medical purposes and case studies, certainly for the cultural, religious, academic, philosophical, and any other themes that I may have missed.  Historic cultural folklore and belief of some civilizations regarded twins as heavenly dieties, or appalling devilry.  Greek Mythology often placed a dualistic nature upon twins; not-so-much in the light for good and evil, but more upon the fixtures for balance and harmony.  Regard Apollo and Artemis, twins in the order of Zeus: Apollo for the sun, Artemis for the moon.  Simply put, greek mythology rarely places a twins into a strict dichotomy, but there is something to be said for the balance of Asterios and Ignazio.

In our first encounter with Ignazio, Asterios appears to be upon the Greek Parthenon (or ruins of something similar), clearly flashing the heavy greek theme the book will illustrate.  Without hesitation or doubt, Asterios calls to Ignazio by name.  Pretty good recognition for an individual he has never met; then again, Asterios is dreaming, and this is his twin.  Mazzucchelli presents a discourse with a narrator of perfect proportions; who better to tell the story of Asterios than a character he can instantly recall in his sleep.  Who could do better justice than his twin.  However, here, Ignazio appears to be on a bed-of-passing, Asterios towering above him in visitation.  

Our next “Ignazio visitation” is quite charming, clearly he’s been resuscitated but through Asterios; here, they are at the same point in life.  We fully observe the difference in the eyes between Asterios and Ignazio here; Asterios has the simple pupil while it is Ignazio who retains the incut, unrevealing eye that Asterios normally maintains (outside of his dreams).  Mazzucchelli illustrates Asterios’ non-revealing eyes when he is with Hana; with these eyes Asterios has the ability to be worldy intelligent, controlling, and self-absorbantly cocky.  In fact, throughout Polyp, we observe Ignazio steal away the life of Asterios, until the moment Asterios fights to take his life back.

Ignazio is more than just the narrator: he is more than the still-born twin, more than a replication of Asterios in his dreams.  Ignazio is, in fact, presented to be the doppelganger of Asterios.  Ignazio is the blindness of achievement to the truths of true success.  Ignazio is the voice of philosophy to Asterios’ will of creation.  Ignazio, he IS the life of Asterios.

I have to say, reading Asterios Polyp was a lot of fun, and I’m certain I would need to read it several times in order to understand it completely.  There’s just so much going on in terms of the philosophical ideas that are expressed by words and images and sometimes it seems the ideas are only expressed in one format and other times in a combination of the two.

My favorite idea expressed is the difference between people’s realities and what happens when two people come together.  The narrator brings up this idea most clearly for me when Asterios first meets Hana in 1984.  The party is full of a variety of people and each of those individuals is drawn using a completely different format: large lines with simple detail; shaded lines and all outline; triangular shadows; letters; circles connected by straight lines.  What’s so incredibly interesting to me, and this does not actually strike me as a novel idea, but I really love the way it’s executed, is how the different styles for Asterios and Hana end up intertwining as they start talking.  Asterios is drawn in blue lines and he looks hollow and made of shapes artists use when first drawing the form of a person.  Hana, on the other hand, is drawn using a very detailed red line that seems to be primarily shading.  In terms of the colors, red and blue are on opposite sides of the spectrum, but reinforcing this opposite idea is how these two things compliment each other.  For instance, the form-style (I’m not sure what else to call it) of Asterios is perhaps the first thing that an artist would draw, but the shading is just as important and is essential to making objects seem more real.  When Hana’s shading meets Asterios’ form, the portrait is complete.

Later on, when Hana and Asterios are fighting (we actually see the final panel of when Hana says, “what makes you think you’re always right?” at the end of the fourth chapter later on when Hana and Asterios are breaking up, but from a different angle) the original styles that we were introduced to when they met come up again and are drawn out.  It seems that as they fight each individual returns to his or her original individual reality, or perspective (?) by returning to the original style used to introduce them.  Hana is the red shading and Asterios is the hollow blue form.

This links to another idea in the graphic novel about dichotomies that Asterios claims are natural and that it seems eventually he learns are not necessary.  I’m not entirely sure why Mazzucchelli does not use the same styles when Asterios and Hana meet again for the last time at the end of the novel, but I do think it has to do with a certain abandonment on Asterios and Hana’s part.  I think by this point they are no longer forcing their original individual realities / perspectives on each other and they are no longer defined by them.