|
Despite the way the
constant references to other books might make one
suspect otherwise (at least initially), Bechdel very
much has her own story to tell—one about growing up
in a small Pennsylvania town in a Victorian house
that her father turned into a monument of careful
historical restoration. His true vocation is living
in a fancy fantasy past that he has given dense
material form to—all wainscoting, gingerbread
architectural details, and a “library” full of
leatherbound books. Teaching high school English and
serving as an embalmer and (third generation)
undertaker are his day jobs. (“Fun Home” is a
family-joke abbreviation of “Funeral Home”).
Well-matched in some ways, Bechdel’s parents become
somewhat estranged from each other over the course of
her childhood; Bechdel and her two brothers defend
themselves by each becoming absorbed in their own
projects and interests, in much the same way they see
their parents doing. Bechdel goes off to college and
comes out to her parents as lesbian. Shortly
thereafter, her 44-year-old father is killed walking
across a road, hit by a passing truck. Bechdel and
her mother both believe his death was a suicide.
Bechdel learns that for a long time her father may
have been leading a secret life as an ephebophile (a
lover or would-be lover of adolescent males). What
kind of largely invisible, but nonetheless powerful,
pressures may her father’s complicated (to say the
least) sexuality have been exerting on the young
Bechdel, and her decision to come out on his? These
are interesting and important questions, and Bechdel
finds truly inspired ways of exploring and depicting
them with the kind of patience and attention it’s
often hard to bring to bear on the most formative
figures and events in one’s own life.
A reader has only to glance through Bechdel’s book to
see that she is fascinated with detail, whether it be
verbal, visual, or documentary (for this last, see
the many topographical maps, passports, snapshots,
pages of dictionaries and magazines, diaries and
calendars that she painstakingly redraws). But the
literature that floods Fun
Home is obviously not
there just to provide more delicious social detail,
like the clothes, haircuts, cars, and styles of home
entertaining and decorating that Bechdel scrupulously
records. More than merely another entry in an
overwhelming and irresistible style-catalogue,
literature—unlike changing clothes and
hairstyle—gives Fun
Home its high degree of
form: the narrative alternates for a long time
between wanting to be more like the respective
alleged masterpieces of those two incompatible
pillars of literary modernism, Proust and Joyce.
Proust because he is the world’s leading authority on
both the inevitability and the futility of nostalgia,
as well as of our attempts to decode the meanings of
our most intimate desires and relationships up to
(and beyond) the point of death. Joyce—more and more
as Fun
Home goes on—because he
is so excessively good at reforging old stories (say,
Daedalus and Icarus) in ways that make them integral
to new stories (say, that of Alison Bechdel and her
father) and vice versa. On the first page of
Fun
Home, Bechdel shows her
father playing “airplane” with her when she was a
little girl and tells us (among other things) that
the term from circus history for such acts in which
one person balances another is “Icarian games.” Her
ability to take Joyce’s example fully to heart and
mind in such seemingly passing touches is part of
what makes her reference to the “Icarian” full of
potential emotional and artistic power—rather than
just being a pretentious and meaningless gesture—the
kind of “antique” that Bechdel’s father may have,
sadly, overvalued.
For me, the most exciting thing about Bechdel’s new
work is that she has succeeded in finding a way of
“translating” “old stuff”—old stories, domestic
interiors, literary styles and obsession—into
strikingly and intriguingly new stuff. Of the other
most accomplished graphic-narrative artists currently
out there, this work of hers (unlike almost any of
her work in her long-ongoing graphic
serial Dykes to Watch
Out For) in some ways
strikingly resembles that of Seth. But Bechdel has
found ways of making her work more emotionally daring
and open, and challenging to readers, than Seth’s
tends to be. Take for example the amazing picture
(top of p. 44) of her child-self in silhouette,
observing her father laboring in his embalmer’s role
over a bearded and naked corpse from which he appears
to have extracted heart, lungs, stomach and bowels
through a gaping hole in the front of the body: “The
strange pile of his genitals was shocking, but what
really got my attention was his chest, split open to
a dark red cave.” Here is meticulous, Thomas
Eakins-like physical detail, in both drawing and
writing. But here too (although we are may overlook
it) is probably the book’s most harrowing
visualization of Bechdel’s worst fears about her
father: that he lacked, to a radical degree, some
kind of crucially important interiority.
Beside the image of the disemboweled cadaver it might
be interesting to place a drawing near the book’s
center (pp. 100-1) of Bechdel’s much-enlarged left
hand holding a snapshot of “Roy,” her father’s
“yardwork assistant” and her former babysitter, who
may also have been a sometime lover of her father’s.
Roy lies stretched out on a bed, odalisque-like, clad
only in tighty whities, his arms up around his head,
his eyes gazing away at the ceiling, his hips,
crotch, and thighs rotated invitingly toward the
viewer. Unlike the eviscerated cadaver, the image of
Roy is one of a closed and integral body. In a
further remarkable sequence of panels, in her
depiction of her own emerging sexual/emotional life
(p. 214), Bechdel shows one of her early lovers,
Joan, lying in bed with her upper body in a position
similar to Roy’s, but with her knees raised, legs
spread, and with Bechdel leaning on her elbows into
the space of Joan’s thighs and crotch. In the
following frame, Bechdel appears to begin,
experimentally, eyes wide open, moving her head and
mouth toward her Joan’s genitals; in the third frame,
she has closed her eyes and begun eating her lover
out. Bechdel here speaks of her lover’s genitals as
“Polyphemus’s Cave,” a warm and delicious tactile
counter-space to the visually fascinating “dark red
cave” of the male cadaver’s pillaged insides. This
whole sequence of nude bodies in radically different
relations to insides and outsides, to erotic and
non-erotic energies, provides the kind of powerful
recurrent visual touch that makes the book exceed
what might otherwise be the limitations of its
“bookishness.”
Ultimately, neither Proust nor Joyce wins the battle
for the soul of Bechdel’s Fun
Home. Quietly and
devastatingly, I think, Bechdel actually awards that
palm to Colette—the Colette of one of the most
ravishingly stylish autobiographical memoirs of the
twentieth century, Earthly
Paradise. In what may be the
only repeated image among the many hundreds that
constitute Fun
Home, Bechdel shows her
father’s hands placing a copy of this very book in
her own hands (top of p. 205 and middle of p. 229).
No author has understood better, or more
compassionately, the vagaries of passion and desire
(both within and outside the family) and the kinds of
deceptions, refusals, and betrayals that often emerge
as the most “natural”-seeming consequences of such
long-lasting and sometimes volatile feelings. Bechdel
succeeds, à la the Joyce of Ulysses,
in bringing about a compelling sense of
reconciliation between her Daedaelus father and her
Icarus self in the closing pages of her book. Bechdel
revealed in a recent interview
that
when her mother learned that she was writing a book
about her father and his fate, her mother stopped
confiding in her. And the mother is definitely left
out of the reconciliatory climax of the book. Only in
this regard do Bechdel and Fun
Home fall short of the
model of a broader understanding of compassion that
she herself brings into play in the book by
intimating that neither Joyce nor Proust, but
Colette, is really its presiding genius.
|
