Image by unknown photographer for Office of War Information, via Wikimedia Commons.
by Oscar Mead
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a reflection not just on grief, but on the illusionary properties of death. Like Bechdel’s life, the book is defined by the presumed suicide of her father. The graphic novel presents its subjects in relation to this monumental event – death especially. Although approached from various angles, death belongs, inevitably, to her father. Bechdel pulls from her life in an endeavor to piece together a complete image of him. Her attempts to understand her father are attempts at untangling the emotional knot that has defined her life. In the process of unveiling some ‘truthful’ depiction of him, Bechdel strays from reality; as he becomes more complex, and she learns more about him, his figure is further eclipsed. In death, her father is simultaneously decoded and disguised. His secrets are posthumously divulged, yet they only add to the intricacy of Bechdel’s interrogation. As she delves deeper, his death becomes the only lens through which she is capable of viewing him. In her impossible task of encapsulating her father, the futility of her attempts at creating his completed image becomes exposed. He becomes retroactively concealed. Death in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home obscures representation; death simultaneously reveals and simplifies the concealed dimensions of Bechdel’s father – ultimately, overriding who he really was.
Death in Bechdel’s Fun Home uncovers revelatory insight into her father, exposing his most private and closely guarded ‘self.’ After her father’s death, Bechdel is able to explore both physical and mental spaces previously barred to her, both in analyzing memories with a new perspective, and through literally searching her father’s belongings. While doing the latter, Bechdel comes across a collection of photographs, including an inappropriate picture of their teenaged male babysitter lying shirtless on a bed in a hotel room: “In fact, the picture is beautiful […] Why am I not properly outraged? Perhaps I identify too well with my father’s illicit awe. A trace of this seems caught in the photo, just as a trace of Roy has been caught on the light-sensitive paper.”[1] Although at this moment Bechdel already knows about the nature of her father’s relationship with Roy, she is, perhaps for the first time, seeing him as truly vulnerable. This picture is evidence of not just his clandestine affair, but of the passion behind it. Bechdel immediately recognizes the trace of her father’s “illicit awe”; she can see, exposed to the world, her father immersed in sensuality. The shot shows more than just its dimly lit subject – it shows the angle at which her father appreciated the scene he so delicately enjoyed. More naked than the boy he relishes in, his elation, his unrestrained zeal, his intoxication with freedom is laid bare. In this image, he is wholly and willingly exposed in the private comfort of the hotel room. This picture captures not just a subject (Roy), but a look given by a man temporarily freed from the monotony of his restrained life. Scholar Sara Villamarín-Freire similarly recognizes the insight revealed by the uncovered photograph, but misinterprets its underlying significance. Her essay argues – primarily – that Fun Home, through its visual-textual devices, deconstructs the typical ‘patriarchal father figure’ through its raw depiction of Bechdel’s late father. One of the essay’s pieces of evidence for this claim is the way in which Roy’s portrait affects Bechdel: “In holding the photo and looking at it, Bechdel inhabits her father’s gaze, and thereby becomes a sympathetic witness to her father’s hidden sexuality.”[2] Villamarín-Freire conversely understands the method by which this picture translates its meaning – through embodying Bechdel’s “father’s gaze.”[3] However, if we expand beyond the narrow conclusion that this allows Bechdel to become a “sympathetic witness to her father’s hidden sexuality,”[4] the photograph assumes greater significance. Again, this photograph is so impactful to Bechdel because it exposes not the affair, but the tenderness tied to it. Villamarín-Freire correctly assesses that this shared look allows Bechdel to connect more deeply with her father, but her conclusion is reductive and too focused on the aesthetics of the moment. Bechdel’s “father’s hidden sexuality” is just the catalyst for the greater reveal of his emotion; she is in awe because she is seeing her father without emotional walls, not because he is gay. Their shared ‘gayness’ isn’t the end of the discussion, but the beginning; this glimpse into her father is impactful not because of their shared sexuality, but because she can see that this is true. The revelation is itself momentous while the details of what is revealed are secondary to her father’s vulnerability. Amidst the same collection of photos to which Roy’s portrait belongs, Bechdel finds other unveiled images. She introduces them to the reader first by commenting, “What’s lost in translation is the complexity of loss itself,” before moving on to the actual description of her findings: “He’s wearing a women’s bathing suit. A fraternity prank? But the pose he strikes is not mincing or silly at all. He’s lissome, elegant.”[5] Whereas the picture of Roy indirectly displays her father’s emotion, this photograph of her father in drag presents him assertively. This image has no need for “translation” – it is itself a total encapsulation of a freer, more invigorated version of her father, a seemingly ‘truer’ version of him. He is captured head-on, fully exposed. Only in death is he made so clear. These images could have been unearthed while he was alive, but now, having no agency in their consumption, his emotions lay bare. He cannot combat the clear evidence presented in these photographs, he cannot deny or ‘play off’ what they display. It is the finality of death that truly ends this discussion; all that’s left are the photos, not explanations or ‘cover-ups.’ These pictures are visceral because they cannot be cheapened by lame attempts to re-hide this side of him. Death has nullified his defense; here he is, this is how he felt – there is no rebuttal. This vulnerability could only be exposed after his death, once these pieces of Bechdel’s father – known only to a select few – have been revealed to her. The question then arises: is Bechdel able to complete her desired representation of her father? Absurdly, she cannot. Bearing witness to these new pieces of him does not bring Bechdel clarity, they only further complicate her restoration efforts.
The newly unobstructed pieces of her father exposed by death do not contribute to a veracious account of the man he was; they do not equate to a ‘true’ image of him. In trying to reconcile the many facets of her father, Bechdel incorporates her understanding of his vulnerability into her reconstruction of him. However, the new information she acquires is not illuminating. While coping with the absurdity of her father’s death, Bechdel seeks to explain his willingness to die through his sexuality, writing, “I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one’s erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.”[6] Bechdel’s greater understanding of her father and his sexuality does not explain the depths of his character, but instead opens new pathways for her endless interrogation. These new lines of questioning only feed into Bechdel’s need to understand him; they do not satiate her desperate hunger. By framing his willingness to die through the “sexual shame” that she has uncovered – whether correct or not – she is imposing herself onto him. She is interpreting the bits of him left behind, and in so doing, moving away from truth. Her conclusions may have precedent, but they are arrived at in vain. Peering into his sensual side pulls her further into herself, as opposed to him. Jessie Munton’s metaphysical interrogation of perception in her essay, “How to See Invisible Objects”, dissects this idea. The essay, as its name suggests, focuses on the mechanics of perception and the implications they have on experience. In the first section of the paper, while explaining that experience and perception are linked to time, Munton uses an example reflective of Bechdel’s decoding of her father:
A phrase of music ending in a perfect cadence and one ending in an interrupted cadence may conclude on the very same chord. It can seem as though one’s experience of hearing that final chord differs in the two cases not just in the sense of completion or homecoming that the perfect cadence has […] but in the more basic auditory experience of hearing the notes themselves.[7]
Munton argues that experience is formed by the culmination of several moments surrounding a single subject; the interpretation of an individual ‘snapshot’ of an experience is fundamentally incomplete, or even unfaithful. Bechdel’s construction of her father functions under this same principle. The captured elements of her father act as fragments of the greater ‘experience’ of him – the ‘truthful representation’ she is trying to create. Each new piece of him she uncovers does reveal another ‘snapshot’, but it is impossible to ascertain the greater significance of each fragment in isolation. As Munton’s example demonstrates, without possessing greater context, “one’s experience of hearing that final chord differs”; Bechdel’s findings cannot definitively ‘say’ anything concrete about her father. Applying this understanding of perception, how can any of Bechdel’s conclusions about her father’s supposed “sexual shame” be grounded in reality? They cannot. Without the whole image, the conclusions she draws from any posthumously unearthed ‘snapshot’ are solely based in speculation. They come from herself, not her father. Thus, in attempting to ascertain the motivations of her father’s suicide, Bechdel creates the meaning she wishes to see. A few pages after her hypothesis about “sexual shame”, Bechdel acknowledges, albeit somewhat vaguely, the impact that her interpretation has on the ‘sides’ of her father she is uncovering: “Perhaps my eagerness to claim him as ‘gay’ in the way I’m ‘gay’, as opposed to bisexual or some other category, is just a way of keeping him to myself – a sort of inverted Oedipal complex.”[8] Bechdel’s desire to “claim” her father’s sexuality is a microcosm of her general interaction with the information she learns through his death. In witnessing his vulnerability, she is not given the answers to her questions, but more perspectives from which to ask. She assumes he is gay and recognizes her bias in doing so. She hasn’t received any absolute evidence, only inclinations – hints that add to the ever-growing portfolio of her father. Villamarín-Freire describes this collection as an “archive” – a fitting term that captures both the methodical and meticulous way Bechdel compiles the puzzle pieces of her father: “However, the archive she assembles cannot speak for Bruce. We have no way (and nor does the author) to gain access to Bruce’s experience or testimony, which leaves a blank space that is filled in by his daughter’s narrative.”[9] Unable to “speak for Bruce”, each photograph, each note left behind, is incapable of telling Bechdel anything ‘true.’ However convincing the narrative she spins may be, her extrapolations of each uncovered archeological find are distorted echoes at best since, as Munton recognizes, a single chord cannot be experienced without its accompanying phrase. The insights Bechdel gains are mutable and subject to differing interpretations. Although she learns more about him, the image she wishes so fervently to see remains opaque, hidden by a multitude of possible meanings. Yet this opacity is not just unaffected by her discoveries but further clouded.
Death, in exposing the vague and interpretable elements of her father, obnubilates his character and distances him from reality. Bechdel’s interpretation of her father creates a narrative – it demands it. The many pieces, the sides of him she unearths, are desperately forged together in an attempt at cohesion. Exposed by his death, and made overtly visible, Bechdel has the vulnerable pieces of the permanently unfinished puzzle that make up her father. Her desire to fit them together – to complete a truthful reconstruction of who he was – overwhelms her ability to see him clearly. As Villamarín-Freire puts it, “Through her act of narrative creation Bechdel takes over the author-creator role, replacing her father as the new master narrator.”[10] Although it seems obvious that Fun Home is about Bechdel’s father, the true focus is on Bechdel herself; her impossible task of wholly representing him necessitates a departure from reality and from him. As she interprets and narrativizes the fragments of her father left behind, she becomes the “master narrator” and overrides his image. Near the beginning of the graphic novel, as Bechdel first speaks of her father’s death, she expresses this sentiment: “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.”[11] The insight to which she is now privy does not account for the missing pieces of this puzzle but reshapes the ones she already had. Each memory – each newly discovered secret or confession from her father – can only be seen “retroactively” through the lens of his suicide. The true image of the puzzle is cut away and stretched as she jumbles the pieces together. The resulting scene – her ‘Frankensteined’ vignette – does not satisfy her, and thus she must fill in the gaps. Munton, in analyzing the process of experience, highlights, in a more formal logical sense, the fallibility of perception as it is assaulted by memory: “A view that claims such stimulation is essential for perception is forced to say that our conscious experience flips constantly between moments of seeing and moments of remembering. And yet to the subject these states are functionally and phenomenally indistinguishable.”[12] Applying this interpretation of perception to Bechdel, it becomes clear she operates under Munton’s experiential clause. Bechdel, while not switching between personal memory and perception, is oscillating between her desired narrative and the interpretation of the ‘evidence’ left by her father. Yet, just as in Munton’s example, to Bechdel, “these states are functionally and phenomenally indistinguishable.” The result is the same. Bechdel is producing an image of her father that travels increasingly further from truth; left with only these incomplete pieces, it is impossible for her to fit them together without distorting the final image. A wholly encapsulating and faithful reconstruction of her father is, by necessity, the harmonization of her interpretation and her craving – no such scene can exist with what has been left behind. In one of her many attempts at hiding the stitches, Bechdel attaches her father to a plausible story: “A narrative of injustice, of sexual shame and fear, of life considered expendable. It’s tempting to say that, in fact, this is my father’s story. There’s a certain emotional expedience to claiming him as a tragic victim of homophobia.”[13] Her endeavor to narrativize her father is a response to the incomplete picture of him that remains. To frame him, in this particular example, as a “tragic victim of homophobia”, is to fabricate her own closure. Through Bechdel’s endeavors to complete the image of her father, the futility of the task becomes clear. As Villamarín-Freire asserts, “The archive becomes not a warrant of truth, but rather the exposure of the feverish process by which truth is sought […] as the whole memoir explores how telling the difference between reality and representations of it is a futile enterprise.”[14] Bechdel is barred from truth and so her many attempts at ‘faithfully’ representing her father cannot succeed. Fun Home doesn’t explore the truth of her father, but the “feverish process by which truth is sought” since, in death, Bechdel has lost not only her father but any chance at understanding him. Through her narrativization Bechdel denies this. She clings, desperately, to the idea that through analysis and dedication, she may come to overcome this barrier. However, the reality of the situation is much bleaker than Bechdel can admit. The death of her father forever resigns him to obscurity. Just as how in death he cannot deny his previously hidden passion that is posthumously revealed to his daughter, he also cannot answer her questions. The possibility of explanation has been permanently replaced by his suicide. Left solely with this final act, Bechdel can only ever partially parse her father. Any attempt to complete his image is an exercise in fiction; she will never wholly and faithfully encapsulate who he was.
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home understands death. Centered around the suicide of the father of the book’s author and protagonist, Fun Home is framed by loss. Bechdel, in and through this graphic novel, seeks to understand and truthfully represent her father. Traveling non-chronologically through her life, Fun Home uses Bechdel’s feelings and experiences to endeavor to decipher the truth of her father. His suicide reveals elements of himself that become visible only posthumously; his most vulnerable and passionate sides are exposed through previously hidden ‘snapshots’ of his private, and, at times, illicit life. Unable to explain or deny the information contained by these unintended silent confessions, Bechdel’s father becomes ‘falsely’ depicted. Death resigns him to silence, and his daughter to an incomplete unsolvable puzzle. Her only method to fill in the gaps of the unfinished portrait of her father is for Bechdel to stray from reality and truth, to create fictitious cohesion. What option does she have? Left with no context and no explanation, all she can hope to do is compile the incomplete and ununderstood pieces of her father – her reconstructions that are unable to authentically capture the man he was. Death, despite unearthing aspects of her father, ultimately shrouds his image. Death makes Bechdel’s understanding forever impossible.
Endnotes
[1] Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Tragicomic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 100.
[2] Sarah Villamarin-Freire, “Two Ways of Looking at the Father: Sharon Olds’ The Father and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,” 425F Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature 27 (July 2022): 179.
[3] Villamarin-Freire, “Looking at the Father,” 179.
[4] Villamarin-Freire, “Looking at the Father,” 179.
[5] Bechdel, Fun Home, 120.
[6] Bechdel, Fun Home, 228.
[7] Jessie Munton, “How to See Invisible Objects,” Nous 56, no. 2 (2021): 346.
[8] Bechdel, Fun Home, 230.
[9] Villamarin-Freire, “Looking at the Father,” 176.
[10] Villamarin-Freire, “Looking at the Father,” 176.
[11] Bechdel, Fun Home, 23.
[12] Munton, “Invisible Objects,” 357.
[13] Bechdel, Fun Home, 196.
[14] Villamarin-Freire, “Looking at the Father,” 176.
Works Cited
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Munton, Jessie. “How to See Invisible Objects.” Nous 56, no. 2 (2021): 343–65.
Villamarin-Freire, Sarah. “Two Ways of Looking at the Father: Sharon Olds’ The Father and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” 425F Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature 27 (July 2022): 83–165.