Writing the "American" Self

Fun Home; A Family Tragicomic author, Alison Bechdel captures the story the of her childhood through comic book elements. Text is accompanied by a visual media, which allows the reader to not only visualize the story through the reading, but also by the author’s drawing–an element that allows the reader to gain certain knowledge of the story without having to have the text explained. For example Bechdel included some of her father’s text into the reading such as “wash these old curtains so we can put up the hand-embroidered lace one I found in Mrs. Strump’s attic” or Bechdel depicts herself as claiming that being raised by her father was like being “raised by Martha Stewart.” Both these statements help the reader to assert that Heschel’s dad does not exactly live up to the title of a manly man (5 and 13).

Yet, these passages need not be included into the story because on the beginning pages of the story Bechdel draws her father putting up lace drapes while wearing a pair of short cut- off jeans. Although some may say that cut off jeans were the trend of most men in the era, regardless the depiction of a guy in short cut-off jeans leads one to think that one may be less than a manly man. But, this is how Bechdel subtly shows herself complicit to her father’s artifice. It is as if Bechdel is giving the reader all the hints to presume that her father was gay, yet she does not bluntly say her father is gay. Bechdel seems to be ok with her father’s artificial life, although she complains of having to dust intricate backs of wooden chairs that her father dubs “beautiful,” but that only sounds like the usual complaint teens give their parents when forced to do chores (15). One place where Bechdel does seem to question her father’s activities is when she states “but would an ideal husband and father have sex with teenage boys” (17). This accusation seems to have some truth behind it. Bechdel knows the ways of her father and does not approve of his actions as a homosexual. Through this notation Bechdel is saying her father was not an ideal father and is hurt by her father because of this.

     Bechdel uses quotes from literature to symbolize and highlight her father’s own distance and inability to idependently express himself.  These manifest themselves in many different ways, whether in dialogue or through the reflections of the narrator.  Bechdel’s father reads constantly, and quotes passages to his family, highlights them for himself, and looks for similarites between his favorite works and his own life.  Bechdel uses this to portray him as a man obsessed- just as he is with his garden, his furniture, etc.  Just as all the extraneous details he loves are inauthentic, so too are his own thoughts and actions.  Even his photographs are an inauthentic testament to a heterosexual existence he is attempting to portray to others. Whether he is attempting to model his life after a Greek myth or quoting Gatsby to his young daughter, he is filling in the blanks in his own life with sentiments approximated from others.  His job as an English teacher facilitates this tendency.

    Bechdel uses this to characterize her father.  It also reveals a lot about her.  She is a bookworm, just as her father is, and draws comparisons between him and various authors just as he does.  The fact that she is referencing these works of literature, and displaying her scholarly tendencies shows us that she is not only complicit in this way of living her father has taught her, but that she carries it on even today, or at least at the time of writing Fun Home.  In that sense, it is probably the way that she is most like her father, and the best indication that she is in fact a product of her father and his upbringing.

Alison Bechdel, in “Fun Home,” re-evaluates her father’s life after his death. After learning that he was gay, she visits (through words and pictures) moments in her past that were significant or now seem significant. Bechdel sees her father differently after his death; he is less of the “superman” and more of a human being. She looks back into old photographs with this new knowledge of her dad’s true identity and gives us a visual map of his/her relationship. She also notes that even in her family pictures, her mother looked unhappy and is thus able to gain insight into her other family members as people who had issues, hurt each other, and hid their true identity. This reminded me of Baldwin  who also re-evaluated his fathers post-mortem. Baldwin has that heart-breaking moment in his writing where he suddenly sees his father as a human being. Many of the authors we’re read have moments where the idolized paternal role is replaced with an adult-like understanding (or at the least, sympathy for the shortcomings of human nature).

As a child, it’s easy to view parents as only having lives based around their parenting. Part of growing up is when a child finally can see their parent as also a human being. Children come to learn that parents are sometimes wrong, they can make bad decisions, and they sometimes hurt the people they love. It is interesting that all authors would feel this change after their fathers’ deaths. It reminds me of Smith and Watson wrote about how traumatic events can shape how we see the self and our narrating “i”. It can change the way we look back at memory. In some ways that grief does “defy language and understanding” and the text is a way for them to engage in this “obsessive memory.”

In Bechdel’s tragicomic Fun Home, the use of indirect voice is often employed through the artifice. In her use of text, Bechdel addresses the reader as a confidant and a casual friend. The reader is immediately ushered into her clever demeanor through the use of imagery, and narration. For example, take the top right hand panel on page 13, 2007 edition. Bechdel relates that her “…dad considered us extensions of his own body, like precision robot arms”, her second use of narration in the same panel continues “…it was like being raised not by Jimmy but by Martha Steward”. Not often do robots and Martha Stewart find themselves in the same line of thought, needless to say, this narrative illustration- as such that the mind’s eye is given imagery of a robot being raised by Martha Stewart- appears as yet another level to the story. This motif is repeated again and again, an appeal to our own knowledge as the method of constructing the scene and setting for the novel – pg.15 : “I was a Spartan to my father’s Athenian” ,“Modern to his Victorian”, etc.

Many of the artifices used in Bechdel’s book call forth text, such as newspapers, dictionary definitions, letters, books, her diary. There is a sense of the cataloguing of life through the scrapbooking of text; the use of text outside of the narrating voice also allows for a change in prose. After having seen her interviews however, it makes me wonder whether these snapshots of text are actually verbatim- I would not be surprised if they were. Regardless the use of such an artifice does two things for the reader, first we are let into the privacy of an intimate script such as a letter between lovers or the diary of a young girl, second we are forced to recognize the distance and strangeness between Bechdel and her father/family/self. As such we are introduced to the actual act of her father’s death through a newspaper heading, “Local Man Dies After Being Hit By Truck” page 27. This factual and removed choice in script is disarming. As the audience we are led to understand a very complex relationship, perhaps in this use of different tones we are led to grasp the subtleties of influence, understanding, and misunderstanding exuding from Bechdel relationship with her father.

In Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home the narrated and narrating “I” are given an interesting perspective not yet viewed in our previous readings. In Fun Home, I find that there are two different protagonist characters for the story, not just in the narrated and narrating voice but instead the illustrated and the narrating.  Bechdel delivers her life narrative with a brilliant combination of very thoughtful and reflective prose with the components that make it a graphic novel.  As mentioned in class, the comic-strip format that gives this narrative its unique creativity, also deliver a variety of benefits to the narrating style.  For one, as I brought up in class, is what I call the punch line factor, that is made possible with the natural progression of reading a comic.  Another interesting addition of the comic format is just the wealth of pertinent information that can be delivered in the story through clever image placement. One example of this that I can think of from the narrative would be in her early discovery of masturbation and orgasm.  Bechdel could have delivered this in a straightforward explanation, but instead she puts it into the story in the form of her character coming across the word in the dictionary.  This simply draws the reader closer to the text, inspecting each panel for what could be revealed.  Finally the narrated and narrating “I,” as delivered by the comic panel style, come off as, instead two different voices of the text, two different characters entirely.  In Douglass’s narrative the narrating “I” comes through in his retrospective analysis of the dehumanizing nature of slavery from the perspective of a freed slave; the narrated “I” is the voice of the slave that is remembered and conveyed by the narrating voice. In our early puritan readings, Sheppard’s narrating “I” was the voice the momentarily broke character, and reflected on just how much the loss of his 2^nd wife hurt him, and the narrated “I” is the puritan Sheppard.  Bechdel’s narrating “I” comes through in the panels that narrate the story, reflecting on her past and coming of age with a certain meticulousness to understand it all.  The unique narrated “I” that the comic style allows is the visual “I,” or like Smith & Watson say in Reading Autobiography, the “version of the self.”  This “version” of the self is what Bechdel processes through her memory and puts down in the comic character playing out her past.

Perhaps one of the most insightful moments into Bechdel’s work occurred for me as I watched her describe the process she used to create Fun Home. As Bechdel described the way in which she meticulously crafted her drawings around reality (going so far as to photograph herself posing for every character in every frame) an interesting paradox occurred to me.

Bechdel uses reality to create a contrived memory. In a way this grants some notion of authenticity to Bechdel’s work; the gay men she draws are modeled on photos of gay men she googled. The rooftop upon which she watched the fireworks is drawn from a photo she took of that exact location. The attentiveness to the reality of her artwork reveals an interesting thought on the artifice of her work.

The OED defines artifice as “a manuevre, device intended to deceive, a trick.” While this is perhaps the case with her father’s artifice, he attempts to conceal his homosexuality, I think the precise nature of Bechdel’s drawings interact with the artifice of the memory she has of her father.

Mikhail Bakhtin coined the term heteroglossia to describe the multiple voices novelists inevitably take during the process of writing. I think this is an interesting theory to apply to Bechdel’s exact illustrations and problematic memories of her father. It is clear that the relationship with her father, and the memories Bechdel has of it are intensely complex, especially given his veiled homosexuality and suicide. While writing, Bechdel inevitably succumbs to heteroglossia in the ways in which she has dealt with the memory of her father and come to understand his life. Different memories, coupled with illustrations, arouse different emotional stances from Bechdel. While Bechdel’s narrated I and the character of her father in Fun Home are often hard to concisely summerize or describe, the exactness Bechdel’s illustrations and creative process serve to counter balance the complexity of the narrative. That is to say, the exactness of the illustrations lend the artifice of authenticity to Bechdel’s depictions of herself and especially her father. Perhaps even, the compulsive nature of Bechdel’s creative process is a response to the intense heteroglossia with which she writes in Fun Home.