Book Rant: Asterios Polyp.

Have I ever told you about the time I raved like a lunatic in a university lecture? Well I did. And while Asterios Polyp, an award winning graphic novel by David Mazzucchelli wasn't the cause, it shares exactly the same problems as the one that was:

Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel was the guilty party. It wasn't because it was an awful example of the worst kind of confession, egoism and shameless mining of cultural vogues - in this case lesbianism - it was the sheer amount of literary name dropping, the more intellectual name of which is "intertext".
For those who've been spared an undergrad literature course, intertext is the referencing within texts to other texts. If I were really intent on having you gouge out your eyeballs with a q-tip I could lead you Bordieu and his essay "Death of the Author" , but I think the title says it all.

 Nominally intertext used to draw parallels and allusions, but in many of the most loved literary novels it forms the core of the story. Other stories serve the basis of the storytelling. In Fun Home it's the entire story. There's hardly a moment in the story which isn't shut down by referencing it to someone else's story; Proust, Joyce and Wilde mostly, though Bechdel does her best to cram in every important literary figure she can. (Baby Cheeses help you if you haven't read those novels - the amount of smug, knowing chortles you'll miss out on!) This is, to paraphrase an actual academic essay I had to read on Fun Home, the author's attempt to communicate with the literary cannon, and in so going gain a place in it.

Is it just me, or is that the literary equivalent of dropping the names of obscure bands to impress strangers? Not only that, it excuses the author from actually telling their own story, the idea being, well why bother if someone else has done it better? Why then, did they bother writing a novel at all? Why not just give me a bullet list of the books their story is "sort-of-like-but-not-as-good" and leave it at that?

This, albeit far less lucidly and much more breathily (I have absolutely no diaphragm control) was the point I was trying to make. What can I say? I got a little "ranty". But it's gross that a book gets international acclaim and attention for name dropping. And don't get me started on the fact that it's a graphic novel. There's so many words in that thing it's more of a novel with drawings. For every frame there is a small paragraph of text describing what's happening in the frame.

At least Asterios Polyps was an improvement. Mazzucchelli does some fascinating stuff with his illustrations and story telling. If only it weren't so relentlessly heavy handed in it's philosophical arguments and intertext. The low-point is also the novels climax, where the novels namesake architect plays Orpheus to his sculptress wife, Daisy. For all it's literary pretension, the entire thing is just as subtle as any superhero comic you'll read.  And probably more misogynistic too, but that's another rant entirely.

To return to my original rant, none of the lecturers really went into the issue. The fact is, intertext is one of the key parts of literature studies. Communing with the dead is what my professor calls it. Look, sometimes it works, but other times it reads like wholesale necromancy. Why read a Franken-novel when I can read the original, sans desperate posing?