Hooded Polyp: Beyond the Binary


Much has been said, this past week—not to mention and this past year or so—about David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, and I feel I don’t have much to add to the discussion of the work itself that I haven’t already said in my earlier examination of the book. However, I think much of the discussion in the present forum has highlighted how excitingly—albeit also frustratingly—open discourse on comics is in these times of redefinition. My contribution, thus, will at least initially concentrate on this discourse rather than on the book, which is perhaps fitting in that Asterios Polyp itself can be seen as meta-discourse on comics.

I agree fully with Caroline’s Sunday post that the binary of visual and literary is ultimately a false one, not the least in comics, but it remains central to contemporary comics discourse, and critical approaches that do the form justice as a synthesis of word and image have yet to develop beyond pubescence. Caroline rather cavalierly accuses Mazzucchelli and his critics of missing the point by perpetuating this pernicious binary, while bluntly claiming that the book “pays disproportionate attention to one side of the binary, the “visual.”

I see Mazzucchelli’s aspiration precisely as the “performative enactment of the ways in which comics defies the binary between literary fiction and visual art” that Caroline solicits from progressive comics. As she rightly points out, ‘literature’ does not necessarily equate ‘words only’, and Mazzucchelli follows that insight in order to craft comics as literature. Reducing Asterios Polyp’s thematic core to a set of trite literary clichés, as several of the present pundits have done, is symptomatic of how vigorously said false binary animates comics criticism—like so many important works of art, Asterios Polyp’s originality lies exactly in how it presents these common tropes in highly sophisticated comics form.

Furthermore, Asterios Polyp is hardly a manifestation of “delayed modernism”—I don’t believe there is such a thing: comics as we know them are gloriously a creation of modernity and they experienced ‘modernism’ along with all the other art forms, long ago. Rather, Mazzucchelli’s project is emphatically post-modern, in that he addresses the modern(ist) legacy of comics in an attempt to assert its value, as well as to suggest its current limitations. His choice of protagonist, plot structure, and symbology is patently deliberate and highly self-reflexive—in order to examine the notion of comics as literature, what could be more natural than approaching some of the most tried tropes of modern literary fiction in the exaggerated, simplified form developed and refined historically in comics?

As I wrote in my essay, Mazzucchelli reveals his post-modernist hand in a crucial feat of obfuscation. Presenting us with a self-consciously heavy-handed refutation of his protagonist’s dualist worldview in lucid, fully-realized comics form, he leaves unstated essential aspects of his story. When probing these, his “formalism” takes on literary meaning in the broad sense of the term, and the book ends up, on one level, as a deconstruction not only of its constitutive tropes—literary as well as cartoony—but of comics as literature in the narrower modernist sense.

As metadiscourse, Asterios Polyp as bold and sophisticated as anything in comics, but its success ultimately might have to be gauged elsewhere and on more uncertain terms. The readings made here of the main characters, Asterios and Hana, have tended toward the ungenerous, and this is no doubt in part Mazzucchelli’s own problem for miring them in this seemingly prescriptive construction of a story, which threatens his larger ambition of transcending the limitations of his form. It’s arguable how well he succeeds, but I, for one, find the lives they live beyond what he makes visible recognizably affecting. Asterios’ worldview doesn’t provide a satisfying framework for understanding his actions, but we can try by going beyond it. And for Asterios, and therefore the reader, the true Hana remains intuited rather than stated. But they are both there, beyond the binary.

23 thoughts on “Hooded Polyp: Beyond the Binary

  1. Hey Matthias. Thanks for responding so civilly to the haters.

    “in order to examine the notion of comics as literature, what could be more natural than approaching some of the most tried tropes of modern literary fiction in the exaggerated, simplified form developed and refined historically in comics?”

    I wish I saw this. I see a lot of self-reflexivity in the use of formal structures, but little in the approach to storytelling. What makes you believe he sees the tropes as played out? Where is the sense that he’s using the literary tropes as tropes? The story just seems really simplistic; the notes you make about what’s left out in your original essay seem more like television plot holes than like considered modernist puzzles.

  2. At last, comments!

    Matthias, you say in this that you do not think Asterios is an example of delayed modernism. But in the earlier essay you say “Asterios is perhaps the most self-conscious manifestation so far of the notion […] that comics are currently experiencing a kind of delayed modernism.” Did you rethink it since the original piece?

    I also want to clear up something in your summarization of my argument, here: “Caroline rather cavalierly accuses Mazzucchelli and his critics of missing the point by perpetuating this pernicious binary, while [italics mine] bluntly claiming that the book “pays disproportionate attention to one side of the binary, the “visual.”” It’s that word “while” that’s bothering me.

    My point is that the “paying disproportionate attention” is the mechanism by which the binary is perpetuated in the book…it’s a binary in the sense of two things that can be separated from each other (only separate things can be treated disproportionately). “While” implies that these things don’t fit together, but the two bits you quote from me are a cause and its effect…

    I can try to say it differently: the difference between graphical and literary is experienced as a binary because they’re unbalanced…if Mazzucchelli had done what Noah asked for, it wouldn’t be experienced as a binary and I would probably have read it as a shining achievement of metafiction!

  3. Noah: you may find it unsuccessful, but I think you’re being a little obtuse when you’re suggesting that the things left out are merely plot holes. Read the book again — it’s clearly all extremely well considered. That you could think otherwise suggests to me that you haven’t been paying attention.

    Caroline: regarding the notion of “delayed modernism”, I wrote the following in my review of Bart’s book:

    “While I agree that the entry of comics into high culture these years is a very important development for the medium, I am unconvinced that comics have not yet experienced their “modernism,” or their “postmodernism” for that matter. To argue that is to expect them to develop in similar ways, and with a similar logic, as the high culture forms they by virtue of their history as a bastard, low-culture medium, are significantly different from. Comics’ “modernism” was their insistence on figuration and archetype at a time when literature and the fine arts, respectively, eschewed those, and their “postmodernism” is their current blurring of boundaries between high and low.”

    In other words, I don’t believe it. Mazzucchelli however feints it like an expert. That’s what I was trying to say in my piece on AP, but it was perhaps unclear. Sorry about that.

    Regarding my summation of your argument, what I was trying to say is that you seem to be perpetuating this binary yourself in your analysis by insisting that these are separate concerns: to me, a lot of what you’re asking for happens in the cartooning.

    Which brings me to a general point: even if we were to discount the metafictional aspects of AP and the sophistication with which Mazzucchelli cartoons his protagonist’s inner life — which I obviously don’t believe we should — what is wrong with a simple story if it resonates emotionally?

    Your analysis, Noah, seems willfully reductive, as if you refuse to grant any emotional verisimilitude to the comic. As I said, I too find that the conventions and tropes deployed by Mazzucchelli get in the way to a certain extent, even if I think their deployment is interesting in other ways, but these are not cardboard characters, to paraphrase Domingos — the clichés deliberately don’t tell the whole story, and Mazzucchelli has clearly invested a lot of energy into suggesting this.

    The scene at the composer’s, for example, seems rather demonstrative on the surface, but think about how distinctly he evokes the presence of each of the four people present. You *feel* the tensions between them, and where they intersect emotionally and intellectually. It’s masterful cartooning.

    I can’t help but suspect that your ideological objections to white male mid-life crisis narratives plays a major role in your negative reaction here. Am I wrong?

  4. I mean, I really hate the story for many reasons, including (most prominently) the tiresome gender stereotypes and the idiotic magical rednecks.

    I mean, the coutersuggestion would be that your affection for Mazzucchelli’s work in general, and the dazzling achievement of the art in particular, makes you want to believe he’s in control of the story and its tropes in a way that I think is not justified by the actual comic.

    Here’s a question. Your argument seems at least partially predicated on the idea that the book is successful in that it mirrors Asterios’ perspective; that it leaves out certain things, but that those are things that are left out because Asterios wouldn’t see them.

    But isn’t the book thematically devoted to the idea that Asterios’ perspective is limited and aesthetically flawed? And the end tries to suggest that he has overcome that flaw by reconciling with Hana. Shouldn’t the book then reflect that change at its conclusion; shouldn’t we get a glimpse of the other, missing perspective if we’re to take the book’s claims seriously?

    But we don’t get that at the end; instead we get intertwining speech bubbles and a big asteroid. The end is as simplistic and idiotic as the rest of the narrative. I guess Mazzucchelli might get points for correctly explaining why his own comic is not very good — but it still, to me, is not very good.

  5. Thanks Matthias: I think we’ve mostly cleared up the confusion. Hurrah! I did think you were situating Asterios Polyp as an actual example of this “delayed Modernism.” I think there’s still some worthwhile grappling over this idea of delayed Modernism — your Beaty essay starts that — but I’m ok with that happening in a different context.

    My intention was to point out the binary because I felt like it was stalking me in the book. I didn’t intend to perpetuate it but to push back against it. Obviously that was unclear in what I wrote as well — I guess this is the joy of blogging? — but I think that confusion is also basically cleared up, now.

    This, then, is the rub: “to me, a lot of what you’re asking for happens in the cartooning.”

    I don’t see it, and I do see a lot in the cartooning. (I did enjoy the book, even though it didn’t excite me intellectually.)

    I think the reason you say that is maybe that you’re focusing on the idea that what I’m looking for is this specific thing, this “breaking down” of the binary. I can definitely see THAT in the cartooning. But the only reason I brought the binary issue up is because binaries are a theme in the book so that was a way to get at what I was really looking for. The thing I’m looking for can’t be just “in the cartooning” because the thing I’m looking for is by definition “in the concept.” (Not either/or, in either direction.) Yes, the cartooning is aware of itself as a cartoon, and it is aware of the themes of the narrative, and the themes of the narrative are reflected in the cartoon, very successfully and with immense technical aplomb and some emotional resonance (for me at least, maybe not for Noah).

    But in the same way, then, I look at whether the themes of the narrative are aware of themselves as themes of a narrative (I think that’s part of Noah’s point), and also aware of the themes of the cartoons, and whether the themes of the cartoons are reflected in the narrative.

    That’s where the simplicity of the story causes it to fall apart, because the two are too self-similar. They reflect each other rather than appearing as facets of a bigger whole. Rather than getting a new insight you get the themes and the material “looking at each other,” just get a reflection (and admittedly, the aesthetic satisfaction of a technical achievement.) They’re separate, not unified.

    And sure, there are two, the concept and its materiality, but those are not oppositions, and binaries are oppositions. The thing and it’s reflection, though, can’t be re-unified: the mirror always divides the thing.

  6. I did say “smart cardboard” and I added a question mark. Going on with my tactics of talking about other cartoonists while writing about _Asterios Polyp_: Art Spiegelman did some graphic experiments while creating _Maus_. In one of those he did really scary cats using scratchboard: “One solution I thought was interesting involved using this Eastern European children’s books wood engraving style that I’d seen in some books of illustrations. But I found myself thoroughly dissatisfied with these woodcut illustrations. […] The cat, as seen by the mouse, is big, brutal, almost twice the size of the mouse creatures […]. It tells you how to feel, it tells you how to think, in a way that I would rather not push.” This is a definition of kitsch according to Umberto Eco: “the prefabrication and imposition of an effect.” It’s true that all Expressionism is a bit like that and I don’t find all Expressionism kitsch. The word never came into my mind while I was reading _Asterios Polyp_, but Steinberg’s technique (if OK used in small doses) is, at least, tiresome and blunt used in a graphic novel. It tells the reader what to think denying her (or him) all possibilities of interpretation. Can you think of anything less modern than that?

    Since I’m coming back to the modernism issue: Bart Beaty does talk about a “post-modern modernism:” http://tinyurl.com/2ecdh9y
    I mentioned Lyonel Feininger, Cliff Sterrett, Geo Herriman as modernists of sorts. But they were primarily commercial artists working for the newspapers. If bringing together low and high art is a sign of post-modernism that’s what they were.

    Here’s a true modernist: lettrist Roberto Altmann (there aren’t many like him in the history of comics): http://tinyurl.com/39bccsp

  7. Matthias: Thanks for this post. I’m very, very late to this party, but have just finished teaching AP to 30 entranced Stanford undergraduates. Then I log on and discover how wrong they/we were. I won’t, and probably can’t, refute all the points raised agin’ the book, but will say this: I find the book to be, first of all, extremely canny in its conjunction of familiar narrative tropes and innovative systems of visualization. As a ‘gateway’ graphic novel, it can’t be beat. And while I do agree that these ARE familiar narrative tropes, I’d still like to praise Mazzucchelli’s dialogue, which I found consistently effective and fresh, and which went a long way towards moving the characters away from the tiredness of their conception. All from me … but I think the book works, dammit.

  8. Well, Scott, Noah’s mileage I guess differed but I agree it’s pleasurable and I can agree that it works as a “gateway” novel.

    But I came into the roundtable having had my expectations set that this was the Next Big Thing, a shockingly tremendous achievement in comics. Not a “gateway” novel, but a leap off a precipice for people who stumbled through that gateway sometime before your undergraduates were born. By that measure, it was pretty boring. But not bad.

  9. I was going to point out over on my thread, right about the time it got eaten by the Evil TCJ.com Comments Monster, that Dirk posted a quote from Dan Clowes (the second half is what Dirk posted; the first half is from the actual article).

    It’s like it was posted just for us!

    “I stopped when I recognized that what was more inspiring was the idea of creating a history of comics that never existed. What if (older comics) had had John Fords and Alfred Hitchcocks?

    “What if the ambitions were at a much higher level? I suppose that now I work in a tradition that does not exist. Some big literary cinematic comic, whatever you want to call it. That’s what I and others are doing, I think. But it didn’t exist before. Not really. So we had to create it. Without an airbrush.”

    Noah doesn’t much like Clowes either…I think, right?

  10. Caro, You beat me to it. I was going to copy that over here too but the comments weren’t working. And that must have been taped at least a week ago. “Creating a big literary comic… in a tradition that does not exist.”

  11. So, let’s invent a tradition.
    The mass media are so clueless about comics they’ll believe any historical tomfoolery.

    “The term ‘graphique novelle’ was first used by Congreve in 1745…”

  12. That’s a great quote. I only saw the second part earlier, via Journalista, and so I hadn’t seen the shout out to John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. Interesting choices, as they reflect commercial directors working within the conventions of specific genres and (sometimes) exploding them. Although if I was picking directors from the same tradition, I’d probably pick Orson Welles and.. I dunno, Michael Powell.

    The strange thing about early North American comics history is the practitioners were there, but the industry never developed enough structurally and financially to offer them the space and autonomy to accomplish really great Awork. It’s almost painful for me to read the Bernie Krigstien books that FG has put out, to imagine what type of comics he would have created if he had really been turned loose. It’s as if all we had of Orson Welles were his preproduction work on “Heart of Darkness”.

  13. I don’t know that I agree with that exactly. There have been great artists who managed to figure out ways to do great work. Charles Schulz, Winsor Mccay — I’d add William Marston, though obviously that’s not a majority opinion.

    Of course, those were folks who worked in resolutely commercial branches of the industry. Maybe your point would hold for artists who wanted to go in a somewhat more high art direction.

  14. I was building off of the original quote, “Some big literary cinematic comic.” Although I agree with you about Schultz being a great cartoonist, I don’t think that description applies to his work- it’s too intimate and punctuated, little poems, as either you or Derik pointed out last week. And although Winsor Mccay certainly had grand, cinematic pages, I certainly wonder what he would have done with a larger page count, and if that would have allowed him to expand his narrative in a similar cinematic way.

    Krigstien, however, seemed to be most interested in expanding narratives, exploding what would have been covered in a single caption in the past into a scene of its own. He needed that space and scope, and the opportunity to work with some adult material, and that just wasn’t available to him.

  15. Ah, I see. That makes sense.

    I actually think giving McCay a bigger page count and a more intricate narrative would have been an extraordinarily bad idea. I love Little Nemo to death…but McCay’s talent was not for complicated themes.

  16. For intersections of comics and modernism (and film), Scott’s (that’s Scott Bukatman, above) article on Little Nemo is actually among the best things out there.

  17. Domingos:

    “(…) but Steinberg’s technique (if OK used in small doses) is, at least, tiresome and blunt used in a graphic novel. It tells the reader what to think denying her (or him) all possibilities of interpretation.”

    This denial is typical of works that are phallic. Mazzucchelli’s phallic imposition of meaning forces the reader into the position of recipient of the tyrannical injected phallus of the author (father) (cf french ‘auteur’, meaning either ‘originator of artwork’ or ‘originator of life: l’auteur de tes jours.)

    But through interpretation, the once-supine reader forces the work towards the primal catastrophe, the confiscation of meaning that snatches the phallic sceptre from the Author-Father. This castration shifts the work from ‘phallic’ (i.e.over-determined) to ‘post-phallic’ (i.e. ‘open’ to penetration by alternate readings.)

    The text itself is as castrated as the Author, and as such occupies the uneasy ground of the Other; Meanwhile, the interpretive reader, having as it were murdered the Author/Father, is prevented from usurping the latter’s ‘rightful’ place by the very fact of his/her parricide.

    The castrated text therefore remains forever ‘open’, beyond stable interpretation. I think this roundtable illustrates the point quite neatly.

    I’ve worked out a more detailed analysis along these lines based on Eddie Campbell’s ”The Fate of the Artist’, which I intend to publish shortly.

  18. Hah! I didn’t know you were all Freudian like that Alex.

    “Meanwhile, the interpretive reader, having as it were murdered the Author/Father, is prevented from usurping the latter’s ‘rightful’ place by the very fact of his/her parricide.”

    This seems like it would work for any text though, wouldn’t it?

    I wonder how this works with deconstruction, too. Derrida’s phallus just gets bigger every time he cuts it off; sort of an evil regenerating hydra-phallus….

  19. I think we should be thankful, McCay didn’t do long narratives. Can you imagine trying to read multiple pages of all that horrendous dialogue!

    It’s a dangerous game to try to relate our expectations of work today to the work of the past or even to the great work of other media/forms. Do we want “cinematic” comics? Or even “literary” comics? What the hell does that mean anyway? If I want to experience something cinematic, I’ll watch a great movie. If I want literary, I’ll read a novel (or a short story or a poem).

    It’s also perhaps expecting a lot that skilled (and even innovative) artists would necessarily have make great work, given the chance. Have you ever read the stuff Alex Toth wrote and drew? I love his visual skill, but he wasn’t going to give us a great work without a collaborator.

  20. I think McCay’s dialogue is terrific, particularly in ‘Rarebit Fiends’.

    There are some cartoonists who have a terrific adequacy between their drawings and their dialogue, even if the latter seems distorted as a result. C.F. Herriman, McCay, Jack Kirby,S.Clay Wilson, Moebius…

    I’m not referring to skill, but to adequacy with the art.

    (Noah– I’m afraid I’m under the Freudian spell of ‘The Metamorphoses of Tintin’– I have to purge this Tintinolatrous madness soon…)

  21. I’m actually not that crazy about AP — I have a fair number of problems with it, in fact — I just thought it needed defending from some of the more unreasonable and ungenerous criticism it has received at this roundtable.

    Domingos, I think we’re pretty much in line. Mazzucchelli’s use of ‘expressionist’ devices *is* prescriptive, but I believe he also *wants* it to be for the specific reasons I’ve detailed. I’m not entirely convinced by this choice, and I don’t think it matches Spiegelman’s explorations use of similar territory in Maus, or David B’s in L’Ascension du haut mal/Epileptic, but it still merits better from critics than mere scoffing.

    Scott & Caro: I think the description of AP as a “gateway” work is apt — one of the reasons Mazzucchelli has chosen to work with consolidated tropes/clichés is precisely because *they work*. Remember, he has a million Batman fans out there checking for his shit, and he has never made any bones about wanting to reach a wide audience.

    Clichés are not kosher amongst the more intellectual critics, especially not those still mired in the modernist tradition, but there’s a reason so many artists continue to use them. I wouldn’t say Mazzucchelli’s deployment of them is the most successful ever, but it has clearly worked very well with the readers, who’ve flocked to this book — it’s a very direct way of addressing the Big Questions without undue intellectualization, just as many of the great Hollywood movies have done.

    And then there’s the highly sophisticated way in which they are rendered in cartoon form, which gives the book the puzzlebox quality you’ve been talking about. In this sense, it is actually closer to Pale Fire than to Ulysses. This, paired with the subversive substructure that I’ve been talking about is enough to maintain my interest in the book, even if it will never be my favorite.

    Noah: I don’t understand how you can maintain that the things I’m talking about are not in the comic — look at the divorce letters, for example, and what about the scene where Hana breaks down? To claim that those things just appeared in the comic without Mazzucchelli wanting them there for a specific reason goes against the whole tenor of the work. He has clearly thought long and hard about the choices he made.

    “Here’s a question. Your argument seems at least partially predicated on the idea that the book is successful in that it mirrors Asterios’ perspective; that it leaves out certain things, but that those are things that are left out because Asterios wouldn’t see them.

    But isn’t the book thematically devoted to the idea that Asterios’ perspective is limited and aesthetically flawed? And the end tries to suggest that he has overcome that flaw by reconciling with Hana. Shouldn’t the book then reflect that change at its conclusion; shouldn’t we get a glimpse of the other, missing perspective if we’re to take the book’s claims seriously?”

    No, I don’t believe so at all. I don’t believe Asterios suddenly gains Archimedean insight into his own life and realizes exactly what he did wrong. Not at all. He just realizes that he did *something* wrong and takes the first logical step to correct it: seeking out Hana. Everything is not neatly resolved when they finally meet again, but they’re close again.

    Plus, I really don’t get why everyone hates the ending. It seems to me a perfect way of expanding the scope of what we’ve experienced reading the comic to the cosmological. It puts the theme of structure and what it means into perspective in both the obvious symbolic way and the more deeply embedded topical way, with it’s reference to 9/11. A great ending, in my book.

  22. Ah, well, I’m actually happy to have you have the last word in our debate at least. I wanted you at the end to finish with a positive note in any case!

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