I found a lot of things to be interesting about Fun Home, even when I couldn’t exactly decide if I even liked the work as a whole. Bechdel does have the knack to align the complex narrative of her father parallel to her own life that she’s still discovering; so I have to recognize the talent involved with that. I thought it was interesting that for so much of the beginning of the book, I had resigned the story by making Bechdel a practice in opposites of her father. He liked ornate design; she opted for streamlined. He loved the feminine mystique; she studied masculinity religiously. He was a literature nut, and she resisted, paranoid enough about her own words to stop her from wanting to look out for others. But, as the tale goes on, or rather not as the tale goes on, but as the graphic novel moves forward, Bechdel and her father’s diverging lines of personality come back together, again paralleling in a way that apparently she only found after his death and after beginning to embark on producing this work.
Really, I think what attracted me to the work, while also being what pushed me away from it, was museum effect that Bechdel points out so early on in the work. Her father kept the house like a museum. The children and his wife were forced with the project of helping him with the upkeep of his masterpiece, becoming extensions of his own body (13), for practical reasons. The family operated as a colony of artists, as she shares, where each separated themselves in order to enjoy their own solitary craft. The house was a museum; the family was its keepers; and it seemed like Bechdel’s parents were on display for her to study, but not to get all that close to, until, that is, when she grew up and into herself.
This attracted me because there was so much so reflection on Bechdel’s part as she tried to make sense of the home and family dynamic that she grew up in. She was the tour guide for our time in the Fun Home, and a studying tour guide for the book or place that was her father. I saw Bechdel as a curator, really, throughout the tale, and that’s why I never felt closeness to her family, but I suppose that just puts us more in her own position with them.
The appeal of her work is that Bechdel does put so much time into orchestrating the tour of her own tale as it is in concert with her finding out more about her father. She uses a lot of devices to guide us through the narrative, most poignantly in her use of the literary texts she uses to frame her life and her father’s stories and passions.
I think ultimately what kept me from saying at the end of this book that I liked it was the fact that I felt unresolved when it came to her relationship with her father, but I knew that would happen because of his death which guides so much of the memoir. When she actually does have the “what we have in common” talk on 220 and 221, I wanted to feel like they had come together definitively, but like she says at the end of that conversation, “and all too soon we were at the theater,” leaving me slightly frustrated but somewhat resigned (221). I know by the end she did come together with him technically, leaving us with a picture of them as being close, playing together on the piano, but I guess Bechdel succeeded in making the memoir like life, real, even if it left me wanting more.
~Kelley
Kelley,
Some good observations. Quick sidenote re. the ornamentation: when I first began reading the book, I was a bit taken aback. Those houses looked oddly familiar… A bit of google searching and sure enough, I once cleaned chimneys in the same small town, during a job I worked after my undergraduate degree. Weird.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, how the very home she grew up in represents so much of the things she’s wrestling with? After all, isn’t it a bit odd that “sexually repressed” Victorians were so obsessed with lacy ornamentation and ornate decorating?
You’re quite right to call the family curators and point out how that both fascinated and alienated Bechdel–it certainly shaped who she is today, as she is very well aware. Like you, at times I found the self-conscious curating a bit off putting. For example, at first I found her insistence on always returning to the literary texts to be a bit too much like her father finding his identity via redecorating: a bit affected, an oddly emotional refuge in emotionless meta-commentary.
In the end, however, I bought it. If any of us were to look at the surroundings that we were brought up in (texts and all), I don’t think we’d be remiss in finding symbols there. The style of the house we grew up in, the books our parents read, the music we listened to–any psych major would be quick to tell us that all these things *do* shape us and they *do* signify cultural connections that often stretch back further than we realize at first. As she explores that, I think Bechdel strikes a surprisingly compelling role as both clinical curator and emotional protagonist, a subtly charming exploitation of time/space to suit her narrative.
One final thought: I think you’re quite right to want more at the end of the story–I think that’s precisely what Bechdel herself now realizes that she wanted, as well.
I like this idea of curation that Kelley and Josh raise. It’s a very helpful metaphor for us—Alison is our curator, walking us through the museum of her life. And just as many museum exhibits are purposefully designed to tell a certain story, through the arrangement of objects, the juxtapositions, the decision of what’s displayed and what’s left behind in the museum basement, so too does Bechdel curate our experience. Very carefully so. It’s interesting to think about the moments where this self-control breaks down, the moments where the self-conscious curation has some “leaks.” Are there any such moments in Fun Home?