Critical Lense - Not Understanding, but Appreciating, the Father: A Postmodernist Perspective on Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

Darcy Smittenaar

Professor Clayton

EN224P

April 8, 2013

Not Understanding, but Appreciating, the Father

A Postmodernist Perspective on Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel’s postmodernist approach to the organization and structure of her memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, illustrates not necessarily her understanding, but definitely her appreciation of her father’s contributions in her life.  Through the study of various words, the use of the full “text” of her father’s life, the deconstruction of previously held notions about her family, and the parallels Bechdel draws between her father’s life and her own, she shows that she and her father are so alike that she may not have been able to fully understand him, but she could have appreciated him more had she known what she does now while he still lived.

According to Dictionary.com, postmodernism in the arts, such as literature, is “a style and school of thought that rejects the dogma and practices of any form of modernism . . . featuring elements from several periods, [especially] the Classical” (Dictionary.com).  This rather vague definition does not help at all in describing specific arts such as literature.  However, a more thorough definition can be gleaned from Literary Movements for Students, which describes a number of postmodernist works, including those from architecture, literature and philosophy.  According to the article, “Postmodernism,” “The postmodernist is concerned with imprecision and unreliability of language and with epistemology, the study of what knowledge is” (Literary Movements 616), which is something Bechdel does frequently in Fun Home.  Bechdel not only seeks to understand the definitions of various words such as the slang term “eighty-six” (Bechdel 106), and “lesbian” (Bechdel 74), but also, through her memoir tries to define her father—and through him, herself.  She is constantly questioning the true meaning of the words she uses, and the truth of what she knew of her father.  Through this examination of words connected both with her own life and her father’s, she is able to appreciate the struggle he went through as a “closeted” homosexual in the middle of the twentieth century.

Fun Home is a sound example of one author’s stipulation that “Any stability in a text is merely illusory” (Literary Movements 622).  Bechdel examines and reexamines the same handful of memories or spans of years, each time finding and revealing a new aspect of her father’s identity through his books, the places he went, and the people to whom he was attached.  Many postmodern literary works have “a tendency to quote, to imitate, and to amplify, rather than to state with authority or integrate. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements” (Literary Movements 617).  Bechdel’s memoir is no different in this respect.  Bechdel pulls not only from her own memories and journal—which does not always include everything she remembers about the time periods in question (Bechdel 162), but also from elements of her father’s life and the world around her.  A whole chapter is devoted to her father’s obsession with home renovation (Bechdel 3-23), and another details the chaos of the period during which her father was on trial for providing alcohol to a minor and her mother was rehearsing for a production of The Importance of Being Earnest while writing her doctoral thesis (Bechdel 183-186).  Such seemingly disparate elements as these and many others dovetail together as Bechdel explores her father’s life and tries to find out who he really was and discovers who she is in the process.

This approach may seem to be contradictory to the postmodern idea that “there is nothing but the text and that it is not possible to construe a meaning for a text using a reference to anything outside the text” (Literary Movements 623); however, Fun Home and all of the disparate parts with which Bechdel brings it together, is the lens through which she sees her father, who was a human being. People are complex, and nowhere does anyone say that a person has to be completely confined to the flesh, blood and bone of their bodies. Bechdel's references to the books her father read and shared with her, the young men her father knew, and other things which seem tangential to the person who was her father are all, in fact, parts of her father--the text of his life, thoughts, and philosophies, however well or poorly Bechdel is able to read it.  Bechdel’s use of her father’s books, photographs and letters does not mean that she is trying to find meaning in her father’s life “using a reference outside [his] text” (Literary Movements 623); rather, she is including his entire personality, the entire text of him, in her analysis of him.  Without the inclusion of even the smallest minutiae she can find from her father’s life, Bechdel would not be able to appreciate him as well as she comes to do at the end of her memoir.

Another one of the “main outgrowths of Postmodernism is the disintegration of concepts that used to be taken for granted and assumed to be stable” (Literary Movements 625).  While Bechdel does not openly say so, she implies that the lack of positive emotional and physical demonstration in her family could have been due to her father’s homosexuality and his wish to hide it.  After telling her family that she is a lesbian, Bechdel receives a call from her mother in which she learns that her father has had affairs with other men (Bechdel 79).  Before this, she had taken for granted that her father was a heterosexual male in a family which was not physically or emotionally demonstrative.  This telephone call shatters Bechdel’s concept of her world, and in the ensuing instability she learns about and comes to appreciate her father as someone who silently supported her in her own self-discovery, and finds many instances in her own memories where her father may have been trying to tell her in his own way that he was a homosexual and that it was okay for her to be one as well—or that he knew what pain could come from homosexuality and that she might possibly identify with him as a homosexual.  Bechdel finds further clues that her father was trying to dissuade her from coming out at the same time as he was trying to connect with her over that similarity between them.  To Bechdel, her father is the original Icarus, falling into the sea because he flew too close to the sun of his own dreams, but in a way he is also Dedalus—creating a path and clearing the way for his daughter to discover who she is without fear, or at the very least trying to cushion the fall and save her when she makes the jump he was too afraid to take.  When she does take that leap of faith—discovering and revealing her homosexuality—Bechdel finds that her father “was there to catch [her] when [she] leapt” (Bechdel 232).

Bechdel’s “search for father and self” is somewhat repetitive (Goldberg 233), but the repetitions reveal more about Bruce Bechdel with every reiteration.  A more linear approach would not have been as effective in defining who he was, and through him, who Alison Bechdel is now.  Bechdel does not really uncover her father’s identity, however, so much as the person he might have been.  After all, no one can truly understand another person, and especially not posthumously.  Throughout the course of her memoir, Bechdel comes to realize that there is no real “notion of a universal truth” in regard to her father and who he was as a person (Literary Movements 625).  In that respect, there is no ultimate definition of her own identity either, so much as she is an ever-changing entity shaped by her parents’ pasts, her own memories, and her actions in the present.  Fun Home focuses on her father’s past to show how it has shaped Bechdel’s own concept of herself and who she is, which she truly comes to recognize by the time she has finished her study.

The parallels that Bechdel finds between her own and her father’s lives highlight the truth—however fluid it may be—of her similarity with her father, who she comes to respect more than she did before.  To this respect, certain pair of photographs is telling in its parallels.  The first, a picture of her father on the roof of his fraternity when he was twenty-two, was taken outside, the left half of his face shadowed, and his wrists relaxed.  The second photograph, this time of Bechdel and taken by her lover Joan, was also taken outside and includes a shadow on the left side of her face with her wrists equally relaxed (Bechdel 120).  She takes this as a clue that she and her father are similar of spirit and proclivity, if not of gender.  The observation of her father’s obsessions and the corresponding—if completely different or opposite—obsessions of Bechdel’s also parallel each other and help her to learn who her father is.  Bechdel’s father is obsessed with renovating and furnishing his home with antiques of all kinds (Bechdel 4), while she cultivates an obsession with certainty—or the lack thereof (Bechdel 141) and the desire for a more functional—or at least less-cluttered—living space (Bechdel 14).  Likewise, her father’s obsession with gardening and flowers, especially lilacs (Bechdel 90-92), was the trigger for Bechdel’s own hatred of flowers of any kind, be they natural or artificial, or just paintings (Bechdel 90).

Another parallel that Bechdel finds between her life and her father’s is that they both wished to wear the clothes of the opposite gender.  Bechdel finds a photograph in which her father—possibly for a fraternity prank—was wearing a women’s bathing suit (Bechdel 120), and Bechdel mentions multiple times throughout her memoir that she wanted to wear boys’ and men’s clothing as she grew up (Bechdel 221).  She hated wearing the barrette with which her father would insist she keep her hair back when she was young (Bechdel 96), and after her “coming out,” reminded him of her preference for men’s clothing when he acknowledged his occasional foray into the world of girls’ clothing (Bechdel 221).  By including this conversation, which took place shortly before her father’s death, as wells as the other parallels she draws between herself and her father in her memoir, Bechdel shows her newfound appreciation of him.

One final parallel between Bechdel’s preferences and her father’s is that of phallic symbolism.  Bechdel notes her father’s fixation on the shape of the obelisk, which he says “symbolizes life” (Bechdel 29), and subtly hints that this fixation may have been a clue to his homosexual proclivities.  On the other hand, when Bechdel was an adolescent, she was briefly exposed to the naked genitalia of a dead man, and was no more affected by them than the average person is affected by a picture of a cardboard box.  In fact, she describes the dead man’s genitalia as a “pile,” and although it was a shock to see them, she was more interested in the wound which caused the man’s death than in his sexual organs (Bechdel 44).  Even being a late-bloomer as she was—and not wishing for breasts either (Bechdel 109)—the fact that the maturing Bechdel had not been interested in the dead man for his maleness, but for the grizzly gore of his death wound is something that she only mentions once, but is important in its singularity.  Her father’s obsession with the phallic symbolism of life (Bechdel 29), however, in hindsight is highlighted in her singular reference of disinterest in the same subject.  This foil between obsessions shows that, while Bechdel could not truly understand why her father was interested in other men, she could appreciate that he was attracted to his own gender, as she was attracted to hers.

Alison Bechdel lost her father at a challenging point in her life, just after her mother informed her about an important piece of the puzzle that was Bruce Bechdel.  Her memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, in the style of postmodern literature, brings disparate elements of both his and her lives together.  Through her own memories and journals, the people her father interacted with, his obsessions and his possessions, as well as through the elements in his life that paralleled her own, Bechdel comes to appreciate better than ever before the man he was, even if she does not fully understand that man.  Through her reflection, she comes to see and appreciate the fact that, although he was as emotionally and physically distant as the rest of her family, he was always there for her.

 

Works Cited

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.

Goldberg, Wendy. "Fun Home." Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels. Ed. M. Keith Booker. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010. 232-234. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 7 Apr. 2013.

"Postmodernism." Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2013. .

"Postmodernism." Literary Movements for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Literary Movements. Ed. Ira Mark Milne. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 2009. 615-653. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 7 Apr. 2013.