A missing limb [updated]

"Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb." (Page 23)

There is just so many things to say about Fun Home, and unfortunately my body is too exhausted to write. I plan on expanding this blog entry tomorrow morning. This graphic memoir lingered with me throughout this holiday weekend, and I've been immersed in its storytelling, unable to process exactly what it's done to me. I've been saturating my thoughts on it for quite some time.

One thing I want to ruminate on before I lay my head to sleep is that cyclical thematic nature of this graphic memoir. Alison Bechdel employs this technique effortlessly. The panels illuminate cyclicality by their pacing, strong and bold lines within its structure, and the grayscale watercolor details that evade the backdrop. The way Bechdel uses textuality and allusion reveals that cyclicality, and her relationship with her face, how they meet and don't meet spiritually and physically embodies that impeccable and and obtuse cyclicality. Bechdel is able to breathe into this narrative a longing representative of that "missing limb," an undercurrent of emotion that is revealed through disparity, which in turn reveals loss, cognitive dissonance, and dysfunction. Bechdel immerses us into American culture, which its through our English canonical literature to culture tropes and obsessions to her individual loyalty to Greek mythology. But all through the grandiose allusions, she brings us back to her family, to herself, through a cyclical specificity, and it's through that individualism, through building her world and showing us through a multilayer storytelling narration of image and text, that we extrapolate the universal missing limbs of family and sexuality. Fun Home left me breathless at the end. The image of her jumping into the pool with her father's arms outstretched reminded me too much of how literature can deconstruct you as much as it can itself. It's another layer of its cyclicality.

More tomorrow morning. More specificity when my body can write with more fluidity.

---
It may be 4pm, but I have a lot to say!

First, I want to focus on the non-linear narrative of Fun Home. It's reminiscent of how The Lover was written by Duras but with that unique twist of being a graphic memoir. Duras used objects, like gold lamé shoes, to bring the narrative back to certain memories and fling the story along, and Bechdel employs similar techniques, refocusing on singular objects and the milieu of her life--whether it's the funeral home, her father's distance through the intricacies of his home decor, through her journals, through allusions to the literature that shaped her and her family's life, through old maps of her town and letters of her parents and even words in the dictionary. There is also a section where Bechdel reveals her OCD tendencies as a child. The way the narrative moves about has an obsessive, cyclical property to it, and it works like a dream, it works like how memory works, and it reveals itself and distances itself, allowing us to peer into a vivid, complicated world. This non-linear narrative works because it's reflective of Bechdel's relationship with her father thematically:

"Not only were we inverts, we were inversions of each other. While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him, he was attempting to express something feminine through me. It was a war of cross-purposes, and so doomed to perpetual escalation." (98)

Second, I want to talk about the art in this book. In The Comics Journal, Bechdel says:

"It's very important for me that people be able to read the images in the same kind of gradually unfolding way as they're reading the text. I don't like pictures that don't have information in them. I want pictures that you have to read, that you have to decode, that take time, that you can get lost in. Otherwise what's the point?"

Like how I am moved/affected by films differently than I am by books, I was moved utterly by Fun Home, in ways that were different and the same, and it brought me back to my childhood and adult memories in modes that are more immediate than had I read this in a textual form. The medium of juxtaposing images and text plays with the idea of narrative and memory through the work and pangs of the "image." Even textual information are images; they're symbols as much as pictures are. The tremendous pangs that Bechdel goes through to get every panel right, every image right (even by photographing herself in different body positions so that the cartoon version is perfected) is what builds the magic and technical artistry of this book. It makes it come alive; the panels, the narration, comes off as alive, as if we are watching or experiencing these moments with Bechdel panel by panel, memory by memory, book by book, thought by thought. Bechdel has a knack of confining the narration in singular panels or grouped panels, and each story arc is built into the larger story arc of her father's death, his coming out, and her coming out. The cyclicality of Fun Home is novel because of its form. The immediacy of this medium is somehow more direct than film, than books, because it's the mixture of the two. Bechdel builds her world wholly and utterly for you, as any novelist or filmmaker should. And in that sense, I can live and breathe and touch in Bechdel's world because of the intricate, painstaking details of her work.

I don't know how I can fully explain how much I love Bechdel's work. The fact that it took her 7 obsessive years to create this graphic novel renews my faith in the tortured artist. This book moved me. I felt the tears, the lies, the wanting to come out, the "debunking of protagonist" feelings in a family drama, the want of love and acceptance, gender identity and closeted vs. open homosexuality. And I knew the moments that moved me had moved Bechdel. She inspired me to make my own art, no matter how long it takes, out of my own tragicomic family. One day I will.




-- Melissa Sipin