Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is rife with incomplete or thwarted parallels between desires, life trajectories, fiction and “life,” parent and child.  Drawing Camus, Joyce, and Fitzgerald’s texts above, below, alongside, and between her father’s words, Bechdel compares her father’s trajectory with the trajectories of these writers and their characters.  Leading readers through the parallels that she perceives between her father and the fictional lives that he pores over, she illustrates the incomplete catharsis in fictionalizing life as a way to memorialize it.  “I think of his letter, the one where he does and doesn’t come out to me.  It’s exactly the disavowal Stephen Dedalus makes at the beginning of Ulysses—Joyce’s nod to the novel’s mock-heroic method” (Bechdel 230).  Specifically, Bechdel’s father asserts, “I am not a hero,” as Ulysses features the line, “I’m not a hero.”  Rather than conveying a humble admission, “I am not a hero” as a literary allusion to a famous literary protagonist and potential authorial alter-ego (for Bechdel’s father as well as for James Joyce) just amps up the simultaneous self-aggrandizement and self-deprecation in the proclamation: a “disavowal” that removes Bechdel’s father and James Joyce just when the parallel seems significant.  Excerpts from Joyce always bear Bechdel’s narration atop them, a sort of explanatory footnoting without the sacrifice of the foreground.  Bechdel breaks down the parallel that her father draws between Joyce’s writing and Bechdel’s mother’s in a “courtship” letter, but Bechdel shows the relevant passage in Joyce and an analysis of her father’s “mistake” or misinterpretation, an association of desire with one character rather than with another (227-228).  This mistaken association parallels the ambivalence in her own parallels between texts and her father’s life, between her desires and her father’s.  On the one hand, his misreading is productive for her, but on the other hand, she assumes quite a lot in order to make that misreading productive in a certain system of meaning that she develops throughout the Fun Home.  Joyce’s text fades in the background, almost gloomy gray and watercolor blurred, while her own text is accentuated by bright white and takes over the foreground, although it is much briefer than the excerpt from Ulysses.  Next, the parallels become more removed: Bechdel invokes (what she presumes to be) part of her father’s relationship to desire, “hiding one’s erotic truth,” and compares it to the obscenity bans against Ulysses (228-229).  Associating Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s publication of parts of Ulysses with their relationship to “erotic truth” within a heteronormative systems, Bechdel then reiterates her father’s suggestion that she study the literary scene (Paris, 1920s) in which the two women took part, implying that perhaps he knows the Ulysses and its history have something for both of them.

Putting this circle of parallels into question, Bechdel qualifies that she does not know her father’s “erotic truth” and has an “eagerness to claim him as ‘gay’” as a way of “keeping him to [herself]—a sort of inverted Oedipal cycle” (230).  This is reminiscent of passages in which Joyce’s characters, father and her seem to be in cycles of removed but imagined identification/perspectives: “He thought that I thought that he was a queer, whereas he knew that I knew that he knew that I was too” (Bechdel 212).  A qualifier that denotes opinion is present (“I thought”), but the impetus to definitively parallel somehow is present, as well (“I knew that he knew”).  Bechdel memorializes her father’s words through Joyce’s words; or does he first instigate this move with this probably self-aware allusion?  Perhaps the appeal of allusions to Joyce, the impetus towards being a hero/anti-hero, fictionalizing oneself to immortalize oneself, is what ends up memorialized in this intertextuality, a reference to the oft-praised intertextuality of Joyce’s works.  Similarly, a reference to the Oedipal cycle memorializes a classical text as much as it memorializes her relationship to her father.  Fiction is re-inscribed as having a memorializing function for memoir, as memoir cycles through and between existing meaning systems offered in fiction.

When Bechdel sees the 1974 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, Bechdel even comments on her perception that her dad resembles Robert Redford in the film: “Perhaps it seems like a colossal illusion on my part to compare my father to Robert Redford, but he was more attractive than the photographic record reveals (64).  By rendering a photo as a drawing, Bechdel already admits that the image bears a limited verisimilitude to its subject.  By saying that the photo model has limited resemblance to him, Bechdel removes further responsibility from the image as evidence of what her text conveys.  This emphasis on removal from the original echoes in the slight difference between: “I am not a hero” and “I’m not a hero” in the allusive and elusive letter (Bechdel 230).  The up-close photograph-esque, shadow-laden details in Camus’ face during the panels in which Bechdel’s dad learns of the author’s death distinguish the two, endowing Camus with a reality as a lived person, rather than as a literary persona and potential alter-ego for Bechdel’s father (48).  Further contrasting the two, Bechdel notes that her father’s profession as a mortician may give him an acceptance of his own mortality that Camus may not share in the same way (48-49).  However, this contrast is still a bit of a dichotomy, still a pairing.  Camus' death, after all, is the moment at which two drawing styles appear on the same page, presenting a stark contrast: These are two distinct lives that are not one; death cuts short the romanticizing/rationalizing parallels and the comfort they provide.  A photograph of Camus memorializes Camus.  She first fictionalizes Camus' significance in order to join memoir and memorialization, in the process cyclically memorializing her father's life in relation to the significance of a man already tied to fiction as an discipline (endowed with the literary authority that Bechdel's father indulges in as an English teacher and as the father of a college student in an English class).  Then she shows that Camus' face is not her father's face, which she draws in a distinct style with fewer pixelated lines/dots and more white space than Camus' quite morose and existentialist 5 o'clock shadow face.

Earlier, Bechdel breaks down the duality between her father and herself as she examines the term “invert”: “Not only were we inverts.  We were inversions of one another” (98).  They both gaze at the magazine with their own desires, although Bechdel links those desires as complementary albeit tense pairs.  To grossly oversimplify and not do justice to the nuances the gamut of their desires, her father may desire the model and she may desire his clothes, but the magazine image very literally joins the two (99).  From the left corner of the panel, Bechdel’s father’s head, her head, and the magazine move in sloping, step-like gradations down toward the center of the panel, evoking the direction and removal of the two gazes toward the magazine (making readers question where their own gazes stand in relation to the central image).  With hairstyle and a jawline remarkably like her father’s, the model in the magazine takes up most of a panel, along with the arm of the other model in the magazine spread, the latter of the two spreading fingers reverently over the chest of the former.  Along the lines of Bechdel pairing her father and her as mutual “inversions,” this image seems to pair her father and the model as conceptually similar or the objects of her gaze.  The images of her father’s face, the model’s face, his muscular torso, and the other model’s reverential touch coalesce to illustrate the process of gaze-creation: the compilation of several parallels (between her gaze and his, the model’s gaze and the other model’s hands-as-gaze) admire and simultaneously construct masculinity.  The eyes of the model are closed tight and he does not return Bechdel’s gaze, her father’s gaze or other readers’ gazes, illustrating the unreachability of such a construct, a gaze that cannot be returned because it is what it produces.  As much as several forms of gaze may parallel or connect Bechdel’s desires with those of her father, the object of their gaze is their gaze, a self-reflexive and ultimately abstract and unknowable connection that is as close as it is removed; there is no concrete link between them in the model.

One panel shows her mother, her father, and her in front of two mirrors (98).  Her mother’s reflection is not visible to readers, while Bechdel and her father are both reflected in the same mirror, their eyes only visible to the reader as reflections, his eyes gazing at her and her giving him (and perhaps readers) the side-eye.  While paired, their gazes do not symmetrically align, and they see each other through the mediation of the mirror, as do readers, another form of removal, of imperfect parallels.  Bechdel depicts her mother’s discovery that she’s taping over her late husband’s voice, representing the two voices running into one another but not quite merging: “But the most arresting thing about the tape is its evidence of both of my parents at work, intent and separate” (133).  In one panel, her father records his voice, and in another, her mother records hers, facing the same direction but angled differently, not evenly parallel (98-99).  They share many of the same facial lines and their hands hold the microphone similarly, but they are “at work, intent and separate.”  As tempting as it is for parallel concepts to meet, they are as unlikely to comfortably merge as would be two parallel lines that gaze upon one another side-by-side but can only memorialize their own trajectories.