1. I can hardly imagine a better way to tell a story than visually and where the convenience of being an artist really shows is in exactly that, graphic story telling. Memoirs are a bit dated, unpopular beyond the extraordinarily famous. This style of story telling certainly is more vibrant and adds a dimension not found in common literature. I wouldn't say that it is part of being a comic, but it certainly makes the stories told more vibrant. It could be that the stories anyone would draw have to be inertly special beyond that of a normal story of words on a page. It takes more time and energy and is to an audience a larger commitment.
2. I hadn't read all of the books covered in Fun Home, but I had a few. The ones covered seemed to be so in a narcissistic way. Because of the nature of the books that I did know, I did not find much interest in reading the few I did not. The father was very appearance obsessive, I certainly think that this method of citing outside works added to the story, but no, not in a way that made me interested in reading more so in that direction.
3. I was certainly given pause on that page, I related it to something that would be shocking to see as a child and not much more.
4. This is the first book without a very direct form of bigotry (so far). While we see struggles with sexuality throughout with the slight exception taken by the authors mother, everyone is very accepting. Instead this book takes a turn down a dark road of a loved one who was distant, so much so, that the family hardly mourned. I could relate this quickly to my grandfather who had such a strange funeral it was more so a social gathering. Not a soul spoke about him at all, it was as though he was never in the room. We joined, spoke for an hour or so about the weather, and what was new in our lives, then left. I was curious if this is something that many people experience at some point or if this at all alienated anyone?
1) You could also argue that TV has a particular appeal of telling stories about sharks in tornadoes if you never changed the channel. There's far more to a medium than genres. But in terms of why artists choose comics to express personal stories, I think it's because of the personal experience between the artist and the paper as well as the reader with the content. It's easy and works. But fiction also is easy and works too, so who knows.
2) This is my second go-around with Fun Home and being from a different major than English I haven't heard of most of the references. I understand plenty of her general allusions without knowing too much about the subject to where the story still makes sense, but I don't feel the need to dig any deeper. My issue with this text, or more Bechdel's monologue in general, is her overuse of obsolete words from the dictionary in an effort to sound smarter. I had to read Fun Home with a dictionary on hand which was pretty irritating as I felt like I was being excluded from the content due to the messenger's overarching need to use words that even Shakespeare wouldn't remember.
3) I totally agree with this moment in either comics, movies, or any storytelling, that the moment of compromise as you call it is very important for how we appreciate works. I do really enjoy being forced to slow down and think in a comic for my own sake and not for the sake of the author telling me to. With that said I think you helped me realize why I don't like this comic. The only times I stopped this way were either due to frustration with the wording, or confusion of the allusions. These are when the author is making me stop, as opposed to me voluntarily stopping. The only moment I had a real moment when I tried to let it all soak in was at the end of the book due to how scatterbrained it all felt in the end. Though each chapter is organized very well, the collective whole felt like it needed some stitching. But hey that's my biased and honest opinion! The book is still technically wonderful, just not as fulfilling as I'd hoped.
4) Eclectic- adjective 1. selecting or choosing from various sources. 2. made up of what is selected from different sources. 3. not following any one system, as of philosophy, medicine, etc., but selecting and using what are considered the best elements of all systems. noun 1. a panda bear eating a banana
Fun Home Graphic novels use images and words to convey feeling while novels obviously use just words except for the occasional picture here and there. The faces of the characters in Fun Home represent who these characters were at certain times of the story. You can see joy, fear and curiosity. These things are hard to actually see in a novel. Graphic Novels allows for more ideas of interpretation because of how these stories are drawn. Character designs, settings, even the occasional coloring can be interpreted in many ways from person to person. I feel that graphic novels are more personal than a novel in respect to memoirs. You are actually seeing these people as who they were and how the author really saw themselves. I think that the connections with novels and her life are very personal. She’s well read and through her experiences at home, saw that her life was similar to these stories. I feel like, as a reader, she sees her family for whom they really are. I have read The Great Gatsby, and seeing her comparison to her father was interesting. Comparing it to these characters, I seem to understand her more on a personal level. I understand how she sees herself compared to others. I feel that she sees the world as a story and less as real life. She sees where life goes before it has even made its way through it. The quote used really opens up her character. I saw her as someone who compared everything in her life to books. She identifies more to fictional stories than to daily experiences. It seems that the way she was raised, strict and not very normal, she would identify more with what is in fiction as the truth. I also see that Alison comparing her life with the photos of her young father really had me thinking about life itself. Alison is slowly opening up her life to her father even after he had died. She’s finding things she never knew before and making herself open to who he was and why he was. I see myself comparing my life to my own parents.
1. I think that these graphic memoirs have a slight advantage over other memoirs in the sense that they can help present a more complete picture of the author’s recollections. For Fun Home in particular, I think the comic medium is very good for showing what the house Bechdel grew up in and the funeral home were like. I personally don’t feel as though I would have been able to picture her descriptions as well if I didn’t see the illustrations along with the words. It also seems likely to me that the choice by authors to tell their stories through comics is just personal preference and interest in this medium, but I also think it shows a tendency on the author’s part to express themselves in a way that involves visuals as well as narration. I find it interesting that a couple of these authors, such as Bechdel (who sees the Addams family comics) and Satrapi, include their early experiences with comics, showing an interest that led them later to create comics of their own.
2. This quote is great, and hearing it put in these terms made me feel like I understood Bechdel’s relationship with her parents better. In a sense, their life has a fictional quality to it - the perfect home and perfect family, but hiding dark secrets and not really having a strong family bond. Literature seems to have played a fairly large role in all of their lives - with the library and her dad’s interest in reading especially. And I like how she pointed out that the line between fiction and reality was blurry for her dad, and the idea that, “Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in the details, that it stops being pretense and becomes for all practical purposes, real.” He spent so much time and put so much effort into creating the allusion of a good life, nice family, perfect house, etc. while all along he was living a double life. I think that Bechdel is really good at using analogies to explain things in her life, like the case with the quote you mentioned and also when she described her family as being like the Addams family. I found that in instances where I read the book or movie she mentions, I felt that I understood what Bechdel was saying better, but I think she did a good job of providing just enough information for books / movies I had not read or seen.
I think the idea of whether or not be can ever actually know someone (even if we feel that we do) is a very interesting question. People change, hide things, etc. and I think we sometimes fill in the blanks with the people we know, taking for granted that they are a certain way because that’s how they present themselves, or what we assume, or whatever may be the case. I never thought of it this way, but I think fictional characters can be easier to get to know, because it seems like the author has a definite idea for their character most of the time and presents it in a consistent way. Also, people in real life are a lot more complicated usually. This question reminds me of that quote Bechdel’s dad underlined before his death by Camus- “We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.” My guess is that whether or not we truly know people (or even ourselves) will continue to be a strong theme in this comic.
3. The “Moment of Compromise” is a great way to put this. I know that if I am reading a book I enjoy, there are always moments where I have to stop and think about what I’ve just read. I think this comic is very thought provoking. The quote you mentioned in the previous prompt definitely made me think, and also Bechdel’s contemplating whether or not her coming out as a lesbian was in any way related to her dad killing himself soon after.
4. I’m really enjoying reading Fun Home so far. All I knew about this comic was that I had seen it on a list of “25 Essential Works of LGBT Non-Fiction,” so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I thought that Bechdel’s experience coming out of the closet was very interesting to read, although I can certainly imagine that her mom’s reaction would be very difficult for her. I thought that the way her mom hints at the idea that her own marriage had made Bechdel cynical about romantic love to the point where she became a lesbian was ridiculous and showed an ignorance on her mother’s part.
1) By employing the visual medium of comics as opposed to a more traditional memoir, Bechdel is making a story that is uniquely her own. It makes me think about how I read the Harry Potter books before the movie came out and had the characters a certain way in my head, but once the movie came out I couldn't see any of the characters in the books as anything but their on-screen counterparts anymore. Fun Home has this effect too, she is showing you all the details, presumedly exactly as they were or she remembers them, and our imagination doesn't really factor into it. We don't get to imagine what she or her father look like, we have numerous drawings and drawings based off of photos. This, like many other comics we have read, has a cinematic pacing and works almost like a frame by frame documentary.
2) I haven't read many of the books that have been named, but I am pretty familiar with the (often tragic) lives of the authors that have been named such as Camus, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. I don't think that it is very important that the reader have read these works, because Bechdel pretty much gives you the gist of what is important to the plot. I think that it is a very interesting tactic, and I am sure that if one has read all of the books listed that they would probably gain some deeper insight into the character, but as it is it's just not necessary to understand.
3) The example on 100-101 is probably the best one, but I also feel very affected when she draws a frame that is based on a real photo. The characters are already pretty realistic and life-like so to add another level of realism onto that is kind of jarring. It really drives in the fact that this is based on real people. It was used very successfully in Maus and in King, and I think that the tactic also would have been successful in Persepolis. It really helps the reader to have a clear understanding of these very real people.
You know when you read a book, and you picture how people look, and the setting, and the facial expressions of the characters, and then you talk about it with a friend or see the movie adaptation and it is completely different from how you yourself pictured it? I think this concept is part of the reason the graphic memoir is fairly popular. The story can not only be told through words, but the author can allow the audience to see the artifacts that are so important to the story, such as the "fun home" and the photographs in Maus. The point of a memoir is to tell a very true story and transport the audience into the author's shoes - the graphic memoir does that even more effectively.
I have read some of the works mentioned in Fun Home and find the references Bechdel makes to be fascinating. It allows the reader to learn so much about a character in such few words, but more importantly, it allows the reader to see the characters through the memoirist's eyes. I understand Bechdel's sentiment about fictionalizing people makes them more real; fictional characters are stagnant and unchanging, they are exactly as they are on paper. You can never really know someone because people are so incredibly dynamic. But fiction is something one can know fully.
I think what makes these stories so good is they are personal family stories. We all can relate to that first person point of view with family problems. Whether we read it in strictly text form, like a novel, or in a more visually involved format, like a comic, we become very investing in the plots. But what makes the comic even better is the extra level of visuals we are given to tell the story. It’s obviously going to be more engaging then just plain text. So the author has a big job when choosing to write a comic. It needs to be easy to follow, picture wise, and enjoyable to look at. We don’t want to look at ugly sketches or hard images to decipher. So it’s a bigger risk and challenge to take on when using pictures AND text to tell a story. The real fun part is if artist can learn to tell stories with just images alone - and not assisted with text.
I have to say, referencing all the literary subjects kind of lost me sometimes. All I kept thinking was, “man, I really wish I knew what they were talking about.” I didn’t understand the character in those books because I’ve never read them. Even though she does a, some what, decent job trying to relate them to her family, I still didn’t appreciate the comparisons as much as I could of since I never knew them to begin with.
But overall, this is a really good book! It seems the more personal stories we have read so far like Maus, Stuck Rubber Baby and Fun Home have been my favorites so far! I’m still concluding why they are my favorite and what they all have in common and I guess it’s just because they are all referencing VERY personal stories amongst family and friends!
1. I believe medium can play a part in the way a story is presented. In this case, I believe that the visual medium lends a lot of credence to the stark, emotionless way that her family deals with each other. From the blank, uncaring faces at her fathers funeral, as she and her brothers stood around the casket, to the way her father looked during every contact she had with him, the art makes it clear that much of what they had together was cold and rational.
2. Personally I have not read the works alluded to in this story, though I was supposed to read Great Gatsby in high school. I do take a little interest in them from my experience of them in the story, the biggest thought it evokes in me is my desire to return to my own art work. Much of the story describes her father through his remodeling work, and it build in me a desire to be active.
3. I would say that moment for me was the moment that she pretty flatly mentions that her father was having relations with teenage boys. It was a jarring moment for me with little to no context or preparation provided until several pages later.
I just wrote this response and for some reason it did not publish, so I am extremely irritated as I now retype it...
I think that the graphic novel is a great medium for memoir, because I generally I find memoirs boring but there is something about comics that is always intriguing. This may be my personal bias but reading a comic is so much more fun than reading a book in so many ways. From the beginning of time people have been fascinated by art, and every panel of a comic is a small piece of art that makes even slightly boring stories worth looking at. If Bechdel wrote this memoir as a novel, I don't think it would have the same charm. So much of the story is focused on visuals, of her father and the house, and herself, that would be so much more difficult to convey simply using words.
The references to literature do not necessarily make me want to pick up all the books Bechdel refers to, but I don't have a problem with what she is doing. The allusions, even if I haven't read the book and don't know what she is talking about, are always clear and effective in helping me understand her comparison. Some of them are actually interesting to me and I might even seek them out. There is an interesting contradiction in fictional characters, since the reader generally gets so much information about who they are, their histories, their motivations, their lives, that they should know the character. But the character isn't real and therefore can't be known. When Bechdel says she knows her parents through fictional characters, I think she is really admitting she doesn't know them at all. She only knows what they appeared to be, and even still the distance is farther because they aren't even unique.
I really liked the pages 100 and 101, but I don't think it had the same impact on me. That "moment of compromise" you mention came earlier on for me on page 17. The quote, "But would an ideal husband and father have sex with teenage boys?" was so striking and that is when I really had to sit and think for a few minutes. There are so many directions that question can go; is "teenage" the problem? is "boy" the problem? is the problem that her father is married and committing adultery? I just did not expect Bechdel to say something like that and it really invested me in the story.
The appeal of using a more visual method of storytelling is a the ability to speak to an audience. Graphic Novels allow for the author to control the level of story immersion, the artistic flow, and give a greater portrayal of what they want to convey. Comics also have an ability to reach a broader audience than books, but can fill out more information or story than a traditional movie. The depth in which a person can fill the various pages with their own perspective is astonishing. From the choice of font, to the style of speech bubbles, the way panels are designed, to the complexity of the models used; all of these factors are a deliberate choice to fulfill the artists desire. The references to literature are an important tool to be able to understand Bechdel's relationship to her family, as it is the tool in which she herself saw them. The references from the few works I have read add to the story as you see how her father and mother really acted, as for the books I haven't read yet, it did indeed spike my own curiosity. The phrase "It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of things past" makes me want to read this piece. I don't know if it is my desire to try and hold on to my own childishness or the idea that I am about to be a father myself that speaks to me, but I now want to read that before I do reach middle age. Fictional characters can be more real to us than real people, at least they were to me when I was a young boy. I had a few friends growing up but to me some of my best friends were the ones I saw on my Saturday morning cartoons, or the Anime I had stayed up past my bedtime to watch. Even the Hardy Boys helped keep my company as my dad read them to me before bed. I would dream of going through haunted lighthouses, and decrepit homes and sometimes people in real life seemed more fake than the characters I read on the pages. It would bring me some joy to think of my classmates as certain characters from my favorite movies, and those that bullied me as nothing more than some of the monsters that the hero would defeat in the novel. This might sound a little odd, but it was these ideas that got me through rough times just as Bechdel used them to get through the hardships she faced in her own childhood, though her experiences were far more traumatic than anything I have ever had to face. Knowing someone is possible, and it takes a great deal of trust and patience to be able to allow yourself to have anyone that close to you. I know my wife and my best friend better than anyone else and they know me for exactly who I am, though that is not always for the best. My moment of compromise was on page 86 where Alison muses with the idea that her father may have had a set time in mind to commit suicide. She is reluctant to believe this however as it breaks the last tie she had to her father; that her coming out caused him to die. When I got to this page I just sat back in my chair and stopped. The bluntness that she uses to express her desire to feel something for her father, to the point where it is better to believe that you are the reason for his death was just a massive thing to take in.
I agree that telling a story using comics gives the author greater control of the reader experience, although I hadn't thought of it in those terms before. It makes sense to me because if this story were told without illustrations, I would most likely have a completely different idea in my mind of what everything looked like. For example, I'm not familiar with styles of architecture so I would not have known what to picture exactly. And as you pointed out, it's not just the illustrations that shape the reader experience, but all of the details that go into the comic. And I also wanted to read Remembrance of Things Past when I read that part! I felt like this was a kind of challenge and I thought it was a funny part of the story as well.
When we tell a story about ourselves, or about our lives, we can’t get nearly as much detail or illicit the same reactions than if we have photographs or drawings. Comics lends itself to be a great medium for telling such stories because it can make the most mundane facts about a person seem like telling signs in a visual manner.
Unfortunately for me, it does not make me want to read Proust or Fitzgerald, but its interesting how Bechdel has pulled narratives from literature to describe her parents, as if life were imitating art. It makes the story believable, at least in my eyes, because writers are people writing about people who are real, or have some characteristics of real people. If you were to look at a different group of characters from a different novel, you may find characters with real life inspiration, or real life traits. Once you get to know someone, than their outward appearance may be the opposite of who they really are. For example, Bechdel’s basically telling how she found out her father was a homosexual, but on the outside, no one knew a thing. She didn’t even find out until after his death that he had even cheated on her mother with other men. To her, this now admitted secret, explained so much about him. Why he cared so much about fixing up the houses, and the garden. I think this moment is when she’s realizing who her father really was. Once you learn something that big, that your father was a closeted homosexual, it lends itself to understanding his past actions. Why he wanted her to dress very lady-like, why he was forcing her to wear barrettes in her hair, etc. He had an expectation of her to be girly, she had an expectation for him to be manly, or at least more masculine than he was. I think this scene also brings forth to her the idea that people can’t help who they are. The circumstances surrounding her father’s death, whether it was suicide or accident, remain unknown, but if it was suicide, than he was trying to comes to grips with his daughter coming out, and his own identity. Or he was just removing some wood from his property and saw a snake, jumped back into the road and was hit by a truck, its entirely possible.
These personal narrative stories use a similar visual style. This common style is somewhere in between realism in their detail and abstraction in the cartoon character styles. This creates a consistency in tone and universality for the reader. All of these stories are told with a certain appreciative fondness for having a unique story. This helps keep the reader interested despite the shocking and depressing events being recalled.
Using allusions to Fitzgerald and other famous classical mythologies and writers helps to make the reader stay focused on the father figure in Fun Home and his legacy in the mind of the narrator.
1. One could make a strong case that graphic novels are a more effective medium in the context of memoirs. With an artist’s ability to verbally narrate visual imagery of their or someone else’s life, comics strike a healthy balance between objectivity and subjectivity, as well as audience and narrator. I don’t think that any one medium is particularly effective in telling a certain kind of story, since flexibility is a key part of what defines something as an artistic medium. That said, I do believe that comic books can make the retelling or reimagining of history, both personal and global, a more accessible task. As for what appears to be the recent arrival of the graphic memoir phenomenon, I imagine that its genesis is not entirely organic. One thing I’ve noticed in many of the books we’ve read are the comparisons to Maus or Persepolis that review blurbs seem oh-so-quick to use when praising the work. I think the mainstream and critical success of these works have shaped the critical and public view of comics such that only graphic memoirs can be seen as “serious” or “legitimate” graphic novels. I like to think of Dan Clowes “Pussey!” as a lovely (if vulgar) subversion of this trend in comics.
2. Bechdel does a good job of twinning her father and mother with strong, identifiable literary figures, and it’s a creative way of approaching the task of characterization. But this technique not only helps us understand Bechdel’s parents, but Bechdel herself. How a story is told helps us understand not just the story, but the storyteller too. In her allusions and eye for literary ornamentation, we see Bechdel’s own appreciation and connection to Western culture, her comfort in the world of fiction, and background in education. Even without her reflection on her time in college, I was already gathering my own impression and understanding of her, as a character.
4. I’m (more or less) enjoying Fun Home so far. Bechdel’s smart, but often times I feel that her intelligence may be getting in the way of her storytelling. At times the references become more obfuscatory than helpful, and occasionally come off as a little ostentatious. But I’m only half way done though, and I can’t help but anticipate a “Moment of Compromise” or two.
I absolutely agree with what you said about comics as memoirs - both that they show a good balance between objectivity and subjectivity and that comics make certain stories far more accessible. I think this is the case not only for comics, but for any medium where words are combined with pictures. I know that I personally respond to that, and can take in the information more easily, but I’m not sure if that is the case for everyone. Even if it’s a poster or an info-graphic, I think that pictures make it easier to understand, and in many cases, more entertaining or attention-grabbing as well.
Sorry this is late; I had an outpatient procedure yesterday and have been in much pain since.
Fun Home is an entertaining read, but at time the language and the constant literature references are off putting and slightly vain. (I have read some, but not all of her references) but, I feel like the author is trying to make me feel stupid at times.
Her confusion about her father is understandable, but often very mild to what one might feel should be an actual reaction. (There is so much I want to say here, but as it probably won't add to the discussion I will leave it). On the other hand how does one admit that their own father was a child molester? There is no right way to do that I suppose, so Bechdel just states it, very early in the book.
Bechdel does a nice job of drawing her feelings into her pictures, as often her abundance of words fails to capture her true feelings. From her pictures she shows how lonely she felt in a home of 5 people, and how much she focused on her own internal struggles which she kept bottled up.
I like that the pages are not black/white. Even though one can argue that there is not color the choice of adding blue into the scenes helps to lighten this dark and morbid tale, showing that the author might not take herself too seriously. Also comparing her family to the Addams Family strengthens this idea.
I think there's a unique mediation between the memoir and the comic medium because it emphasizes the sort of "objective" reality with speech laying raw and unadorned on the page, but with great degrees of expressiveness in subtle, not logically coded way. I feel like pictures can function in an almost subjective meaning where words cannot easily. "cat" has a loaded meaning predetermined, but the rendering of a cat via image operates in a space that is encoded further with subjective meaning and expressiveness. It has a lot to do with process as well. With words, there's a sort of sense in which you have to have meaning narrowed and figured out. But the image allows for something to be expressed, but not explained or coded explicitly. Images get at a sort of "essence" of a thing that is at once fluid but inherent (e.g. the memoirist has processed this object/event/character internally and has coded that meaning onto the image, but it transforms in meaning as the narrative supplements it). The gender identity of Alison I think can be examined under this light, and it's unique because we can see her resistance to femininity at a very early age in the work, but it's not coded and explained in a biased, learned voice of her future self until much later.
I think it is something very special about comics that lends medium to telling such stories, in the sense, it makes it easier for some people to express their thoughts, emotions and ideas through comics instead of just writing down words with no graphics. I think whoever came up with this idea, to tell stories through comics, is a complete mastermind and a genius, this is a great way to entice readers to keep reading and a even better way to share your story.
I honestly haven’t read most of the books/pieces Fun Home references, but it really did grasp my attention and make me want to read them, I mean, if they’re mentioned in a great work like Fun Home, they must be good enough for anyone to read.
It is crazy that this question was asked, I always talk amongst family and friends and ask them all the time, is it ever possible to really know someone? And what does it mean? It simply means, how well can you know someone and still accept them, flaws and all, with no judgment? Is that possible? I feel sometimes, yes, fictional characters can be even more real than “real” people because we view characters not just by how they’re portrayed, but how we interpret them and how we relate to them, so seeing someone or relating to someone you understand in your own way, may seem more real than knowing someone for years and not really understanding them.
1. I can hardly imagine a better way to tell a story than visually and where the convenience of being an artist really shows is in exactly that, graphic story telling. Memoirs are a bit dated, unpopular beyond the extraordinarily famous. This style of story telling certainly is more vibrant and adds a dimension not found in common literature. I wouldn't say that it is part of being a comic, but it certainly makes the stories told more vibrant. It could be that the stories anyone would draw have to be inertly special beyond that of a normal story of words on a page. It takes more time and energy and is to an audience a larger commitment.
ReplyDelete2. I hadn't read all of the books covered in Fun Home, but I had a few. The ones covered seemed to be so in a narcissistic way. Because of the nature of the books that I did know, I did not find much interest in reading the few I did not. The father was very appearance obsessive, I certainly think that this method of citing outside works added to the story, but no, not in a way that made me interested in reading more so in that direction.
3. I was certainly given pause on that page, I related it to something that would be shocking to see as a child and not much more.
4. This is the first book without a very direct form of bigotry (so far). While we see struggles with sexuality throughout with the slight exception taken by the authors mother, everyone is very accepting. Instead this book takes a turn down a dark road of a loved one who was distant, so much so, that the family hardly mourned. I could relate this quickly to my grandfather who had such a strange funeral it was more so a social gathering. Not a soul spoke about him at all, it was as though he was never in the room. We joined, spoke for an hour or so about the weather, and what was new in our lives, then left. I was curious if this is something that many people experience at some point or if this at all alienated anyone?
1) You could also argue that TV has a particular appeal of telling stories about sharks in tornadoes if you never changed the channel. There's far more to a medium than genres. But in terms of why artists choose comics to express personal stories, I think it's because of the personal experience between the artist and the paper as well as the reader with the content. It's easy and works. But fiction also is easy and works too, so who knows.
ReplyDelete2) This is my second go-around with Fun Home and being from a different major than English I haven't heard of most of the references. I understand plenty of her general allusions without knowing too much about the subject to where the story still makes sense, but I don't feel the need to dig any deeper. My issue with this text, or more Bechdel's monologue in general, is her overuse of obsolete words from the dictionary in an effort to sound smarter. I had to read Fun Home with a dictionary on hand which was pretty irritating as I felt like I was being excluded from the content due to the messenger's overarching need to use words that even Shakespeare wouldn't remember.
3) I totally agree with this moment in either comics, movies, or any storytelling, that the moment of compromise as you call it is very important for how we appreciate works. I do really enjoy being forced to slow down and think in a comic for my own sake and not for the sake of the author telling me to. With that said I think you helped me realize why I don't like this comic. The only times I stopped this way were either due to frustration with the wording, or confusion of the allusions. These are when the author is making me stop, as opposed to me voluntarily stopping. The only moment I had a real moment when I tried to let it all soak in was at the end of the book due to how scatterbrained it all felt in the end. Though each chapter is organized very well, the collective whole felt like it needed some stitching. But hey that's my biased and honest opinion! The book is still technically wonderful, just not as fulfilling as I'd hoped.
4) Eclectic-
adjective
1. selecting or choosing from various sources.
2. made up of what is selected from different sources.
3. not following any one system, as of philosophy, medicine, etc., but selecting and using what are considered the best elements of all systems.
noun
1. a panda bear eating a banana
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ReplyDeleteGraphic novels use images and words to convey feeling while novels obviously use just words except for the occasional picture here and there. The faces of the characters in Fun Home represent who these characters were at certain times of the story. You can see joy, fear and curiosity. These things are hard to actually see in a novel. Graphic Novels allows for more ideas of interpretation because of how these stories are drawn. Character designs, settings, even the occasional coloring can be interpreted in many ways from person to person. I feel that graphic novels are more personal than a novel in respect to memoirs. You are actually seeing these people as who they were and how the author really saw themselves.
I think that the connections with novels and her life are very personal. She’s well read and through her experiences at home, saw that her life was similar to these stories. I feel like, as a reader, she sees her family for whom they really are. I have read The Great Gatsby, and seeing her comparison to her father was interesting. Comparing it to these characters, I seem to understand her more on a personal level. I understand how she sees herself compared to others. I feel that she sees the world as a story and less as real life. She sees where life goes before it has even made its way through it. The quote used really opens up her character. I saw her as someone who compared everything in her life to books. She identifies more to fictional stories than to daily experiences. It seems that the way she was raised, strict and not very normal, she would identify more with what is in fiction as the truth.
I also see that Alison comparing her life with the photos of her young father really had me thinking about life itself. Alison is slowly opening up her life to her father even after he had died. She’s finding things she never knew before and making herself open to who he was and why he was. I see myself comparing my life to my own parents.
1. I think that these graphic memoirs have a slight advantage over other memoirs in the sense that they can help present a more complete picture of the author’s recollections. For Fun Home in particular, I think the comic medium is very good for showing what the house Bechdel grew up in and the funeral home were like. I personally don’t feel as though I would have been able to picture her descriptions as well if I didn’t see the illustrations along with the words. It also seems likely to me that the choice by authors to tell their stories through comics is just personal preference and interest in this medium, but I also think it shows a tendency on the author’s part to express themselves in a way that involves visuals as well as narration. I find it interesting that a couple of these authors, such as Bechdel (who sees the Addams family comics) and Satrapi, include their early experiences with comics, showing an interest that led them later to create comics of their own.
ReplyDelete2. This quote is great, and hearing it put in these terms made me feel like I understood Bechdel’s relationship with her parents better. In a sense, their life has a fictional quality to it - the perfect home and perfect family, but hiding dark secrets and not really having a strong family bond. Literature seems to have played a fairly large role in all of their lives - with the library and her dad’s interest in reading especially. And I like how she pointed out that the line between fiction and reality was blurry for her dad, and the idea that, “Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in the details, that it stops being pretense and becomes for all practical purposes, real.” He spent so much time and put so much effort into creating the allusion of a good life, nice family, perfect house, etc. while all along he was living a double life. I think that Bechdel is really good at using analogies to explain things in her life, like the case with the quote you mentioned and also when she described her family as being like the Addams family. I found that in instances where I read the book or movie she mentions, I felt that I understood what Bechdel was saying better, but I think she did a good job of providing just enough information for books / movies I had not read or seen.
I think the idea of whether or not be can ever actually know someone (even if we feel that we do) is a very interesting question. People change, hide things, etc. and I think we sometimes fill in the blanks with the people we know, taking for granted that they are a certain way because that’s how they present themselves, or what we assume, or whatever may be the case. I never thought of it this way, but I think fictional characters can be easier to get to know, because it seems like the author has a definite idea for their character most of the time and presents it in a consistent way. Also, people in real life are a lot more complicated usually. This question reminds me of that quote Bechdel’s dad underlined before his death by Camus- “We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.” My guess is that whether or not we truly know people (or even ourselves) will continue to be a strong theme in this comic.
Delete3. The “Moment of Compromise” is a great way to put this. I know that if I am reading a book I enjoy, there are always moments where I have to stop and think about what I’ve just read. I think this comic is very thought provoking. The quote you mentioned in the previous prompt definitely made me think, and also Bechdel’s contemplating whether or not her coming out as a lesbian was in any way related to her dad killing himself soon after.
4. I’m really enjoying reading Fun Home so far. All I knew about this comic was that I had seen it on a list of “25 Essential Works of LGBT Non-Fiction,” so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I thought that Bechdel’s experience coming out of the closet was very interesting to read, although I can certainly imagine that her mom’s reaction would be very difficult for her. I thought that the way her mom hints at the idea that her own marriage had made Bechdel cynical about romantic love to the point where she became a lesbian was ridiculous and showed an ignorance on her mother’s part.
1) By employing the visual medium of comics as opposed to a more traditional memoir, Bechdel is making a story that is uniquely her own. It makes me think about how I read the Harry Potter books before the movie came out and had the characters a certain way in my head, but once the movie came out I couldn't see any of the characters in the books as anything but their on-screen counterparts anymore. Fun Home has this effect too, she is showing you all the details, presumedly exactly as they were or she remembers them, and our imagination doesn't really factor into it. We don't get to imagine what she or her father look like, we have numerous drawings and drawings based off of photos. This, like many other comics we have read, has a cinematic pacing and works almost like a frame by frame documentary.
ReplyDelete2) I haven't read many of the books that have been named, but I am pretty familiar with the (often tragic) lives of the authors that have been named such as Camus, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. I don't think that it is very important that the reader have read these works, because Bechdel pretty much gives you the gist of what is important to the plot. I think that it is a very interesting tactic, and I am sure that if one has read all of the books listed that they would probably gain some deeper insight into the character, but as it is it's just not necessary to understand.
3) The example on 100-101 is probably the best one, but I also feel very affected when she draws a frame that is based on a real photo. The characters are already pretty realistic and life-like so to add another level of realism onto that is kind of jarring. It really drives in the fact that this is based on real people. It was used very successfully in Maus and in King, and I think that the tactic also would have been successful in Persepolis. It really helps the reader to have a clear understanding of these very real people.
You know when you read a book, and you picture how people look, and the setting, and the facial expressions of the characters, and then you talk about it with a friend or see the movie adaptation and it is completely different from how you yourself pictured it? I think this concept is part of the reason the graphic memoir is fairly popular. The story can not only be told through words, but the author can allow the audience to see the artifacts that are so important to the story, such as the "fun home" and the photographs in Maus. The point of a memoir is to tell a very true story and transport the audience into the author's shoes - the graphic memoir does that even more effectively.
ReplyDeleteI have read some of the works mentioned in Fun Home and find the references Bechdel makes to be fascinating. It allows the reader to learn so much about a character in such few words, but more importantly, it allows the reader to see the characters through the memoirist's eyes. I understand Bechdel's sentiment about fictionalizing people makes them more real; fictional characters are stagnant and unchanging, they are exactly as they are on paper. You can never really know someone because people are so incredibly dynamic. But fiction is something one can know fully.
I think what makes these stories so good is they are personal family stories. We all can relate to that first person point of view with family problems. Whether we read it in strictly text form, like a novel, or in a more visually involved format, like a comic, we become very investing in the plots. But what makes the comic even better is the extra level of visuals we are given to tell the story. It’s obviously going to be more engaging then just plain text. So the author has a big job when choosing to write a comic. It needs to be easy to follow, picture wise, and enjoyable to look at. We don’t want to look at ugly sketches or hard images to decipher. So it’s a bigger risk and challenge to take on when using pictures AND text to tell a story. The real fun part is if artist can learn to tell stories with just images alone - and not assisted with text.
ReplyDeleteI have to say, referencing all the literary subjects kind of lost me sometimes. All I kept thinking was, “man, I really wish I knew what they were talking about.” I didn’t understand the character in those books because I’ve never read them. Even though she does a, some what, decent job trying to relate them to her family, I still didn’t appreciate the comparisons as much as I could of since I never knew them to begin with.
But overall, this is a really good book! It seems the more personal stories we have read so far like Maus, Stuck Rubber Baby and Fun Home have been my favorites so far! I’m still concluding why they are my favorite and what they all have in common and I guess it’s just because they are all referencing VERY personal stories amongst family and friends!
1. I believe medium can play a part in the way a story is presented. In this case, I believe that the visual medium lends a lot of credence to the stark, emotionless way that her family deals with each other. From the blank, uncaring faces at her fathers funeral, as she and her brothers stood around the casket, to the way her father looked during every contact she had with him, the art makes it clear that much of what they had together was cold and rational.
ReplyDelete2. Personally I have not read the works alluded to in this story, though I was supposed to read Great Gatsby in high school. I do take a little interest in them from my experience of them in the story, the biggest thought it evokes in me is my desire to return to my own art work. Much of the story describes her father through his remodeling work, and it build in me a desire to be active.
3. I would say that moment for me was the moment that she pretty flatly mentions that her father was having relations with teenage boys. It was a jarring moment for me with little to no context or preparation provided until several pages later.
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ReplyDeleteI just wrote this response and for some reason it did not publish, so I am extremely irritated as I now retype it...
DeleteI think that the graphic novel is a great medium for memoir, because I generally I find memoirs boring but there is something about comics that is always intriguing. This may be my personal bias but reading a comic is so much more fun than reading a book in so many ways. From the beginning of time people have been fascinated by art, and every panel of a comic is a small piece of art that makes even slightly boring stories worth looking at. If Bechdel wrote this memoir as a novel, I don't think it would have the same charm. So much of the story is focused on visuals, of her father and the house, and herself, that would be so much more difficult to convey simply using words.
The references to literature do not necessarily make me want to pick up all the books Bechdel refers to, but I don't have a problem with what she is doing. The allusions, even if I haven't read the book and don't know what she is talking about, are always clear and effective in helping me understand her comparison. Some of them are actually interesting to me and I might even seek them out. There is an interesting contradiction in fictional characters, since the reader generally gets so much information about who they are, their histories, their motivations, their lives, that they should know the character. But the character isn't real and therefore can't be known. When Bechdel says she knows her parents through fictional characters, I think she is really admitting she doesn't know them at all. She only knows what they appeared to be, and even still the distance is farther because they aren't even unique.
I really liked the pages 100 and 101, but I don't think it had the same impact on me. That "moment of compromise" you mention came earlier on for me on page 17. The quote, "But would an ideal husband and father have sex with teenage boys?" was so striking and that is when I really had to sit and think for a few minutes. There are so many directions that question can go; is "teenage" the problem? is "boy" the problem? is the problem that her father is married and committing adultery? I just did not expect Bechdel to say something like that and it really invested me in the story.
The appeal of using a more visual method of storytelling is a the ability to speak to an audience. Graphic Novels allow for the author to control the level of story immersion, the artistic flow, and give a greater portrayal of what they want to convey. Comics also have an ability to reach a broader audience than books, but can fill out more information or story than a traditional movie. The depth in which a person can fill the various pages with their own perspective is astonishing. From the choice of font, to the style of speech bubbles, the way panels are designed, to the complexity of the models used; all of these factors are a deliberate choice to fulfill the artists desire.
ReplyDeleteThe references to literature are an important tool to be able to understand Bechdel's relationship to her family, as it is the tool in which she herself saw them. The references from the few works I have read add to the story as you see how her father and mother really acted, as for the books I haven't read yet, it did indeed spike my own curiosity. The phrase "It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of things past" makes me want to read this piece. I don't know if it is my desire to try and hold on to my own childishness or the idea that I am about to be a father myself that speaks to me, but I now want to read that before I do reach middle age.
Fictional characters can be more real to us than real people, at least they were to me when I was a young boy. I had a few friends growing up but to me some of my best friends were the ones I saw on my Saturday morning cartoons, or the Anime I had stayed up past my bedtime to watch. Even the Hardy Boys helped keep my company as my dad read them to me before bed. I would dream of going through haunted lighthouses, and decrepit homes and sometimes people in real life seemed more fake than the characters I read on the pages. It would bring me some joy to think of my classmates as certain characters from my favorite movies, and those that bullied me as nothing more than some of the monsters that the hero would defeat in the novel. This might sound a little odd, but it was these ideas that got me through rough times just as Bechdel used them to get through the hardships she faced in her own childhood, though her experiences were far more traumatic than anything I have ever had to face. Knowing someone is possible, and it takes a great deal of trust and patience to be able to allow yourself to have anyone that close to you. I know my wife and my best friend better than anyone else and they know me for exactly who I am, though that is not always for the best.
My moment of compromise was on page 86 where Alison muses with the idea that her father may have had a set time in mind to commit suicide. She is reluctant to believe this however as it breaks the last tie she had to her father; that her coming out caused him to die. When I got to this page I just sat back in my chair and stopped. The bluntness that she uses to express her desire to feel something for her father, to the point where it is better to believe that you are the reason for his death was just a massive thing to take in.
I agree that telling a story using comics gives the author greater control of the reader experience, although I hadn't thought of it in those terms before. It makes sense to me because if this story were told without illustrations, I would most likely have a completely different idea in my mind of what everything looked like. For example, I'm not familiar with styles of architecture so I would not have known what to picture exactly. And as you pointed out, it's not just the illustrations that shape the reader experience, but all of the details that go into the comic. And I also wanted to read Remembrance of Things Past when I read that part! I felt like this was a kind of challenge and I thought it was a funny part of the story as well.
DeleteWhen we tell a story about ourselves, or about our lives, we can’t get nearly as much detail or illicit the same reactions than if we have photographs or drawings. Comics lends itself to be a great medium for telling such stories because it can make the most mundane facts about a person seem like telling signs in a visual manner.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately for me, it does not make me want to read Proust or Fitzgerald, but its interesting how Bechdel has pulled narratives from literature to describe her parents, as if life were imitating art. It makes the story believable, at least in my eyes, because writers are people writing about people who are real, or have some characteristics of real people. If you were to look at a different group of characters from a different novel, you may find characters with real life inspiration, or real life traits. Once you get to know someone, than their outward appearance may be the opposite of who they really are. For example, Bechdel’s basically telling how she found out her father was a homosexual, but on the outside, no one knew a thing. She didn’t even find out until after his death that he had even cheated on her mother with other men. To her, this now admitted secret, explained so much about him. Why he cared so much about fixing up the houses, and the garden.
I think this moment is when she’s realizing who her father really was. Once you learn something that big, that your father was a closeted homosexual, it lends itself to understanding his past actions. Why he wanted her to dress very lady-like, why he was forcing her to wear barrettes in her hair, etc. He had an expectation of her to be girly, she had an expectation for him to be manly, or at least more masculine than he was. I think this scene also brings forth to her the idea that people can’t help who they are. The circumstances surrounding her father’s death, whether it was suicide or accident, remain unknown, but if it was suicide, than he was trying to comes to grips with his daughter coming out, and his own identity. Or he was just removing some wood from his property and saw a snake, jumped back into the road and was hit by a truck, its entirely possible.
These personal narrative stories use a similar visual style. This common style is somewhere in between realism in their detail and abstraction in the cartoon character styles. This creates a consistency in tone and universality for the reader. All of these stories are told with a certain appreciative fondness for having a unique story. This helps keep the reader interested despite the shocking and depressing events being recalled.
ReplyDeleteUsing allusions to Fitzgerald and other famous classical mythologies and writers helps to make the reader stay focused on the father figure in Fun Home and his legacy in the mind of the narrator.
1. One could make a strong case that graphic novels are a more effective medium in the context of memoirs. With an artist’s ability to verbally narrate visual imagery of their or someone else’s life, comics strike a healthy balance between objectivity and subjectivity, as well as audience and narrator. I don’t think that any one medium is particularly effective in telling a certain kind of story, since flexibility is a key part of what defines something as an artistic medium. That said, I do believe that comic books can make the retelling or reimagining of history, both personal and global, a more accessible task. As for what appears to be the recent arrival of the graphic memoir phenomenon, I imagine that its genesis is not entirely organic. One thing I’ve noticed in many of the books we’ve read are the comparisons to Maus or Persepolis that review blurbs seem oh-so-quick to use when praising the work. I think the mainstream and critical success of these works have shaped the critical and public view of comics such that only graphic memoirs can be seen as “serious” or “legitimate” graphic novels. I like to think of Dan Clowes “Pussey!” as a lovely (if vulgar) subversion of this trend in comics.
ReplyDelete2. Bechdel does a good job of twinning her father and mother with strong, identifiable literary figures, and it’s a creative way of approaching the task of characterization. But this technique not only helps us understand Bechdel’s parents, but Bechdel herself. How a story is told helps us understand not just the story, but the storyteller too. In her allusions and eye for literary ornamentation, we see Bechdel’s own appreciation and connection to Western culture, her comfort in the world of fiction, and background in education. Even without her reflection on her time in college, I was already gathering my own impression and understanding of her, as a character.
4. I’m (more or less) enjoying Fun Home so far. Bechdel’s smart, but often times I feel that her intelligence may be getting in the way of her storytelling. At times the references become more obfuscatory than helpful, and occasionally come off as a little ostentatious. But I’m only half way done though, and I can’t help but anticipate a “Moment of Compromise” or two.
I absolutely agree with what you said about comics as memoirs - both that they show a good balance between objectivity and subjectivity and that comics make certain stories far more accessible. I think this is the case not only for comics, but for any medium where words are combined with pictures. I know that I personally respond to that, and can take in the information more easily, but I’m not sure if that is the case for everyone. Even if it’s a poster or an info-graphic, I think that pictures make it easier to understand, and in many cases, more entertaining or attention-grabbing as well.
DeleteSorry this is late; I had an outpatient procedure yesterday and have been in much pain since.
ReplyDeleteFun Home is an entertaining read, but at time the language and the constant literature references are off putting and slightly vain. (I have read some, but not all of her references) but, I feel like the author is trying to make me feel stupid at times.
Her confusion about her father is understandable, but often very mild to what one might feel should be an actual reaction. (There is so much I want to say here, but as it probably won't add to the discussion I will leave it). On the other hand how does one admit that their own father was a child molester? There is no right way to do that I suppose, so Bechdel just states it, very early in the book.
Bechdel does a nice job of drawing her feelings into her pictures, as often her abundance of words fails to capture her true feelings. From her pictures she shows how lonely she felt in a home of 5 people, and how much she focused on her own internal struggles which she kept bottled up.
I like that the pages are not black/white. Even though one can argue that there is not color the choice of adding blue into the scenes helps to lighten this dark and morbid tale, showing that the author might not take herself too seriously. Also comparing her family to the Addams Family strengthens this idea.
I think there's a unique mediation between the memoir and the comic medium because it emphasizes the sort of "objective" reality with speech laying raw and unadorned on the page, but with great degrees of expressiveness in subtle, not logically coded way. I feel like pictures can function in an almost subjective meaning where words cannot easily. "cat" has a loaded meaning predetermined, but the rendering of a cat via image operates in a space that is encoded further with subjective meaning and expressiveness. It has a lot to do with process as well. With words, there's a sort of sense in which you have to have meaning narrowed and figured out. But the image allows for something to be expressed, but not explained or coded explicitly. Images get at a sort of "essence" of a thing that is at once fluid but inherent (e.g. the memoirist has processed this object/event/character internally and has coded that meaning onto the image, but it transforms in meaning as the narrative supplements it). The gender identity of Alison I think can be examined under this light, and it's unique because we can see her resistance to femininity at a very early age in the work, but it's not coded and explained in a biased, learned voice of her future self until much later.
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ReplyDeleteI think it is something very special about comics that lends medium to telling such stories, in the sense, it makes it easier for some people to express their thoughts, emotions and ideas through comics instead of just writing down words with no graphics. I think whoever came up with this idea, to tell stories through comics, is a complete mastermind and a genius, this is a great way to entice readers to keep reading and a even better way to share your story.
I honestly haven’t read most of the books/pieces Fun Home references, but it really did grasp my attention and make me want to read them, I mean, if they’re mentioned in a great work like Fun Home, they must be good enough for anyone to read.
It is crazy that this question was asked, I always talk amongst family and friends and ask them all the time, is it ever possible to really know someone? And what does it mean? It simply means, how well can you know someone and still accept them, flaws and all, with no judgment? Is that possible? I feel sometimes, yes, fictional characters can be even more real than “real” people because we view characters not just by how they’re portrayed, but how we interpret them and how we relate to them, so seeing someone or relating to someone you understand in your own way, may seem more real than knowing someone for years and not really understanding them.