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Autobiography?
Fiction?
Autobiografiction?
Some Fun underlying themes
loss/longing (for something that never
existed?)
ambivalence: anger/admiration
shock and trauma
roles and role-playing
truth, lies, censorship
books and reading
writing as self-narration
A narrative about narration
narrating as creating the self
autobiography as selfcreation
narration as identity
Glossary: Narrating-I;
Experiencing-I
In retrospective first-person
narration, the narrating-I is the older
self who recounts the experience
undergone by the earlier experienceI .(Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory)
The narrating-I is the older self who
creates a narrative of herself as an
experiencing-I , and in doing so creates
her own identity. [MCK]
The narrator-I and the
character-I
the narrator-Bechdel and
the character-Bechdel
Or
Alison ( 4 years old to 21+ years
old)
Bechdel (21-26 years old)
Old father, old artificer, stand me now
and ever in good stead.
The first allusion in Fun Home.
The last line in James Joyces A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1915)
James Joyces Stephen Dedalus
Stephen reads his life through every
part of the Daedalus myth. He seeks a
spiritual Daedalus as his father to give
him the identity of an artist. He wanders
through a labyrinth of the Dublin streets
and of his mind. He is the monster, the
Minotaur, in his lusts. He is Icarus,
overly-proud, and aiming too high. But
in the end, he prays to Daedalus as his
protector, and the one whose mantle he
Pieter Breughels The Fall of Icarus
Continuities and reversals
Bruce Bechdel is Daedalus and Alison
is Icarus 3.3
But Bruce Bechdel may also be Icarus
4.1
Alison is the Minotaur, in the labyrinth
12.1-4
Bechdel fears she may have been
Icarus to her fathers Daedalus. Did he
care? 12.5-6
Chronology: the story
1936 Bruce Bechdel born
1957 he goes to college, then meets
her mother in NY, they marry
late 50s he does his service in
the army; they live in Germany;
Alison conceived
c. 1960 grandfathers heart attack;
they return home to run the funeral
home
A-chronology: memory work
Opening, about seven?
10 eleven? longer hair
15 about seven
21.1 eleven
21.2 back to seven
27 about 20; his death
35.3 in first grade (barrette in hair)
36.2 seven
36.3 three years old grandfathers death
Cycling around fathers death
23.1 first mention of his death
27 his funeral
30 his tomb stone
45.5 news of his death
46 returning home after his death
50 returning home after his death; the the
funeral
54 cemetery; his tombstone
Repetitions: the moments of
again!
Icarian games (3-4)
the bath (22)
the story about Dad stuck in the mud
(39-42)
(beginning of reversal?)
moments of trauma
the moment she got the phone
message from her mother 28.5
echoing a moment from the past? 32.3
the call home 45.5
moments of trauma
first revelation to the reader of the
fathers homosexuality 17.1
first revelation to Alison 58.5
narrative is recursive, not
chronologicalit returns again and
again to central, traumatic events
Glossary:
story and (narrative) discourse
Story: the chronological plot as we can
reconstruct it
Discourse: the how of how the story
is told
The house
fathers obsession with truth to the
original: authenticity 6.5; 9.4
or are ornamentations all lies? is
decoration covering up? 16.2
relates to role-playing, the fake and the
sham 17.1-3
Alison's preference for the unadorned
and functional 14. 4
yet consider Bechdel's drawings:
The house as both a mimetic and an
imaginary creation
our house was not a real home at all
but a simulacra of one, a museum 17.3
but like Charles Addams cartoons in
the New Yorker 34.2
Fun Home
Funeral home
revivify and ultimately dispose of the
dead
Fun House in circus
mirrorsrepetitions; the same space
copied and recycled; also the labyrinth;
you go and meet yourself coming back
20.4
Fun Home
Libidinal. Manic. Martyred.
Brns parish church. Passion of
Christ (15th century ): Bearing of the
cross.
Hieronymus Bosch
The Way to Calvary 16th C
Sisyphus Titian 1549
Albert Camus,
The Myth of Sisyphus
You have already grasped that Sisyphus
is the absurd hero. He is, as much through
his passions as through his torture. His
scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and
his passion for life won him that
unspeakable penalty in which the whole
being is exerted toward accomplishing
nothing. This is the price that must be paid
for the passions of this earth. Nothing is
told us about Sisyphus in the underworld.
In the letters he sent me at college,
sometimes he seemed the perfect absurd
hero, Sisyphus shouldering his boulder
with detached joy. 49.1
"the line that Dad drew between reality
and fiction was indeed a blurry one."
59.4
My parents are most real to me in
fictional terms 67.1
Alisons first autobiographical crisis:
How did I know that the things I was
writing were absolutely, objectively
true? 141.3
But how do you have a self without a
narrative?
And if narratives can be told in different
ways, what is true?