Robert William Buss, Dickens’s Dream, 1875, watercolor. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

It must be Thanksgiving or some such holiday, because I have shown up at my brother’s house to find Mother and Father waiting. Mother stands in the front hall bearing her old smile of greeting, overlaid now with a touch of anxiety because, I realize, she doesn’t remember my name. “Lewis is here!” I call out, as if such announcements were our custom. I don’t want to embarrass her. “Lewis is here!”

*

Sometime in the twenties in Berlin, a certain Dr. Kurt Lewin noticed that the waiters were very good at remembering the particulars of his restaurant bill—until the bill was paid. Soon settled, soon forgotten. Lewin wondered if he hadn’t stumbled upon a fact of mental life, that the finished task drops into oblivion more easily than the unfinished.

In 1927, a colleague of Lewin’s, Bluma Zeigarnik, designed a study that appeared to show that Lewin had observed a specific example of the general case, now called the Zeigarnik effect. “Unfinished tasks are remembered approximately twice as well as completed ones,” she concluded. That was her finding with adults; with children, the effect was stronger: not only did they remember tasks they’d been forced to leave unfinished but “not infrequently they would beg to continue the interrupted tasks even two or three days after the experiment was over.” Read More

In 1939, as the buildup to war in Europe intensified, a brilliant French mathematician named André Weil made a plan to emigrate to the U.S. He was thirty-three and didn’t want to serve in the army; his life’s purpose was math, he felt, not soldiering. His escape turned out to be more difficult than he anticipated, in part because, as he would write in his memoir, “the Americans, who so warmly welcome those who do not need them, are much less hospitable to those who happen to be at their mercy”—as we’ve gone on to prove repeatedly since then.

He was vacationing in Finland when the war broke out, and he tried to lay low in Helsinki but was arrested and returned to France, where he sat in jail during the spring of 1940, awaiting trial for desertion. While there, he took some consolation from the fact that jail allowed him to work undisturbed, as well as to read novels and write letters, in particular letters to his sister, Simone Weil, who was also remarkably talented, a philosopher and spiritual thinker.

Though her brother’s incarceration infuriated her, Simone saw an opportunity. His work in advanced mathematics was to her, as it would be to most of us, esoteric. Since you have some spare time on your hands, she wrote to him, why don’t you explain to me exactly what it is you do?

There wouldn’t be any point, he replied. Trying to explain my work to a non-mathematician, he wrote, would be like trying to explain a symphony to someone who can’t hear. Later he would rely on another metaphor, calling math “art in a hard material.”

Mathematics is an artistic endeavor, his words suggest. Yet Simone was skeptical. What kind of art? What is the material? Even poets have language, but your work seems to rely on sheer abstraction, she wrote her brother.

That math is an art, that one of its signature qualities is its beauty—these are ideas that continue to be articulated by mathematicians, even as non-mathematicians may wonder, as Simone did, what that could possibly mean. I myself become wary when a mathematician or scientist speaks about the beauty of her discipline, since it can seem vague and high-handed, if not wrong.

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Pretend for a moment that there was a genetic testing kit for the modern graphic novel. The ancestry report would begin with the form’s most distant ancestors: prehistoric cave drawings, Sumerian pictograms, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Bayeux Tapestry, Japanese Buddhist picture scrolls, and Chinese hand scrolls. After that, closer relatives would be listed, like the work of the Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846), who is credited as the creator of the first European comics, and the pioneering woodcut novels of the Belgian graphic artist Fran Masereel (1889–1972) and the American Lynd Ward (1905–1995).

Though the maternal line of the graphic novel has yet to be adequately documented, I’d imagine several books by the eminent children’s book artists Virginia Lee Burton (1909–1968) and Marie Hall Ets (1895–1984) would be noted. Burton’s Calico the Wonder Horse (1942) and Ets’s Oley the Sea Monster (1947) acknowledged and built upon the vocabulary of the comic books of their day but with greater sensitivity and subtlety of writing and design.

You would expect to see the work of the family patriarchs in the report—Will Eisner (1917–2015), Harvey Kurtzman (1924–1993), and Art Spiegelman (born 1948)—whose paternity has been widely acknowledged and who have sired many offspring. And these days, what’s a genetic report without a few surprises? Beginning in the 1860s, Native American ledger drawings documented the history of the Plains tribes using a picture writing that bears a striking resemblance to many modern graphic novels.

Another surprise would be William Gropper’s 1930 graphic novel Alay-Oop. Read More