Another Icarus Story: Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel

I was planning on writing a nice blog post about Catcher in the Rye, about Holden’s relationship with Allie or something in that vein. But two days ago I picked up the graphic novel Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, and knew within ten pages that I wanted to write about that. (This isn’t supposed to be a review, but − read it. It’s amazing. I promise.)

For starters, Fun Home is very much a coming-of-age novel. It’s Bechdel’s memoir, narrating her childhood and adolescence in rural Pennsylvania and her experience coming out as a lesbian in college in the 1980s. However, it mainly centers on her relationship with her father, a troubled and borderline-abusive English teacher, funeral director, and obsessive aesthete. He dies in an accident when Bechdel is 20, an incident that she believes (but can’t confirm) was suicide. Around the same time, she discovers his lifelong secret – he’s had numerous affairs with men and teenage boys, including her babysitter and several of his students. These aren’t spoilers – Bechdel lays them out early on and spends the rest of the book circling her and her father’s lives from different angles, supplying new information each time.

                Literature is a central theme in Fun Home. Alison’s father is an English teacher, and they bond over books. The novel contains references to seemingly half the Western literary canon, ranging from Joyce to Wilde to Camus to Wind in the Willows to The Odyssey to Lord of the Rings. (My mom asked me if my 12-year-old brother would like this book. His favorite series is Dragonball Z, and this book is full of phrases like “his absence resonated retroactively”.) This is a deliberate storytelling choice; Bechdel tells the reader at one point, “I employ these allusions [...] not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms.” This is the best way she knows to tell her story, because it’s the tradition she grew up in. Most relevant to this class, though: there are many references to books we’ve read in class this semester.

The most obvious parallel to a book from our class comes from Catcher in the Rye. As a high schooler, Alison ends up in her father’s English class, a class called “Rites of Passage” (“Coming of Age Novel”, anyone?). They are reading Catcher, and Alison’s father asks the class who Mr. Antolini is. The class is silent, and he goes on to explain that he’s Holden’s teacher, and he made a pass at him. Bechdel points out, through her narration, that a) sitting in back of the class is a preternaturally handsome football player who’s currently “helping my dad haul junk out of the basement” (implied that’s not all they’re doing), and b) Alison’s father has a “great capacity for cognitive dissonance”. While I read Fun Home, I drew the connection between Bruce Bechdel and Mr. Antolini, and was happy when the book made that comparison as well.

In many ways, Alison Bechdel bears a lot of similarity to Stephen Dedalus. In fact, she herself acknowledges this. Alison and her father bond over Joyce, and he encourages her to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, saying, “You damn well better identify with every page”. The very first chapter of the novel is titled “Old Father, Old Artificer”.  Fun Home uses some of the same imagery that Portrait does: the book opens with a young Alison playing airplane with her father, a moment of “rare physical contact”. She likens this game to Dedalus and Icarus: soaring in the air, held up by her father. Like Joyce in Portrait, she calls into question who is Dedalus and who is Icarus. Her father’s craftsmanship and obsessive attention to detail seem to make him the “old artificer”, but he is also the one who suffers the fall. Like Stephen, Alison goes through artistic and sexual epiphanies over the course of the story, culminating in a moment of metaphorical flight where she reconciles the Dedalus/Icarus paradox, illustrated by a young Alison jumping into a pool and her father’s waiting arms:

“What if Icarus hadn’t hurtled into the sea? What if he’d inherited his father’s inventive bent? What might he have wrought?” Implying, of course, that she is what Icarus could have been – a successful artist (in her case, cartoonist), and, of course, alive.

“He did hurtle into the sea, of course. But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt.” No, her father is Icarus. Are they both Icarus, in their own way?

Like Night and Day

“Dark” and “light” are terms often used to differentiate good and evil, even to the point of being cliche. Joyce (and Stephen) embrace them wholeheartedly, using them to set the mood for scenes and suggest whether a particular situation/goal is a good one for Stephen.

Night is a universally recognized symbol of danger and secrecy, and Stephen associates it with both. Sometimes, darkness is something evil that waits to swallow Stephen up – he has to face a long, dark hallway before confronting the rector at Clongowes, when he is in a religious crisis after listening to the sermon at the retreat, his dark room becomes like the entrance to hell. At other times, the language of darkness is associated more with secrecy – he wanders through the streets seeking illicit encounters with prostitutes, and in his first encounter he describes “the dark pressure of her softly parting lips” and “darker than the swoon of sin”. Later on, when he’s seeking confession, he wanders through the “dark streets” again in search of a place where no one will recognize him. He pictures Judgment Day as a “black cold void waste”; the candles on the altar have been extinguished, leaving the chapel dark. At least for me, the mental picture in these scenes was one of pitch-blackness, only illuminated by the things Stephen was describing: the lips of the prostitute, the slide of the confessional door, his hand beating his chest in repentance. It really emphasizes the small actions at the heart of the scenes.

While all of this darkness describes paths that Stephen initially thought were right, but weren’t (having sex, rigid religious morality), light is used to describe Stephen’s true artistic passion. Throughout his life, Stephen’s search for meaning is motivated by a feeling of unattainable glory, his nebulous artistic ideal. (I know this is a vague description, but for Stephen it seems to be more of a feeling than anything concrete.) We see this in full force during his walk on the beach at the end of Chapter Four, and he mentions it later as part of his theory of aesthetics. Repeatedly, he describes it as “radiant” or “luminous”. In the same scene, he imagines music “piercing like a star the dusk of silence”. Even when night falls at the end of the chapter, it is described with language implying light – there is a “young moon” above the “pale waste” of the sea. This imagery seems to support the idea that Stephen represents Icarus rather than Dedalus – his intense attraction to this spiritual, artistic light is like the pull of the sun on Icarus.

The section with the most pointed usage of light/dark imagery is the scene where Stephen is talking to the priest, who is trying to convince him to join the priesthood.  Joyce repeatedly describes the fall of light on the priest’s face – he mentions it so often it must mean something. He is standing with his back to the light, so that his face is hidden in darkness. Behind him is a large window with a view of the sky, but he has no interest in it. In contrast, Stephen, facing the other direction, “gazed calmly before him at the waning sky, glad of the cool of the evening and the faint yellow glow which hid the tiny flame kindling upon his cheek”. Later, arguably the exact moment he decided to refuse the offer: “[...] he raised his eyes to the priest’s face and, seeing in it a reflection of the sunken day, detached his hand slowly which had acquiesced faintly in that companionship”. Stephen welcomes the wide world outside the church, but the priest has closed himself off. Although Stephen once thought the church was his calling, it can only offer him darkness, not the light he truly seeks.

Hellfire

When I read the passage in Portrait where Stephen is contemplating his potential life as a priest and hearing sinful (salacious) confessions from "the lips of women and girls", then quickly reminding himself that he must remain pure and sinless, I knew it reminded me of something. Then I realized it was this song from The Hunchback of Notre Dame:

I'm not saying Stephen could ever be like Frollo, but he has all the same self-loathing, stemming from religion-based sexual repression. And, of course, they both like to blow a perfectly normal situation way out of context. Of course, Stephen is not a villain because he doesn't blame his sin on the women he lusts after and condemn them to death. He just writes angsty poems about them.