Love in the Fun Home; also in this issue – Vocabulary!

1. Love in the Fun Home

I was fascinated by the way Bechdel chose to resolve her graphic memoir/tragicomic. By starting with the seemingly final act in her relationship with her father – his killing himself – she allows her narrative to find joy in a construction of her life in which a memory becomes a dominant portal to how she approaches that relationship: an image, overlaid with complex literary analogies and meditations, of herself as a young swimsuited girl, jumping off a diving board into her father’s arms. The final panel is a large, 2/3 page square, with the text in a voiceover: “But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I lept.”

In my brief exploration of the love between Alison and her father, I am approaching her own reverse narrative from the end, reading her relationship with the final panel and text as the hermeneutic. I work my way backwards, noting her real affection in the drawings of her father and the activities they shared – the exuberant joy of their piano playing, both leaning heads forward, his in quiet but open happiness, hers bent forward and eyes closed in fierce concentration but with a open-mouthed grin of happiness. Even the excruciatingly awkward conversation in the car, represented by a mosaic of similar, very small, panels in which Alison and her father revisit past events and seemingly come to no real resolution, the stern, obsessive face of her father, with its almost perpetually downcast eyebrows, seems to me to beg for understanding and affection, which Bechdel as artist gives in her lines.

With these images of awkward but intense love, the first chapters, with their melancholic fury at her father’s distance, appear new to me. Instead of merely blaming, the stark depictions of the unhappiness her father spread are like mourning. Well, obviously the whole book is something of an elegy, but it appears in a light not untinted by love now.

2. Vocabulary

Bechdel said (I feel like a prig saying that, but I was really excited about seeing her and really appreciated much of what she had to say) that she was in love with words, and her editor had to pull back many of her flourished vocabulary. Something I want to connect with that is her stated goal of trying to avoid duplication – letting words and images become inextricably intertwined, so that you cannot have one without the other. For Bechdel, words aren’t merely exposition of events, times, and places. They convey the richness of character and relationships. When Alison asks her father for a particular shirt, he responds “We’d have to measure your…appendages” indicating her puberty and subsequent breast growth. However, instead of saying “Your breasts make fitting such shirts awkward,” Bechdel allows us to see both her father’s reticent, repressed personality and the corresponding confusing effect it has on Alison and his relationship. Similarly, Alison’s character appears as both highly literate, perhaps a bit arrogant, and yet honestly finding joy and meaning in literary reference when she describes her actions in forcing her brother to call her Albert to avoid awkwardness with pornography-displaying workmen: “My stratagem strikes me as a precocious feat of Proustian transposition—-not to mention a tidy melding of Proust’s real Alfred and his fictional Albertine.” The erudite nature of this observation contrasts with the childish coercion of the young Alison’s actions, diversifying our reactions to include the resonances and valences such references evoke (rather like the overly ornate vocabulary of this final sentence displays my own obsession, fascination, and ego in using words).

Postscript: I am extremely excited to hear Bechdel’s next project will be her relationship with her mother, as I found the portrayal of her mother in Fun Home to be one of the most intriguing characters in a sea of already complex, incredibly corrupted yet still somehow ennobled figures.