Art and life seem to intersect at my alarming weakness for the archetypal dissatisfied middle-aged American male.
In countless viewings, I’ve watched reverently as Annie Hall’s Alvie Singer mutters and paces in neurotic self-absorbed circles, and I adore Rabbit Angstrom in John Updike’s four-book saga, which chronicles the entirely non-remarkable life of the high school basketball has-been as he ages in suburban Pennsylvania. Something about these men—or the stories told about them—has a riveting affect on me.
I also tend to gravitate towards the classic chip-on-the-shoulder, older-than-his-years curmudgeon in my dating life. For this I have no explanation. Blame my father, blame my own Jewish neuroticism and doleful outlook, blame my First Love’s resemblance to Woody Allen. My own analysis has a place, and it’s definitely not here.
In fiction, anyways, I think I find that the more self-possessed and contained a central character is, the sharper his sense is to the textured fabric of his daily life. A book or movie that precisely re-creates life’s fleeting sensory details provides an immediacy that for me is irresistible. In the Rabbit novels, for example, Updike provides, through his title character’s consciousness, rich descriptions of twitching eyelids, humming refrigerators, the scents of suburbia—all of which seem to confirm my own existence, perhaps by seizing on to the flickering realities of forgotten life and holding them in the seeming firmness of the written word, the typed page.
David Mazzucchelli, in his graphic novel Asterios Polyp, provides his readers with the same sort of beautiful re-created life detail in telling the story of his self-absorbed, pompous, miserable title character, a retired professor of architecture who used to teach at an unnamed university in upstate New York. I loved this book because Mazzucchelli, in beautiful pastel scenes and well-crafted dialogue, provides Asterios the chance to grow—and he provides the reader a lens into that growth, and a place in a continuous dialogue about chance, love, and the limits of human experience. Asterios’s story is narrated by the omniscient voice of his would-be identical twin brother, who died in the womb with Asterios before Asterios was born. The brother’s critical and usually unflattering presentation of Asterios, as he is at the story’s beginning, is most profoundly presented by graphic illustrations; we see Asterios seated on an Ionic pedestal, for example, hovering in space, overlooking a Greek sculpture of a naked woman under the caption, “He taught because he loved the intellectual environment.” This comment is followed by a sequence of panels showcasing the admired professor’s series of co-ed conquests, described by a different woman in every adjacent panel, each with one word of the phrase “Here’s your coffee, professor,” ballooning out of her smiling mouth. The brevity and precision of the details of Asterios’s life allow the story to move swiftly and with intense feeling.
As the story opens, fifty-year-old Professor Asterios Polyp, whose exquisite designs, we are told, have never been built, watches porn in his empty Manhattan apartment. He aimlessly clicks a cigarette lighter open and shut, bags under his eyes, a five o’clock shadow sketched around his mouth. On the subsequent pages, the angular apartment, drawn in blues and dripping window panes you can hear in the purple night, suddenly lights with orange flame, and Asterios is pictured in silhouette, sprinting down the stairs while the onomatopoeia of blaring fire alarms and panic wraps around the stairwell. In subsequent pages, the flames are shown silently engulfing the books and apparently fine furniture of the apartment. Next, a dripping Asterios, having arrived at what could be Penn Station, utters his first words of the book to a Greyhound agent, over his open wallet: “How far would this take me?” What follows is a story of regeneration, of a closed man opening himself up to a second life as he reflects upon his previous one. His never-born brother provides the back-story of Asterios’s dissolved marriage with Hana, a soft-spoken sculptor, as Asterios settles as a newly taciturn auto mechanic (after researching the basics of car parts at the library) in the rural town he finds at the end of the bus line.
It is through the retrospective of Asterios’s relationship with Hana that Mazzucchelli provides some of his most riveting thoughts on dualities and self-perception. Asterios, in his work and teaching, is wedded to the idea that in architecture, “anything not functional becomes decorative.” His designs are symmetrical, clean and sparse—but they have never been built. We see examples of the blueprints of his grand schemes over captions reading “funding withdrawn.” Until he meets Hana, it would seem, his life is perfect on paper, flawless in theory—but he is enraptured by his own perfection, by his impressive credentials and his accidental womanizing. (I say accidental because purposefully hurting the women who parade through the panels of his young adult life would require a certain intention, and the ability to exist outside of his immediate need, that Asterios doesn’t initially possess. So he is careless and selfish, not malicious.) Hana, on the other hand, is usually shown working on abstract, amorphous pieces in the middle of cluttered studio spaces. Her organic shapes have won her countless awards and honors and a position at the university where Asterios teaches. And Hana’s pieces are, for all their “decoration” and lack of “function,” as Asterios might have it, “functional” in that they are actually realized in clay and stone and wire, not stuck on paper or discussed in the snarky, grandiose language we see Asterios using in his lectures. The ying-and-yang nature of the marriage is never obliquely discussed, but rather the visuals of Hana’s work juxtaposed with Asterios’s theoretical pontifications are underscored by the couple’s conversations—and the unborn brother’s commentary—pitting Apollo vs. Dionysus, male vs. female, positives vs. negatives. In one scene, Hana is shown asking, “Wait—So…Eve was a clone of Adam?”
“If she were made from his rib,” Asterios answers, “She would have the exact DNA.”
“Which is why they’re…”
“Twins.”
So there is a constant conversation in this book about the way opposite attract and interact, the way one end of a pole can serve the emphasize or highlight the other end—and whether dualities and symmetry is a figment of human invention, or the objective order of the universe. But the conversation is not limited to pointing out the places in our lives that are seemingly split in two. Instead, Mazzucchelli asks, in words and pictures, whether splitting our lives into dualities and opposites and binaries is simply easier for us than accepting “a sphere of possibilities.” “It’s just a convenient organizing principle,” Asterios says, bending his head over his packet of cigarettes, as though in answer to his brother in-absentia. “As long as one doesn’t mistake the system for reality,” answers the brother. And while Asterios seems convinced in his own ability to separate the human tendency to simplify and bisect from the potentially terrifying and limitless “sphere of possibilities,” the saga that follows shows him failing, time and again, to realize the limits of his own perception. Like a classical Greek hero felled by his own hubris, it is Asterios’s stubborn conviction in his open-mindedness, his proud grasp of solid facts and functional lines, that causes his emotional relationship with Hana to wither with neglect.
Where Asterios Polyps makes best use of its simple graphic form is in the scenes of domestic discord between Hana and Asterios. Early in the book, the unborn brother introduces the idea of the solitude of self-perception, of the loneliness created by the disjunction between the way each of us see ourselves and the way the world perceives us—which is something we can never truly be sure of. In illustrations that exaggerate each individual’s view of themselves in graphic form, we see people retreat into their secluded ideas of themselves in moments of interpersonal conflict. In one particularly moving scene, Hana and Asterios are in bed when Asterios reveals what seems at first to be a revolting secret. Hana is suddenly rendered in pink sketchy lines, perhaps as a testament to what she perceives to be her flowing, forgiving, and sensitive artistic nature, while Asterios becomes a construction of strictly geometric shapes. In the jarring moment of misunderstanding, they are two separate figures, unable to function in the same plane, let alone communicate. Once an explanation is given, the two meld figures slowly melt back into their more human forms. In Mazzucchelli’s book, coexistence and deep personal understanding allow us to be human—to take the shape of someone who is able to love and breathe beside another. His graphic representation shook me with its precise recreation of the specific brand of intense isolation it is possible to feel, even and especially in bed, even and especially with an intimate. That loneliness, perfectly presented in words and pictures, is almost too recognizable to bear.
The part of the book that I flipped to over and over again was an astounding six-page sequence that recounts, in flickering flashbacks, the heartbreaking familiarity and mundane intimacies of married life that Asterios has lost since Hana left him. In scattered rectangles, we see close-up drawings of Hana brushing her teeth; of a single curled hair stuck on a bar of soap; of Hana bending her head forward to allow a hand to zip up the back of her dress. As the sequence continues, the rectangles become closer together and fill up the page at what feels like an increasingly rapid pace: Hana flossing her teeth, waving away cigarette smoke, applying lipstick, farting—and between all these samples of daily life there is a sequence of Hana running towards train doors as they are about to shut. These pages end with the image of Asterios, solitary and small at the bottom of an otherwise-blank page, bending over his foot, bandaging what looks from the reader’s distance to be a blister. From the richness of shared life and experience we are shuttled abruptly into Asterios’s profound loneliness and sense of loss. This sequence is followed by a wordless few pages describing the re-imagined legend of Orpheus and Eurydice in dark monochrome; Asterios, envisioned as Orpheus, takes a floating subway car to retrieve Hana/Eurydice from the land of the dead, only to lose her once again at the journey’s end. One after the other, these two sequences provided incredible and wordless movement and feeling to a story whose character I have encountered in so many other forms—but never with as much feeling, or as much beauty. As the unborn brother tells us at the end of the book, “Every memory, no matter how remote its subject, takes place ‘now,’ at the moment it’s called up in the mind…Every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.” We watch Asterios learn about himself, about his limits, and ultimately about the power of expanding one’s self-view to include another, primarily through these recollections and series of re-lived “nows.” Asterios Polyp re-creates the memories of Asterios’s life as much as it re-creates the texture of life and feeling, and the experience of losing love, profoundly for the reader.
