Unflattening

Edwin A. Abbot (1838-1926), author of the 1884 novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, is a key figure in Sousanis’s text. Abbot was a British professor, writer, and theologian, and his novel was a mathematical satire that he wrote under the pseudonym “a square.” In the novel, he introduces the concept of multiple dimensions while mocking the closed mindset of people who think that their perspective is the only one.

Sousanis devotes Interlude 1 to Abbot’s novel, stating that those who are caught up in a preexisting system and act without individual agency “resemble the two-dimensional geometric inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbot’s Flatland” (Location 35). He then explicates what the inhabitants of different dimensions in Flatland see, providing visual demonstrations of how flatlanders and the even more perceptually disadvantaged linelanders see reality. For Sousanis, Abbot’s book is a useful tool for alerting the reader to the potential narrowness of their own perception. The reader may be like the square, thinking that what they perceive is all that exists; however, an encounter with Sousanis and Abbot’s texts may encourage them to begin the work of unflattening their viewpoint.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was an Italian Renaissance polymath who excelled in painting, sculpture, and science. He was an important figure in Renaissance humanism, a movement that sought to make man and the human figure the measure of all enterprises. Da Vinci’s work appears in two distinct forms in Sousanis’s text. First (and most importantly), da Vinci’s Vitruvian man appears in opposition to automatized contemporary humanity (Location 27). The 1490 sketch features an athletic human male figure bordered by a square and circle; the figure’s overlapping postures include standing with open arms and closed feet as well as with slightly raised arms and open legs. With this sketch, da Vinci conveys both the ideal proportions of the human body and the way these proportions suggest a harmonious scale in art and architecture. The name “Vitruvius” derives from an ancient Roman architect whose artistic efforts inspired those of the Renaissance.

Sousanis accompanies a sketch of the Vitruvian man with the caption, “[T]his creature who once attempted to define the universe through its own proportions […] and saw itself […] a microcosm of the grander spheres […] now finds itself confined, […] boxed into bubbles of its own making” (Location 27). Here, Sousanis argues that humankind has entered a fallen state since the Renaissance, as societal standards no longer reflect human attributes but those of the man-made machines that control us. However, in his final chapter Sousanis argues against so-called “perfect” human proportions as a standard, because these exclude those who do not conform to and promote the replication of a preexisting ideal.

Da Vinci’s iconic painting, the Mona Lisa (1503), also appears in Sousanis’s text as an example of imagination in vision. The Mona Lisa portrait is arguably the most famous face in Western art, as generations of scholars have puzzled over the sitter’s enigmatic facial expression. Sousanis fragments the sitter’s famous face, providing multiple distinct views of her features to show how she can never be fully and finally perceived (Location 103). Instead, the act of perceiving and appreciating this work is continuous and contributes to its mystique.

The mythical Greek hero Perseus features repeatedly in Sousanis’s comic. He is most famous for slaying the gorgon Medusa, who had snakes for hair and whose gaze could turn onlookers into stone. While Perseus is mythic, Sousanis casts him as a skilled perceiver who questioned everything, “never lost sight of himself” (Location 123), and was therefore able to avoid being rendered inanimate by Medusa. In contrast, those who think that the existing body of knowledge is infallible risk becoming stuck in stubborn and outdated ways of seeing the world.

Perseus also makes an appearance in Sousanis’s text as a figure with winged sandals. The mythical Perseus received these shoes from the Graeae, the sisters of the gorgons, and became a flying superhero. In Sousanis’s work the sandals symbolize transcending the limits of present reality and seeking a richer dimension of experience. This depiction of Perseus draws on the work of Italian novelist Italo Calvino, who dreams of flying “like Perseus into a different space” by changing his perspective on the shape and logic of reality (Location 39).

The American comic author and theorist Scott McCloud (born 1960) is a key influence on Sousanis’s work. McCloud’s 1993 publication Understanding Comics was crucial in showing Sousanis the potential of comics as valuable tools in education.

Sousanis makes an explicit case for comics’ roles in education when he mentions McCloud in Chapter 3. McCloud argues for the contrapuntal engagement of the verbal and the visual, which enables the reader to traverse “the gaps between fragments” and stitch them together until “a meaningful wholeness emerges” (Location 74). McCloud’s promotion of comics also encourages a more active mode of participation in the text, as the reader jumps between text and image and “animates and transforms the static into the kinetic […] and brings it to life” (Location 74). Sousanis thus considers McCloud the initiator of a revolution in education and himself as a disciple.

René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician who developed the theory now known as Cartesian dualism, which positions the mind and the body as opposite and independently functioning entities. Descartes considered the intellect the superior partner, reducing the body to a collection of organs. Rational thought is so important for Descartes that he in fact takes it as evidence that he exists: “[F]or Descartes, thinking was everything and thinking meant words—inner speech” (Location 68).

Descartes is therefore part of a tribe of Western philosophers who mistrust the senses and position verbal communication above the visual. Sousanis, arguing against this entrenched view, presents Descartes as an austere, old-fashioned figure by framing his teachings in medieval-like illuminated manuscripts (Location 68). Sousanis uses these antiquated graphics to show how wrong and damaging he thinks Descartes ideas are, as the divorce of mind from senses leaves us “disembodied […] afloat in a sea of words” (Location 68). Sousanis also suggests that Descartes himself did not fully abide by his philosophy; he prioritized sight above the other senses and investigated optic phenomena such as refraction, or the bending of light. This appreciation of visual phenomena shows that not even the greatest champion of the intellect could commit to a single mode of understanding experience.