ENOUGH ABOUT ORPHEUS ALREADY

[fulselden]

So! I finished Asterios Polyp. And it did a lot of the things I was expecting it to do, but it did them very well.

Below the cut, there are some pictures. Also a brief rant, regarding the world's general failure to provide classic literature about mid-life crisises OF THE FEMALE VARIETY.  But mostly pictures.

 

I’m not going to enlarge much further on the comic itself than I did in my last post, because this review nails just about everything I wanted to say. And if you want an internet artefact which sums up why the book sometimes reads as more of a virtuoso formal exercise than anything else, see here. If I clicked more with the style Mazzuccelli’s using here, I would be being a lot more effusive, I must admit.

But it is extremely beautiful, and I have pictures (although not very good ones, I’m afraid - my crappy scanning is doing Mazzucchelli a massive disservice).

But still, pictures.

For instance! It definitely hit my schematic-American-suburbia kink (I blame a youth spent reading textbooks full of seventies/eighties style technical drawings):





Likewise, Badlands style open-roading ...




... well, up to a point.


And one of its most lovely chapters is the pitter-patter sequence of scenes from a marriage, which starts like this:

So fresh and smart and intimate.

Perhaps the most recent thing the book as a whole reminds me of, oddly enough, is another piece of stylish Americana/painful male mid-life collapse, A Serious Man. But while I loved that to a perhaps unreasonable extent (even though I sometimes find the Coens rather stifling, that wasn’t the case there – perhaps because it was so closed-off to start with, so very much a document of growing up Jewish in America, with such an air of playing by the rules of an Alice in Wonderland-esque personal mythology: much more elusive and private than, say, Barton Fink), I don’t love this, not as such, despite the fact that it’s the sort of narrative I’m usually very forgiving of.

It’s the style, the way the whole book is so very much a meditation on modernism, and the tight, tight symbolism, and, hell, even the colouring. But there’s a lot in it that I do love, especially the ending, appropriately enough given the myffic dimensions of the story (Asterios really, really is Polyphemus) a very large deus ex machina indeed.

But.

… You know what I want to read? A sprawling, intricate, baggy, monstrous book about a woman’s mid-life crisis. That isn’t by/about Woolf. I mean, I love reading books about middle-aged dudes and their dark woods of the soul. But I am given to understand that middle aged women have dark and stormy nights as well! INDEED THEY ARE FAMOUS FOR IT.

Sometimes these might even involve the making/losing of ART AND NOT NECESSARILY BABIES. Asterios Polyp is as much about architecture (not to mention comic books) as it is about aging and illness and marriage. But where is the girl!Künstlerroman which doesn’t just deal in some sparky young thing’s struggle to define her creative calling in the big city? I want a novel with Louise Bourgeois scope, world! OLD LADIES! IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?

Or, in other words, ENOUGH ABOUT ORPHEUS ALREADY.



And I know it's not like the question hasn't been addressed. But ... I want more. In the meantime, here's Adrienne Rich on Jean Cocteau's Orfeo:

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus

I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown
         under an arcade.

I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers
and those powers severely limited
by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
I am a woman in the prime of life
driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce
through a landscape of twilight and thorns.
A woman with a certain mission
which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.
A woman with the nerves of a panther
a woman with contacts among Hell’s Angels
a woman feeling the fullness of her powers
at the precise moment when she must not use them
a woman sworn to lucidity
who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires
of these underground streets
her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind
on the wrong side of the mirror

1968

Adrienne Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 78-79.

 

Recommendations, internet?