Tag Archives: Fun Home

Seeing the Big Picture: The Use of Composition in Comics

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Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of student papers from Phillip Troutman’s class at George Washington University focusing on comics form in relation to Scott McCloud’s theories. For more information on the assignment, see Phillip’s introduction here.
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In his book Understanding Comics, McCloud talks a lot about the balance of words and pictures, and how a change in this dynamic can affect the feeling of a comic as a whole. This relationship is so important that McCloud dedicates an entire chapter of the book to it. But even so, McCloud doesn’t go far enough. He deals with the pictures and words in a comic on only the most basic level, treating words as merely the means to convey written information, and pictures as merely the means to convey  visual information. He completely ignores the element of how the information in communicated, which, given that Understanding Comics is meant to be an examination of  the medium, is quite the oversight.

The choices that the comic creator makes in what to show  within the pictures, where to put the words on the page, and how the reader is to progress from one panel to the next (and not just in the chronological sense) are all crucial to comics. In addition to words and pictures, these aspects constitute a third aspect of the comic: its composition.

The pictures and words contain the base information of the comic — the what. The way they are presented to the reader is the composition — the how. Based on different compositions, the same scene can have a very different feel to it. For example, the pictures and words may dictate two people having a conversation. Imagine this conversation was drawn as a close-up of the two people’s faces, or possibly a wide, full-page panorama of the area surrounding them. Imagine if their text balloons overlapped, or alternatively were as far apart as the page would allow them to get. Those kinds of presentations would create different undertones to the raw information of the scene.

That’s what the composition does. The composition is the perspective the information is shown from. It is how the comic creator controls the reader’s pace, direction, and reaction throughout a comic. No comic illustrates the power of thoughtful composition quite like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Fun Home is an autobiographical piece by Bechdel, which primarily details her relationship with her father. The book discusses her efforts to come to terms with her homosexuality, her love of literature, and  her father’s death in a possible suicide.  Bechdel tells her story through eloquent prose littered with literary allusions and illustrated with deceptively simple drawings. But where Bechdel really shines is in her extremely deliberate compositions, with their masterful use of visual metaphor and layout.

Composition generally happens on two levels: the makeup of individual panels and their contents, and the layout of entire pages. The individual panel scale dictates smaller, more discrete decisions, such as the angle from which to view a scene. The layout uses the larger scale of the entire page and includes matters of sequence, such as how panels flow together and how the narrative progresses. In Fun Home of these levels contribute significantly to how the comic works.

In it’s most basic form, one can think about composition as literally the physical composition of individual panels. It is the way in which the author uses light/dark contrast, line-work, movement, etc. to make the reader look at specific parts of the picture. Take for example the panel below, showing Bechdel and her siblings overhearing their parents fighting.

Notice how all the dominant lines in the image, such as the banister, the wall, the kid’s bodies, all point to the sound effect in the corner. Every part of that image is focused on that one small word and it gives the sound effect a much bigger impact. Even the tails off the text balloons point to the crash. No matter what part of the image the reader looks at, Bechdel is leading them back to the sound.

But composition goes much farther than physical presentation. Arguably the most prominent aspect of composition in Bechdel’s work is her use of visual metaphors; that is, the deliberate setting up of a scene to convey a certain emotional subtext. Take for
example the image below.

This is at face-value just Bechdel and her father doing yard work. But the long shot showing the physical distance between them suggests the emotional distance as well. The fact they were doing yard work and that at that particular moment Bechdel was far away from her father doesn’t convey any textual information, but the choice of composition does convey important subtext.

Visual metaphors can be found throughout Fun Home. For example, look at the image below (which has been edited slightly for the sake of context).

The intimacy of the dancers in the background correlates with the conversation in the foreground. Bechdel states in the panel that she’s “never had the nerve to approach somebody” in the club, so for her, the fact that she’s talking to someone else is so radically different from the norm that she and the approaching girl may as well be kissing, just as the dancers behind them are doing. And while the reader may not consciously notice the background, it nonetheless gives the entire panel a feeling of intimacy. Thus Bechdel’s use of these background elements affects our view of the foreground.

Bechdel also uses visual symbolism in Fun Home. In the book, Bechdel’s father is obsessed with their family home, and spends a great deal of time trying to keep it in pristine condition. The house, then, becomes a central symbol for the family’s relationships. For example, Bechdel often shows us the house from outside, with different characters framed in different windows, emphasizing their isolation. You can see this in the image below, which shows two panels from different parts of the book.

From the reader’s point of view, the windows create a literal barrier that surrounds each family member and prevents them from interacting. Towards the end of the book, however, Bechdel begins to feel closer to her father. To emphasize this shift, she shows herself and her father in the same window for the first time in the comic.

This compositional choice perfectly accentuates the resolution of the book.

Beyond single panels, composition on a larger scale is about the sequence of moments, the transition between panels and the like. McCloud touched upon this subject in Understanding Comics when he discussed how comics move through time. However, transitions don’t only move a reader through time, they move a reader through mood. Here’s one example

As Bechdel walks between the two panels, the scene gets noticeably darker, reflecting the pessimism expressed in the narration.

Or look at the image below

Here, Bechdel illustrates every beat of the conversation, even the moments of silence, and thus makes the reader experience it in the same awkward, slowed-d/wn pace as she did herself.

But perhaps the best example of how Bechdel uses composition to set mood occurs when Bechdel visits the Gay Union student group at her college.

Bechdel sets up a large amount of suspense on page 209, calling the group the
“underworld.” Then page 210 she resolves the tension by revealing they’re
just normal people. The narration of course shows how nervous Bechdel was about taking this step down the path to accepting her homosexuality, but the real genius is the fact that she makes this transition over two pages. She uses
the physical action of the reader turning the page to suggest how she herself is physically opening the door. In that moment, Bechdel’s anxiety is the reader’s anxiety. If these panels had been on the same page, they would not have had nearly the same impact.

Perhaps the best approach to thinking about composition is by relating it to movies. If the pictures are the actors, and the words are the script, then the composition is the director. He’s never seen on screen but his hand is in every part of the final piece, choosing how to show the actors, determining what is and isn’t relevant enough to include, and deliberately focusing the
viewer’s attention where he wants it to go.

This is the role composition plays in comics. It fleshes out and gives the pictures and the words meaning that they wouldn’t have on their own. As Fun Home shows, composition is what changes a book of illustrations into a comic book.

Voices from the Archive: Alison Bechdel on Fun Home

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Alison Bechdel commented briefly on Tom Crippen’s Fun Home review.

Tom, I think you’re spot on about my dad and his experience with grad school. I don’t think he had a nervous breakdown, but he certainly freaked out when faced with stiffer competition. I definitely did not follow that path to its proper end in Fun Home. At the time it seemed just too complicated, like it would drag the narrative off track. But of course that’s probably an indication that it was worth pursuing.

And thanks for corrective critique, Noah et al. Really. The praise gets a bit wearing. I’ve been rather surprised that no one called FH pretentious before.

The description of me as a one-armed tennis player is eerily apt—I often feel like that. And lemme tell you, it’s fucking exhausting.

 

The Therapeutic Narcissism of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

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“But the picture was not of them, she said. Or, not in his sense. There were other senses, too, in which one might reverence them. By a shadow here and a light there, for instance. Her tribute took that form…”

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

Those looking for a synopsis and evaluation of Are You My Mother? are directed to a pair of reviews in The New York Times by Katie Roiphe and Dwight Garner, a rare honor for a comic publication. Roiphe is effusive in her praise and suggests that she hasn’t “encountered a book about being an artist, or about the punishing entanglements of mothers and daughters, as engaging, profound or original as this one in a long time.” Her’s is the more detailed and perceptive reading but I am not without sympathy for the conclusions of Garner’s more negative article which suggests an “undistinguished edifice by a builder who forgot to remove the scaffolding.”

The comic can be easily summarized as an account of Bechdel’s relationship with her mother through the lens of psychoanalysis. There is no avoiding the fact that the comic is immensely didactic and in many ways almost a lecture cum case study of her life and relationships. This is a situation which Bechdel has no intention of avoiding, a point which becomes clear when she cites (approvingly) lectures by Adrienne Rich and Virginia Woolf which were later transformed into notable books (Blood, Bread, and Poetry & A Room of One’s Own). There are sections of this book which will prompt distant memories of the “For Beginners” comics series though Bechdel’s comic is considerably more elevated and complex.

Bechdel prefaces her comic with a quote from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse:

“For nothing was simply one thing.”

That sentence describes the moment when James Ramsay finally sees that “silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye” for what it is, “stark and straight” and “barred with black and white.” Both images true in their own way just as Bechdel’s overlapping recollections, metaphors, and dreams reveal the shifting facets of her life; the contradictory statements of the Ramsays in that novel (“it will be fine”/”it won’t be fine”) foreshadowing her own work; the same way that the suggestion that she is angry with her mother towards the close of the book is so obvious and yet so impossible to reconcile with the rest of her feelings.

The repeated citations of Woolf and To the Lighthouse invite comparisons between that novel and the comic: the bedtime rituals; the domineering yet strangely dependent father; and (not least) the relationship between the artist, Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay (Lily’s nascent feminism, her depiction of mother and child as a “purple shadow”, how the focus on marriage in the novel compares with Helen Bechdel’s apparent anxiety about her daughter’s lesbianism etc.). I will set aside these connections for now, but the elements of homage and criticism in the comic are certainly ripe for dissection in some college classroom.

Are You My Mother? follows the structure of dream, analysis, and resolution through chapters titled “The Ordinary Devoted Mother”, “Transitional Objects”, “True and False Self”, “Mind”, “Hate”, “Mirror”, and “The Use of an Object”. Where Fun Home framed its narrative with quotation and criticism of myth and literature, the new comic is heavily centered on the science or pseudo-science (I will assume the former since the author holds it in such high regard) of psychoanalysis. This last dilemma is inconsequential since it is merely the foundation upon which a single life is built, a self-contained world with its own rules, “laws”, and reasons; in many ways an expression of the author’s “therapeutic” creativity and imagination

The hardness and scaled down poetry of Are You My Mother? is a subset of this shift in values. The work is highly expository and Bechdel spends considerable time and effort explaining psychoanalytic and developmental concepts and their application in her life. Even so, Bechdel does leave many things unsaid—some obvious, others less so. The early account of a stroll through London by Virginia Woolf and Donald Winnicott (the paths adjacent but never actually meeting) is ostensibly historical fiction but is clearly a metaphor for the conjunction and distance separating the literary memoir (the Bloomsbury group, the Hogarth press, and hence Woolf and her diaries) and science, connecting the main root of psychoanalysis to the personal analysis she wants to concentrate on.

The therapeutic and relationship diagram seen on page 22 is the true index of Bechdel’s comic which readers will need to refer to at various points in the narrative if only to keep track of the discontinuities and overlap of years. The timeline suggests a kind of mathematical equation even though it exists purely in the realm of the graphic arts with all its approximations. Those looking for a linear account of these relationships will be disappointed for the progress and conclusions are as disjointed as any patient led analysis. It is very much a Holmesian mystery (hence its “comic drama” subtitle) offering the pleasures of a hunt which the author—who at this point has been in therapy longer than she has not—so enjoys.

Fun Home was rife with text-image counterpoint and juxtaposition and while these still exist in abundance in Bechdel’s latest comic, the focus has shifted into overlapping texts which “speak” all at once creating a kind of lexical broth, not only creating a tension between texts but also a conflict between the written and the spoken word

—the romantic language of her father’s letters to her mother contrasting with her mother’s impression decades later that, “[He] was a different person in his letters. He wasn’t like that when we got together.” Not simply a comment on truth but the entire project she has placed before us, for we see her on the very next page in “a peculiar performance” in which she plays both her “mother the reader” and her “father the writer.”

Even with this proviso in mind, I would still suggest that where the former memoir offered possibilities and guess work concerning her father’s sexuality and suicide, this new work advances diagnoses and cures; a move away from the intemperance of the confessional booth and religion to rationality, that sacrament providing no escape for Bechdel’s mother whose depression was only accentuated by her presence at church (“It was hell.”).

Hidden in the title is a threefold question. The most obvious one relates to the uncovering of her mother’s aspirations and depression, that sense of abandonment when she stops kissing her at the age of seven and seems to prefer her male offspring. This tension is reiterated throughout the comic both directly (in the pre-college tiff between mother and daughter) and indirectly (in Donald Winnicott’s “Oedipal revolt” against his psychoanalytic mother”, Melanie Klein). Bechdel’s long one-way conversations (interview, interrogation, analysis) over the phone with her mother are always initiated by herself and she begins to surreptitiously take notes like an analyst dissecting her mother’s psyche.

The second question manifests itself in the transference which Bechdel casually mentions and then elaborates upon in chapter 3. The most overt instance of this is the dream sequence at the start of that chapter which shows her analyst in the guise of her mother, mending her clothes and thus symbolically her tears.  Later Bechdel pulls out a pad to note down her therapist’s suggestion following a breakthrough, thus mirroring her activities during her telephone conversations with her birth mother.

Her therapists by proxy are also ever present in the text, and she makes the transference explicit in a statement regarding Donald Winnicott (“I want him to be my mother.”)

While some of the conclusions Bechdel reaches with her therapists may seem trite, the solace she gains from their words of affirmation (“I like you.”) are more disturbing [1].

The third question is directed at her readers for there is little doubt that Bechdel is taking the talking cure with her readers in a one-sided conversation. The memoir as a means of catharsis is of course repugnant to some but Bechdel clearly thinks otherwise and cites To the Lighthouse as an instance of one such (temporary?) success. One presumes that she expects them to report back with their findings and in a sense they already have.  Perhaps, the ultimate expression of this relationship would be an analysis of her self-analysis. Bechdel never fails to emphasize her dependence on this tenebrous and fickle approval, a chimeric cycle of ambition and reinforcement which the author seems to think is (in part) healthy though painful—like a neurotic child throwing a tantrum.

The title of Bechdel’s comic recalls, of course, P. D. Eastman’s children’s book of the same name, the cheerful tale of a baby bird’s search for its mother and its failure to imprint. Bechdel does very much the same throughout her memoir with interspersed anecdotes on her mother’s failure to breast feed her as a child. On at least four occasions, she shows her father disrupting the bond between mother and child. Hence the aforementioned confusion of progenitors.

These developmental disruptions are rationalized through the work of Winnicott and Alice Miller. Yet they also place her firmly in the position of a child in relation to her interlocutors, this despite her full grown size for most of the comic. The only other prominent psychoanalytic text in Bechdel’s book is Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. This emphasis can be easily explained by a statement found in the opening pages of Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child which suggests that:

“…every childhood’s conflictual experiences remain hidden and locked in darkness, and the key to our understanding of the life that follows is hidden away with them.”

In the same chapter, we find some “basic assumptions” concerning a child’s need for a “legitimate” and “healthy narcissism”. Miller states that “parents” (and presumably individuals in general):

“…who [do] not experience this climate as children are themselves narcissistically deprived; throughout their lives they are looking for what their own parents could not give them at the correct time—the presence of a person who is completely aware of them and takes them seriously, who admires and follows them. This search of course, can never succeed fully since it relates to a situation that belongs irrevocably to the past, namely to the time when the self was first being formed.” [emphasis mine]

Bechdel provides herself as a frank and unhesitating example of this formulation at every stage in her book. One might say that even the metatextural moments in the comic are a subset of this condition, the “scaffolding” left out for all to see in the interest of full awareness.

Of these moments, some are patent while others are hinted at. The two page spread (pg 32-33) showing her discovery of a set of baby photos is an example of the latter. The table top is shown littered with the detritus of creation and falsity, the images presumably photo-referenced but still at least a step removed from the originals, just as Bechdel’s comic will always remain a land of half-truths and potential “lies of omission”, of fiction and autobiography. The section in question is preceded by an earlier panel:

“I’ve always been fascinated by this snapshot of the two of us. But I didn’t realize until relatively recently that it was one of a sequence.”

And later,

“I don’t have the negatives, so there’s no way to know their chronological order but I’ve arranged them according to my own narrative.”

This pair of pages can be seen as a simple analysis of a moment in time but also of the comic as a whole, the chapters of which are easily disgorged and rearranged to suit the moment and desired meaning. Is there any reason, for example, why that final image in Bechdel’s sequence should not be placed first? Bechdel’s arrangement sees her mother as helpless before her father’s misanthropy; the alternative suggests a more successful comforter and protector.

Analyzing every facet of Are You My Mother? would be an exhausting process both for me and any potential readers. Bechdel’s traditional approach to drawing and cartooning obscures an obsessive approach to structure and recurrence in her narrative, making it one of the densest comics reading experiences of the past few years. On the most basic level, this amounts to linear exposition though sometimes separated by the entire breath of the book. For instance, on the very first page of the comic, Bechdel recounts a dream in which she is trapped in a dank cellar, the only way out being a “small, spidery window” which she forsakes upon the sudden materialization of a door.

Her first sentence upon falling back to reality is, “Mom.” The spider’s web appears again in a dream initiating the second chapter of the book. Nearly 300 pages later towards the close of the comic, we learn of her mother’s arachnophobia which was triggered by the sight of seeing a grasshopper being entombed in silk as a child. Then a chance reading of a biography of Winnicott reveals his analysis of an arachnophobic patient in his twilight years:

“I think that somewhere in your early development…when you hadn’t quite separated out from your mother…you hallucinated her. That is, you hallucinated the subjective object, the breast or whatever, expecting to be met. But you weren’t. There was a gap…And then it became a spider and you became afraid of it.”

This analysis and its accompanying forebodings suggest that both Alison and Helen Bechdel are caught in a vicious cycle of narcissistic deprivation, the end result of which is described by Miller:

“…a person with this unsatisfied and unconscious (because repressed) need is compelled to attempt its gratification through substitute means. The most appropriate objects for gratification are a parent’s own children.”

And later,

“…she [the mother] then cathects him narcissistically. This does not rule strong affection. On the contrary, the mother often loves her child as her self-object, passionately but not in the way he needs to be loved. Therefore, the continuity and constancy…are missing…from this love. Yet what is missing above all is the framework within which the child could experience his feelings and his emotions. Instead, he develops something the mother needs…but it nevertheless may prevent him, throughout his life, from being himself.”

On the next page, Winnicott’s final moments are revealed; the date, one month before Bechdel started keeping her diary. In that diary, a single episode is highlighted, a case of food poisoning with the vomitus taking on the shape of a spider, the “dark lack” and “absence” which Winnicott was just remarking upon just a page before. And thus it continues with Bechdel layering image over image and word over word.

The chapter, “Mind”, is another case in point, with its repeated references to birth, death, and the womb.  Woolf, in transforming an episode from her childhood into a scene from To The Lighthouse where a boar’s skull is covered with a shawl, is Bechdel’s exemplar.

The womb is echoed in a jumble of details and associations: her special cramped office in her childhood home; her drawing of a gynecological examination as a child; Donald Winnicott’s analysis of a child who describes the darkness of the womb…

…the uterine-shaped plexiglass dome of a Dr. Seuss book about sleep…

…and hence to her mother’s decision not to kiss her while she is lying in her womb-like bed. Her mother’s back turned from her and hence as expressionless as the thin silhouette she casts in the mirror across the hallway; the map of the world hanging over her bed now half-shrouded in shadow and uncertainty (see first image above); the child’s face half in darkness and half in light.

This paramount failure to connect (reasserted at various points in the comic) is echoed in the final pages of that chapter where Bechdel is enveloped in darkness in her room, the black full page bleed being the very substance of dreams in the vernacular of the comic (here applied to firm reality).

The final image of that chapter is almost quotidian by comparison showing Bechdel’s old dorm room telephone ringing, the room from which she moved out just before her father died, a door knob preceding this on the page, these points in the darkness highlighted by their proximity to the captions (“And another. And another.”).

A lifeline and a doorway between worlds. A breast and an umbilical cord. The severed communication resounding through the pages of the chapter just as the ring stretches across the breath of this final panel.

Earlier in the chapter, there is a scene where Bechdel asks her mother for an extension cord (“I don’t know, don’t bother me,” her mother replies) before mirroring her mother in this desire for isolation, setting up an “inviolable” area of creation.

Just a few pages before this near the start of the chapter (pg 123), her therapist asks, “The phone is literally a lifeline. But who’s the authority you’re appealing to?” The question is asked in relation to the chapter’s opening dream which sees Bechdel trying to call the police on an “intra-campus phone system” to absolutely no effect. Bechdel interprets her punching of the phone keys in the dream as an act of writing and points to her therapist or her “authorial voice” as the authority she is appealing to.

Her final answer seen in that missed phone call from her mother at chapter’s end—a phone call advising impending divorce (and soon death)—is direct but unexpected. The progress is distinctly logical but the overall effect, with its chronological jumps and uncertainties, quite impressionistic. It is an impressive feat of storytelling and the chapter a high point in the comic. The rest of Are You My Mother? is less consistent. The magic starts, skips, and stops; the art wavers in consistency but occasionally soars; the text demands recursions; that balancing act always precarious, the battles sometimes lost; for all its faults a book well worth reading.

Notes

[1]  From Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child: “True autonomy is preceded by the experience of being dependent, first on partners, then on the analyst, and finally on the primary objects.” [back]

 

Further Reading

The marketing power of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is something to behold and there have been a slew of articles by the mainstream press. This may well be the most extensively reviewed comic of 2012 with the press being overwhelmingly positive. Here are some of the more detailed articles:

(i)  Meghan O’Rourke’s review at Slate is probably the best review of Bechdel’s comic online:

“What Winnicott—and Bechdel—was interested in was what happened when this crucial mother-child mirroring broke down, and the child became precociously attuned to the mother’s needs instead of her own. Likewise, Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child chronicles the kinds of abuse children suffer at the hands of narcissistic parents, particularly mothers.”

(ii) Interviews and authorial revelations: Hilary Chute at Critical Inquiry, Heather McCormack at Library Journal, Shauna Miller at The Atlantic, Peter Terzian at the Paris Review

 

The Price of the Ticket

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In the comments to Suat’s post on Fun Home, Uland notes;

The milkman bit is interesting, but I think it bears pointing out that a literary allusion isn’t an allusion at all if it’s being pointed out in the text. It’s a reference.

It isn’t that I have a problem with the drawing or the subject matter. It’s more that it all seems so prescribed . The author refuses to allow mystery to intrude upon her strategy. The literary references seem like a huge part of that strategy. Employed in a less on-the-nose kind of way, I think it could’ve been really effective.

I get the sense that Bechdel pulled back and , reminding herself that it’s just a graphic novel, tried to pull all these different schemes into nice little packages. Problem is, it’s a story about confusion, mystery, shame, secrets, etc. Rather than letting them loose, she seemed to want to conquer them..

Agreeing with Uland is always disturbing…but I agree with Uland.

I think the comparison with Likewise is pretty interesting here. Both Bechdel and Schrag have an ambivalent attitude towards literariness and art. Bechdel associates it with her father; Schrag associates it with Joyce (and through Joyce with Ariel’s girlfriend, Sally.)

Schrag uses that ambivalence structurally; her desire to embrace Joyce and distance herself from him is incorporated into the storytelling, both through her use of or dropping of stream of consciousness, and through the artwork, which is in some ways obsessively ordered and in some ways deliberately random. Chaos and confusion are important thematically, so Schrag makes them part of her storytelling

Bechdel doesn’t do that. She criticizes her father for his artificiality and for wanting a neat bourgeois existence — but her own work never gets beyond insistent artificiality and the conventions of a decidedly bourgeois genre. Everything is neat and in its place; if she’s referencing Icarus, she tells you she’s referencing Icarus; if the house is a metaphor for her dad’s obsessions, she tells you the house is a metaphor for her dad’s obsessions. And if she wants to show a parallel between herself and her father, she does it in the most obvious ways possible — look, it’s a split screen! And also…mirrors!

I find Bechdel’s writing itself almost intolerably clumsy…but I think the narrative and thematic flaws of the book are in many ways more crippling. This is a story about the dangers of deliberately acclimatizing yourself to a typical middle-class existence. But the book…deliberately acclimatizes itself to a typical middle-class narrative. Bechdel fits her book about queer fathers and queer daughters neatly into a classic father/son memoir dynamic. As I said in another context:

The American memoir is a fairly simple formula. Clearly identify your colorful ethnic heritage (Chinese, Jewish, Irish…even Appalachian will do.) Milk said heritage for all it is worth. Discuss your simultaneous love of and resentment of said heritage. Milk your ambivalence for all it is worth. Feel deeply. Stir well, then appear on Terri Gross.

Suat notes that “Much of [Fun Home’s] appeal to general audiences must lie in the way it gently eases readers into the comics medium.” Fun Home did appeal to a lot of people. The irony is, of course, that it’s ingratiating in much the same way that Bechdel’s dad is ingratiating. It uses bourgeois and literary trappings to present a familiar and comforting front. Thus, readers can safely condemn Bechdel’s father for his capitulation to convention while reading a book that goes down so easily by virtue of obsessively cleaning up all its messes. Bechdel takes her quirky, colorful past, dabbles it with knowing commentary, and serves the results to a literary audience eager to smack its lips over delectable, safely contained difference. A rich, unusual, ideally painful childhood is the spice that both validates one’s present normality and makes it worth consuming. Sacrificing your ancestors is, as James Baldwin acidly put it, the price of the ticket.

Fun Home: Technically Speaking on the first 86 pages

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The recent roundtable on Likewise and Ariel Schrag produced a number of helpful comments but there was one in particular which made my ears prick up:

“I actually think Fun Home works best as prose (not sure about Schrag’s work). It’s a beautifully written novella/short story, really…and rarely (to me) does the art add much to that. For that reason, I kind of think it’s not really such a great “graphic memoir”–It doesn’t really use the “graphic” tools to great effect–as Maus, for instance, does (sorry Noah).”

These comments were made by Eric B. in relation to my own concerning the difficulties I had with Schrag’s art. Fun Home was not a work which I read particularly intently at the time. In a sense, I let it wash over me like any average reader would. Still my memories of the work were far from unpleasant and Eric’s statement did seem a bit at odds with what I experienced.

Continue reading →

Review of Fun Home

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I reviewed the book for TCJ when it came out. Ng Suat Tong says it’s more favorable in tone than my recent post. I know I didn’t bring up the business about Bechdel’s dad dropping out of grad school. But what strikes me is what a dreadful first sentence the piece has. I must have been paid by the preposition.

And now …
“Puzzle Palace”

Fun Home is a set of seven essays about Bechdel’s memories of her father, a dominating but highly sissified man who led a secret life of chasing after boys while he raised his family and outfitted the family’s home as a sort of museum devoted to his particular aesthetic (cream settees, lilacs, “silk flowers, glass flowers, needlepoint flowers”). The book takes you inside a baffling childhood, one where not a whole lot could be counted on to hold steady, to match its official description. “My father began to seem mortally suspect to me long before I actually knew he  had a dark secret,” Bechdel writes above a picture of her young self watching Dad apply his bronzing stick. Bechdel herself was gay and didn’t know it until college. Until then, she lived with a sense that she and her father were misfits for their proper roles — “inverts” was the the term she adopted later, “the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.” While at Oberlin, she did some thinking and came out. Her mother then told her about Mr. Bechdel’s secret life and soon began talking about a divorce. A few months later Mr Bechdel was dead. He jumped in front of a truck, but he jumped backwards, so whether his death was a suicide is hard to say. Fun Home admits the question is open but states its preference: Bechdel thinks her father killed himself because she managed to tell the truth.

Fun Home puzzles over how Bechdel was cheated by the biggest figure in her life. Her father was an outsized personality, but to be around him was somehow to be in the presence of an absence. Fully as he lived it, his life was not really his, and everybody close to him felt the effects. “He really was there all those years,” Bechdel writes, ” a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwood, polishing the finials, smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.” Bechdel sees her father’s life as a slow retroactive suicide, and she says the beautiful mansion where he housed his family was tainted by his sexual self-hatred: “His shame inhabited our house as invisibly and pervasively as as the aromatic musk of aging mahogany.” In fact he turned his house into a kind of labyrinth. “Mirrors, distracting bronzes, multiple doorways. Visitors often got lost upstairs,” Fun Home says. Her father’s instinct was to baffle others and hide his real self. It’s no surprise that Fun Home is constructed as a set of riddles instead of a straightforward narrative.

     Bechdel kept her eyes open, and she has thought long and hard about what she saw. The book’s panels are full of painstaking physical detail (right down to headlines for newspapers, graffiti next to a dorm telephone and the dictionary entry for “queer cubbin”). More important, Fun Home is honest about painful moments and highly intelligent about tracing their roots. At points Bechdel seems to X-ray the life she and her family shared, to see it all right down to the bones. Not that the book is cold-blooded. It’s chilly, but it’s human. There’s humor and plenty of day-to-day detail about the family. Most of all, Bechdel seems to care a great deal about the lives she’s dissecting.

The approach is high-toned and literary, so expect allusions, symbols, hidden meanings, hidden jokes, obtrusive elegance. Each chapter in Fun Home wind its way about one aspect or another of the family situation: obsessiveness (“The Canary-Colored Caravan of Death”), the unspoken drive to hold back unwelcome secrets (“The Ideal Husband”), Alison’s creeping sense that she and her father are not what they’re supposed to be (the well-named “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”). The essays are so well constructed they snake you into their guts. The book is dense, but it’s a fast read and it locks the reader inside its atmosphere. The ink wash and the ever-present captions make the events feel like exhibits, and not in a bad way. It’s as if a person’s mind had been made into an ingeniously laid-out museum and we got to walk the halls. The tone of the place is hypnotically ruminative, grave, mordant. The narration is always at your elbow, and it’s silver-edged in the extreme. When it doesn’t connect, the writing gets a bit Bulwer-Lytton. (“It was a benign and well-lit underworld, admittedly, but Odysseus sailing to Hades could have not felt more trepidation than I did entering that room.”) But often enough it does connect, and either way the tone is set.

The drawing shows traces of Bechdel’s old Edward Gorey influence, which comes in handy. It’s childlike and also funereal, a good combination for the subject, but of course it doesn’t have anything like Gorey’s bizarre expressiveness. Bechdel’s figures are stiff, and their expressions don’t always rise to what’s demanded. Draw the smallest mouths in comicdom and you’ll get “elated” Mr. Bechdel, “manic” Mr. Bechdel, and young Alison (“limp with admiration”) all looking a lot the same, which is to say irate. The book’s greatest technical strength is its layout. Comics layout is a great craft for meshing, for guiding attention with interlocking sequences of forms and angles, and Fun Home does it well for page after page. The book has a certain suave command that prevails over any faults in the writing and drawing, and its source is the skill with which one subject is flipped into another. The layout is crucial to the effect.

In fact, Fun Home shows how useful comics can to be to the high-gloss literary approach of hidden meanings and look-at-me elegance. Using both words and pictures provides more crevices for sliding in implications and secret jokes (the cucumber in the upper left-hand panel of a page in “The Ideal Husband” is not only lined up suggestively with Mr. Bechdel’s profile, it mirrors the spread legs of the randy Dr. Gryglewicz in the page’s lower right-hand corner). Also, the illusion of coherence is deepened when you have two sets of signs to play with. Not only do the words chime together, but the pictures chime with the words. Bechdel writes “my father’s life was a solipsistic circle of self” and places the caption atop a circle highlighting the small area on the map where her father spent his life. There’s no real connection between the caption’s point (that her father centered his life on himself) and the image’s point (that he lived and died in one town). But it feels as if there were.

I mention the “illusion of coherence” because Fun Home has an odd sort of fault. The book has substance and it’s elegantly done, but the elegance has been brought about through a certain amount of fraud. Most of the book’s transitions are enabled by a network of allusions to Camus, Shakespeare, Wilde, Proust and others. The allusions do great work as a kind of trellis, a technical convenience for laying out the good stuff, the facts and feelings. But as statements they don’t always add up to much. Mr. Bechdel was reading Albert Camus’s A Happy Death before he died, he had a copy of The Myth of Sisyphus from college, a college photograph shows Mr. Bechdel smoking, and Camus smoked. And so what? “But in a way Gatsby’s pristine books and my father’s worn ones signify the same thing — the preference of a fiction to reality.” Yeah, all right, whichever. When Greek myth comes in, it turns out Mr. Bechdel managed to be Daedalus, Icarus and the Minotaur. Maybe he was also King Minos and the guy who sold tickets out front.

Any literary bafflement aside, Bechdel had the brains and honesty to analyze a painful situation and to be true to the feelings that came with it. Life piled some atmospheric details atop the Bechdel household’s basic plight. Mr. Bechdel was an undertaker on the side, and we see the Bechdel children polishing caskets and viewing bodies. The house was still unrenovated and moldering in Bechdel’s early childhood, so she has potent memories of looking at Charles Addams cartoons. But all of that’s incidental. The heart of Bechdel’s book is about growing up in a home where the family’s common ground has been poisoned. Her father addressed her mother as “you”; her mother claimed there was no story about how they met. “My parents seemed almost embarrassed by the fact of their marriage,” Bechdel says. To survive emotionally, she remembers, all the family members had to fend for themselves. They retreated into separate capsules of obsession: music, model airplanes, Bechdel’s drawing, her father’s refitting of the house. “Our selves were all we had,” she writes.

Fun Home is fine work and sometimes unbearably poignant. Several chapters manage a last panel in which drawing, writing and layout come together to hit a high note. A girl lies by her father’s tombstone and looks at the sky. Father and daughter are seen through separate windows, together in a room but oblivious to each other. Call the scenes greeting cards for isolation, but the effect is still overwhelming, and it’s typical of this somber, skillful and heartfelt memoir.