Discussion Posts – Page 7 – ENGL 25640 The Problem of Fictional Character

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Solipsistic tendencies in Fun Home

Trying to relate to other people is a constant in Fun Home, but Alison chooses to do it through the form of the autobiography: on page 139-140, she establishes a line, from her family as a “mildly autistic colony”, her father’s life as a “solipsistic circle of self, from autodidact to autocrat to autocide” and her own “compulsive propensity to autobiography”. Characters in Fun Home seem to try to hold themselves up, living not in relations to each other but building their character-system by the force of their own narration. Alison’s epistemological crisis, where nouns and declarative sentences suddenly cannot take a fixed and delimited meaning in her autobiographical experience, could result from the failure of Alison trying to define herself without this relation to others: adopting a subjective, solipsistic perspective has made her unsure of what links words and meaning, signifier and signified. This crisis starts to find a resolution –materially, in the diary, and epistemologically – once her mother’s handwriting takes over (149), when two consciousness meet. It is also resolved in experience, the setting sun creating a silent understanding between her and her father.

The effect of narrative reliability on the gap between signifier and signified in Fun Home

February 7, 2018 / jenayang / 0 Comments

After our discussion of intertextuality and its function in Fun Home in class on Monday, I found the segments of chapter five and six in which Bechdel talks about her journal entries particularly interesting. She includes the entries to reveal both the extent of her obsessive compulsive disorder and her resulting “epistemological crisis” (141) as she realizes that “all [she] could speak for was [her] own perceptions, and perhaps not even that.” (141) The passages develop her character within the narrative while raising questions as to how her character is developed by the narrative and whether it can be reliable. Bechdel as narrator does appear reliable in how she relates the past — regarding her diary entry on a camping trip, she notes that “considering the profound psychic impact of the adventure, my notes on it are surprisingly cursory” (143) and later that her journal “was no longer the utterly reliable document it had been in my youth.” (162) But the passages also have clear metanarrative implications, with Fun Home itself as another example of autobiography that could demonstrate “the troubling gap between word and meaning” (143) and “could not bear the weight of such a laden experience,” (143) and so they raise questions as to how we read the novel and its characters. Particularly, how do we manage the “gaping rift between signifier and signified” (142) to understand Bechdel as a character and person, not only within her memories of the past, but in the present day of her narration? This question comes back to the central tension of fictional character that we have focused on over the course of our class.

Sexuality in Fun Home

February 6, 2018 / jpanct1 / 0 Comments

As Fun Home progresses, the relationship between Alison and her father shows at the same time, increasing contrast but increasing similarities, specifically in their sexuality and their preferences. As Alison becomes more aware of her sexuality, her father’s preferences start to contrast heavily to hers. “Indeed, I had become a connoisseur of masculinity at an early age”(95). The bottom panel of the page shows her father, meticulously polishing a vase of flowers, while Alison sits in front of a television, watching a show featuring cowboys and guns. Likewise, on page 99, her father insists that Alison puts on some pearls, stating that she was afraid of being beautiful. Alison tells her father to leave her alone. In the next panel, she suggests that her father should get a suit with a vest. Instead of objecting however, her father meekly agrees. The differing in these two responses indicates precisely the willingness both parties are to revealing their sexuality. While Alison refuses the pearls, thereby confirming herself as a lesbian, her father agrees to the suit and vest, therefore continuing his facade of the heterosexual man.

Omniscient Narrator in Fun Home

February 6, 2018 / rnaimon / 0 Comments

While reading Fun Home, I’ve been thinking about the fictitiousness of memoir, and in particular, graphic memoir. One avenue of my thoughts on this subject is the question of point of view. There’s a particular moment I noted on page 185, in which Bechdel draws two scenes in a row picturing her father and his court-ordered counselor. The first is straightforward—an imagining of her father arriving for his session. The second is more imaginative: the counselor’s eyebrow is made to give him a furtive look and he is adjusting his tie in what looks like nervousness. However, Bechdel never met that man. In her written sections, she writes that the idea that the two were having an affair was in the categories of “suspicions” and “tempting.” For two beats, Bechdel gives herself something of an omniscient POV, compounded by the visuals of something she never could have actually seen. Her hypothetical musings are rendered in images, not just words, and become a part of the memoir. She does the same thing on page 192-3, with her brother’s solo jaunt in New York. It includes the phrases, “When he realized,” and “Instinctively,” as if Bechdel is in his head. Again, she can take on an omniscient POV. By the end, in saying, “I shouldn’t pretend to know what my father’s [erotic truth] was” (230), there is an acknowledgment of the subjectivity of all of these omniscient truths. However, “shouldn’t” and “tempting” does not mean that Bechdel does not. Writing this memoir was an exercise in pretending to know the meanings of events rather than simple recall. The writer Bechdel has afforded her narrative self-character the omniscience that she (the author) lacks.

Community and Belonging in Fun Home

February 5, 2018 / aattie / 1 Comment

One of the things that struck me in the opening chapters of Fun Home was Alison’s sense of her community and her place in the various communities she describes. We get descriptions mainly of Alison’s interactions with two communities – the family community that she was born into and struggles to navigate, and the queer community which she discovers in college. The intersection of these two communities was quite interesting to me, particularly as Alison struggles to reconcile her father’s sexuality with her own experience of sexuality. For Alison, joining (at least for one meeting) the Gay Union at school is a method of declaring her sexuality both to herself and to her community, and when she leaves she feels “exhilarated.” Alison’s discovery of her sexuality through books, these meetings, and her relationship with Joan serves the function of a kind of coming of age narrative within the novel, but this arc is complicated by her relationship with her family. Alison describes her declaration of her sexuality to her family as overshadowed by the news of her father’s affairs with young men, claiming that she had been “upstaged, demoted in [her] own drama to comic relief in [her] parents’ tragedy” (58). Alison seems to resent her father for this, but at the same time, it helps her to make sense of her relationship with him and her role within the family. Alison seems to find some sort of comfort in labeling herself as the “butch” to her father’s “nelly” (15), and this is further exemplified as Alison ponders whether her coming out could have influenced her father’s suicide. She writes that she is “reluctant to let go of that last, tenuous bond,” (86) implying that some part of her wants to have influenced her father’s death. Having grown up with such an estranged, complex relationship with her father, and with her own sexuality, the intersection of these two narratives seems to provide a sense of belonging and comfort for Alison, even though these personal

Defining interiority through sexuality in Fun Home

February 5, 2018 / elliotk / 0 Comments

In Fun Home, Allison spends a majority of the first four chapters investigating her father through his actions, but instead of immediately compiling them to create a coherent person, she first breaks them down into pieces of a sexuality. While Alison acknowledges her father is defined by his actions, she attempts to form a character instead from what she sees as the similarities between her and him. We see this a few times, most notably on page 97, on which a blank box reads “It’s imprecise and insufficient defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex”. She follows this with a panel where her back is turned, captioned “But in the admittedly limited sample comprising my father and me, perhaps it is sufficient.” The end of chapter four continues with this mirroring, with the two photographs of Allison and her dad respectively, taken in their twenties.

By using her own narrative of her own sexuality, Allison can find traits of what she can conceive as her own character and construct a new character out of those pieces. Passages that would at first to appear to be about her own narrative are really about her father. We see this with the panels on page 97, where a drawing where Allison’s sex is indistinguishable because of the direction she is facing is captioned with text describing the sexuality of her father – only through her own development can we reimagine what interiority could be contained in the exteriority of her father.

Agency in Fun Home

February 5, 2018 / ingoldjr / 1 Comment

Throughout my reading of Fun Home, I was interested in the ways in which the format of a memoir would impact the development of fictional character. Despite the fact that Alison Bechdel is afforded the freedom to develop her character and the character of her father in a way that feels natural to her, I was also struck by the lack of agency/sense of lack of agency within the graphic memoir. When Alison discovers that her father had been having affairs with other men, for example, she describes the revelation as being “demoted from protagonist…to comic relief” (58). Not only does this news upend the way in which Alison views herself as a character, but it’s also viewed as an “abrupt and wholesale revision” (79) of Bechdel’s history, as if the rug had been pulled out from underneath the character. With that being said, I think the concept of agency is a complicated one, especially because Fun Home is a memoir that is told through flashbacks and memories. Is it fair to say that Bechdel’s character lacks agency even though her counterpart in the real world is responsible for telling her story? And how exactly does a memoir, or the idea that the author is recreating themselves in the fictional form, change the way we look at the characters?

Fun Home: Who’s the Real Protagonist?

February 5, 2018 / caitlin24538 / 0 Comments

“I’d been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parent’s tragedy” (58).

Last class, we discussed the possibility of minor character’s stories overshadowing that of the protagonist in relation to Woloch’s idea of the reader’s “double-vision,” or awareness of both the story being told and all the other stories that are implied, but not told. Thinking about this in relation to Fun Home, it brings forth the question of who is the real protagonist. In the other two books we’ve read so far, Invisible Man and The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonist was distinctly clear. None of the minor characters came close to overshadowing the invisible man or Oedipa, and all of them existed in the novels to solely to help the character development and self-realizations of the respective protagonists. However, the situation is different with Fun Home. The story of Alison’s parents, particularly that of her father, overshadows, and as she writes “upstages” her own story. She is finding herself again and again relegated to the role of minor character. Her discovery of her sexual identity, clearly a huge moment in the story of her own life, takes a backseat to the events surrounding her parents. We first learn of her sexual realization as part of the story about her father’s death. She jumps over it so briefly as her father’s story overpowers her own, that she has to go back and retell it again a few pages later, this time remembering to add details about herself.

So, again, there is the question, who is the protagonist? Alison or her father? Because while his story often overpowers hers, him and his story are instrumental to Alison’s development and self-realization. In that function, he is a minor character, adding to the protagonist’s growth over the course of the story.

Enjoying Pleasure: differentiation and identification of Alison and the father

February 5, 2018 / hyunahn / 0 Comments

Two members of the family may happen to share homosexual tendencies. But it seems that for Alison, homosexuality was one of very few means of Alison identifying with the father. When explaining the father’s death, Alison allocates a Webster’s dictionary page of the word “queer.” Alison makes it very clear that although many definitions of the word may explain the father’s death, homosexuality was the one concept that most well-defined the existence of the father and his demise: “most compellingly at the time, his death was bound up for me with the one definition conspicuously missing from our mammoth Webster’s” (57). In the cuts in the same page, Alison holds up her sherry glass in a peculiar perpendicular way as if she were giving a toast, and then follows to drink it. The father in the later scenes draw a reminding parallel with Alison (of course in reality it would have been Alison replicating the father) as he also raises his glass in the same way (65). What is more implicit is that Alison drinks her sherry glass as if she were to enjoy her drink while a page of the word “queer” is forward-deployed towards the readers, while the father only raises the glass but not drinks it.

On the other hand, Roy, the father’s (supposed) sexual partner drinks it, as a possible counterpart for Alison’s Webster’s page of the word “queer.” The interpretation of the scene is that the two characters are both shown to be homosexuals, but while Alison openly admits her homosexuality and enjoys her pleasure, the father is portrayed and implied to have fragmented himself between his homosexuality identified by Roy in the cut and a father that not-so-successfully takes care of his family. This schizophrenic division of self is expressed when Roy goes onto drink and enjoy the sherry while the father does not, at least in front of others such as the mother. Considering that the father’s trial happened due to alcohol and the fact that he offered it to other teenage boys, the sherry scene is fairly foreshadowing. The father’s drinking and pleasure habits are deliberately concealed and kept in secret, unlike Alison; as those habits are exposed, the father is put in legal peril. Alison, as she comes out of the closet, does not meet a similar fate, at least not in the book.

Unreliability regardless knowledge of the future

February 5, 2018 / Ashley / 1 Comment

There seem to be two lines of narration in the book: the text which is an older Alison’s account of past events, and the pictures that showed things that were actually taking place, and therefore the textual narration could provide readers with information of events that had not yet happened in the pictures. The older Alison could be more reliable than the younger one in sense of her knowledge of “future,” for example she foretold her father’s death — “It’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty/But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him”(23) — but it does not give her full credit as a reliable narrator. The older Alison attributed his father’s death to suicide, yet combined with her confession— “It’s possible that we chose to believe this because it was less painful” — which showed the cause of her father’s death was indeterminate, the readers could see her probably subconscious attempt to filter past events and her awareness of her subjectivity. Similarly, when the older Alison commented on the motive or feeling of the younger Alison, she filled in psychological activities which the dialogues and images failed to present, but it could be rather a reinterpretation of the event that we as readers could refer to instead of taking as truth.

ENGL 25640 The Problem of Fictional Character

University of Chicago