Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Allison Bechdel. 2006. Houghton Mifflin, 0-618-47794-2.
This is a graphic autobiography I had to read one time for school. I initially found it typical for Americans of a certain class: very navel gazing with that solipsistic focus on the most narrow interpersonal relationships. Apparently, these act as a sort of fence, or worse yet, a brick wall between the subject and society, but history cannot help but seep through. Tolstoy said "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" but it is not so! How many novels about affairs and divorces do they need to read before they realize they are part of a mold and stamped very indelibly with the mark of the stage of civilization within which they find themselves. I remember how pissed the teacher got when I brough this up. You're not supposed to see nasty, partisan, divisive things like social class in the Great American Novel! You're not supposed to read Fun Home as a universally relatable narrative and not a document of the 20th century's conquerors of humanity, but reading it upside down, where the only way out is through: you can see their empire has not made them happy at all. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?.
It is sad to think that there was a time when the naive world saw the Americans as erudite and dignified like Bruce Bechdel, not the ugly Americans, not the Donald Trump creatures. In the first chapter, Allison’s father is presented as a forger and dissembler, in both his hobby as a furniture restorer and his job as a funeral director. Towards the end, his love of literature is revealed with the section about the library on page 61 being the pivotal point in this development. In terms of the argument, it would appear that art is more important, as Bruce himself can maintain the illusion, like Gatsby. But really, there’s nothing urbane about him, he is straight up just rich, as spoiler alert! it is established quite early on that the family owns large tracts of land. Who toils them? It is not said.
As a scion of this wealthy family, Bechdel herself is able to devote herself to literature. Through this, she is also able to navigate her sexuality and even mediate a relationship with her parents which she never had in her childhood. The visual arts, however, remain important to her storytelling, which convey the empty and joyless faces of the characters throughout. The book is remarkable for the innumerable artistic allusions sprinkled throughout. The Diptych of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza by Piero della Francesca in the background of the 3rd panel of page 210 reinforces the aspect of the heterosexual world during Allison’s coming out, backgrounding Allison’s roommate’s risibly oblivious reaction. It is a reminder that the straight world is a different one, as different as the ones depicted in the separate images, that of woman and man who face each other. Worlds which both Bruce and his daughter crossed. Bruce himself is from an older generation of gay culture, a pre-public and pre-political one, the age of a “love which dared not speak its name”. For Bruce closure comes when he is sentenced to six months counselling and the teenage boy he attempted to seduce even apologizes to him(!). But most of all, his dignity remains intact and he isn’t publicly outed and therefore his job, marriage, etc are safe for the time being.
By contrast, when Allison and her brother exclaim “spread ‘em punks” in the last panel of page 160, describing the exact posture of Dr. Gryglewicz in her husband’s painting on the wall, which is somewhere between Gustave Courbet’s Origin de Monde and just about the whole Œuvre of the contemporary Carol Dunham. Similar subjects in photography might reasonably be found on the walls of the frat house next door, and the description of Bechdel’s stay there as a “saturnalia” portrays a similar wantonness, setting the scene for the revelation that the Gryglewiczs once propositioned the Bechdels for group sex. Here we see that education is not the only aspiration of the Bechdels, which (in further contrast to the Gryglewiczs), was thwarted.
The parallels go beyond specific images towards the stylized: the therapist in the 2nd and 3rd panels is drawn with an economy of lines uncharacteristic of any other characters, more akin to cartoonists such as Bill Kliban, Gary Larson, or the artists of the New Yorker, which Bechdel mentions explicitly on page 153. The psychotherapist is certainly a stock character in American cartooning, as were the friar or parish priest in Old Europe. The irony mentioned by Bechdel would give the book a tempting absurdity which is alluded to but never confirmed. As an imaginary scenario, it mirrors the man drawn in her journal on the first panel of the previous page. It is presented within the episode in which Allison and her friends are dressing up as another stereotypical stock character in American life: con-men. Thanks to the work of Freud’s pupil, A.A. Brill, “shrinks” had by then become America’s soothsayers. The price of their services is frequently met with of the cartoonist’s pen while the legal and scientific validity of their discipline itself has frequently been called into question by those within and without. These last two points, in conjunction with the class position of the Bechdel family, serve as a reminder of how the American legal system serves the interests of the wealthy and lets them get away with anything. Where would Bruce Bechdel be if he couldn’t afford the counsellor, or even the lawyer who recommended he see one as a preemptive measure?
Because of the theme of closure which runs throughout the work, we often complete the appraisal of a picture in the absence of all the details. In the 1st panel of page 203. The print of The Descent of Minerva to Ithaca by John Flaxman in Allison's professor Karl Avery’s office seems at first glance like the more infamous American Progress by John Gast. In the limited form of the drawing, without the caption (as we find it in the 6th panel of page 210), it might easily be mistaken for it. Minerva, the counterpart of Athena (who Bechdel mentions), only with the addition of her own distinct profile of war, points beyond the American university as a place of arts and letters and to its role as a workshop for imperial and colonial conquest. It was not long ago that Karl Avery’s own son had returned from invading Vietnam. The subject of Avery’s course, Joyce, had sneered at the anti-colonial struggle raging in his native Ireland, dismissing Irish nationalists as provincial fanatics. It is no mistake that it is Joyce, and not Pearse, for example, who is the darling of letters in the imperial core.
Finally, the soldier on the bunk next to Bruce on the 2nd panel of page 62 is reading The Haunt of Fear, a classic EC comic. The likes of these drew the reproach of Dr. Frederic Wertham who blamed them for a laundry list of vices, among them, homosexuality. In the context of the latent homoeroticism of Bruce’s stint in the army, illustrated by the jibes and 'horseplay' of the men in his unit taking place behind him as he reads and writes. While The Haunt of Fear represented some of the most timeless and influential comic art, EC horror comics themselves were a subversion of 50s America; depicting the seedy underbelly of the suburban idyll. Their skepticism of the American dream stemmed from the outsider’s perspective of their publishers, who, as children of poor Jewish immigrants huddled in leaky East Side tenements, had no doubt experienced the breadth of America’s ugliness. The censorship of EC comics came at a time when America’s imperialist crusade needed to put forth a squeaky-clean image of itself above any pretense of “free speech”. EC comics would be confined to their crypt while Gatsby would be “the great American novel”. If so, then Bruce, after all, was in Germany for the same reason that EC comics were subject to that senate hearing. The false taboo in Fun Home is homosexuality, but the real taboo is imperialism. It is the building block upon which all the little dramas of their lives are built - the very water in which they swim. Much fuss is made of Bruce Bechdel’s sexual activity, but none of his, or Avery’s son’s, stint in the military, as a conscript or otherwise. The rest of the world, cloven by the Cold War, is to Fun Home what Antigua is to Austen’s Mansfield Park. Remarkable how this austere, quiet, pale NPR image of white America contrasts with the beetfaced, bellowing, febrile Trump acolyte we know today. More remarkable still how it must have fooled enough foreigners to win.