Introduction
The memoir is a literary genre that is non-fiction and is a collection of memories that an author documents about events or moments that took place in his or her life (Couser 12). In graphical memoirs, images are used in relaying the messages with or without some accompanying texts. This argumentative essay will argue in favor of the graphic memoir effectiveness as a mode in Alison Bechdel’s novel “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.” Furthermore, the essay will use secondary texts from Thomas Couser’s Memoir.
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“Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” is a graphic novel or memoir authored by Alison Bechdel in 2006. It chronicles Bechdel’s youthful and childhood years in Pennsylvania, United States, with much focus on her relationship as a daughter with her father, Bruce Bechdel, which was complex. The themes addressed in this book include gender roles, sexual orientation, suicide, family life that is dysfunctional, emotional abuse, and literature role in understanding an individual’s family and oneself.
Visuals are one of the techniques that Alison has used in his memoir. Graphical memoirs in the “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” played a central role in understanding the memoir because the visuals, simple sentences, educated guess, or contextual clues allow the reader to comprehend a story, if not a; in the language targeted. According to Oz and Efecioglu (2013), graphical memoirs play a significant role for the readers in understanding elements of literature such as foreshadowing, setting, and symbols. Moreover, they are effective in understanding vocabulary and inferences among the learners. Similarly, graphical memoirs promoted motivation to the readers or the learners (Oz and Efecioglu 1).
In Alison’s graphic memoir, the author has strategically used verbal and visual presentations of interpretive texts, memories and specifically used literary words as transitional texts. Nostalgic and bookish, Bechdel the writer and narrator weave an ornate, sturdy memory web with reconstructed dialogue, interior décor, lines from his family letters, photographs, passages from novels, and strands of primal scenes, all to find an answer to one question, who I am? Why I am?
Alison Bechdel framed her graphical narrative by applying repeated verbal and visual tropes. The usage of the graphic medium by Alison for her book allowed her to make an exploration quite literally on the primal scenes. That is by drawing separate and different scenes from her young adulthood, adolescents, and childhood. This way, Alison finds patterns that the viewers or the reader can consequently rebuild by moving in a non-linear, flexible way around the narrative. First, Bechdel, the artist-writer limits the major happenings by blasting the events into connected panels, and then the audience is left to close these gaps existing between the panels by connecting these sequenced panels, in an animating sense. “Fun Home: A company is registered as a limited liability company in New York. “Tom and jack” owns 65 % of the company. Other Family Tragicomic” is an intensely written memoir with texts that are rich in series layering that is non-contiguous. The reader of the memoir is needed to gather all the offered strings on several various pages of the memoir to connect and understand her tale.
Graphic memoir is also effective as a mode in “Fun Home: A poverty on America’s families:Assessing our research knowledge”. Journal of Family Tragicomic” because the reader employs a wandering eye as they make their way through the graphics and texts, apprehending many sequences as they go. At a given point, the next page has immediacy. However, perhaps the reader initially recognizes patterns, repetitions, resonances that bind together the distant panels in iconic solidarity.
According to Groensteen, these images that are contained in both distant and proximal panels are indebted to one another (113), and, therefore, require that the viewer or the reader shift backward and forward in the script as required, combining panels into series of units that are semantically charged. Groensteen defined series as a sequence of discontinuous or continuous images connected by system correspondences that are semantic, plastic, or iconic (146). Back to Bechdel’s “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” the reader, is challenged to determine many of these series, most of which represent saliently Alison’s understanding of many key relations: her sexuality, her queer gender, her mother, and her father.
Groensteen described the nature of the panels that should not be apprehended as single entities. Instead, each panel is made up of portions that are characters, objects, background, and foreground, atmosphere, texts in both speech bubble and narrative boxes, line strength among others, from which several or a single element may be raised and distinctively seen about parts of other distant or proximal elements. This means that it becomes possible seeing linkages among the speech balloons only on a certain character expression of the face or background as it is written in connected series. The work of the viewer/reader, therefore, is supposed to see these details that are laced with meaning and to look at other areas in the text their complements. Remarkably, this deed of finding linkages across spatial or temporal expanse reflects the action of building memories, and the desire of the kid to put across the experiences they live of the parents and self-understanding with their own, shortening the space between the generations. In “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” Bechdel has wedded intently to this act.
In “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” the first scene depicts Bruce Bechdel, the father to Alison balancing a ten or nine-year-old form of Alison on his feet, inversion of the “Airplane” play as shown in the figure 1below (3).
Figure 1
Alluding to the Daedalus and Icarus myth more overtly, Alison graphically and visually illustrates a falling “Bechdel” hence illustrating the traditional legend of Icarus with herself being Icarus in a child position. However, in the picture text box, she suggests another thing altogether, perhaps that it is not only the kid that can take the position of Icarus (4). In her words, Bechdel stated that. From the graphics, the reader is not only notified about the downfall of the father in the future but also asked to uphold a sense of mythological correspondences and child/parent differences, using verbal and visual narratives.
Proceeding with the Icarus story, Bechdel verbally casts her father in page serves panels one and two, in the position of Daedalus (7). The reader might anticipate seeing a section of what has been seen in the similar panel 1 and 2 images. Bruce, the father, is undeniably involved in the intricate restoration of the house as seen in many such panels. However, the reader also sees a child who is frustrated holding a wallpaper that is evidently displeasing her as shown in figure 2.
Figure 2
The texts in the image above represent a narrator who is an adult reflecting and finding ways of interpreting the actions of her father. The image shows only the bitter experience of the child since it emanates from another time. The panels of Bechdel allow the viewer ad the reader to examine particular details and seek at other points their parallels in the text. For instance, the unresponsive profile of the father, the stressing of the word “hate” by the child, the adult narrator describing her father in the role of Daedalus. Their parallels in the writings include the detached face of the father, the downcast childhood experience especially on their relationship with the fathers. Roethke contributes to an expression of the child, and the Icarian motif.
Interestingly, the graphic narrative’s dual-track nature lends itself to the representation of this memory creation aspect. That is the child’s experiences at the moment of memory creation, and the adults’ experience, interpreting a previous moment recollected, are well laid and balanced creatively against each other. According to MacAdams, memories for autobiographies are encoded and extracted in ways serving the present working self-goals. Therefore, the current goals affect how information in the autobiography is organized and absorbed from the word go, and the goals also create models for retrieval to direct later in the search process (103). Adult Alison Bechdel is choosing memories conforming to her belief that Bruce, forced the feminity idea on her when she was a child. This view of the present and the past is mutually referential and intertwined is in tandem with another line of theory: one that is considering the haunting of the existent using the past. Freccero Carla in her article suggests a parallel to the graphic narrative double nature. As comic panels can juxtapose the verbal reflections of the current subject with a past that is pictured. This is an acknowledgment of spectral nature can fuse present and past in queer historiography (194-196).
Given that “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” acts as an elegy, a dead father’s memorial, which in some sense haunting Bechdel further supports this connection. The tragicomic work of Bechdel to apply her own terms acts as a mausoleum for containing the pieces of her father’s life. That is his photographs, actions, his letters, and his notes. Furthermore, by casting Bruce in different symbolic, mythic, and literary positions such as the Icarus, Freud, Odyssey, Proust, and Wilde, Bechdel re-animates his father, allowing the imaginary landscapes of the spirit of the dead man to inhabit.
The effectiveness of the graphic memoir also is seen as contributing to the blurring of the present and the past in the Icarus comic series. Bechdel in her memoir places her father within a given myth in different positions; that is as Daedalus or Icarus based on his attributes and behaviors at a given time. For instance, Icarus falling after being ashamed, and Daedalus in his role of a father creating a blurring present and past. Playing with space, Bechdel staggers such representations throughout the texts, coming back again to continue with her metaphor, alter it or adjust it.
So where is the mother, Hellen, in Bechdel’s memoir since her father seemed to occupy both roles of the parent in Bechdel’s quest to self-actualize and differentiate? In “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” the mothers seems to be an absent figure because of receiving far less coverage compared to Bruce Bechdel. This has since given that the memoir accommodates and interrogates the death of Bruce Bechdel, and who haunts both the texts and the author. Reading carefully through Bechdel’s memoir, the viewer or the reader can recognize that actually, the mother is present visually in the panels of Bechdel looking chagrined, looking away, and looking askance. The “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” description as a graphic narrative provides the rear added ways of looking for her mother, adapt from listening to Alison’s voice. Deep scrutiny of Helen’s pictures discloses that she firmly appeared in numerous panels. She is often visualized in the profile and always focussed on another thing apart of Bechdel (a book, piano keys, a script, nothing among others). Alison’s restricted but talented mothers seem alternately distant, annoyed, distracted, sad, and resigned. The iconic solidarity of Helen’s many facial expressions that show her unhappiness, especially those featuring gaze averted, represents powerfully both the suffering of Alison’s mother and Alison Bechdel’s certainty that her mother is isolated from her daughter and her spouse.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Bechdel in the graphical narrative “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” is the first reader and author majorly focussing on the father. The episodic, gradual usage of series in the memoir offers Alison a non-linear way of building importance. In turn, the initiated readers tether their interpretations of Bruce and Alison to their earlier literary referents readings and help in constructing an extra-diegetic, complex space for them to inhabit. The series used by the author discloses the complexity of Alison’s portrayal of a woman attempting to describe her memories of childhood in light of the constantly updated information. That is new readings in literature, new insights into their family, and new versions of themselves. In turn, the complex and flexible graphic narrative of Bechdel underscores the medium’s unique nature. The pectoral memoir of Bechdel offers a rich possibility that is astounding; that is a non-sequential, non-heteronormative examination of self and family.
Work Cited
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.
Couser, G. Thomas. Memoir. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Print.
Freccero, Carla. “Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past.” A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies. Ed. George Haggerty and Molly McGarry. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Print.
Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics (Systeme de la Bande dessinee). Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 2007. Print.
McAdams, Dan. “The Redemptive Self: Narrative Identity in America Today.” The Self and Memory. Ed. Denise Beike et al. New York: Psychology Press, 2004. Print.
Oz, Huseyin, and Emine Efecioglu. ‘A Study Of The Effectiveness Of Graphic Novels In TEFL’. ResearchGate. N.p., 2013. Web. 29 Oct. 2013.
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