The intricacy of repetitive images and actions throughout Fun Home seem to finally create a layered reality where each truth is not quite whole until the entire story is told. We see Bruce’s death several times throughout the novel, for instance, and each time we hear about it or Alison’s mother telling Alison about her father having affairs with men and boys, we have a slightly different perspective.
First, we hear about Bruce’s death at the end of the first chapter, only after hearing about how obsessed he was with interior design and restoration of the family home, and the lack of relationship he therefore had with his family. Next, we go through the evidence of what adds up to Alison’s belief that her father killed himself. We see more into the sorrow of the individual man and not his neglect as a father. Next, we see some of the difficulty within the marriage itself and see Alison’s declaration of homosexuality. This goes on, but what’s so interesting to me is that Bechdel slowly reveals her story by adding more details each time she tells it to us. We don’t see the extent to which Alison was dealing with her own homosexuality until later when we see that she had already brought her girlfriend home (though introduced her only as a friend) by the time of her father’s death. Whereas earlier in the graphic novel it seemed that the link between Alison’s coming out of the closet and her father’s death were much closer in time. Another layer to this is Alison’s winter class through Ulysses. Her parents are receiving her declarative letter of “I am a lesbian” the same day that she is having her oral exam for the class on Ulysses and she’s obsessively reading more and more books about homosexuality.
Basically it seems that, and there are tons of examples throughout Fun Home, Bechdel is purposely telling the story in a way that adds layers to what seems at first to be a simple story of a bad father killing himself. This multi-layered perspective is intriguing because it calls to mind questions about the authenticity of memory, similar to Maus and Alan’s War, while simultaneously showing that the truth in the first chapter is not negated by last page when Bechdel endearingly remembers how her father caught her. This truly seems to underline the complicated relationships most of us have with our families, especially with parental figures. Instead of peeling back the layers one by one, however, Bechdel reverses it and adds the layers, one by one to show the whole truth from multiple angles. She starts with anger and ends with love, but her love at the end does not erase the anger in the beginning, and instead complicates it.
I’m curious what you mean by “complicates it,” since I viewed the love at the end as a way of Bechdel’s making her story bearable for both herself and her readers. Not simplification, certainly, but meaningful, as we experimented with in class last week.
I noticed the repetition and layering as well — with each time through a set of events, particularly Bruce’s death and Bechdel’s announcement that she is a lesbian, there was more weight, more knowledge that the reader had to bring to the event and more knowledge for the reader to garner from the event.
I think the repetition (or the revisiting of events) and the added layering as the graphic memoir progressed is very much wrapped up in the literary allusions Bechdel uses to color (and layer) her and her father’s story/ies: by ordering events (non-fictional in Bechdel’s case, fiction in the cases of Fitzgerald, Joyce, and others) into a narrative, you create a story, and even the most simple seeming story — as you noted, “what seems at first to be a simple story of a bad father killing himself” — has layers that can be brought out and perspectives that shift slightly under the weight of the knowledge Bechdel gives us and our own relationship to the texts that she cites and uses in her memoir. By telling her story in such a way, I think Bechdel is not revisiting the story of her father’s death and her sexual awakening, but is demonstrating how stories are told, how events become meaningful and how this meaning can change or be layered upon.
The father catching Bechdel at the end of the graphic memoir seems quite different than the father we meet in the “period rooms” of his strange mansion, and I believe this is Bechdel’s point. Told from the perspective of one of her brothers, of someone unable to sympathize with Bruce’s homosexuality and artistic leanings, Bruce’s death would be a very different story, completely devoid of the interpersonal and emotional layering Bechdel infuses into the graphic memoir, and would not have the allusions to James Gatz/Jay Gatsby, Daedelus and Icarus, “Ulysses,” and so on. In so many words, it would be the story of a cruel and eccentric father’s suicide, nothing more.
“Fun Home,” however, is not simple story, nor is Bruce left only a simplistic character — Bechdel takes pains to flesh him out, the good and the bad, the luminous and the dark, the triumphs and tragedies, using techniques such as repetition/revisitation, layering, and allusion to established literary texts, characters, authors, and publication histories. While people have commented on Twitter that Bechdel’s ending doesn’t make the forget how horrid a person Bruce was, I don’t think “forgetting” is the point — Bechdel seems to be trying to remember everything about her father, not because he was good, but because he was/is important to Bechdel’s development as a person, an author, and an artist.