By Beth Hewitt
My decision to review these two books
together began innocently enough. Look, I thought, here are
two new graphic novels that seem to explicate
topics—genetics, molecular biology, and theoretical
math—that seem otherwise inhospitable to narrative, to
pictures, and certainly to fiction. I felt rather
chastened, then, when at the beginning of
Logicomix
the author (metafictively
portrayed within the comic’s very pages) chastises those
who would imagine his book as a graphic “textbook” designed
to explicate the complexities of mathematical logic and
analytic philosophy.
The Stuff of Life
conversely explicitly
declares this very project in its subtitle—“A graphic guide
to genetics and DNA”—and clearly part of the aim of the
title is classroom use. Similar to Larry Gonick’s Cartoon
History series, The Stuff of Life
narrates what is otherwise
diagrammed into the arid taxonomies of secondary school
textbooks. The difference, however, is that while history
is already a narrative and easily amenable to graphic
novelization (as is evident by the frequency with which
comic writers turn to historical romance), Schultz’s topic
seems fundamentally non-narrative (what could be less like
a story than the double-helix structure of DNA?). Thus the
challenge for Schultz is how to transform his topic into a
captivating tale. Schultz takes a simple but also entirely
effective tactic, which is to frame his novel as science
fiction. The conceit is that a researcher from an alien
species explicates earth’s evolutionary biology to his
world’s ruler. What follows then is a remarkably
entertaining, clear, and informative explanation of the
structure of molecular biology, of cellular biology, and
the consequences of such scientific discovery to medicine,
criminology, and historical inquiry. The slender volume
feels rich with information and I felt a smarter for
reading it, and I’m certain that anyone who, like me,
hasn’t been in a biology or chemistry classroom for, let’s
say, 25 years, will feel likewise.
Such a Hard-Subject-for-Dummies approach is one that
Logicomix
rejects out of hand, and the
character Doxiadis represents in the comic’s pages
admonishes his readers that his story will succeed or fail
only insofar as it does or does not constitute a good
story. That said, he nevertheless recruits Professor
Christos Papadimitriou (who teaches theoretical mathematics
at Berkeley) to, as he says, make certain that his story of
the development of analytic philosophy does not go
(technically) astray. More importantly, he incorporates his
encounters with the mathematician into the very fabric of
the story, which begins as the artists (Doxiadis himself,
the illustrator, Alecos Papadatos, the colorist, Annie Di
Donna, and the researcher and letterer, Anne Bardy) make
their case for their comic to Christos. The narrative
frame, in this way, is complex, weaving together the
contemporary story of the comics’ creation, the story of
Bertrand Russell’s lecture to an audience of pacifists
protesting the United States’ entry into World War II, and,
at the core, the bildungsroman of Russell’s quest towards
and away from logical certitude.
Despite Doxiadis’s exhortation that we take his novel as
fiction—neither as a primer on logic nor as a real
biography of Russell—one pleasure of the book is that it
explicates its difficult subject matter so well. (Rarely,
for example, have I encountered such a cogent explication
of early Wittgenstein.) That said, the novel also succeeds
in precisely the terms the authors mandate: it is a darn
good story. Like Professor Papadimitriou, who midway
through the book challenges his co-author’s investment in
the “logic and madness theme,” I too was not as captivated
by this particular leitmotif, which seemed a bit too much
of a caricature in this nuanced novel—nor did the didactic
statement of theme seem necessary. But this was a minor
blemish in an otherwise spotless tale about the desire for
absolute certitude as it reveals itself in this seminal
moment in intellectual history. The art—with its clean-line
style and gorgeous saturated colors—somehow seems to
capture the novel’s implicit assessment that illustration
(be it pictorial, linguistic, symbolic, or logical) can
only ever be a map of the real, even as it also keeps us
firmly grounded in a realistic portrait of both
turn-of-the-20th century Europe and the 21st-century
composition of the book itself. All of which is to say, if
the book tries to map the ambiguous space between Russell’s
ambitions for logical certitude and his recognition of the
logical necessity of unanswerable questions, then
Logicomix’s visual style captures this middleground between
caricature and mimesis. The delicacy of the novel’s
structure and argument reveals itself in the novel’s
“Finale,” where our authors watch a performance of Oresteia
and debate whether or not Russell’s “foundational quest”
(which was also the original title of Logicomix) ought to
be considered a tragedy. During this quarrel the professor
and the illustrator, Alecos and Cristos, briefly meditate
on the possibility of writing a “story of computers”
focused on tragedy/heroic epic of Alan Turing. My hope is
that this conversation was, in fact, a real one and that
the group will put their considerable talents towards this
next chapter of the foundational quest.
