Writing the "American" Self

In exploring the extant to which her father constructed his life in a deceptive way, Alison Bechdel implicates herself in the studied artifice of his life and death. Profoundly impacted by the echoes of her father’s death, Bechdel’s memories of her childhood cannot be disentangled from the circumstances that later seem to define them. Retrospectively, everything that her father says and does is shaped by his absence; in Fun Home, Bechdel questions and probes the ways in which the sense of her father’s artifice and absence could be felt during her life with him and the ways in which these impressions have been superimposed on her memories by her modern understanding of him.

In deciding that her father committed suicide, Bechdel ultimately credits her father with the greatest artifice. She questions his commitments to all that seemed important to his life, noting even the smallest details of his activities in the days leading up to his death, such as his note in a bird-watching manual: “The date is five days before he died. Do people contemplating suicide get excited about spotting rufous-sided towhees?” The apparent answer to this question, based on the symptoms of suicidal depression, seems to be “no.” However, Bechdel’s belief that her father intentionally stepped in front of the Sunbeam bread truck highlights the kind of artifice required to maintain a shallow interest in the events of daily life while harboring the intention to end one’s own life. Bechdel’s analysis of her father’s behavior leading up to his death, essentially his behavior throughout her childhood, reveals a certain propensity on her part to accept that the majority of life might be constructed from false impressions.

In Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” the concepts of knowledge and self-knowledge become powerful markers in how Bechdel remembers and interprets her past. It’s really interesting when Bechdel starts a diary and begins to doubt and discredit her daily experiences. On page 141, Bechdel writes “How did I know that the things I was writing were absolutely, objectively true?” Doubt creeps into her diary with “I think” prefacing every action: “I finished [I think] ‘The Cabin Island Mystery’…I made popcorn [I think]…” (141). A diary is supposed to be a medium to divulge one’s true and twisted thoughts and deeds, but Bechdel’s ultra-analytic mindset at such a young age shows how her “‘conscience’” second-guesses itself (RA, 244).

In Smith and Watson’s Reading Autobiography, knowledge and self-knowledge can be described as how one “interprets dream or particular experiences” (244). When Bechdel and her siblings stumble upon the snake in the river, a caption of her subsequent diary entry crosses out “We” in the sentence, “We saw a snake”; she feels anxiety over “the troubling gap between word and meaning.” (143). I think she finds the truth hard to comprehend, (also in light of her obsessive-compulsion) because she doesn’t know the truth in her own museum-like house. Her father’s “secret” homosexual identity feeds into the distance between her and her mother; her mother focuses more on acting and finishing school rather than her crumbling shell of a marriage. Bechdel’s self-knowledge doesn’t start to really surface until she’s away at college and has the opportunity to explore her sexuality and identity.

Before she comes out to her parents, there are moments in Bechdel’s childhood where her father’s understated truth reflects her own. When “the truck-driving bulldyke” dressed in men’s clothing walks into the diner and Bechdel’s father asks her if this figure is “what [she] wants to look like,” Bechdel’s knowledge is increased (118). She realizes that not all women look alike, that she can grow up and not have to look like her feminine mother. The same goes for her velvet-suit-wearing father (98). There are many instances in the graphic novel in which Bechdel’s perception of the events that have happened to her add to how she sees herself.

As I was trolling around the web for some suitable background tidbits related to our second-to-last autobiography, Fun Home, I first arrived at Bechdel’s home base on the interweb. It’s a lovely space.  It also led me to these two videos which I think are fascinating not only because they offer a behind-the-scenes look at Bechdel’s complex artistic process, but they also relate to certain core concepts concerning autobiography and how the autobiographical self arrives, both implicitly and explicitly, in each text. We’ll watch these in class, but I wanted to post them here in case you wanted to check them out later as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cumLU3UpcGY&feature=related

Who am I? What defines me? These are the questions that seem to linger over some high schooler’s head at the beginning of some 90’s teen movie. Yet, although one may want to pass off these seemingly pre teen ideas as ones that only a confused adolescent might conceive of, one also has to be honest with him or herself, we have all asked ourselves these same exact questions.

When someone thinks of intertwining pieces to one’s life, one may think of the contradictions of one’s life and try to create meaning from it. I imagine that President Obama may face such contradictions in his life, like being the President of the United States, yet also a father. Which, duty comes first? Should he make it to his daughter’s first dance recital or have dinner with the Prime Minister of Great Britain. Does he intermix his two lives? Leave dinner early to see the last dance of the show? Are there certain family days for the president? Or does the position of President never sleep? Is his role as father put on the back burner while he holds the position of President of the free world?

But, one cannot live like that. Put one role on the back burner while the other one thrives. Life is not like that. People have a combination of roles, duties, and personalities and like it or not they are always present in their lives. Although this may seem complicated, it is what makes individuals unique, and what makes you, you. If everyone were simply a student the world would be quite boring. But, it is the varying degrees and backgrounds of students that makes us all interesting. Perhaps one student in class is not only a student, but a mother of two who has more than just her class assignments to worry about. Maybe another holds two jobs just to pay for tuition while another thrives on a G.I. bill after his or her time in service. People have layers to their life, that makes this not only a student, but an individual.