Loss, Revision, Translation: Re-Membering the Father’s Fragmented Self in Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Fun Home is a rereading of a family history characterized by false appearances, composed many years after the suicide, or accidental death, of the author’s father; as is not uncommon in memoirs, it relies heavily on archives, but the use to which they are put in this graphic novel is quite singular. This paper analyzes Alison Bechdel’s peculiar autobiographical mode through a focus on a few of the photos in Fun Home, all of which have been redrawn by the cartoonist, whose hand holding them is often also drawn, so that, far from merely testifying to the veracity of the narrated events, as the author insists, they greatly contribute to the complexity of the graphic and narrative composition, combining syntagmatic and paradigmatic gestures (montage and juxtaposition, superimposition and substitution) that endow this attempt to recover the figure of the father, and the father-daughter lineage, with a powerful poetic expressiveness.