As I started Fun Home, I wasn’t sure what to make of the language and allusions.  Although sometimes prone to verbiage myself (is using verbiage itself a case in point?), I felt going into the graphic novel that the vocabulary was a little excessive in some places. Who smells garbage in the summer and labels the smell “putrefaction”?   Also, whenever anyone starts name dropping Proust my entire mind shuts down.  However, I waited it out, and once Proust had passed, and the revelation of her acute childhood OCD had come into light, the specificity of the language started to have more of an impact on me.  I started to look at the language as something almost pathological, something that represents Bechdel’s obsession with her own identity, and discovering that identity.  What I mean is that Bechdel’s extremely specific word choices exhibit both an intense need for an accurate self-representation and an intense anxiety about misrepresentation.  Choosing the exact word is a way of combating the insecurity of the memories of her childhood and her relationship with her father.  Bechdel’s own pathological insecurity about her memory and the veracity of her own sense experience is clearly shown in the “I thinks” of her early diaries, not to mention the compulsive diary keeping itself.

We discussed modernism in relationship with the text, and I was still thinking about the “why” of the elaborate, highly allusive nature of many modernist texts after class.  And then I remembered that modernism arose largely as a response to World War I.  The devastation and violence of this war was almost incomprehensible in scale.  It was a global trauma without precedent, and the writers of the modernist movement sought to reframe their writing in ways that addressed the experience of living in this post-traumatic world.  In some cases, this apparently amounted to an attempt to frame contemporary experience through classical or mythical allusions, generally, as I understand it, to highlight the profundity of “modern” experience, the sense of living in a momentously new time.  In a similar way,  Alison Bechdel utilizes allusions to show how incredibly profound the effect of her father’s death and her troubled relationship with him were, especially through the image of Icarus and Daedalus.

As a random aside, I would recommend anyone interested in reading a prime example of modernist “hyper-allusiveness” and inscrutability to check out Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

Also, if you check the #eng493 feed on twitter I posted a set of literature parodies by the comic book artist R. Sikoryak, which include one of a modernist, Kafka: http://bit.ly/3tzkto. (Hint: It’s the one with the bug in the zig-zag sweater.)  And a familiar name from Bechdel, Camus:  http://bit.ly/3QUKN.  Definitely worth a look.