Fun Home

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Rebecca 3.31.10 / 7am

In response to the second part, I would say that Bechdel doesn’t make death morbid, but creates a liveliness in it with her descriptions. The smell, the way the caskets move and the image I get in my mind from it. I keep having my imagination go to the movie My Girl where the girl living with her father also works in a funeral parlor. The images of her playing in their own version of the “Fun Home” is what I associate with Bechdel’s opinions of her “Fun Home.” It is just another part of their daily routines and the morbid and melancholy auras that one would usually associate with these physical objects and knowing characteristics of death become aesthetic and accessory, almost glamorized in the clean and tidy words that Bechdel uses.

Personally, I am not afraid of death. I am terrified that I will, eventually, be completely forgotten. The stories and words that I so carefully construct and the legacy of which I one day wish you have, will be forgotten and everything in this life of mine will be a blank piece of paper for my children’s children to write into, and then also be forgotten. I hate the feeling that everything I do and all the effort I make, though it will have influence now and possible influence on future generations, will have no association with me. Call me narcissistic, but I want to be remembered. I want glory and printed, time-stamped photographs of my work. I want to be something worth referencing. So, to be forgotten is worse to die because everything I will have lived for will be just as purposeful as my rotten corpse: feeder for something bigger and better than what I wanted for myself.

Of course there will be conflicting views of this, but I do not want to leave this world without evidence of my arrival and standing on it.

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1. Logan 3.31.10 / 12pm
  
  I would also agree that it’s not really morbid. It’s really more just having a sense of humor about things. I think the title being “fun home” and that being the nickname for funeral home sets the tone of the whole thing.
  
  I think about the show “Six Feet Under” a lot whenever I read this book, as that deals similarly with a family chock full of issues going on in their day to day lives and is then interspliced with interesting information about stuff that needs to get done to prepare dead bodies for burials etc. etc. And something I always enjoyed in Six Feet Under was that they would often devote part of whatever episode to showing the death of the person and the circumstances leading up to it and the reactions of family members/friends.
  
  I think you learn a lot more about people in death sometimes than in life and you certainly learn things that were kept secret or swept under the rug. Being exposed to all that behind the scenes emotional stuff (let alone the things that have to do with dead bodies themselves) definitely would make for an interesting life experience.
  
  I think she just adopted what we’d say is “a dark sense of humor” but I don’t find it morbid
  
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Demy Tabangcura 3.31.10 / 9am

I like how poetic “the spoken text of life” sounds. It’s an interesting concept because then essentially you can read almost anything in life as a text. If life is a text, then in what ways do we read it? Perhaps the world speaks in subtle tones that we cannot all hear, but we see and smell and taste before hearing. Maybe we create a connection between the picture and from the picture we textualize the experiences we have. As for Bechdel’s emphasis on the significance of pictures in a graphic novel, I think the dichotomy of text/picture is broken down a bit, especially when she says to read the images rather than just see the images. If an image can be read, then our definition of text is rendered unstable in the fact that if the text now includes pictures, then just words on a page cannot constitute a text nor can words in general be the only thing that constitutes a text. Is a number a word? Because then what of the images we conjure in our minds as we read plain words? The pictures can be just a physical replication, a subjective one, of what we can picture in our heads as we read. Of course, I cannot say that the same happens in terms of seeing pictures and then picturing words in our heads because as McCloud says “Words are totally abstract icons. That is they bear no resemblance at all to the Real McCoy” (McCloud 28).

As for death, I find it interesting that she strips death of all its more “noble” qualities. The lack of emotion from Alison seems to push through the aesthetic qualities her father’s funeral, as well as funerals in general. The flowers, the beautiful wooden caskets…what does it matter? The person is dead. They’re there for those of us alive to soften the morbidity of death with some pretty floral arrangements. Perhaps the apathy presented leads us as readers to fill in the emotions where they seem necessary and we begin to ask ourselves where these emotions originate in the first place. What are we supposed to feel (if anything at all)? I think death also can offer a numbness that can be felt. Interesting how you can feel numb…

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Greg Maguire 3.31.10 / 12pm

I’ve heard it said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, one can view an image and gather quite a bit of information from it, but can we not say the same for a blurb of text? I argue that a blurb of text is worth a thousand images. If not more! The blurb of text allows your mind to conceptualize a situation in any fashion you like. No wonder most movies made from books are often, “not as good as the book,” because there are thousands, if not MILLIONS of ways readers can interpret text. When images are provided within text, it doesn’t give the reader much room. However, it is effective in elucidating exactly what the author hopes to get across. I feel that there is no argument between which is better: text or image. It is only a matter of what the author hopes/wants/desires/yearns to get across.

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1. Ryan Rheingold 3.31.10 / 9pm
  
  I totally agree. Often times peoples imaginations create much more elaborate and fullfulling images than those put on the “big screen”.
  
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Heather Ray 3.31.10 / 12pm

I don’t believe that Bechdel’s preoccupation with death is particularly morbid at all. First of all having grown up working in a funeral home gives Bechdel an unusual first hand experience about death. I don’t think this necessarily makes her interest in it particularly morbid. For her, I feel, death is a constant that she can hold on to. Throughout her life Bechdel struggles with the intangibility of life, and thus she finds solace in the certainty of death. This, perhaps, is a unique view of life and death, but I do not believe it has to point to an unhealthy, morbid view of death.

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Marian 3.31.10 / 2pm

I love how Bechdel’s novel breaks the idea that words are more important that pictures, whether in a graphic novel or otherwise. In class, it seemed the majority felt that the graphic novels can be read quickly because there are only a few sentences per page But Bechdel’s drawings force more time to be spent. I think the way she intentionally points out parts of the drawings in order to draw the reader’s attention is very effective. Many of us are used to reading “grown up” books which are not supposed to have pictures. So we aren’t familiar with them anymore. The words telling us what is being cooked for dinner in the picture, what Bechdel hated about her bedroom as a child, etc, make us really look and think about these pictures rather than passing by them after just a glance.
The pictures in her novel make it so much more than it could be without them. She weaves so much more into the plot through pictures of her siblings under the Christmas tree and at the dinner table. The pictures make the story come alive.
When typically reading a novel, I build images of how the characters and their environment must look. In a graphic novel, however, this is not left up to the reader. It seems a way to make the story more intricate and full. The reader can experience Bechdel’s family in a much closer way than would be possible if we only built the pictures in our heads.

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Austin 3.31.10 / 3pm

In response to your third prompt, to me it seems that Bechdel’s constant allusions – to fiction, to the lives of others, to film – are a pretty prime example of the “chance” aspect of her narrative. From a copy of Camus’ A Happy Death we get the implication of his death being a possible suicide, another tale about Camus (in a different book, also bringing up death), her father’s resemblance to Camus, Camus’ own death in a car accident…(46-48). Bechdel layers on the incidental beauty by anecdotally introducing these confluences of image and idea in thematic resonance with one another, and the impression is that it’s all coincidence.

But, of course, it isn’t. These multiple levels of connection can all be attributed to the level of Bechdel’s craft and life experience. To name one of these connections, she not only has the eye to identify Camus as a dad-look-a-like, but the mind to bring that to the fore and the pen to make the juxtaposition look effortless, perhaps even nudging the resemblance a tad closer together. And then, of course, it’s the reader’s responsibility to take from these ideas what he or she wants.

These echoes are Bechdel’s primary mode of storytelling in Fun Home. We have the Wind in the Willows chapter, the Importance of Being Ernest chapter, the Addams family, the family from It’s a Wonderful Life. (My least favorite: the Odyssey/Ulysses chapter.) It’s a neat trick, it’s clever, her elliptical narrative, the recurring motifs. And for a piece that’s so concerned with an individual’s relationship to fiction, it’s a nice moment of form dictating function. (Or vice versa.) But what is there to say about such finely wrought incidental beauty? When I think of examples, I always get stuck on a cigarette’s smoke, a candid photograph. I loved the moment about the dreams of the sunset (123, 150), equally calculated but not so obviously crafted. Some of the chance associations – especially in the final chapter of the book – are so forced, so on the nose, or so patently ridiculous (I am thinking specifically of Joan’s vagina on all three of those), that the finely wrought becomes definitively overwrought.

The ennui (like Proust!), the slathered on allusion (like Ulysses!), the elegant artwork (like The Wind in the Willows!) – they all add up to be a little too much.

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Miranda Aragon 3.31.10 / 4pm

When you consider seriously the inevitability of death, does it comfort you or make you afraid?

The actual act of dying does not scare me, its more of who you leave behind. I often find myself thinking about this. Death can be interpreted many ways, you can simply sleep, go to heaven, be reincarnated etc. Everyone has their own opinions about death. So the troubling part, for me, is who you leave behind. Or even scarier, what if I am left behind?

I have read the first few chapters of Fun Home and I find it very interesting that they do not mention the afterlife. The characters are surrounded by death everyday and I wonder if it defers them from internalizing it or even hypothesizing about what comes after death.

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Kevin 3.31.10 / 6pm

For the sake of answering the first part, I find that images on a page are almost more important, because they describe things in a way words are distinctly unable to. While imagery in text is undeniably important, it’s never fully able to cause different people to recall the same exact thing–words have different meanings for different people. Images are permanent, and while it’s possible to read into images in a number of ways, it’s impossible to change their intrinsic shape. In a way, images help the author impress a distinct vision on the mind, without the reader being able to draw any other iconography to or over it (sans some of the more abstract works of course), making the author’s explicit vision the same as the reader’s.

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1. Jesse Stommel 4.1.10 / 11pm
  
  Kevin, I love the line here about images being “permanent.” Still, I can’t help but think about photographic emulsion, which fades over time (in spite of it being chemically “fixed’). Are images becoming more permanent in the digital age? Also, do images get drawn over when they are recontextualized? Can we use words to write over images? I’m thinking of how captions can force us to re-see or re-think an image. I think this is different from (i.e. does not necessarily disagree with) what you are arguing here, but these seem like related questions.
  
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  1. Kevin 4.2.10 / 11am
    
    Haha, to be honest I’m not sure that ‘permanent’ is the right word. A better way of stating it, I think, would be to say that I’m seeing images as possessing a greater degree of fixity, which is what makes it so interesting when images are recontextualized. The image acts as a distinct anchor in a sea of words–while it’s still principally defined in structure and function by the surrounding environment, and it can be swayed one way or another by the power of the current, it remains, intrinsically, unmovable. All this is individual speculation and far from the last word, but I don’t see an image as something that can be drawn over by words, instead, I feel that it can only ever be enveloped by them.
Dave Ryan 3.31.10 / 8pm

Sights, smells, sounds, sensations are all expressed in pictures and fueled by words. On page 36 alison is highlighted with a vacuum cleaner. The vacuum has squiggly lines coming up from it and even though they are only lines, I can hear the vacuum revving perfectly. The highlighted portion helps out to, it shows you what is most important and directs your attention to the act of actually cleaning. The attention to detail is also nice for the reading experience. Every little cleaning product and type of metal she cleans, although it isn’t fully colored you can still imagine it shining clean. Since her dad owns a funeral home it seems fitting that she be apathetic towards death. She writes that you don’t feel death, you only feel life. Since it is inevitable, you can’t really fear death, you just have to accept that it will happen, and could happen at anytime. I think her closeness with death makes it more aesthetic, also her and her brothers smirk at each other did not seem awkward to me at all. It seems fitting because they both realize the same thing, the end of their father. Sexuality seems to serve function. To say it serves chance is overlooking all the effort she goes through to realize and permanize her sexuality. She goes to meetings, reads books, and finally interacts, but it seems strange that she would be shocked at finding out that her father is gay. The book seems to allude to it, but her being herself homosexual I don’t think it should be hard to accept. The book seems to function as a biographical narrative and in wondering if it is all true or not, the fact does not matter, if it seems real maybe it is real. Just like the way her father emulated his books, she actually is in her own book and her writing seems to only prove that it is all real.

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Lyndsey Weiss 3.31.10 / 11pm

I really enjoy the way Bechdel talks about death. I think it’s funny how people dread many inevitable things. What’s the point? It is going to happen at some point, it’s a waste of time to fear it. That’s how I’ve always felt. I wrote a story about what heaven will be like in 5th grade. I imagine it as a wonderful place. Even if I don’t really believe in an afterlife (which I’m still not sure of) it’s a nice thought at least.

Her pictures tell an amazing story. It adds that extra level of closeness and getting to know your author as you read an autobiography like this. I feel like it’s the same as talking on the phone with someone are talking to them in person. In person you get the facial expressions to add to the sound of their voice. Her pictures definitely make you look at them more than I usually would in a comic like this. I really enjoy it.

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1. Austin 4.5.10 / 10am
  
  Lyndsey, you talked about the “extra level of closeness” that the pictures provide in the autobiography. By chance, I was flipping through a book I have called Lesbian Studies: Setting an Agenda, and came across this passage: “It is no coincidence, I suggest, that many living lesbian artists are cartoonists. Cartooning is small scale, needs no vast studio, no expensive canvas, paints, or stretchers, no public funding or commercial sponsorship, no entroit into the magic circle of galleries and exhibition space. It is also a short-lived art form, ideal for political and social comment, and in this age of high-tech, low-cost printing and desk-top publishing, is cheap and easily accessible. In addition, humour can be both a sharp political weapon and the social glue of communities under siege” (Wilton 146). Could the intimacy of her pictures have something to do with comics being particularly suited to lesbian expression?
  
  The trope of lesbian invisibility could be seen in two ways when considered through the medium of comics: one, lesbian visibility is necessary to the telling of the story, thus making invisibility not only undesired, but completely counterproductive to the narrative. (Like you say, Lyndsey, “talking to someone in person.) On the other hand, invisibility in comics is particularly suited to the tropes of the sup0erhero, the kind of narrative which launched comic books into the public eye in the first place.
  
  The history of GLBT intersection with comics is an interesting one; the furor over comics as an industry without oversight led to congressional hearings worried about the depiction of Dick Grayson, as Bruce Wayne’s young ward, and the possible implication of a pederast relationship between the two. The possibility of producing comics cheaply, as Wilton notes, enables marginalized groups a mode of expression through channels deemed, until recently, illegitimate. Wilton notes Bechdel’s long-running strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” in her section on lesbians and comics; I wonder, what is the effect of a marginalized medium (comics) used by a marginalized group (Bechdel, of the lesbians) to mainstream success and praise?
  
  Is it a turning point or an exception to the rule?
  
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  1. Lyndsey Weiss 4.5.10 / 11am
    
    I think the subject of her pictures could definitely have something to do with the closeness I’m talking about. I like how there are pictures about the most intimate parts of her life and of the most mundane. Her drawings give you a second perspective of a situation so you can really understand what she’s describing.
Ryan Rheingold 3.31.10 / 11pm

Words are just arbitrary symbols that represent something else. It’s the feelings that words illicit from us that are so powerful. The connection between a word and what it represents reminds me of the relationship between the mind and the body. On one side you have the physical, and on the other you have the immaterial, an idea. What is most facinating is how the two sides interact with one another.

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Anna 4.1.10 / 1pm

I think there are huge differences between text and images in graphic novels. What I get from text is much different than what I get from the images. Text offers lots of analytical background and it allows the reader to make up a picture in their own mind. Images however show you pretty much exactly what the author wants you to see. In real life, I feel that what you see is the overpowering influence on what is going on. Body language is usually more telling about how a person feels more so than what they say.

I did not feel uncomfortable about the huge use of death in the novel. Because her father was a mortician, Bechdel was simply used to the idea of death. However, this is somewhat destructive because after her father dies, she doesnt have any emotion about it. Its like she says it is what is is, which is true, but as humans we have emotions and I feel like a death is very emotional. Especially the death of your father. Death does scare me! I am not looking forward to not living, but as I get older I think it will probably get better. 🙂

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Phil McMichael 4.1.10 / 5pm

I have a hard time looking at the pictures. I make myself slow down and look at each image looking for details. For Fun Home I would read the entire passages of other books her dad had read.

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1. Kate Autera 4.5.10 / 10am
  
  I’m the same way! I think I get so excited about how quickly I can get through the text, and so I fly through it without taking time to appreciate the pictures. In the second half of the book I had to remind myself to slow down and take in everything on the page. I’m always amazed how much can be in just one frame.
  
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Miranda Aragon 4.2.10 / 11am

Greg,

I love the point you are getting at with the picture and a thousand words versus a blurb of text being worth a thousand images. I read Fun Home in two different setting, my house and at the gym. When I am at my house I am able to look at the pictures in much more detail. I take more time and I find myself getting more out of the story from the pictures then the text.

When I read Fun Home at the gym it is an entirely different story. I read the text and barely look at the pictures (Its hard for me to look at pictures when I am on the treadmill).

They are two totally different experiences, but after reading your blog I see that there is nothing wrong what I am doing. Neither method is better or worse than the other.

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Holly Arnold 4.3.10 / 4pm

I feel as though Bechdel’s treatment of death allows her to examine her father’s death in a more objective way then she otherwise could have. It is as though she is separate from death; death is far from being portrayed as morbid-it is treated as though it is something very casual. This treatment of death seems to be central to the book because it provides her a way to systematically treat the events of her father’s death with logic-as though she is a professional detective rather than a child reflecting on the death of her father.

Yet although she is very disconnected, she does through in a few sentences to show you that she is indeed very affected by the emotion associated with her father’s death (such as when she almost says she wants to have been the reason why her father killed himself because it provides her with “a bond”). These are important because it still allows her to show her love of her father while still trying to be objective about his death.

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Kate Autera 4.5.10 / 10am

The emotional detachment from death is what really drew me in. How many weepy, over-emotional accounts of death have you read in novels? Millions. It almost seems to be the way writers choose to discuss death when they just don’t know what else to say. It’s expected. Bechdel’s reaction to her father’s death feels so much more honest and brave. As I read, I trusted her account of her life, never feeling like she had tried to make things more meaningful or emotional in order to sell a few more copies of her book.

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1. Lyndsey Weiss 4.5.10 / 11am
  
  I definitely agree with that. It was definitely a nice change to the normal autobiography of a death occurring in someone’s family. Plus, she feels this way about death for such a valid reason instead of just detaching herself from those emotions by herself. Her dad being a mortician had to have an effect on her. It was a different take on this type of story.
  
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