Fun Home
Unfortunately, I didn’t like Fun Home very much; something about the presentation of the story as a graphic novel didn’t really click with me. However, the one aspect I really did like is the fact that the book manages to tell a story without telling you “facts”. Instead of trying to claim that her father definitely killed himself, Alison Bechdel explored several possibilities, all the while making it clear to the readers that she believes that he did. Many autobiographies or memoires try to give a series of chronological “truths”, and given that life and relationships are never one-sided, this approach doesn’t really give us a broad picture of the story. Obviously, this story is still biased towards Bechdel’s views of her father and family in general, but she doesn’t try to shove her point of view down the reader’s throats, and instead, she lets them explore the evidence themselves and decide what to believe. This works in this situation because the family dynamics are so complicated that there’s no real right or wrong; everyone has reasons for their actions, and sometimes, they go directly against each other or happen to correspond. This novel allowed Bechdel to learn about her life, but it also allowed the readers to get a view into this select part of her life story and make their own conclusions. Additionally, this novel largely seems to be a continuation of the diary Bechdel kept but in a more open manner. The diary had allowed her to watch what was going on and make conclusions about them. However, she never actually stated things as being definitely true and went through a period where she would put “I think” next to each sentence. Similar to this, Bechdel never actually claims a truth in this book, but she labels most of her observations as possibilities. Overall, I enjoyed the openness and variability in interpretations of this book, but I still don’t really like it.
I appreciate your honesty in stating that you didn't enjoy fun home! Personally I did like the book, and found that the uncertainty added to the realism of the narrative. I think the approach Bechdel took emulates real life situations in which we can guess the facts behind a series of events but often can never know for sure.
ReplyDeleteYeah. I enjoyed that aspect of the book as well. I just didn't like the book as a whole.
DeleteI think you've identified a fundamental truth about the book. Because Bechdel is trying to tell a story rather than just a progression of her life, the story is freed from a lot of conventions. For example, chronology is one of the things that Bechdel doesn't pay attention to in order to paint a clearer picture of her life.
ReplyDeleteI would say that the visual/graphic-novel style of the book relates to these issues of uncertainty and truth that you praise in the book: there's something about visual data that feels more like a glimpse of what "really happened" (especially the reconstruction of scenes and people from actual photos, which is apparent in Bechdel's style throughout), and a visual image can give us a kind of confidence that we're looking in on something fact-based and real. In fact the visual images in the book are reconstructions of memory just like any other kind of memoir-writing, and memory has been shown to be extremely unreliable as a guide to what "really happened" (especially around such emotionally charged material as can be found in this book). We come away from the book with multiple images of the Sunbeam bread truck closing in on Bruce Bechdel at the side of the road, something that Alison never witnessed and which, despite the facts ("it really was a Sunbeam bread truck," she writes), is very much a product of her imagination. The most consequential detail--Bruce's intentions--are lost to time and can never be reconstructed, so we're left with an artist trying to build these scattered facts into a coherent form. Paradoxically, Bechdel's visual narrative often shows us precisely what we *can't* know, and that's an odd and unique way to tell a story.
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