ENGL 685: Graphic Novels

           Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home pays extraordinary attention to detail; of course the details of the work come from a heavy slant given the material is shaped in a memoir, but the details are the creation.  From illustrations to texts, the smallest details set the novel apart from the previously read works.

          Observe the artistic portrayal of her father, a man who, from the very first page is presented in a light somewhat, different from those we’ve seen thus far.  The material is black and white, like Nat Turner but Bechdel ensures there is no confusion in the artistry, no haziness in the lines, no ambiguity of the body.  With a series of lines, Fun Home pays utmost attention to body hair, facial expression, lighting, clothing features, etc.  the shading of the first page and the faded gaze of her father on the first page tells the reader to prepare for bare, open account.  If there were any questions to the detail, observing her father’s cut-off shorts with the horizontal lines helps hint at Bechdel’s desire to share an open account.  The numerous pages where the vertical lines to form his hairy legs or arms and chest hair do fair justice to constantly remind the reader that her father was a hairy man.  Looking at the detail of Camus on page 48, one observes a remarkable detail to the accuracy of the picture.  I’m not saying that every work until Bechdel has failed to portray the minute details in the illustrations, just that Bechdel’s seem somehow…different.  I can’t explain it.

            There is also her language; I cannot remember the last time I spoke the word “flesh” in my mind (which is to say, I read the word “flesh”).  In fact, she uses the word “flesh” more often than I believe i’ve ever read; I seem to even recall the phrase “fleshy meat thing” somewhere in the text but upon a quick search, I can’t seem to find the phrase.  Bechdel doesn’t hold any phrases from the reader; when was the last time a reader encountered a text with a father telling his daughter “tough titty.”  These words are not new to me, nor is the phrase; however, Bechdel’s liberal use of such phrases and terminology struck me as quite fresh.  

            I can’t explain my experience with Fun Home.  I can’t explain how words and themes and phrases and artistry not new to me, struck me as somehow…fresh.  I can honestly say, Fun Home was quite the bit of freshness I have been looking for, and so glad to have found.

I am assuming that everyone has read a work of scholarly criticism. Maybe some of you have even written a work of scholarly criticism <kudos if that’s the case>. But what happens when you take the tropes of that type of writing and apply it to yourself or how you view others? The elevated language, the convoluted symbolism and the ever constant references to different works can leave a feeling of numbness. At least, that’s what I experienced while reading Bechdel’s graphic novel.

When I refer to numbness I am not trying to insult the text by saying I was bored. But how can one truly connect with a text when the author tries its best to create the distance?

It was like she was recreating her father’s fortress of solitude <aka-his library> in pictures and narrative. He tried to make a room solely devoted to art and expression, the higher reaches of culture. But most of the books in there were never experienced, left to collect dust. The appearance without substance.

Why write an extremely personal and graphic <no pun intended> account of your life and devalue the best part? It was like she couldn’t explain herself or the relationship she had with her father without dissembling or making a connection with literature. And I find it slightly ironic that she BSed her way through her oral exam of Ulysses, even stating that she didn’t understand why someone would look for the underlying symbolism and just read the damn thing, and then uses Ulysses as a way to represent herself and her father.

At that point I just wanted to exclaim,” Just let me read the damn thing without adding anymore metaphors or symbolism!” Or at least don’t point it out to me and trust that I can see the parallels myself.

Why is it that for a 21st century memoir to succeed, people have to have parental issues. Specifically, it seems all the “classic” memoris written by folks like Sedaris, Eggers, and Burroughs all come from crazy homes and suffer from some serious daddy issues. It’s like they don’t realize that 90 percent of the U.S. population has some kind of daddy issue or another.

Other people this semester have talked about how they’ve had a hard time relating to one or another character, and this week I think I’ve found mine. It’s not that I didn’t like Fun Home, I felt as a narrative it did a lot with artistic attention to detail, storytelling, and and weaving in other stories (as we see strong parallels between this and Ulysses, especially in the end). But the characters seemed largely flat and inaccessible. In fact I felt that Alison and her father, the foci of this text, were completely desensitized to emotions and showed very little development or progress throughout the text. Even when they share their experiences of homosexuality (or more importantly, her father shares his, and she just listens), little seems to develop and by the end I feel I’m left with the same awkward, uncertain, book-nerd girl we started with, and the same unreachable, distant, secret-keeping father.

One diary entry in particular seemed to epitomize the desensitization to emotion in Fun Home. In one diary entry, Alison writes: “We watched cartoons. Dad showed us the dead people. They were cut up and stuff. mother took John to a party. we didn’t go to church. John + I looked at the Sears catalog. Dad had the funeral today. Mother went to the funeral home. :-)” (148). A smiley face. She ends an entry about seeing dead people, including a kid her own age, with a smiley face. The same way Alison is detached from, and desensitized to death by a family that runs a funeral home, her emotionless family, and emotionless narrator, desensitize us to anything that resembles emotion. Even in the wake of her father’s death, she only cries for two minutes (46).

It should be noted that Bechdel, herself, does point out her inability to grieve. She writes about how after her father’s death, she would tell of it matter-of-factly, “eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me” (45).

In another way, as Lars mentioned on twitter, the whole story is told with allusions to other works of literature, almost as a way for Bechdel to distance herself from the actual tumultuous events in her life, and understand them through literature. While this approach has some merits, I felt that every parallel between her life and another person’s written one (fictional or factual) was a way for her to distance herself even further from emotions. And this made it hard for me to really feel connected or engaged by Fun Home. The characters remain too static, and avoid any serious self-reflection at all costs. When Bechdel self reflects, I feel she’s trying to make sense of a history recorded as a 10 to 14 year old in light of her adult self. This type of if-I-knew-then-what-I-know-now thinking is cliche for a reason, since we can dwell on the past all we please, but remain powerless to change anything but the present. In Fun Home Bechdel seems more interested in an unchangeable past than taking a look at the present person she’s become. This and the lack of emotion make it hard for me to connect to any of the characters in any kind of meaningful way. Not like Jake, or Brett, or Darl, or Daedalus, or Leopold, the modern fictional characters she writes about and relates to, but whom couldn’t be more different in their presentation as characters. Maybe in the end, this is Bechdel’s point: these modern characters still lived in an age of change. Perhaps now, as in 2006 when the text was published, characters are meant to reflect their modern equivalents, people who change even less than their modern lit counterparts (many of the above change very little, but still develop and show emotions as the texts progress), and remain the same uncertain, book-nerdy, timid girls and secret-keeping men throughout their lives. I’d just like to think that’s not the case.

What struck me as interesting in reading Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was how her memoir seemed to be focused on her father Bruce.  His story is so thoroughly entwined with her understanding of her own, that it seems she cannot accurately talk about her own life without talking about his. As estranged from her father as she felt her whole life, his story seemed to define her own more than any other figure.

I am not sure if this entwining was her intent when she set out to tell write her “tragicomic” memoir, or if it was an organic result of committing her life to paper. I believe that in hindsight she obviously felt there was more of a connection between herself and her father because of the discovery of their shared homosexuality, but I think things go deeper than just that.

For better or for worse, the text seems to reveal (whether this is the author’s intent or not is immaterial) that it was not this singular similarity, but in fact the vast ocean of differences between them that defined Bechdel’s understanding of her life. We are constantly given instances of how different they are from each other, and how he never fit her understanding of masculinity, fatherhood, or love. She even remarks at one point that she felt like she was treated like furniture, just another part of his house. Yet his presence appears more central in her memoir than even her own. His presence, both in the literal physical sense and the metaphorical metaphysical sense, is the fulcrum upon which Bechdel’s life pivots in the text.

Even Bechdel’s understanding of her homosexuality seems to be completely inseparable from her father. He provides the book that helps propel her understanding of her own sexual identity. His coming out overshadows and redefines her own. His death changes her perspective on her own life.  Bruce’s life is so intricately entwined with Bechdel’s understanding of her life that his comes to define hers in this memoir.

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

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 found Bechdel’s references to “vintage” media in her work, especially newspapers and television, give Fun Home a sense of nostalgia, at least to those of us old enough to remember being kids during the 1960s. Particularly evocative is her repeated mention of the Blind Faith album (p. 95), which sets the tone for one of the scenes where Bechdel and her siblings encounter Roy, her father’s lover at the time and the baby sitter for her and her brothers.

Released in late 1969, the sale of the album was temporarily banned in America because of the cover art; a naked pubescent girl holding a phallic symbol.  Until the alternative cover was printed and issued in the U.S., the album was hard to get and finding a copy of the British release, which is the version Bruce has, was a coup of sorts.  Bechdel seems to emphasize this when she refers to her father “cultivating young men” at the top of the page; it would have been a magnet to a teenage boy at the time.

Her two renderings of the album cover also presages Bechdel’s painful entry into puberty with her confusion and discomfort reflected in the banned cover art.  It’s a portrait of who she had such trepidation about becoming.  The young girl on the cover, rumored to be a groupie slave and/or the illegitimate child of a band member, seems at easy with her nascent sexuality while Bechdel is anything but comfortable with hers.

The lyrics reproduced in the panel sum up the scene.  Bruce’s secret is catching up to him at this point and Bechdel learns later that he has had a brush with the courts.  Like Wilde and Blind Faith, artists who stepped on the moral conventions of the time, Bruce is pushing his luck with his escapades.  He is living outside they law, which in 1969 looked at homosexuality as being against the moral standards of the day.

The Blind Faith album, along with her references to Wilde, could be seen as Bechdel’s way of pointing out the changes time brings to society views art and the human condition.  By today’s standards, the album cover would be barely rate a glance. Today Bruce wouldn’t feel compelled to hide his homosexuality behind a sham marriage that brought such grief to him and his family.  Like everything else from the 60s and 70s, if his life hadn’t been such a disaster to those around him, his views of himself and his homosexuality would seem almost quaint.

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.

I really enjoyed looking at Fun Home as a counter-point to the two other memoir related texts we’ve read this semester, Maus and Alan’s War.  The dynamic between creator and subject is especially interesting for me in Bechdel’s work.  The narrative in Maus is often told in Vladek’s voice.  Likewise Alan’s War is exclusively told in Cope’s voice (at least from a verbal perspective).  Fun Home differs from these in that the creator, Alison, narrates throughout.  Even the visual moments in which Alison is absent from the page (her father writing love letters in the Army, her parents fighting on the honeymoon in Europe, etc.) are framed by her narration.   
 
Experiencing the entire work from Alison’s perspective certainly personalizes the story for me, but also prevents me as the reader from seeing Bruce in any other light than the one Alison herself sees him in.  Perhaps Spiegelman and Guibert employ this technique in their creative styles as well, but for whatever reason – it seems more overt in Fun Home. 

As a reader, I can’t help but share in Bechdel’s complicated feelings towards her father.  It’s difficult to have any positive emotions towards Bruce when you see him at his controlling-worst early on in the text, terrorizing the children for simple mistakes around the house, forcing Alison to wear berets, and even changing her coloring to make it more aesthetically pleasing.  Yet there are also moments in the text where the overwhelming emotional response I have towards Bruce is pity for the self-loathing and dishonesty that seem to dominate his life.  As the book ends, I find myself semi-endeared to Bruce given his round-about support of Alison and awkward attempts at honesty with her.  I don’t think any of these feelings are a stretch on the part of the reader, as it would seem one of Bechdel’s primary motives in Fun Home is to paint a more complex picture of a man who can all too easily be labeled as a bad person, or terrible father.  
 
Changing gears somewhat, another aspect of the text that I really enjoyed was the way Bechdel explores the nature of art and the artist.  The various artistic and creative expressions that define the Bechdel household can be described alternately as compulsive, sexually repressive, empowering, and even therapeutic.  For Alison’s parents in particular, their respective “arts” of home restoration and acting seem to comprise the few moments of happiness they are given in their otherwise repressed and loveless marriage.  And as Freedman examines in her article, art in the form of great literature serves as not only the primary currency in the fractured adult relationship between Alison and her father, but also as a framing device for Alison to better make sense of her own complicated family structure.  

John