Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is in many ways a Modernist work of literature. Beyond the fact that it references numerous Modernist novels and has a fascination with James Joyce in particular, its form and themes show traces of Modernism as well. One of the work’s most striking Modernist qualities is its recursivity. Overall, the work is reflexive and labyrinthine, as it circles around the absence of Alison’s father, Bruce, and around his hidden homosexuality. Bruce’s death not only created a void physically, but in retrospection, his apparent suicide casts a pall over all the memories that came before. Likewise, Bruce’s homosexuality, which is only discovered at the end of his life for Alison, creates a lens for her to retroactively understand many events from her childhood and many of her father’s behaviors. In its recursivity, Fun Home rejects a linear narrative and instead looks at elements of Bechdel’s life from different perspectives. Additionally, each chapter could almost stand alone as one way, among many, to tell the story of Alison’s childhood, from her early life growing up to her coming out as a lesbian and to her father’s death. In this way, the story seems reminiscent of Faulkner in particular, where stories within a novel often follow different perspectives or themes that combine into a narrative shaped mostly by the presence of an absent force.
In Hilary Chute’s reading of the work, she acknowledges many of its Modernist elements. When discussing the relationship between Alison and Bruce, Chute focuses on two primary themes: contact and progeny. Regarding contact, Chute highlights the embalming room scene where Alison hands her father a pair of surgical scissors. Although they come close to touching, uniting themselves over death, their hands never meet, leaving a gap between them. While Alison and Bruce are indeed drawn together by their few similarities (e.g. a love of literature and homosexuality), and while Bruce’s death sparked Alison’s interest in the archive of her childhood, which ultimately resurrected her relationship with her father, they have nevertheless taken distinct paths in their lives which, unlike the paths in Proust, never fully touch. Additionally, Chute acknowledges the text’s similarities with the works of Joyce, and discusses how, like Daedalus, Alison is indebted to her father and shares many similarities with him, yet she feels compelled to take her life in a different direction and to reject many of his ways. Alison rejects her father’s (seeming) heterosexual life with its subsequent procreation, closetedness, and sublimation, and instead seeks artistic progeny, openness, and honesty. Therefore, as the tagline on the cover declares, the novel is “refreshingly open” in more ways than one.
A final Modernist feature of the text that was not discussed, however, is the novel’s Poundian interaction with the past. Chute discusses in great detail Bechdel’s laborious process of re-creating and interacting with the archive, hand-drawing not only each frame of the comic, but also taking pictures of herself posing as each character in each frame and hand-copying letters, photographs, books, and diaries. Beyond the artistry, personal connection, and performativity evoked by this process, it is also reminiscent of Ezra Pound’s Modernist injunction to “Make it new.” And, in many ways, I feel that Alison’s struggle to make things new is one of the most prominent ways in which she differs from her father. For Bruce, the past needs to be re-created exactly how it was. Bruce is more Victorian, traditional, and classical: he restores a Victorian house, he enjoys biographies, and he is shown twice reading about the perfection of classical sculptures of the human body. Bruce has no desire to change the world around him; he does not want to alter the codes and structures that surround him in his small, Pennsylvania town. As a result, he lives a conventional life, all the while struggling to express his homosexuality in covert, closeted ways. Alison, on the other hand, is Modernist, unconventional, and forward-thinking. She does not dream about the past; she uses the past. For her, the archive, Modernist literature, Greek myth, and her own childhood memories are not things to be conserved or recreated. Rather, they are frameworks which she can inhabit and reformulate to say something new, to gain new insights into not only what took place when she was younger but to understand where and who she is now. Fun Home, for me, incorporates Modernist stories, of Fitzgerald, Gatsby, and Stephen Daedalus, in a similar way that Joyce uses the Odyssey, Eliot uses Buddhism, or Woolf uses Freud’s Oedipus Complex. All of these Modernist authors take structures from the past (whether the distant or the immediate past) and incorporate them into their works. This functions as a way of using that framework to provide a unique perspective for the story, but it also provides a way of changing that framework and accentuating its shortcomings.
Anthony,
ReplyDeleteI am intrigued by your reading of Bechdel's ability to reconstruct and revise the past (to make it her own), as opposed to her father's interest in renovating it--rebuilding it as it was, maintaining the status quo. When you think about Bechdel's portrayal of herself and her father coming to terms (or not) with their own identities, and the way they discover/pursue those identities through literature--or live vicariously through identities portrayed in literature--I find it very interesting that it is Alison, the young woman, who finds herself able to accept her lesbian identity, to claim it to her family and to her friends, and to live it out, whereas Bruce, the man, father, patriarch (seemingly the one with all the power) cannot live his "true" life; at least, not out in the open. He hides his sexuality, represses it, and never, truly, to Alison, claims it. When you add in the way Alison, in constructing the novel, in using the past and her childhood, as well as her father's life, to understand herself, she literally embodies him (and every other character), retraces the handwriting and the type face, and in every way mediates the experience for the reader of HER past and HER childhood, there seems to very much be an emphasis on PRESENCE--Alison's presence, even as the narrative spends so much time dealing with her father's absence and the absence of Bruce's sexual identity. Chute writes that "Bechdel's cartooning practice clarifies what runs through Fun Home in theme and form at every level: embodiment.... Bechdel repeats her parents' role, both at a figurative and a literal visual level--a physical level in space. And in her re-creation, her body is never separate from their bodies, she performs their postures, remakes the marks they made" (200). Bechdel's presence in the narrative IS the narrative, and her identity, its fluidity (as opposed to Bruce's stiff, unchanging one--the one that her performs and maintains out of, apparently, fear and shame) is something that she is capable of because she is a woman, a lesbian, a child, or some combination of these factors. She finds possibility of identity whereas Bruce has always, from Alison's perspective, been restricted.