Samuel Otto Carolyn Callaghan Engl 111 23 February 2016

MP2 Proposal Line of Inquiry: Bechdel heavily employs the use of external texts, mostly fiction, to help interpret, retrospectively, her relationship with her father so that it fits a certain narrative. This narrative is one that, while not making assumptions of closeness or deeper connection to her father, describes Bruce Bechdel as still being there to support her. This reliance on allusion has multiple effects on her novel. First, it lends structure to the graphic novel, taking the reader through her maturation process. But it also calls into question the outright truthfulness of the scenes that she is portraying. Not to say that she is misleading the reader or lying about events, however in choosing scenes that fit this literary narrative, she is possibly not giving the reader the full picture. Evidences “My parents are most real to me in fictional terms” (67) Alison Bechdel utilizes two voices in the novel, Alison the narrator and Alison the subject, or character (or even actor). Alison the narrator is more important, yet Alison the character is more honest. Bechdel utilizes literature to understand here life through the retrospect. Her parents were most real to her in fictional terms. Even when introducing her father for the very first time, she uses an icarus metaphor. So the very foundation of her relationship with her father was based on literary allusion (in the eyes of the reader). “Once you grasped that Ulysses was based on The Odyssey, was it really necessary to enumerate every last point of correspondence? Maybe so. Without Homeric clues, it would certainly be unreadable.” (Bechdel, 206-207) She uses intertextual references to make sense of her own life, and thus help her find closure with her father’s death/relationship with her. She reads Ulysses, it serves as a literal and metaphorical connection between her and her father. However, she does not find it easy to get through. This parallels her own life, she seems to come up with understanding in her own life by drawing on literature and fiction to help ascribe meaning to her own life. “What if Icarus hadn’t hurtled into the sea? What if he’d inherited his father’s inventive bent? What might he have wrought? He did hurtle into the sea of course. But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I lept.” (Bechdel, 231-232)

On this last page she argues that the story of her and her father is pushed forward by tricky reverse narration. She is saying that she looks back and puts a story onto the relationship between her and her father. When analyzed this way, he was there for her. In this last chapter, she references times when he was there for her as she matured. She makes the statement that while she can’t exactly interpret his motives and actions, he did essentially catch her when she made the leap of faith (when coming out as gay). He did small actions like the letter to her, giving her Collette, connecting to her through fiction. She also ties everything together by starting and ending with the same literary reference. Since we know the story, she is allowed to be short and succinct in her remarks, which then delivers more power in her words. “In our Wind In The Willows coloring book, my favorite page was the map. I took for granted the parallels between this landscape and my own. Our creek flowed in the same direction of Ratty’s River. But the best thing about the Wind in the Willows map was its mystical bridging of the symbolic and the real, of the label and the thing itself” (Bechdel, 146-147). As the landscape parallels Bechdel’s landscape, so to does Bechdel parallel the Wind in the Willows through the bridging of the symbolic and the real. “Self-consciously literary, Bechdel creates a character of herself that interacts better with text than with people. In her own coming-out story, unsurprisingly, she finds answers to her feeling through textual evidence from Wilde, Colette, and other literary figures. Bechdel presents them [scenes from her coming out to her father] as treasured memories and ends her book with a salute to him. In her metaphor, her “Icarus” does not plummet into the sea; instead, her father has caught her.” (Booker, 233) Self explanatory. “The fact that Fun Home is also an elegy, a memorial for a dead father who is, in a sense, haunting Alison adds weight to this connection: Bechdel's "tragicomic" work, to use her own term, functions as a mausoleum to contain fragments of Bruce's life – his actions, his photographs, his marginal notes, his letters. By casting her father in various mythic, symbolic, and literary roles (here, from the Icarus legend; later, from The Odyssey/Ulysses, Freud, Wilde and Proust), Bechdel re-animates him, allows the dead man's spirit imaginary landscapes to inhabit”

“Finally, and to return to our Icarus inquiry, the comic series also contributes to this blurring of past and present. Playing with time, Bechdel can place her father in different positions within a given myth (as Icarus, as Daedalus, etc.) based on his behaviors and attributes at a given moment (Daedalus in his father role; Icarus falling when shamed); playing with space, she can stagger such representations throughout her text, returning again and again to continue the metaphor, adjust or alter it.” (Mitchell)

Extra: -Also uses Marcel Proust to describe her father. Proust was a homosexual. Rather than imposing her father into the book she alludes to the author himself Proust’s tendencies towards having feminine characters actually be in reference to young men, points to Allison’s own desire to be referred to as the opposite gender. Is she more referring to Proust to describe her father or herself? Is this a way of forging connection? -Father’s almost obsession with F. Scott Fitzgerald. He sees himself in Fitzgerald. Bechdel herself compares him to Jimmy Gatz. This suspension of the imaginary and the real connects both characters. Her father’s closeted homosexuality and obsession with the grand. -College experience mirrors Odyssey. -Much of Allison’s past was filled with unresolve and unsure of herself. So she finds certainty in retrospect through literature and fiction. Citations: Booker, M. Keith. "Fun Home." Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels. Vol. 1. N.p.: Greenwood Group, 2010. 232-33. Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels. Web. 23 Feb. 2016. Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print. Mitchell, Adrielle. "Spectral Memory, Sexuality and Inversion: An Arthrological Study of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic." . ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. 4.3 (2009). Dept of English, University of Florida. 23 Feb 2016. <http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v4_3/mitchell/>.