TOPIA 22 77

Jane Tolmie
Modernism, Memory and Desire:
Queer Cultural Production in
Alison Bechdels Fun Home
ABSTRACT
Using what Barbara Christian has called the technique of rememoryingthe
deliberate reconstruction of memory to void xed categoriesAlison Bechdels
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic expands the perimeters of graphic memoir and
creates a sense of queer canonicity in the process. Fun Homes structure is recursive
rather than linear, returning again and again to the same sites of emotional
pain: the authors coming out, her fathers suicide, the pressures of compulsory
heterosexuality, the always-impossible search for lost time. Like other graphic
memoirs, such as Art Spiegelmans Maus: A Survivors Tale and Marjane Satrapis
Persepolis, Fun Home tackles subjects rooted in trauma and memory. Fun Home oers
a lesbian feminist counterpoint to texts such as Maus, adding queer autobiography
to the purview of the growing canon of womens alternative comic art. Moving
freely from Marcel Proust to Roald Dahl, mixing memory and desire, Bechdel
interrogates some comfortable perceptions of the autobiographical materials that
constitute high culture.
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RSUM
En utilisant ce que Barbara Christian appelait la technique de la remmorisation
la reconstruction dlibre de la mmoire an danantir les catgories xes
Fun Home. A Family Tragicomic, dAlison Bechdel largit le primtre de
la mmoire graphique et cre en cours de route le sentiment dune trange
orthodoxie. La structure de Fun Home est plus rcurrente que linaire, revenant
encore et toujours aux mmes lieux de douleur motionnelle : le coming out de
lauteure, le suicide de son pre, les pressions dune htrosexualit compulsive,
limpossible recherche du temps perdu. linstar dautres mmoires graphiques,
comme Maus. Un survivant raconte, dArt Spiegelman, ou Perspolis de Marjane
Satrapi, Fun Home sattaque des sujets enracins dans le trauma et la mmoire.
Fun Home propose un contrepoint lesbien et fministe des textes comme Maus,
et ajoute lautobiographie altersexuelle au champ en expansion des codes de la
bande dessine alternative fministe. Passant librement de Marcel Proust
Roald Dahl, mlangeant mmoire et dsir, Bechdel remet en question certaines
perceptions bien ancres des matriaux autobiographiques qui constituent la
grande culture.

In an inuential issue of Modern Fiction Studies on graphic narrative, Hillary

Chute correctly predicted that Alison Bechdels Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
was sure to soon become an important reference point in academic discourse
(Chute 2006: 1004). Fun Home has indeed come to occupy a signicant place
within the recent explosion of critical work on so-called graphic novels and on
graphic memoir in particular. As work on autobiography increasingly turns to the
question, or the problem, in Judith Butlers formulation, of the bodily condition
of ones narrative account of oneself (Butler 2005: 39), graphic memoirsor what
Gillian Whitlock has categorized as autographicsappear to oer new insights
through the specic conjunctions of visual and verbal text in ... autobiography
(Whitlock 2006: 966). Fun Homes particular conjunctionsliterary, visual and
politicaloer the opportunity to unpack a specically queer autographics, in
which Bechdels negotiations of the relationships between artist/writer/body and
drawn/written/text raise the question of whether stories ... capture the body
to which they refer in a lesbian feminist context (Butler 2005: 38). Chute and
DeKoven argue that graphic narratives fundamental syntactical operation is the
representation of time as space on the page, but it is also important to analyze
the queer body on the page (Chute and DeKoven 2006: 769). More specically,
this text oers the chance to analyze the physical and verbal presentation of the
queer body in a particular set of times and places in (mainly) white, middle-class
America of the 1970s and 1980s.
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Fun Home is a graphic memoir of the authors coming out as a lesbian and the
suicide of her closeted father, Bruce Bechdel. In a sense the story is over from
the start. In chapter one the narrator observes, against the backdrop of a scene
from her childhood in which her father is very much alive, that Its true that
he didnt kill himself until I was nearly twenty (Bechdel 2007: 23). After a few
more panels, with Bruce still in action in the drawings, the comment reads: But
I ached as if he were already gone (23). Tis opening salvo is microcosmic of the
whole book: layered, textured, temporally mixed, loaded with loss. It is not about
the plot so much as the manner of revelation. Will Eisner observes of Bechdel
that she is equally adept at making time stand still as she is at moving between
decades (Eisner 2008: 28). Each of the seven chapters tells the same core story
of the fathers death twined up with the daughters personal epistemology of the
closet. Te books episodic, non-linear structure enacts an awareness of memory as
subjective process, something that is visually highlighted by the fact that Bechdel
photographed herself for every frame in a labour-intensive process which is part
of the reason that the production of the manuscript took seven years. In contrast
to its long production time, its integration into the critical worlds of literary and
cultural studies has been quick, in part because of its own high degree of academic
referentiality: like calls to like. It is this degree of referentiality, primarily embodied
in the memoirs constant reliance on high-modernist literary texts, that I wish to
address, in the specic context of queer feminist cultural production.
Fun Homes negotiations of a modernist canon do not merely aim to set up a
competing discourse of high culture comic books, but also to trouble our reliance
on categories of high and low, included and excluded, straight and queer, textual
and embodied. As the ultimate form of exclusion in this text is death, Bechdel
is not making an isolated or small argument about textual canonicity but a large
one about excluded terrains in memory, desire and subjectivity. Fun Homewhich
invokes the familys funeral home business (and perhaps also the physical and
psychological upheavals of the fun house)is fundamentally concerned with
cultural responses to both generic and sexual dierence. Te text both tells and
shows us how excluded terrains become discarded bodies. In the course of a
discussion of the need for more advanced visual and cultural literacies to interpret
the intersections of various modes and media and the complex embodiments of
avatar, autobiographer, Whitlock and Anna Poletti describe the confronting
bodies that recur under the sign of autographics; this article turns our attention
to the queerness of that confrontation in Bechdels work (2008: vi).
Charles Hateld argues that alternative comicsloosely dened as non-
superhero/heroine materialsproduced by the lone cartoonist over collaborative
or assembly-line work are best read as an emerging literature that has extended,
revitalized, and indeed redened the form [of comic art] (2005: 16, 31).
Obviously the collaborative work involved in producing projects such as Harvey
Pekars American Splendor or Mariko Tamakis and Jillian Tamakis Skim fall
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within my understanding of alternative comics, and Hatelds argument does
accommodate that collaborative aspect, as he qualies his argument to note that
today the privileging of self-expression in alternative comic books is a very strong
tendency despite exceptions (18). Within this emerging literature of comic
self-expression, models and standards for cultural seriousness, for self-revelation
and for the representation of trauma are being challenged and reformed. Art
Spiegelmans now-classic Maus: A Survivors Tale (1996) is a sons-eye view of a
fathers experiences of the Holocaust, an expos of intergenerational trauma set
in a world of cats, pigs and of course mice; Bryan Talbots A Tale of One Bad Rat
(1995) maps a story of incest and abuse against the backdrop of the formerly-
reassuring world of Beatrix Potter; Rutu Modans Exit Wounds (2008) oers an
unusual love story set against the Israeli-Palestinian conict; Marjane Satrapis
Persepolis (2007) exposes the restlessness and loss of diasporic subjectivity; Joe
Saccos Palestine (2001) focuses on the experiential realities of Palestinians living
in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; the Tamaki cousins Skim (2008)nominated
in Canada for a 2008 Governor Generals award; controversially, only the text
was nominated, sending out very dubious signals about the perceived value of
the illustrator to collaborative alternative art projects (Brown 2008)tracks the
dicult processes of sexual coming-of-age in a school very similar in appearance
to Toronto private school Havergal. Te list goes on and on. What is happening in
popular culture is a re-evaluation of the role of the comic book, its cultural status,
its engagement with literary traditions, its dierence or sameness, its textuality or
embodiment and its potential relevance to the average reader, most particularly
the reader who in the past might have walked right past the cartoons to browse
through the novels, those more reliable repositories of cultural seriousness.
Tat same adult reader is nding that the illustrated book, that fantastic object often
remembered nostalgically from childhood, need not be automatically discarded
when looking for the next good read. Te comic enables a doubled connection to
both image and text. Graphic narratives allow us to re-invite that dynamic into
our everyday adult reading practices. Julia Watson points to the possibilities this
opens up for individual connection and reader empathy, she observes that the
way we read cartoons, as a pleasurable alternative to high seriousness, also aords
occasions for reader identication with characters and situations that solicit our
autobiographical intimacy (2008: 29). Fun Home is part of this perceptual and
purchasing change, a change now highly visible, as is so often the case, far along
the arc of a long curve extending back at least as far as John Updikes premature
comments about the death of the novel in 1969 (Gravett 2005: 3). And just as
people are buying dierently, literary and cultural studies scholars, including those
interested in trauma and diaspora, are increasingly looking at the evolution and
current expansion of the graphic novel as an area of study.
Academia is moving toward a re-evaluation of the status and meaning of comic
art, both mainstream and alternative, as critics such as Jan Baetens, David Ball,
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Lopamudra Basu, Christopher Bush, Isaac Cates, Alisia Chase, Hillary Chute,
Ann Cvetkovich, Marianne DeKoven, Will Eisner, Jared Gardner, Ron Goulart,
Charles Hateld, David Herman, Karin Kukkonen, Trina Robbins, Lillian S.
Robinson, Scott McCloud, Nancy Miller, William Nericcio, Amy Nyberg, Derek
Royal, Roger Sabin, Sidonie Smith, Teresa Tensuan, Rebeccca Wanzo, Julia
Watson, Michael Wenthe, Joseph Witek, Gillian Whitlock, Benjamin Widiss, to
name only a few, have shown in recent years. Te full-time academics in this list
come from a variety of backgrounds: art history, cultural studies, literary/English
studies, linguistics, history. Many of these critics wear multiple career hats. Eisner
is both comic artist and critic, ditto Cates, McCloud and Robbins. Similarly, many
books about the history or criticism of comics blur the lines between coee-table
books and scholarly monographs, books for reference and books for fun. Tese
crossovers and mixed forms of cultural work are characteristic of a larger hybridity
that is key to the emerging eld of interdisciplinary comics scholarship. Chute
and DeKoven comment:
We read this hybridity as a challenge to the structure of binary
classication that opposes a set of terms, privileging one. We further
understand graphic narrative as hybrid in the following sense: comics is
a mass cultural art form drawing on both high and low art indexes and
references; comics is multigeneric, composed, often ingeniously, from
widely dierent genres and subgenres; and, most importantly, comics is
constituted in verbal and visual narratives that do not merely synthesize. In
comics, the images are not illustrative of the text, but comprise a separate
narrative thread that moves forward in time in a dierent way than the
prose text, which also moves the reader forward in time. Te medium
of comics is cross-discursive because it is composed of verbal and visual
narratives that do not simply blend together, creating a unied whole, but
rather remain distinct. (2006: 769)
Comic hybridity, both artistic and critical, is a distinctive feature that opens up
numerous possibilities for dialogue between theory and praxis, body and text,
consumer pleasure and academic pleasure (and displeasure).
Cartoonists/writers/artists such as Jessica Abel, Alison Bechdel, Jennifer Camper,
Diane DiMassa, Julie Doucet, Chitra Ganesh, Phoebe Gloeckner, Roberta
Gregory, G. B. Jones, Carol Lay, Serena Pillai, Cristy Road, Mutu Rodan, Marjane
Satrapi, Ariel Schrag are part of the current upsurge in alternative comics, and
of a particular alterity that celebrates the woman comic artists creation of non-
superheroine/hero material. Tese women writers all focus on the everyday lives
of their characters, whether real (a problematic designation) or ctional (ditto,
of course). In doing so they have vastly expanded the comic worlds treatment of
dierence, including the dierence of sexualized, racialized and diasporic subjects,
queers, trans men and women, and those experiencing multiple marginalities.
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Tese writers place those dierences squarely in the everyday and position them
as sources of familiarity, reader recognition and reader pleasure.
Womens alternative comic art, so often concerned at some level with gendered
power structures, is under-represented in the existing criticism of alternative
comics, which tends to agree that both comics stores and the comics industry
(mainstream and alternative) are male-dominated spaces. Tis agreement
takes two main forms. On one hand, there is a seemingly unproblematic and
unproblematized awareness that the comics world is dened by a masculine ethos
(Hateld 2005: 16); on the other hand, there is a deployment of androcentric
language that naturalizes and normalizes the masculine ethos to the point that
it disappears from view, which has the inevitable eect of marginalizing women
artists/writers as exceptions to the rule. Groensteens inuential and exciting work,
Te System of Comics (2007), nevertheless provides an example of the latter sort of
analysis, in which the inherent complexity of comics is produced and analyzed
almost entirely by men, in relation to men and for men, but never in those or
any other explicitly gendered terms (160). Tis is a striking feature when one
considers that Groensteens work has done so much to emphasize the importance
of the margin in terms of semiotics, spatial theory and narratology (31). Similarly,
in McClouds (1994) literal portrait gallery of creators who shake things up
are McCay, Spiegelman, Herriman, Sterrett and Moebius. In an odd bracket
underneath the gallery appears the comment (In other art forms: Stravinsky,
Picasso, Virginia Woolf, Orson Welles, etc.) (179). Woolf s presence is jarring
in its suddenness and uniqueness; the impression McClouds gallery of pioneers
and revolutionaries leaves is an unbalanced one that is fairly characteristic of the
gendered narratives that make up the history, as currently written, of comic art,
though at long last the interventions of critics such as Robinson and Robbins are
urging critics towards a rewriting of that masculinist history (179).
In a review of Fun Home, Anne Elizabeth Moore, a series editor of Te Best
American Comics, observes that:
...the comics industry has always resisted the success of women. See
the Masters of American Comics Exhibition if you require a specic
examplewhich purports to create a canon of American comics artists,
and contains no women at allor take a quick jog through your local
comics shop or better yet, if you can stomach it, chat up a die-hard fan. Te
history of comics is that of the distilled desires of red-blooded American
males, writ large and wearing tights.
Even more than the success of women, the industry has resisted the
success of queer women. (Moore 2009: n.p.)
In his introduction to the 2007 edition of Te Best American Comics, volume editor
Chris Ware notes that a frequent complaint regarding these sorts of collections
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(and even recent museum shows) is that there arent enough (or any) women in
them (Ware 2007: xxiii). He then comments: I should state right here that I am
not of the cut of cloth to check an artists genitalia at the door. Nor in the case
of this book did I go out in search of a couple of hermaphrodites to even out the
score (xxiii). While his anthology both includes and praises the works of several
women, Bechdel among them, the genitalia comment embodies a particular sort
of dismissive rhetoric that obscures the cultural processes by which both centre
and margin(s) are dened and valued. Fun Home, as queer autographics, is all
about the placing of the margin, and the historically marginalized, at the centre.
Fun Home demonstrates that queerness is marked and forced to be dierent in
negative ways, rather than being allowed to be in any sense positively or creatively
dierent; witness the numerous coercive dressing scenes in which one version or
another of femininity or masculinity is forced onto a reluctant body. Quotidian
dierence, as it were, is one of the strengths of the piece, which literally shows
us in pictures how the heterosexist world makes queerness dierent. Bechdels
explorations of dierence seek to break down the apartheid type of dierence
between straight and queer. As such, Fun Home is part not only of a larger
expansion of the comic canon but of a particularly lesbian feminist intervention
in literary culture through the graphic arts.
Fun Home uses memory, and specically the memory of desire, to show how
Bechdels own queer desire was formed/understood, how her fathers desire was
formed/understood, how desire lives/has lived in languageto expand genre and
to make feminist points. Using what Barbara Christian has called the technique
of rememorying the deliberate reconstruction of memory to void xed
categories, Fun Home expands the perimeters of autobiography and comic book
alike (Christian 1990: 48). Te books layered qualities are signalled by the title,
with its dual invocation of tragedy and comedy, and then presented in a series of
overlapping representations of the same events from varied perspectives and in
dialogue with prior texts by authors usually associated with high literary culture,
including Colette, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, James Joyce, Marcel Proust
and Oscar Wilde. Tese markers of culture are then deployed as backdrop for the
coming-out story of a comic artist previously best known for her long-running,
highly political syndicated strip, Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel 1986). Bechdel
uses juxtaposition, pastiche and intertextuality to oer a queer feminist critique
of perceived locations of high and low culture, and of simplistic ideas about the
linear nature of memory which, as the book shows us, does not move cleanly from
past to present. Memory, like sexuality, is messy and a work in progress. Te books
structure is recursive, returning again and again to the same sites of emotional
pain: the authors coming out, her fathers suicide, the pressures of compulsory
heterosexuality and the always-impossible search for lost time. In a comic book
about pain, memory and lesbian identity, Bechdel punctures some comfortable
perceptions of the autobiographical materials that constitute high culture.
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Fun Home, like Spiegelmans Maus and other texts about past trauma, enacts a
memorialization of trauma while also passing it on to the readers, including the
family of the author. Trauma, and its ospring grief and angerand Fun Home is
angry too, angry about homophobia, angry about the death and the life of Bruce
Bechdelare not contained or solved by art. Quite the contrary. Tey are preserved
and passed on to the reader or audience for specic purposes, didactic, aective
and memorializing, just as they are passed on in Maus, in Satrapis Persepolis and
in other texts that work through past pain by bringing it into the present and the
open. In interviews, Bechdel is forthright about the fact that reading her book
was painful for her mother in particular, embarrassing and stressful for the whole
family and also disturbing for some of the real people positioned as characters in
the book. Recalling the writing process, Bechdel says, I worked on Fun Home for
a year before I told [my mother] what I was doing, and then I knew I had to tell
her so she wouldnt have a stroke or anything. Bechdel further describes the book
as trampling on [her mothers] life (Weich 2006: n.p.). Indeed the book cuts
close to the bone, including family photographs and old letters, all reproduced in
an expos that is not, in fact, stark, but rather artfully embellished.
Autobiography, however embellished, remains double-edged. It hurts others, and
perfect representation of real life remains always beyond the grasp of the text
and the art alike, no matter how hard the author tries to capture it. Stories, even
in graphic memoir, do not fully capture either the body or the past, though new
formats lead us to ask new and perhaps better questions about the nature of the
body/text gap. Bechdel does not shy away from acknowledging the imperfect
nature of her personal search for lost time and of the diculty of representing
with full accuracy the psychic pull of deep identications around gender and
sexuality (Watson 2008: 27). In Fun Home, narrator-Bechdel describes her
epistemological crisis and self-doubt as narrator:
How did I know that the things I was writing were absolutely, objectively
true? All I could speak for was my own perceptions, and perhaps not even
those. My simple, declarative sentences began to strike me as hubristic at
best, utter lies at worst. (Bechdel 2007: 41)
In a Panels and Pixels: Graphic Lit interview (2008), Bechdel attempts to expand
on this idea from the point of view of others reading her book:
Well, none of us were prepared for how visible the book was going to be
and how much press it was going to get. We all sort of expected it would
reach the audience that Dykes to Watch Out For did which meant the
neighbors wouldnt see it.

Well, the neighbors did see it. My moms friends read about it and read it.
We hadnt anticipated what that would mean and it was dicult for all of
them to have someone else tell their story.
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None of them object to anything in particular that I wrote. I think they
would agree that it was fairly accurate. But still they have dierent versions
of those events and dierent interpretations and I think it was just hard to
see the one version out there be assumed to be the true or correct version.
It would be disturbing to have someone else use me as a character in their
story. (Mautner 2008: n.p.)
Te assumption that autobiography is truth in an unmediated way is something that
Bechdel writes and speaks against, and something that academics nd fascinating.
How should literary scholars characterize the uctuating lines between mimesis
and ction? Is autobiography always and only a frustrated desire, a cultural fantasy,
based on a doomed search for lost time, to continue Bechdels own extended ri
on Prousts Remembrance of Tings Past/Te Search for Lost Time? How useful has
it ever been, really, to describe Sylvia Plaths Te Bell Jar as semi-autobiography?
How should we revisit our assumptions about autobiography, semi-autobiography,
epistolary ction and diary in dialogue with the current explosion in production
of zines, autographic comics and comic-format memoirs? Where do we go from
here? In On the Cultures of Exile, Translation, and Writing, Paolo Bartolini argues
that when we talk:
about writing we speak of a corporality mediated through ideas and
inscribed in language. We do not see the author who writes, we only hear
and listen to the language resonating on the page. Te concrete meeting we
experience as readers is with the authors language. It is indeed instructive
that recent critical trends in literary studyin particular in the study
of biography and autobiographyare poised to negotiate, and perhaps
overcome, the severance between body and language in an attempt to gain
control of the writing subjects physicality and, in doing so, to close the gap
between body and language. (Bartolini 2008: 116)
Tis troubling gap between body and languagethe same gap invoked by Butler
in her analysis of the exposure that is one of several vexations in the eort to
give a narrative account of oneself is the space in which a great deal of the
most interesting literary-critical work on graphic memoir is occurring (Butler
2005: 39).
Te eld of trauma studies, like those of literary/cultural studies, is increasingly
engaged with autobiography and its limits, with fascinating implications for
the study of autographics. In the introduction to an essay collection on trauma
and visual culture (the subjects range from genocide to Vietnam home movies),
Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas observe that:
Trauma studies have sought to redeem the category of the real by
connecting it to the traumatic historical event, which presents itself
precisely as a representational limit, and even a challenge to imagination
itself. Trauma studies thus oer poststructuralist theory a means to
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reintroduce a political and ethical stake in the representation of the real
without regressing to the very notions of mimetic transparency it has
striven to overturn. Trauma studies consistently return to an iconoclastic
notion of the traumatic event as that which simultaneously demands urgent
representation but shatters all potential frames of comprehension and
reference. (Guerin and Hallas 2007: 3)
Trauma fuels creativity, just as memory fuels creativity, but it remains impossible
to capture or represent the past perfectly. What Guerin and Hallas label mimetic
transparency is what literary critics have often looked for in autobiography and
other rst-person accounts of the self, but increasingly critics in many elds are
aware that the rst-person narrator inevitably fails to achieve this impossible goal.
Te past remains in the past; the self, perhaps never coherently whole to begin
with, fragments on the page. A strong desire for the appearance or impression of
mimetic transparency in ction is detectable in the idea or ideal of the omniscient
narrator of the novel, that powerful voice speaking from one of the relatively
recent pinnacles of Western literary art: the narrator who captures every aspect,
every inner thought, who produces the impression of perfect mimesis. Bechdel
is not that narrator and specically rejects that form of narration as hubristic.
Nevertheless, she goes ahead with her rst-person project, with the same stubborn
persistence and self-awareness that can be discerned in Christians observation
that like any other critic, my personal history has much to do with what I read
(Christian 1990: 45). Fun Home is unapologetic about the subjectivity of written
memoir much as Christians work is unapologetic about the subjectivity of
criticism; similarly, nowhere is it clearer that Fun Home is also unapologetic about
the subjectivity of art/graphic representation than in Bechdels use of her own
photographed body to represent the bodies of other characters.
Te depiction of traumatic events is increasingly the focus of intense scrutiny by
both literary critics and trauma theorists. Of course the thing itselfthe original
act or acts of wartime atrocities, the Holocaust, incest, diaspora, the attacks on
the Twin Towers, rape, suicidecan never be fully recuperated at the experiential
level: the traumatic historical event is a representational limit. We never see the
actual moment of Bruce Bechdels death. Bechdel shies away from that moment
of representation. Only Bruce himself was there, and having left no note he left it
open to debate that it was suicide at all. Te remembrance of things past is always
imperfect, impossible. Nevertheless the graphic memoir or partial memoir (Fun
Home, Maus, Persepolis, Gloeckners A Childs Life, Debbie Drechslers Daddys
Girl) increasingly insists on the urgency of the search for and the visual and verbal
representation of lost time. Te past is lost, but the lost past is real in the sense that
it is a shaping cultural force, and that force shapes, among other things, ideas of
high and low cultural forms, included and excluded books and bodies.
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Recently I went into a very nice bookstore in Wymondham, U.K., looking for a
copy of Persepolis. Te bookseller told me: I do not stock graphic novels. Implied
in this refusal was a clear set of criteria dening the proper and improper contents
of a real and serious bookstore. It is good that I did not ask for a comic book,
though the very label graphic novel is hotly contested, standing as it does as a
pretentious alternative to comic book and invoking in problematic ways all of
the touchy debates of the meaning and status of the novel. In any case, to that
bookseller, graphic novels were neither real art nor real novels, and he is not alone
in these views.
Te place of graphic narrative within the various constructed canons of university
education and high culture is one that is currently under examination. Tis
examination is both external (novel-readers, university teachers and bookstore
owners looking in) and internal (comic artists looking outor vice versa, depending
on your location). It is not just about what is in the store but what is in the book.
As mentioned, Bechdel structures many parts of Fun Home as rereadings of major
texts in the Western canon. She cheerfully queers the canon and politicizes the
autobiographical, while participating comfortably in an elitist literary universe of
referentiality, name-dropping and prior texts. Tose are not her only inspirations,
however. She does not blink at placing Roald Dahls James and the Giant Peach
next to Proust and company. As a university lecturer teaching this text, I have
taken the opportunity to talk about both Proust and Dahl, neither one familiar to
my students. Te comic book/graphic novel is perhaps especially appealing to this
generation of students. It has a special cachet for those who have been exposed
to visual media from a young age and are sophisticated readers of visual as well
as verbal cues. Te teaching of a graphic novel such as Fun Home does not dumb
down material, but on the contrary oers a literarily challenging and referential
body of knowledge in a format with the added appeal of visual sophistication.
I would be quite surprised if the earnest Norfolk bookseller realized the extent
to which Fun Home is invested in precisely the sort of high literary culture he is
working to protect from barbarian incursions.
Of course, there are incursions of many sortqueer, feminist, postcolonial and
funnythat some might nd barbarous. Bechdels playful touch is evident not just
in her free juxtaposition of types of references (Addams family/Shakespeare, etc.)
but also in her delight in oering subversive re-readings of texts. In her excerpts
from Dahl, the dripping peach represents the lusciousness of the female sex parts in
a manner both hilarious and transgressive, so that we read and indeed see with new
eyes that: ...the walls were wet and sticky, and peach juice was dripping from the
ceiling (Bechdel 2007: 81) (g. 1). Similarly, Bechdel and her girlfriend Joan explore
the world of childrens literature: God. Christopher Robins a total imperialist!
(80). Bechdel describes these processes of re-reading as an entwined political
and sexual awakening (81) in which even the mammoth Websters dictionary,
staid and steady repository of knowledge, comes under scrutiny as an arm of
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heterosexism for, as she asks, where is the entry for homosexual under queer? (57).
In the autobiographical Cartoonists Introduction to Te Essential Dykes to Watch
Out For (2008), Bechdel describes a rejection letter from Adrienne Rich (written
in reponse to some of Bechdels literary writing submitted to Sinister Wisdom) as
one of [her] most prized possessions, adding that it helped her to realize she
wasnt a writer OR an artist but instead both/neither (Bechdel 2008: xiii). A
later letter from Rich, lovingly reproduced by Bechdel in this same introductory
section, congratulates Bechdel for explod[ing] dyke essentialism in her work
(Bechdel 2008: xvii). Bechdels double challenge to high culture in Fun Homea
challenge rooted both in intertextuality and feminist anti-essentialismis key to
her particular brand of comic hybridity.
When I claim Bechdel as a feminist interventionist in literary and visual culture
I have the advantage that she self-identies as such, unlike, for example, Satrapi,
who comments of her work that ...the feminists become very angry when I say I
am not a feminist. I am a humanist. I believe in human beings (qtd. in Sully 2004:
n.p.). In Bechdels case, there is no need for me to situate a feminism for an author
who nds the label feminism uncomfortableor indeed to consider the ethics of
imposing a Western feminism on a reluctant subject, an issue of real relevance to
the study of Satrapis work in the broader context of Iranian exile writing.
Bechdels years of experience in queer feminist cartoon work are clearly evident
in Fun Home, as is an informed grasp of Western academic feminism, North
American second- and third-wave feminist politics and the place of feminism in
North American everyday life. In fact, Bechdel is widely credited on the Internet
with producing one of the basic rules of feminist lm-watching. Te rule is that
movies should have (1) at least two women, (2) who talk to each other, (3) about
something other than a man. Sometimes called Te Bechdel Rule this formula may
be found in a strip titled Te Rule (with thanks to Liz Wallace) in the original
Fig. 1 Permission to reproduce these two panels has been granted by Houghton Miin.
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Dykes to Watch Out For collection (Bechdel 1986: 22). A woman talking, watching,
reading and self-forming forms the bedrock of Fun Homes narrative as well. A
great deal of Western postmodern feminist theory hinges on the premise that
knowledge is in part a product of subjectivity, and that premise is exactly what
Fun Home sets out to explore. Bechdels rst-person narrative makes no attempt
to speak for others, to ll in the gaps, to produce a perfect history or to show
the actual moment of her fathers death. Te omniscient narrator is not wanted.
Similarly, sexuality, like knowledge, is the product of experience and individual
understanding. In Fun Home, narrator-Bechdel constructs her own identity
as a lesbian, piecing together a sexual self from books, experience and politics.
She declares herself to be out (she does so in epistolary form, ttingly) without
having ever had sex with a woman. Returning for a moment to the narrators
epistemological crisishow does she know what she writes is true?it is key to
note that this is a rejection, in specically academic terms, of the cultural fantasy
of perfect mimesis.
Bechdel is not, however, endorsing academia as the land of the free. Fun Home
oers a strong critique of the traditional Western literature curriculum. While
some writers key to her piece, such as Joyce and Proust, are agships for the
intellect across North American and European campuses, many of the books
Bechdel depicts on the shelves of Fun Home remain sidelined in the traditional
curriculum, oered, if at all, in specialist classes in womens and gender studies
departments or in small upper-level seminars rather than in regular literature/
English classes. As Bechdel hunches over a pile of books including Out of the
Closets and Into the Streets, Maurice, and Te Front Runner, her parents ask on
the phone: What are you reading? Anything good? And Bechdel replies, Uh
... Not really (Bechdel 2007: 76). It is not the classroom but the library systems,
both private and public, that provide many of the readings that Bechdel seeks at
university. She describes herself as trolling even the public library, heedless of
the risks (75). Tere she nds the materials that do not need queer rereading: Te
Fig. 2 Permission to reproduce these two
panels has been granted by Houghton
Miin.
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Unlit Lamp, Te Well of Loneliness, Delta of Venus and others (75)(g. 2). A small
frame of the narrator masturbating while reading Anas Nin titillatingly reminds
the reader of the multiple intersections of text and body, constructed identity and
experience, art and life (76). Watson comments that:
Fun Home calls upon readers to be literate in many kinds of textsnot only
comics and Modernist literature but feminist history and lesbian coming-out
stories, as well as many modes of the decorative artsas a sophisticated
and politically impassioned community. (Watson 2008: 29)
More than text is at stake. Fun Homes particular strength lies in its constant
juxtaposition of academic proteophobia with other forms of cultural proteophobia,
including phobia about the mixing of fact and ction, text and life, straight and
queer, memory and desire. Te gap is not merely between unmarked/universal
body and language but between marked/queer body and language: a multiple
estrangement.
In choosing to structure her memoir around a particular set of books, Bechdel
works to create a strong sense of a queer canon, signalling the lines that connect
queerness across past and present (invoking the sexual struggles of Colette,
Proust, Wilde in dialogue with those of her father and herself ) and extending
into the future. When talking about Proust, Bechdel remarks: If there was ever
a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust. Proust would have intense,
emotional relationships with fashionable women ... but it was young, often straight
men with whom he fell in love (Bechdel 2007: 93-94). Bechdels father, too, is
shown as prone to fall for young, often straight men, and the genesis of her own
homosexuality is negotiated through similar layered references. Homosexuality is
at the centre of this books deployments and interrogations of the canonical, the
known and the remembered, and the desired. Fun Home highlights a normative
and painful exclusion of queerness from high culture and education alike. In the
end, Fun Home proves to be largely about the trauma of exclusion of certain types
of people, and of certain types of books, in so-called normative life. In the case
of Bruce Bechdel this takes the ultimate form of exclusion from life itself. Her
fathers silence about his sexuality in Fun Home is representative of a more general
silence around homosexuality in the world of compulsory heterosexuality. Bechdel
is consistently self-aware of this link: [My fathers] legal entanglement seemed
like a technicality to me. But I didnt know then that furnishing a malt beverage to
a minor was the least of his troubles. Te real accusation dared not speak its name
(175). In a remarkable frame near the end of the book, Bechdel tries to ll the
silence. She draws her father participating in a gay pride marchsomething that
never happenedwhile wondering, in the caption, what would have happened if
my father had come out in his youth, if he had not met and married my mother...
(197). Te obvious problem arises: Where would that leave me? (197). If he
had been out, she would not have been born. Te book could not exist. It is an
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impossible moment of representation, even more impossible than the search for
lost time. And so Bechdel returns to memoir and her careful, if doomed, attempts
at mimesis, rejecting one form of fantasy for another.
What about the graphic novel in relation to ideas about exclusion, from literature
and everyday life? It is satisfying to observe, as indeed everyone observes with
satisfaction, that Fun Home was referred to by Time magazine as a 2006 book
of the year not graphic novel (let alone comic book) of the year. Yet Fun Home
does not simply aim to enter a sort of cultural high art niche. Just as shelters are
increasingly wary of the politics of rescue, Bechdels point is not to rescue a low
form, but to move from comic book to novel to intertext of Proust or Joyce. Te goal
is not to move the bar for high culture, but instead to trouble the categories that
make sharp distinctions between high and low necessary for the dissemination,
consumption and enjoyment of certain cultural products, and certain bodies too. If
Fun Home succeeds in entering into a high culture category because of its rareed
referential qualities, the same distinctions between included and excluded books/
bodies that are critiqued in the text itself are reinforced. One more exceptional
(note the contradiction) graphic memoir moves up by virtue of its serious subject
matter, its associations with big names, its truth value and home truths, when
the truth is, as feminists know all too well, exceptionalism is a awed model for
conditional inclusion. Bechdel does not want to transcend the limitations of her
form. She loves her form and to hell with imposed ideas about transcendence,
all of which depend on and perpetuate limited, indeed proteophobic, ideas about
form. Te whole point, in fact, is that the comic book, not having a really xed
form in many ways, opens up possibilities: from proteophobia to proteophilia?
What she is hoping for and seems to be seeing is an expansion of what can count
as literature or at least a good book, a queering of category, so that hybridity can
have a valued place and a lesbian feminist comic book can have a room of its own
in the house of literary culture, without making universalist claims: Im always
happy, Bechdel comments of her critical reception post-Fun-Home, that I get
perceived as just a cartoonist, and not a lesbian cartoonist like in the old days.
Tats how I would get boxed up (Zuarino 2007: n.p.). Tere is some irony to the
role that queer autographics have played in making this expansion of category
possible; Bechdels own self-positioning as a Queer Minority Cartoonist in her
sequence of the same name in the rst of the two Juicy Mother anthologies speaks
to her conicted cultural position. It is a delicate maneuverpossibly as doomed
as the search for lost timeto move the margin to the centre without making
it the centre. Bechdel says of her Juicy Mother piece: I did Opressed Minority
Cartoonist at the pinnacle of my bitterness. But I cant tell you what it has done for
my mood to have Fun Home get so much recognition. Really, I was getting pretty
depressed there (Zuarino 2007: n.p.). Te Juicy Mother anthologies, described
by editor Camper as comix for Discerning Homosexuals, Uppity Ladies, Fierce
People of Color and all their friends, have yet to make the same critical splash as
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texts such as Fun Home and Persepolis, though their day, I suspect, is not long in
coming (Camper 2005: 7).
We all dread, now, the invocation of thinking beyond the box, which is mostly
tediously invoked by those whose words are echoing from deep within the box, but
unboxing the boxed is a large part of Fun Homes project, politically and artistically.
Perhaps a brief reference to McClouds inuential crossover text, Understanding
Comics: Te Invisible Art (1994), might be useful here in framing Fun Homes
deliberately conicted cultural status. Understanding Comics is simultaneously at
least three things: a comic book, a popular book treating comics as an art form
and a literary-critical/historical study of comics. McClouds arguments open up
some interesting and problematic issues for the feminist critic, not least of which
is his insistence on the universality and universal appeal of comics, as Whitlock
observes in a slightly dierent context when she points out that in these times
and in the aftermath of the cartoon wars, we think more cautiously about asserting
universality (Whitlock 2006: 976). But my point here is about form: the books
structure provides a critical parallel for one sort of imaginative work done by
books like Fun Home. At once pleasurable object and teaching text in the areas
of art history and literary criticism, McClouds text embodies the comic worlds
constant conation of terms, categories, systems of knowledge and, of course,
power. It is non-linear, but logical; illustrated, but not just a comic book; a critical
text, but not purely academic; an academic text, but not purely critical; a popular
coee-table-style book; a fun book; a serious book. Similarly, Fun Home aims to
be fun, serious, autobiographical and critical of the academy. It is a coming-out
narrative, a comic book, a graphic novel, a tribute to Proust. So where to put it
in the book store? With all the other comic books (which perhaps should not
be in serious stores anyway)? But then maybe the Proust fans would never see
it, and how would they locate it anyway among the DC and Marvel oerings?
Perhaps we also all dread, though maybe not as strongly, the carelessness with
which postmodernity is oered as a blanket cure for crises of category. Should we
make the move that there is basis here for a claim that several kinds of alternative
comic book could be shelved under Postmodern Books, inviting us as they do to
reappraise various cultural and literary categories?
Tere is no need. Reappraisal tends to involve the assignation of new categories
or the expansion of pre-existing oneshence, of course, graphic novel in all its
inadequacy. Category crisis, however, does not really have to be solved. We just
imagine that it does. Te desire to solve it is almost irresistible and that is why
it is gured as crisis. People can be as uncomfortable when confronted with an
uncategorizable book as when confronted with an uncategorizable gender or sexual
identity. In both cases, reactions can be hostile/puzzled/afraid/contemptuous or
whatever the individual reaction to cognitive dissonance may be. At the time of
writing, a graduate English student at my university had newly expressed surprise
that I was reading Hatelds Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature for my
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research rather than just for fun. It was an automatic reaction. Obviously such a
book was not a serious object for literary research (When is a comic book just a
book? When is a queer minority cartoonist just a cartoonist?). Academic research
often takes its own seriousness far too seriously, with the predictable results of
becoming ludicrous, reductively territorial and eventually, boxed in. Indeed
Groensteen invokes just such a territorial model when he concludes Te System
of Comics with the observation that the prejudiced academics are hardening
themselves to suer ... a reconsideration of the presupposed theories of various
disciplines (Groensteen 2007: 160). Again, one observes with satisfaction that
literary and cultural studies scholarsand art historians and trauma theorists
are engaging with sequential art forms in many productive ways, as the surge
of recent new work has shown; Whitlock and Poletti describe the many ways
in which comics are triggering innovative criticism that responds creatively to
the demands of these troublesome cross-discursive texts (Whitlock and Poretti
2008: ix). Tis is not to imply that comics scholarship is all new, cutting-edge or
recent; some of its newness is an impression created by the current expansion
of the eld into both traditional (e.g., English departments) and interdisciplinary
academic areas, often areas with only nascent cross-communication. Followers of
journals such as the International Journal of Comic Art (IJOC)which has been
publishing scholarship on comics since 1999and MELUS (the journal of Te
Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) will be rightly
suspicious about claims of novelty and innovation that are not substantiated by
the scholarly record.
Yet Groensteens invocation of prejudice highlights the fact that both knowledge
and power are at stake in Understanding Comics and in Fun Home alike, and indeed
in the entire phenomenon of sequential arts much-trumpeted entry into the
mainstream household, classroom and canon. Canonicity, disciplinarity, genre
(and reections of genre such as marketing): they are at their hearts about the
establishment and defence of systems of knowledge and power. Te power to
determine category is the same power that determines dierence, to return to
the earlier invocation of apartheid dierence between straight and queer, in and
out, old and new. Te fear of collapse of meaning that immediately rears up with
each crisis of category is a fear we need to see for what it isanother automatic
reaction to cognitive dissonance. It is the fear itself that is meaningless. As Nancy
K. Miller observes wryly, Appearances to the contrary, genre is pretty intractable,
never more so than when its distinctions seem hopelessly out of date (2007: 539).
Te last thing academics need to worry about is the end of category. We should
worry instead about the nature of our reliance on category in everyday life, from
the bookstore to the bedroom. A turn to the notion of creative and productive
dierence, rather than negative or apartheid dierencea turn to dierence that
no more needs to be rescued than it needs to be solvedis a useful direction for
our critical, and other, desire.
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Note
A version of this paper was given in July 2008 at the Womens Worlds/Mundos de Mujeres
conference in Madrid, Spain.
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