Some intertextuality examples in Fun Home
Throughout my reading of Fun Home, the sheer quantity of parallels between the different events in Alison's life and the different lives of characters in popular fiction struck me, with countless comparisons constantly drawn between people in her life and fictional characters. I wanted to quickly summarize a couple of the comparisons that she made and read a little into the works themselves to get context as to why she was using these works as descriptions. I'm glad I got to look into these stories, especially Ulysses, as I have a huge respect for James Joyce as an author now even after seeing just one chapter he wrote.
One of the first comparisons she makes is between her father and Icarus and Daedalus. The characters of Icarus and Daedalus are described in their story escaping the island of Crete with wings that Daedalus geniusly crafted, and Icarus tragically falling into the sea after flying too close to the sun due to recklessness and melting the wax holding his wings together. At the beginning of the book she calls her father a "Daedalus of decor" (6), obviously due to his talent for design, shown in his work on their house. By comparing her father to Daedalus she is making a statement about his skills as an artist. In case you forgot like I did, Alison had also compared her father to Icarus, due to the fact that it was he who "fell from the sky" by passing away. She uses this simile to describe how after being "freed" briefly by being open with and close to his daughter Alison, his life was cut short. However, I don't think she uses the simile to describe how he died after showing immaturity or recklessness as Icarus did, which is one aspect in which this comparison falls short.
Another comparison I needed to look into a little was her comparison of her and her father to Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus from Ulysses, characters with a relationship she characterizes as father and son-like. On page 221 of Fun Home, one of my favorite pages in the book, Alison and her father have a short conversation which could be described as a confession of sorts by her father, who tells her about his first gay relationships. Alison mentions that in that moment, they were "like fatherless Stephen and sonless Bloom," not becoming closer by joyously celebrating but peacefully, solemnly enjoying each other's company.
I read a bit of the Ulysses chapter (or "episode") where the scene between Stephen and Bloom happens at 7 Eccles Street to understand a bit more. Do not try this at home, it was extremely confusing to read. The whole chapter is described to us by the narrator in a question-answer type format, where there are no free floating statements, just a sentence asked by the narrator like "What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom’s offer?" which the narrator then answers himself at varying lengths. This pattern repeats over 300 times, according to the Wikipedia article. One thing that stuck out in many of the descriptions was the domestic feel they gave, whether talking about shaving, boiling water for cocoa, or both of their family lives, and this can be helpful to understand how Alison felt next to her father, though she says she felt more like the father than the son.
It was surprising to me how well-read Alison was, and the books she read were obviously heavily impactful on her life. I think her father also impacted her in this way, as he recommended her books and discussed them with her all through her life and in college. In the end I think the Icarus comparison is a little forced, and I think Bechdel recognizes this too, even saying on the last pages that somehow she could be seen as Icarus because she falls, except getting caught by her father instead of plunging into the sea, which is a nice image but so far removed from the original story that it's funny that she even makes it.
I personally didn't understand many of Allison's references save for Icarus and Daedalus. I found your analysis of Esther's almost-conflicting references of her father to both Icarus and Daedalus interesting. She does seem very well-read, and makes complex metaphors instead of simple comparisons. The characters in her novel are pretty complex and not one-dimensional.
ReplyDeleteThe literary metaphors throughout Fun Home all seemed so complex that I never totally understood them until reading this. It's interesting to see the areas where the Icarus and Daedalus metaphor falls short, but it seems like the Ulysses metaphors adhere to Alison and her father's relationship much more accurately. Even just the question-answer format in which Ulysses is structured reminds me of the vagueness of their relationship and how Alison's constantly asking herself questions about her father.
ReplyDeleteI did not really understand why she was making so many allusions throughout until we got to the end and it was shown that she and her father bonded over literary works. That made all of the references throughout a lot more meaningful. I will say though, the most hard hitting allusion for me was the comparison of her father to George Bailey.
ReplyDeleteOh wow, jumping into _Ulysses_ via the notorious "Ithaca" chapter--I agree that this approach is not recommended to try at home! This is a deliberately and perversely frustrating chapter in this massive novel, where we've been tracing the wanderings of these two quasi-father/son characters throughout the book, and now they finally meet and go to Bloom's house together to sober up with some hot chocolate (Stephen has just been beaten up by a naval officer he drunkenly insulted). But Joyce writes the chapter in this maddeningly abstract "catechism" q-and-a style, and we do learn certain things in the process, the "scene" itself is hidden behind the words.
ReplyDeleteI do recommend _Ulysses_--I wrote my undergrad thesis on it, and I have read the whole thing multiple times, most recently in the summer of 2019 in preparation for a Joyce/Bloom-themed trip to Dublin. But this post really makes me regret that we didn't fit _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ in this course. This is Joyce's classic coming-of-age novel, really the book that made the bildungsroman a "serious" literary form in English, and it's way more accessible than _Ulysses_ (although it has its difficult elements). I would start with _Portrait_, and if you dig it, try _Ulysses_ next. It's sort of a "sequel" to _Portrait_, in that the earlier novel ends with Stephen poised to leave Ireland forever, to strike out on his own, and _Ulysses_ opens with him back in town for his mother's funeral, too broke to go back to Europe, bumming around all day and thinking a lot about literature and art and lots of other stuff.