Opening the hardcover edition of Fun Home, the inside front and back covers are the same wallpaper we see later in the tiny panels showing the funeral home. The dust jacket is gilded like I imagine the floor-to-ceiling curtains or the plush inside of one of the coffins. The cover displays a silver tray with a business card from Fun Home. We enter the book as if we are entering the funeral home. Someone has died. We are visitors in this house, maybe even prospective customers. Or are we a ghost behind the walls?
By compressing herself between literary classics and holiday movies on TV (10), Bechdel catches everyone in her net of reference. Analyzing stories that were dear to her father helps her understand this most elusive character, pushes the narrative forward, and makes her story a universal one, something belonging simultaneously to the literary canon and to the human experience. She does this throughout the book, also using her mother's scripts from plays to elucidate her mother's character in the home and her parent's troubled marriage.
"I employ these allusions to James and Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms"(67)
Adding to her extensively researched bibliography, is Bechdel's use of her own childhood diary. We believe the child Allison because the adult Allison is decoding/mediating the diary and saying, "Here's what I remember, this diary is spurring my memory." She interprets the text like she would Camus, but with Camus she layers Camus on top of her experience to make connections, meaning, push the story forward, and most of all, to build up a socially relevant story that needs to be reconciled. With the diary she layers her current self and perception without the diary on top of the diary to make sense of her current self and past self, her selves. It becomes a practice of reconciliation.
Bechdel relieves us from our wonder when she says on page 196: "Or maybe I'm trying to render my senseless personal loss meaningful by linking it, however posthumously, to a more coherent narrative." And she succeeds in linking her story to many more narratives than she could imagine.
Some things I'm interested in:
Bechdel uses photographs both explicitly (35) and
implicitly (32). Much of Fun Home was rendered by Bechdel posing,
photographing herself, and drawing from the photograph.
How much research went into this book. Not just internal, familial and literary, but historical.
How Bechdel alternates between a literary text, dialogue, and internal thought (84)
How Bechdel jumps ages on page 74, from 13 to 19, to back to 13.
How each panel is drawn from a different angle, a different point of view.
There's much more and I'm curious what you think.
What are readers looking to purchase when they/we enter Fun Home as "prospective customers"? If readers are "a ghost behind the walls," how do they/we haunt Fun Home?
ReplyDeleteis there more analysis? or are you starting your own discussion group? I agree with the dense use of outside texts and information as important strategic development, not as accessory but essential to the core.
ReplyDeletebut how does it function in these many ways?
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It's interesting to remember what the cover looks like, considering I read the kindle version. It is extremely distinctive, and does invite the reader into Bechdel's gaudily decorated childhood. I think the ornate cover mirrors Bechdels layered storytelling. Yes, there is a lot going on in the wallpaper pattern in the funeral home (thats also on the cover) but there is SO much going on in the tensions Bechdel creates between herself and her family, in her many angles and themes.
ReplyDelete"Analyzing stories that were dear to her father helps her understand this most elusive character, pushes the narrative forward, and makes her story a universal one, something belonging simultaneously to the literary canon and to the human experience."
ReplyDeletetotally. and i think in her own personal process of finding herself, she explores a new, burgeoning literary canon in order to make sense of her own identity. just as bruce looked to marcel proust, gunter grass, f scott fitzgerald, etc to attempt to understand himself (and his relationships to others), bechdel does a similar literary searching to come to terms with and build her own sense of self. she talks about her coming out was not, at first, grounded in "experience" or "practice," but was completely theoretical... there was something about the definitions of homosexuality, inversion, and lesbianism that felt compelling and fitting for her life, so she squirreled herself into a research mode to substantiate this "hypothesis" of her queerness... reading sappho was a right on woman and all the other texts before being "actively" a lesbian (meaning having an actual sexual/sensual/whatever experience or relationship). in a way, bruce sought out literature in the same way to make sense of himself and used these texts to relate to others (be it his wife during their courtship, roy, even alison).
The level of detail with the decor (and on my Kindle I was able to close-in a few times) with the layers and layers of Victorian stuff that was the essence of the Victorian home was a hint of the layers and layers of meaning in the relationships in Allison's home life. Along with that, I was able to relate to events and history that was infused to give the reader a sense of the timing of everything. She is not much younger than I am, so her historic points of reference resonated with me.
ReplyDelete