Closing the Gap in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

Alison Bechdel’s 2006 memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, makes a strong and explicit claim for the power of graphic narrative as witness. Employing the straightforward visual style developed over more than twenty years as creator of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, in Fun Home Bechdel explores her relationship with her father, Bruce, who died when she was in college. Although his death was declared an accident—he was hit by a truck while working outdoors near their family’s home in rural Pennsylvania—Bechdel is convinced it was a suicide, a sign of his deep unhappiness. The event occurs shortly after she comes out to her parents as a lesbian, an announcement that is followed by the revelation that her father, too, has struggled with his sexuality. In the memoir, Bechdel seeks to understand the connections between her father’s life and her own and to work through the trauma that can accompany queer identity. Created in the shadow of a father who “used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not” (2006a, 16), however, Fun Home bears witness not only to Bruce Bechdel’s trauma and its effect on his family, but also to the artist’s effort to claim the authority to represent their story.¹

Bechdel’s comic style may at first seem almost “invisible” behind her exploration of other mediums, particularly photography and literature.² Photographs and texts are critical to her effort to uncover her family’s history, and she relies on them extensively in structuring Fun Home. Hillary Chute notes that a family photograph drawn by Bechdel appears at the beginning of every chapter (Bechdel 2006b, 1009), and these are carefully paired with phrases from works of literature relevant to this story of two English-teacher parents and their well-read daughter. In this context, what Bechdel has called the “usual cartoony style” she uses to draw most of the book seems to exist in service to the “real” documents and images it is used to explore (1009). Yet, as Ann Cvetkovich observes in her essay for this issue, the contribution of literature and photographs to understanding the story of a life are interrogated within the memoir, their usefulness as documentary evidence or narrative models held up to careful scrutiny (see pages 116 and 122, this volume). Photographs prove difficult to decipher, while overidentification with literature by and about other people threatens to throw lives off course. By framing each of her chapters with words and images that bear a complex relationship to each other, Bechdel reminds us that it is in the space between existing visual images and familiar storylines where we make meaning of our individual lives. Here, that is precisely the space described by comics. And while Fun Home casts doubt on our ability to interpret the visual and textual worlds around us, it also invests a particular faith in its author’s chosen medium.

Cvetkovich rightly identifies Fun Home as a work of what Marianne Hirsch has called postmemory (see page 113, this volume), a term for how the memory of trauma belonging to one generation can shape the memories of the next (Hirsch 1997, 22). In her ongoing study of postmemorial visual art, Hirsch has stressed the importance of “forms of identification that are nonappropriative,” through which artists may communicate the memory of transmitted trauma without claiming to know it fully (2002, 88). This is accomplished most successfully, Hirsch maintains, by work that “allows for a historical withholding that does not absorb the other” but is also able to “expand the circle of postmemory in multiple, inviting, and open-ended ways” (88).³ Consistent with these ideas, Cvetkovich shows how Bechdel admits to being unable to truly know her father’s trauma and thereby preserves the specificity of his story. Additionally, however, Bechdel relies upon the visual element of comics to bring the reader into her complex family history. As Hirsch has argued in Family Frames, “The individual subject is constituted in the space of the family through looking...