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.