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THEGAPINALISON
CLOSING BECHDEL'S
FUNHOME
JENNIFER
LEMBERG
identity. Created in the shadow of a father who "used his skillful artifice
not to make but to make to be what were not"
things, things appear they
(2006a, 16), however, Fun Home bears witness not only to Bruce
Bechdel's trauma and its effect on his family, but also to the artist's effort
to claim the to their
authority represent story.1
Bechdel's comic at first seem almost "invisible" behind her
style may
prevents her from speculating too widely. Despite her father's seemingly
plex and multifaceted. "Fun home" is a nickname for the funeral home
her father (an event that brings Bechdel's
inherits parents back to his
to live), but it also suggests, in its
hometown similarity to "funhouse" or
"funny farm," the distortions of Bechdel's childhood and the way the
house her father restores serves as a screen for his
slavishly unhappiness.
that her father was there" the author to render
Proving "really requires
not the rare moments of connection between father and
only daughter,
but also his effort to hide. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his con
tinuing struggle to perfect the house, which therefore becomes the most
visible feature of his presence.
The family's house and her father's internal conflicts are directly
linked in the narration as well as the of the memoir. "His
composition
shame inhabited our house as and as the aromatic
pervasively invisibly
musk of Bechdel writes. "In fact, the meticulous,
aging mahogany,"
interiors were to conceal it. Mirrors, distract
period expressly designed
ing bronzes, multiple doorways. Visitors often got lost upstairs" (2006a,
20). On this single page, Bechdel employs an arrangement used only
in the book, with four of the same size
rarely rectangular panels evenly
laid out.6 In their the the sense of order her
symmetry, panels convey
father strives to achieve in his obsessive attention to his
surroundings.
more however, we find of an interior
Looking closely, images upstairs
that is but also as Bechdel describes.
perfectly arranged unsettling, just
In the the vertical of the hallway are inter
panels, stripes wallpaper
a series of doorways, behind which we glimpse young Alison
rupted by
132 THEGAPINALISON
CLOSING BECHDEL'S
FUHHOME
slipping into her room or spy her father safely tucked away in bed.7 We
are unable to see their faces, so that the physical space overpowers our
perception of the people inside. The more visible human figures in the
and lower-right as a child and a rep
upper-left panels include Bechdel
resentative visitor to the house who stands, confused, before a large
(funhouse) mirror that seems deceptively like yet another doorway.
Both figures are simply drawn, so that the daughter who lives there and
the unnamed guest seem similarly lost. With the equally sized panels
promising order that we do not find, the confusing vertical lines of the
doorways, stairwells, and wallpaper, and figures that are barely visible
or are unknown to us, we the house's interior as a series of
experience
refusals, and like its occupants, we have difficulty making sense of what
we see.
past her father's constructions in her depiction of the house. But as she
makes very clear, the order of the house belies the chaos of the life lived
within it, not just her father's shame but also the messiness of everyday
interactions. "It's to in retrospect, that our fam
family tempting suggest,
was a sham," Bechdel reflects. "That our house was not a real home,
ily
but the simulacrum of one, amuseum"
(2006a, 17). However, she affirms
that despite the lies, just as her father "really was there," "we really were
a
family, and we really did live in those period rooms" (17). With these
words we find a long horizontal panel depicting a great deal of activity: a
cat strolls across the room; the children race toy cars around a track, play
? 2006
Fig. 1. Excerpted from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. Copyright by
Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
LEMBERG 133
finally see the family in disorder back at home, it reminds us of the ability
of comics to depict the life behind the formal pictures. The panel demon
strates the artist's interest in the surfaces, the stories
"going beyond telling
the to open the curtains" 1997,
surrounding images, attempting (Hirsch
ing awareness of the "troubling gap between word and meaning" (2006a,
143). The problem persists until her mother intervenes to help her record
her activities, in an instance of the older woman's or of
daily caretaking
her introducing Alison to a language of denial. As Cvetkovich remarks,
the crisis is caused in large part by Alison's growing awareness of the
silences in her family's life and the sexual secrets they imply (page 121,
this Even as Bechdel demonstrates how becomes
volume).9 writing
almost for her, however, she offers several of the
impossible examples
way in which drawing seems capable of filling the "gap" between lan
guage and its subject. What remains unspeakable in her family and
in her can be at least
unrepresented diary partially represented through
While she does not articulate how or this is so, she
images. precisely why
as a more direct mode of
consistently privileges drawing representation.
134 THEGAPINALISONBECHDEL'S
CLOSING FUHHOME
(2006a, 170). Over several panels, we see first Alison's hands drawing
the young man; then the lower part of her body as she rocks in her chair
to achieve then her hands now the desk sur
orgasm; again, clutching
the she's made as she an
rounding picture experiences "implosive spasm
so and perfect that for a few brief moments I
staggeringly complete
could not question its inherent moral validity" (171).While drawing the
has not itself caused her to orgasm, the makes it so that
picture caption
the reader encounters these two acts almost their con
simultaneously,
nection made explicit.
battle in which she resists his efforts to make her more obviously femi
nine. "It the hair out of your he tells her. "So would a crew
keeps eyes,"
insisting she wear the barrette before she goes out and replacing it after
she removes it the Alison's resistance to this
during game (96). wearing
feminine accessory is premised upon desires that she cannot yet fully
articulate, much as her father's determination is related to
unspoken
needs of his own. as a that embodies of
Functioning "surrogate" aspects
her queer identity, the basketball player she draws signifies feelings she
cannot into words. These are related to desire, and self
put pleasure,
Although Bechdel has said that the family photographs she drew for
the book remind readers that the story is "real" (2006b, 1009), Scott
McCloud contends in Understanding Comics that more "realistic" draw
a sense of absolute "otherness" (1994, 44), while
ings of people convey
cartoons, in their simplicity, seem more readily accessible (36). Bechdel's
of may therefore allow us to feel that we
"cartoony" drawings people
know them more their simplicity a direct link between
fully, implying
the and its like the on the map that fasci
subject representation, images
nated her as a child.11 In this way, the world outside the photographs, the
comic world Bechdel creates for us from her own vision, seem most
may
? 2006
Fig. 2. Excerpted from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. Copyright by
Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission of Hough ton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
ages Alison from admitting the strong feelings of affinity by which she is
possessed (2006a, 118), as readers we are compelled by the woman's
image. The emphasis on looking in these panels suggests the over
whelming visibility Bechdel assigns to this figure and engages us in see
LEMBERG 137
ing the connection between Alison and the bulldyke that her father is
anxious to erase.
impulse to identify too strongly with him, and cautiously tries to avoid his
tendency to overidentify with the biographies and stories of authors he
admired. Yet careful as she is, an important part of her project is also to
Near the end of the memoir, Bechdel intensifies her use of this tech
image of the pair together in New York during the 1976 Bicentennial.
Bruce and Alison face the reader, in a static pose that allows us to exam
ine their faces, while Bechdel tells us that on this visit to New York, her
first since a she saw Greenwich "in a new
becoming teenager, Village
light" (2006a, 189). Alison is "seeing" Greenwich Village, but we see her,
side by side with her father, and for us the "new light" she describes illu
minates the resemblance the two members bear toward
striking family
each other. Thedark background of the night sky makes the image
unusually stark, creating relief against which their faces and bodies stand
out. Bruce is drawn in greater detail his "other
(again, emphasizing
are undeniably their ambiguously
ness"), but father and daughter alike,
appearances great between them. And
gendered allowing similarity
while a in the background divides the figures in the fore
skyscraper
our and away from them, this
ground, drawing eye upward only
our desire to the two halves of the
strengthens piece picture together.
Bechdel's ambivalence about too a claim to her
Despite laying strong
138 THEGAPINALISONBECHDEL'S
CLOSING FUHHOME
father's story, this image asserts a direct link through an ineffable same
ness, its visibility an important part of the story she is trying to tell.
This does not mean that Bechdel claims absolute authority for her
artistic vision. Crucial events remain our such as the
beyond sight,
instants before and after Bruce's death: no matter how times
just many
we revisit the empty stretch of highway where he died, we cannot see her
father's death, cannot be certain of why or how it Even
happened. seeing
his dead body and visiting his grave cannot make Bechdel believe that he
is gone; like his life, his death remains
"incomprehensible" (2006a, 50). Yet
ultimately Bechdel insists upon the validity a
of her art as form of witness.
This is emphasized by the choice she makes at the end of the book, when
she closes the final chapter with a panel depicting herself with her father.
At the top of the last page, the a
grille of truck bears down upon us. Below
it, in another panel, young Alison a
leaps off diving board into her father's
arms, an that in its construction the that the
image reprises panel began
memoir, when he held her aloft during a game of .airplane. The image
reverses the that begins the last chapter, which shows
"photograph"
father and daughter from the opposite direction. In the taken
photograph,
from a distance, we see Alison's while in the and
face, drawing, larger
close up, we see her father's. It is as if Bechdel has flipped the picture to
peer the other side, of course, an act
through impossible, except through
of imagination. Although nearly every chapter ends with an image of
Bechdel with her father, this is the only case where she deliberately
reconstructs and reverses the
photograph with which it begins.
These final panels suggest the power that Bechdel attributes to her
vision and her art, even as to her awareness of its limitations.
they testify
The image of the truck is arrested by a text box that continues Bechdel's
closing thoughts, inwhich she reflects on the myth of Icarus with which
she opens the book; the words seem to push back at the oncoming vehicle,
as if to stop it, but we know this cannot
happen. The narrative cannot be
altered, if the truth is to be told. And though she may admire an artistic
commitment to what she calls "erotic truth," Bechdel admits that it is "a
rather sweeping concept" and that her father's truth is beyond her knowl
edge (2006a, 230). Despite all that remains hidden from her, however,
Bechdel maintains that "in the reverse narration that our
tricky impels
entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I
leapt" (232), suggest
her into life as an adult artist. In bear
ing, perhaps, metaphoric leap queer
to
ing witness their lives, the picture of her
family
can be reframed, the
LEMBERG 139
is an instructor
JENNIFERLEMBERG at the Gallatin School of Individualized
New York She also serves as coordinator for
Study, University. project
the Holocaust Educators Network, a
professional development organi
zation housed at Lehman College, City University of New York.
NOTES
1. In her essay for this volume, Ann Cvetkovich demonstrates the importance of
the "everyday" trauma Bechdel describes.
recognizing
2. By to Bechdel's comics as "invisible" I am Scott McCloud's
referring invoking
of comics as "the invisible art" in Comics. McCloud on
denoting Understanding plays
the notion that comics can the invisible" but as W?lk
"represent (1994, 129), Douglas
notes, his title also reflects "the medium's tradition of effortlessness" (2007, 124).
3. In her discussion of "historical withholding," Hirsch draws from Gayatri Spi
vak's analysis of the transmission of trauma between mother and daughter in Toni
7. Nancy K. Miller (2007), in her recent essay "The Entangled Self: Genre
Bondage in the Age of the Memoir," refers to "Alison" when describing Bechdel's
younger self as she appears as a character within her own story. My own references
are meant to be consistent with Miller's example.
8. The curtains mentioned here recall the frontispiece to Roland Barthes's Camera
an as a
Lucida, image by Daniel Baudinet, which, Hirsch writes, "serves figure for the
WORKS
CITED
Bechdel, Alison. 2006a. Fun Home: A New York: Mifflin.
Family Tragicomic. Houghton
-. 2006b. "An Interview with Alison Bechdel." Interview Chute.
by Hillary
Modern Fiction Studies 52(4):1004-13.
Fresco, Nadine. 1984. the Unknown." International Review
"Remembering of Psycho
analysis 11:417-27.
W?lk, 2007. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What
Douglas. They Mean.
Cambridge: Da Capo Press/Perseus Books.