Author: Jay Ivey

Allusions in Asterios Polyp: Duality, Chaos, Interconnectivity

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.

Nat Turner’s Ambiguous Conclusion

In the end, I was impressed by Baker’s Nat Turner because it left me feeling so conflicted – almost disturbingly conflicted.  As I got toward the end, I was growing uncomfortable with how the rebellion was portrayed.  I thought the ironic juxtaposition of brutal imagery with Turner’s own dispassionate, matter-of-fact descriptions was great, but the Christ-like depiction of his hanging (complete with celestial light beaming down from the heavens) was overly congratulatory.  There’s no doubt that Turner was a great man who stood up against the worst sort of human oppression.  However, he did so by equally inhuman means (slaughtering women, children etc).  You could definitely make an argument that those are the only means that could truly wake people up to the evils of slavery, but I thought the super-martyrdomy imagery and the caricature-like drawing of the bloodthirsty mob was making our minds up for us and oversimplifying the insane (and extremely interesting) moral complexity inherent in Turner’s account.

That being said, I thought the last few panels brought a lot of that ambiguity back to the party.  I inferred that the girl who steals away to read Nat Turner’s confession is Harriet Tubman, especially considering how the timing fits and how Baker mentions in his introduction that the rebellion inspired her, among others.   Considering how, historically, Tubman was illiterate, this may be a stretch.  If this is a valid reading, though, it suggests the possibility that more violence isn’t the only way to resist violent oppression.  As we see throughout the story, it’s education that gives Nat Turner his power to organize and inspire his rebellion.  In Tubman’s case, however, stories (including biblical stories and stories like that of Turner’s rebellion) spur her to take a different approach.  You could see it as Nat Turner’s sacrifice paving the way for gradual resistance and improvement, or you could see it as Tubman learning from the episode, consciously rejecting Turner’s methods, and taking another path.  Or maybe it isn’t Tubman.  Maybe it’s meant to be generic, and the emphasis is simply on the potential of stories and education to give us power to shape our worlds.  Maybe it’s a mix.  In any case, it’s an intriguing conclusion to a visceral, ambiguous story.

“Metafiction” in Volume 2, Chapter 2 of Maus

Talking about metafiction in Maus is complicated because the book’s genre is a little ambiguous – if it’s a biography, then a self-consciousness about writing the book is pretty standard.  Still, there are several moments where Spiegelman breaks out of his mouse allegory and/or dramatically changes the perspective, and I would call these “meta” moments.  I’m thinking specifically of the first page of the chapter “Auschwitz (Time Flies)”.  Regardless of whether this section qualifies as being “metafiction,” I found this to be perhaps the most powerful page of the book.

Like “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” it depicts Art as a man rather than a mouse, and it takes a much more personal point of view.   By drawing the people in this section as humans with literal animal masks tied on, Spiegelman cracks the veneer of his metaphor.  This reminds us sharply of the humanity behind the story’s rodentine characters, but it also hints that, in a way, the author is hiding behind his allegory.  What makes this section so impactful, to me, is how it grapples with the idea that any attempt to communicate these experiences is feeble and hopeless.

Art talks about the story’s events and describes the success of the first volume with flies buzzing around, and then there’s the large bottom panel with him at his writing desk surrounded by the emaciated bodies of Auschwitz victims.  This perhaps implies that his success so far has been somehow built on top the tragedy of the Holocost, but it also expresses a feeling of being overwhelmed by the subject.  As a writer spending years working on this book, he’s surrounded by this horrible history, but it’s something he knows only second hand and he faces the impossible task of communicating that experience.  He tells his therapist, “Auschwitz just seems too scary to think about…so I just LIE there.”  That the bodies are not only in his office, but in the street outside his apartment as he walks to his therapist shows just how immersed he is in the topic.  It’s like it’s haunting him, hounding him everywhere he goes.

On that first page of the chapter, Spiegelman plays with our perception of time by relating the major events of his story out of order.  He begins with Vladek’s death, which is shocking to the reader because we haven’t come that far in the narrative. By listing all these important moments tersely and in a matter-of-fact tone and contrasting that with him writing atop the Auschwitz victims, we see how he’s struggling both to express these occurrences to the reader and to truly understand them himself.  By playing with time, we see how the past and present are interconnected, how these characters are forever in the shadow of history.  Even Art, who wasn’t born until after the war.

Spiegelman creates that distance we’ve talked about, chiefly with the point of view, but when he does zooms in, it makes it all the more memorable.