Modernism, Memory and Desire: Queer Cultural Production in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

Abstract

Using what Barbara Christian has called the technique of “rememorying”—the deliberate reconstruction of memory to void fixed categories—Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic expands the perimeters of graphic memoir and creates a sense of queer canonicity in the process. Fun Home’s structure is recursive rather than linear, returning again and again to the same sites of emotional pain: the author’s coming out, her father’s suicide, the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality, the always-impossible search for lost time. Like other graphic memoirs, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Fun Home tackles subjects rooted in trauma and memory. Fun Home offers a lesbian feminist counterpoint to texts such as Maus, adding queer autobiography to the purview of the growing canon of women’s 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.

Troubling Boundaries and Negotiating Dominant Culture: Fun Home as a Transmedial Text

“…But in what way? Tolmie (2009) points out that 'the assumption that autobiography is truth in an unmediated way is something that Bechdel writes and speaks against […]' and asks 'How should literary scholars characterize the fluctuating lines between mimesis and fiction?' (Tolmie, 2009: 82).…”

“…D'Arcy: Troubling Boundaries and Negotiating Dominant Culture Art. 17, page 9 of 21Fun Home and Transmedial Negotiations of Dominant CultureWhen one begins reading critically about Fun Home, it becomes clear very quickly that to write about Fun Home is to write about the problematic conceptual dichotomisation of canon and popular, high and low culture.Ariela Freedman (2009) discusses how the graphic novel consciously draws on a canonical modernist lineage in its explicit engagement with Joyce, Proust, Fitzgerald, Camus, James, and others; JaneTolmie (2009) similarly considers how the text's 'integration into the critical worlds of literary and cultural studies has been quick" because of its "degree of academic referentiality' (79). Hillary Chute locates this literariness also in Fun Home's narrative sophistication and formal experimentation, and in the text's selfreflexive preoccupation with textual interpretation, pointing out that 'reading is the site where almost everything happens in Fun Home'(Chute, 2010: 184).…”

Reviews

“…Those traditions are seen as a straitjacket from which Chute's chosen authors must escape. The problem is a familiar one: recall, for example, how the controversial, century-spanning exhibition 'Masters of American Comics' (2005), which represented women artists not at all, sought to justify its choice of artists on the basis of formal mastery, and how this strategy has been criticized, rightly in my view, on feminist grounds (see the discussions in, e.g., Chase 2008;Berwick 2005;Abel 2011;Tolmie 2009). However, I wonder about Chute's assumed equation of formalism and aesthetics with a male-dominated ideology; after all, there are a great many self-motivated women artists in comics whose work strives after forms of beauty and composure far from Kominsky-Crumb's style.…”

Comics, Graphic Narratives, and Lesbian Lives

“…Jane Tolmie has argued that Fun Home is "not about the plot so much as the manner of revelation," and it is precisely this focus on the constructions of feelings and knowledge, identity and subjectivity, that characterizes the narrative. 36 Fun Home draws attention to the collective contingencies of individual experience. Bechdel locates her own family narrative within a wider political context by framing Fun Home in terms of questions about the historicity of the lives of Alison and Bruce.…”