Fictional Parents...

To backtrack slightly, there was something from Fun Home that I wanted to post on briefly:

One of the most interesting lines to me from the whole of Fun Home is when Bechdel is describing her parents and says, “I employ these allusions of James and Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms” (67.1). This line appears above a panel depicting an ordinary mundane family scene: Alison and her mother are cooking (with the ever present “Sunbeam Bread” on the counter), her brother is leaning against the wall, and her father has just come home. Perhaps, for her parents, this ordinary scene of domesticity was a fiction. Her father obviously lived a “double-life” of sorts and her mother seems to be trapped by her family obligations. There always seems to be a sense of regret surrounding her mother of a life not lived. Her involvement in the local theatre and playing the piano seem to be the last vestiges of her former life and ambitions. Bechdel describes her mother’s appearance in a passport photograph, saying that her “luminous face has gone dull” (72.4) as compared with the younger, freer woman she was in the passport photo on the previous page, 71.1. She even describes her mother at that time through the lens of a fictional character, Isabel Archer from James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and describes the reason her mother stayed with her father as the same reason that Isabel stayed with Gilbert: “[b]ut too good for her own good, Isabel remains with Gilbert / … and despite all her youthful hopes to the contrary, ends up ‘ground in the very mill of the conventional’” (72.2-3). Relying on fiction as a way to relate to her own family serves to reinforce the sense of separation and “cool aesthetic distance” (67.2) Bechdel describes to the reader. At one point she even describes her household as being “like an artists’ colony. We ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in our separate pursuits. And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion” (134.3). The only way left for Bechdel to relate to her family seemed to be through art.

Relying on the Narrator

In our class discussion it was argued that Bechdel's reliability as a narrator was sometimes faulty since she would often draw places or events that we know she could not have participated in. However, the bulk of the book focuses on events that she had been around for. What does it mean then, in comparison to Fun Home, that the bulk of Maus is visualizing a story that Spiegelman was not around for? Yes, it's true that there is more to emphasize that he learned this story from his father, but the fact remains that Spiegelman's story is wholly anachronistic. Does this make him an unreliable author?

Memoir as Therapy?

In her interview with Lynn Emmert, Bechdel discusses the benefit of therapy on her writing. In response to Emmert's half-asked question whether it had helped, she bursted out "Oh my GOD, yeah...It wasn't just the emotional benefits I got from therapy, but a whole way of learning to think psychologically," she elaborated. "Understanding what we were just talking about, these layers and layers of motivations behind people's behaviors." I found this fascinating, as the very same day, visiting writer Martin Moran had mentioned his "great editor" and his "great therapist" as the two biggest helps in writing his book. Obviously therapy mostly develops an understanding of one's self and the people in one's life, but is it also some kind of secret to getting a better grasp on people in general? Could all writers benefit from this "insider info" on our deepest motivations, whether for comics or prose, fiction or non-?

Bechdel mentions sharing her material with her mother, saying that each time it was very "emotionally tumultuous." I think that this depth of emotion is what makes her work so rich, and I think that it never goes too far into sentimentalism or schmaltz because a) Bechdel is an excellent writer and b) she had therapy to sort through her thoughts and memories, to sift out the deeper meaning and the strongest threads to braid together.

Character Depiction in Fun Home

Since we have discussed the way the writer depicts himself in many of our texts thus far, I thought it would only be fair to examine Alison Bechdel's self-portrait in Fun Home. Even in the few scenes that we see young Alison in a dress, there is an undeniable boyishness to her. She always has close-cropped hair, wears gender-neutral clothes, etc. We rarely see her smiling; in fact, she is often seen with a scowl on her face. The only time she is seen laughing is when she is telling a friend of her father's death on page 227. There is a slight hint of a smile on her face in several scenes when her father is giving her positive attention, most notably when she was his student on pages 198-199. There are very few similarities between the depiction of Alison and the depiction of her father; she mostly seems to resemble her mother. Whether this is actually the case or a just a way of Alison distancing herself from her father is unclear. Her character does not really change much physically over the course of time; it is easy to pick her out of crowd scenes and distinguish her from her siblings. Bruce, however, is not always drawn with a consistent pen. Even if Alison had not made a comment about her father's good looks on page 64, it would have been easy to tell that he was a fairly handsome man. His face carries a very bookish and serious quality, and his style seems to evolve in subtle ways with the passing of time. But the scenes in which he is reprimanding her or her siblings show a different man. For instance, the image of Bruce on 99.2 bears practically no resemblance to the image on 92.1, and is even quite different from the Bruce on 98.1. Perhaps this is Alison's way of conveying the idea that there was a side of her father that she didn't know, that he really was two people living in the same body. I think that Alison says a lot with her drawings, especially with the expressions on the characters' faces. She never states explicitly that she or her mother or her father were unhappy, but it is as clear as the titles of the books they are reading.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young (Wo)Man

There is no escaping literature in Fun Home. Alison and her father are constantly seen book in hand, title visible. Chapter titles cleverly allude to some of the most celebrated works in the canon. Most of these references are explained within each respective chapter, but I found it curious that in Chapter 1, "Old Father, Old Artificer," Bechdel, allows the reader to believe that this is simply an invocation of the Daedalus/Icarus myth, whereas anyone who has read Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will recognize this as the begining of that novel's very last line. Of course Joyce takes on greater importance in the the graphic novel's final chapter, "The Antihero's Journey" (which follow's Joseph Campbell's model for the journey of the hero quiye nicely), mostly in relation to Ulysses which Allison "studies" in college. A Portrait of the Artist. . . is brought up fleetingly as a text that she should read prior to Ulysses; and when Allison mentions this to her father he remarks "You damn well better identify with every page."

I bring this up because for all the heavy handed connections Bechdel between between her family history and the works of Proust, Fitzgerald, James, etc, it seems as if Fun Home taken as a whole is a far more subtle and compelling retelling of A Portrait of the Artist . . . and I appreciate that she doesn't have to spell that out for me.

Fun Home Photographs

Almost in direct contrast with Sacco, Bechdel uses literary devices to her advantage in Fun Home and brings the reader into her non-fiction reality in an effective and seemingly effortless manner. The juxtapositions and dualities of her and her father, literary allusions and analogies in literature, and metaphors of snakes/mud/etc all effectively advance Bechdel’s memoir without challenging its believability. [Perhaps it is unfair to categorize Safe Area Gorazde in the same context as Fun Home, however, as the former is literary journalism and the latter memoir. For a reader, it’s much easier to enter the “truth” in a world of someone’s childhood than in a political and influential war-zone. But if it’s important to recognize the works’ difference in categorization, it’s equally important to note why shared (or singular) literary devices work well in one context and not the other.]

Bechdel uses one particular graphic device - the retracing of photographs - to help verify her story’s alignment with reality. The retraced photographs that appear at the beginning of every chapter reinforce the “real” people that Bechdel depicts. The comics inside the chapter are likely drawn to depict reality, but the stroke and form of the characters are more comic-like and steer away from the painstaking details that appear in the photographs. Bechdel didn’t need to present her non-fiction work in a strictly realistic manner (in fact, Bechdel goes so far as to give characters lines and dots for mouths, even when they speak!) Instead, Bechdel uses the comic form to her advantage, adding in retraced photographs only when prompted by her discoveries in the story. Photographs that Bechdel discovers of her family, father and Roy (47.6, 100-101, 102.1-3, 120) help tell her story alongside her narrative, strengthening the reader’s perception of the characters and adding credibility to Fun Home overall.

But where photographs work well in Fun Home, SAG lacks any realistic variations in its overtly comic form. If memory serves, Sacco doesn’t employ a single image or character in photographic realism. Even when given the chance to present one small image (the television screen in 122.2) to mirror actual images from the war, Sacco still employs a more comic-like style to portray “reality” and leaves me wondering whether or not he overlooked an opportunity to help his case of the “real truth.” In the end, this is just one of many devices that Sacco seems to have misused or, in this case, forgotten altogether.

Reality and Fiction

The most striking image of the first half of "Fun Home" occurs on page 120. Panel two juxtaposes two very similar photographs. The first photo (the one on the left) portrays a young Bruce lounging in the sun in his early twenties, while the second photo is of a young Alison also in her early twenties. She wonders, "Was the boy who took it his lover? As the girl who took this Polaroid of me on a fire escape on my twenty-first birthday was mine?" (p.120). She goes on to highlight the similarities between the two pictures: the shadows dancing across their faces, their "pained grin[s]," and even the similar exterior settings. What is most interesting about this is the inclusion of the picture of her father (Bruce) dressed as a woman. However, her father looks nothing like a man in this picture, halfway tucked behind the two prominent images in the frame. Instead, he looks like a beautiful young woman, just as Alison looks like a handsome young man.

Panel two best represents the dualities that exist throughout the text. At times Alison brings particular attention to these "diametrically opposed" dualities (p.101). These are: femininity and masculinity, homosexuality and heterosexuality, and most prominently, reality and fiction.

Throughout the first half of the graphic novel memoir, Alison is not only trying to understand herself in terms of her father's mysterious double life, but also trying to come to terms with these many dualities that are maybe not so "diametrically opposed" (p.101). It seems that in the first half these definitions that she assigns to aspects of her life are not so clear-cut. For example, doesn't the memoir demand us to ask ourselves if there is really a huge difference between reality and fiction/art? Moreover, by writing about her struggle with identity and self in such a way (the graphic novel form) isn't she blurring the lines between reality and art? Alison explains, "my parents are most real to me in fictional terms" (p.67), as if this whole work was her way of finding a common ground between these dualities of reality and fiction. Alison even goes so far as to describe her mother's life in terms of Henry James's Catherine Sloper and Shakespeare's shrew, Katherine (p. 66 and 69). Again on page 83, after her mother reads Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," Alice comments: "perhaps she also liked the poem because its juxtaposition of catastrophe with a plush domestic interior is life with my father in a nutshell."

The most prevalent duality in the text (besides the hidden/known duality concerning her father's life) is that of reality and fiction. Here Alison has a difficult time separating the two. I think that the text, like Alison, is forcing us to ask some questions. Are fact (reality) and fiction (art) really all that different? Is it simpler? More complex? Can we better understand and make sense of our own reality through fiction and art?