I kind of kept mum on the “theme” for this set of Raindrops on Roses posts, not because I was trying to avoid admitting that there wasn’t one -- there is -- but because I didn’t really have a “third option.” This is going to be a bit of a preamble, but I’d like to go into why.
The theme is “unconventional coming-of-age stories,” and for newer mediums like films and video games, that’s an easy enough find. Frances Ha has a significantly older protagonist than most stories like these and is so hipster it criticizes the previous generation’s perception of millennial culture before it was cool to do so, and Gone Home relied on environmental storytelling to tell the bulk of its story; the majority of the main characters don’t appear at all. But coming-of-age stories still generally have a set structure to them and stripping away the more visual elements makes it a bit more difficult to find something that separates them.
So maybe it’s cheating, then, to spend this slot on a graphic novel instead of a novel novel, but it’s my blog and the part I’m interested talking about isn’t specifically related to the pictures (though the pictures are nice). If you do want a novel novel recommendation, though, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami is a magical realism story about a cat, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and male pattern baldness and it’s good enough that it probably deserves its own post one of these days. But anyway, back to the topic at hand.
If coming-of-age stories are about coming to terms with a more cynical view of the world, watching as the protagonist grows out of their childlike optimism and accepting a more complete worldview, well, then Logicomix’s story of Bertrand Russel’s search for the fundamentals of mathematics appears to follow that guideline rather well. But it’s not just about that. There’s also a meta-story at play involving the comic’s authors and their own understanding -- their own search -- and it’s this intertwining of narratives that enhances both of them. If Logicomix was solely about Bertrand Russel, I don’t think it would have worked as well; the main theme -- that it’s hubris to try and understand every facet of reality -- becomes much weaker when it’s presented in the past, while the present-day story ends up being the author’s own commentary that, left alone, just begs for context to be put alongside it.
And then there’s the book’s own framing story which ties it all together. The authors aren’t portraying their story of Bertrand Russel, they’re presenting a talk by Bertrand set right at the outset of World War Two. The question, “Should America go to war with Germany?” is brought up frequently as the example of the questions Russel is trying to solve through his search for mathematics’ fundamentals. “When presented with a problem, we should just be able to say, ‘Calculemus! Let us calculate’” one of Russel’s colleagues says. But the war question isn’t an easy one. It’s answerable, as evidenced by history, but nobody ever uses math to solve it.
At the end of the book, the authors go see The Oresteia, a play that presents its own problem. Orestes has killed his mother in revenge for his own father’s death, and the goddess Athena rules that a jury of Athenians should decide his fate. Even with this problem -- should Orestes be punished? -- the jurors are tied, however, and only Athena can definitively rule for or against.
For a book about reason and the search for truth, Logicomix is actually a quite spiritual book. Not in an “Only God knows the answer” sort of way, but in a “Life’s mysteries are boundless and the search for understanding is difficult but still worth trying” sort of way. A splash panel about two-thirds of the way in shows this fundamental tenet: Ludwig Wittgenstein realizes, “The meaning of the world does not reside in the world!” only after a bout of existential extremism.
That’s the coming-of-age story. Of reason itself. It’s not a moral that some people can accept; one could apply its message as an argument against a lot of twenty-tens ideas, especially those involving deplatforming hate-speech. But Logicomix’s promise, of a better world as long as we constantly try to seek out what meaning we can, still keeps me coming back.
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