. Spinning .

We naturally recall other readings when we come across something similar, and one would think that these two books are just about opposites but then, there’s much that’s relative to both.

In Perfect Example, John Porcellino portrays his own adolescence in a short graphic novel that focuses on his  difficulty in understanding the transition from child to adult.  Miller’s Tropic of Cancer’s narrator is older, but does as well have many of the same questions about life as Porcellino’s character.  What’s interesting, is the way each puts into words–and in Porcellino’s case, graphic images–their wonderings and insights.

Here’s some from Miller:

In that sort of half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane.  And like those frost patterns which seem to bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be giving obedience to ineluctable laws.  My whole being was responding to the dictates of an ambiance which it had never before experienced; that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter knew only the modulations of the nerve ends. (p. 95)

And here’s Porcellino:

And somehow we ended up at the place where he worked.  So I went inside.  I was wandering back and forth–the faces of people and things around me; there were lights–but I didn’t see them.  Sounds–but I didn’t hear them.   Because I saw then that life is like a dream.  (The Fourth of July)

Porcellino’s words are enhanced by images:  The faces of the people are disembodied, in many panels, John is tiny in comparison to the expanse of world around him.  In this particular scene, John floats alone towards a star, the people gone from his world.  In the final panel, even John does not exist in a world where a crescent moon and single star float about the ocean waves.

Miller’s character feels he sees everything with crystal clarity, in contrast to John’s image of life as a dream:

And the more substantial, the more solid the core of me became, the more delicate and extravagant appeared the close, palpable reality out of which I was being squeezed.  In the measure that I became more and more metallic, in the same measure the scene before my eyes became inflated.  The state of tension was so finely drawn now that the introduction of a single foreign particle, even a microscopic particle, as I say, would have shattered everything.

Miller’s character is a writer, therefore with more of a tendency to provide the imagery that Porcellino creates with his drawings, thus allowing the text to be of a simpler and yet no less dramatic form.

There are reasons I’m forcing myself to read this, just as I had with Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  Admittedly, I go a few pages at a time with days in between pages.  It’s tough reading and not particularly engrossing as far as character or story, but there are some wondrous passages hidden within the lazy ease of a young writer with too much free time and not enough ambition who seeks out the inner forces beneath the grimy crust of his friends. 

Still in the concert scene, the narrator is moved by the experience–both the music and the intermission–to closely observe the audience with a heightened awareness that appears to draw forth his creative nature making things not as they may be:

My thoughts are spreading. The music is slipping away from me, now that the drums have ceased. People everywhere are composed to order. Under the exit light is a Werther sunk in despair; he is leaning on his two elbows,his eyes are glazed. Near the door, huddled in a big cape, stands a Spaniard with a sombrero in his hand.  He looks as if he were posing for the "Balzac" of Rodin. From the neck up he suggests Buffalo Bill. In the gallery opposite me, in the front row, sits a woman with her legs spread wide apart; she looks as though she had lockjaw, with her neck thrown back and dislocated. The woman with the red hat who is dozing over the rail–marvelous if she were to have a hemorrhage! If suddenly she spilled a bucketful on those stiff shirts below. Imagine these bloody no-accounts going home from the concert with blood on their dickies!  (p. 77)

Fired up by the Spanish number, does he truly see a man with a cape and sombrero?  We get this image, but we are then told he reminds the narrator of Balzac and Buffalo Bill.  What we’re getting here is the excitement of spirit riled up by live perfomance.  I get that way at a Willie concert.  The narrator’s imagination carries the present into possible scenarios (I go there too, watching Willie).  They are extremes, so in this episode, he has been sufficiently excited to project his thoughts onto the real members of the audience (I tend to shut out the audience, the stage crew, the other band members…).

This isn’t just an invitation to trip along with the narrator.  It tells us as much about him as about what he is thinking.