![]() ![]() Gillian Whitlock has coined the term “autographics” to call attention to the representational strategies of graphic memoirs and the vocabularies mobilized by the possibilities of cartooning. The medium of comics is cross-discursive because it is composed of verbal and visual narratives that . . . As Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven argue, “comics is constituted in verbal and visual narratives that do not merely synthesize. . . . As a result, Fun Home invites-and requires-readers to read differently, to attend to disjunctions between the cartoon panel and the verbal text, to disrupt the seeming forward motion of the cartoon sequence and adopt a reflexive and recursive reading practice. ![]() ![]() At the same time it is intertextual, incorporating a wealth of Modernist literary references into comics that turns the form into a forum on the multi-textual pastiche of contemporary culture. By engaging with and drawing a range of visual forms, Bechdel emphasizes that cartoon representation, as a genuinely hybrid form or “out-law” genre of autobiography in Caren Kaplan’s term, is a multimodal form different from both written life narrative and visual or photographic self-portraiture. By working on and working through several aspects of the generational, personal, psychosexual, and political entanglements of family life, Fun Home maps new ground in life narrative.įun Home is, however, fundamentally different from verbal autobiography. Miller observes, “Autobiography’s story is about the web of entanglement in which we find ourselves, one that we sometimes choose” (“Entangled” 44, my emphasis). Fun Home reworks this experience in an autobiographical act of retrospective interpretation that is multiply embedded: in the familial network of other lives in the psychic pull of deep identifications around gender and sexuality in the commingling of literary and popular identity discourses that intersect in particular ways at a given historical moment and in the interplay of views on and views of the artist-maker as a self-construction always in process, in the reflexive exchange of hand, eye, and thought. “Fun Home” as a concept also evokes a fun-house of mirrors, which the family’s restored Gothic Revival home proves to be as a psychic incubator for Alison’s story. Their father Bruce is the funeral home’s director and mortician additionally, both parents teach high-school English. “A Family Tragicomic” asserts and its project of affirming the family despite and because of her father’s history avows.įun Home’s title refers to the family’s mid-century funeral home in the small town of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, near the Allegheny front, where Alison is the eldest child and only daughter in a family with three children. It hovers between the genres of tragedy and comedy, as its subtitle A memoir about memoirs, memory, and acts of storytelling, Fun Home is at all times an ironic and self-conscious life narrative. It is a dazzlingly and dauntingly complex set of interconnected life stories, modes of print text, and panoply of visual styles. Bechdel is a well-known American feminist cartoonist who for over two decades has published the politically savvy lesbian-feminist syndicated comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” In taking up the graphic memoir form, she composes Fun Home in seven extended chapters that are beautifully drawn in black line art and gray-green ink wash. It both enacts and reflects on processes of autobiographical storytelling, and exploits the differences of autographic inscription in the art of cartooning. Alison Bechdel’s autographic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) is such a text, a provocative exploration of sexuality, gendered relations in the American family, and Modernist versions of what she calls “erotic truth” (228). Gillian Whitlock has observed the “potential of comics to open up new and troubled spaces” (“Autographics” 976). Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (Watson 2008) ![]()
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