In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, the story is crafted through a lens of intertextuality between the characteristics of people in her life and those in great literary works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Much like how Joyce’s Ulysses is a story dependent upon a framing of intertextuality between his work and Homer’s Odyssey, Bechdel’s Fun Home has a method of storytelling crafted through a conscious continuation of this literary tradition. “The literary intertextuality of Fun Home is palpable. Narrator Alison herself tells us in Chapter Three that “I employ these allusions to James and Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are the most real to me in fictional terms.” (Modernism) In this narrative of young Alison’s life, the lines between art and reality are blurred to give the reader the perspective through which Alison so intentionally chose to artfully depict the story of her childhood, family, sexuality, and her father’s mysterious death. Fun Home explores the tension between the desires and needs to live according to realism or fantasy. The role-reversing relationship between Alison and her father is articulated through the representation of the characters of both Icarus and Daedalus from Greek mythology, and Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses.
In both the very beginning and very end of Bechdel’s novel, allusion to The Odyssey (Ulysse’s in Latin) is made by evoking the imagery of Icarus falling into the sea after unsuccessfully attempting to use his wings to fly out of the Labyrinth on the island of Crete to describe the memory of her father holding her up in the air by his feet playing “airplane” with her. “Considering the fate of Icarus after he flouted his father’s advice and flew so close to the sun, his wings melted.” (Bechdel,4) The book ends with an inquiry, “What if Icarus hadn’t hurtled into the sea? What if he’d inherited his father’s inventive bent? What might he have wrought?” (Bechdel, 231) By ending the novel with this allusion of intertextuality the reader is urged to look at Alison’s story as a whole through the framework of intertextuality with The Odyssey. More importantly this exploration of Daedalus and Icarus is a relationship meant to mirror that of Alison and her father. In Greek mythology the character of Daedalus is a creative genius of great scientific achievement. Unfortunately, this creative genius is coupled with tendencies for impulsivity and coldness of heart.
Very early in the story, Bechdel begins to characterize her father as a “Daedalus”. By describing her father in this manner, she is able to craft fully implicate what kind of personality he has without being overly explicit in her description. Allison describes her father, “He was an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of décor.” (Bechdel,6) This description of someone who is overly concerned with aesthetics and style through the term “Daedalus of Decor” is something that a reader who has never been exposed to the texts being referred to would still be able to gather through the context clues provided by Bechdel. The character of Daedalus in Greek mythology was a skilled Craftsman and artist, likely being a character possessed by nuances of style and beauty. The character of Stephen Daedalus brought to life by Joyce in books such as Ulysses (The “Odyssey” in Latin) exhibits the same kind of preoccupation with the aesthetic, “Mr. Daedalus eyed with cold wandering scorn various points of Ben Dollard’s Figure. Then, turning to Father Cowley with a nod, he muttered sneeringly: That’s a pretty garment, isn’t it, for a summer’s day?” (Joyce, 219-220) This line of commentary really captures the sniveling personality of Daedalus. The blasé and poignantly indirect manner in which he so mockingly evaluates the visual presentation of what is around him is the character trait most implicitly imposed upon Alison’s father by these continual references to Daedalus.
Again, it is important to note that Alison’s fathers “Daedalus’sness” is something that readers can gather through the use of specific word orderings. The parallel grammatical structure of “Alchemist of Appearance, Savant of Surface, Daedalus of décor” is used to foreground the idea of these personality traits being expressly linked to the words used to describe them. The term “Daedalus” is meant to become synonymous with a very real aspect of Alison’s Fathers personality within the mind of the reader.
Although the entire text is wrought with literary allusions that implicate the notion of literary criticism as an important aspect in the art of storytelling within the story itself, a young college age Allison expresses her weariness at the validity of literary criticism after her first experiences in a college English class, “I didn’t see why we couldn’t just read the books without forcing contorted interpretations on them.” (Bechdel, 200) This presents a level of irony within the dimensions of the story as well. Bechdel is clearly modeling this book after several profound literary works and is engaging in her own kind of literary criticism by modeling her own narrative within their structural framework.
Throughout Fun Home, Bechdel refers to her father as a “Dedalus” five times within the first 12 pages of the book. This allusion is inundated into the mind of the reader early on in the story and sets the framework for the foundation of the intended characterization of Alison’s father. “He would perform, as Dedalus did, dazzling displays of artfulness.” (Bechdel, 9) Even a reader with absolutely no familiarity with the character of Dedalus would be able to quickly gather the artistic personality traits that the evocation of his name represents. Interestingly, Bechdel goes between referencing Stephen Dedalus from Ulysses and the character of Daedalus from Homer’s Odyssey (“Ulysses” in Latin) “Then there are those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea?” (Bechdel, 12) Here it is evident that the lines of intertextuality are blurred and distorted as well.
Alison’s choice to see her family through a fictional lens allows the readers to do the same. The reality of who her father is can never be fully extracted from the characterizations provided within stories by Joyce, Proust, Fitzgerald, and Wilde. Bechdel’s craft of storytelling relies on dimensions of literary allusions that provide the characterizations of the nuances of her father’s personality. This approach allows the reader to make their own inferences regarding these characterizations based upon their understandings of the implications of these literary references themselves (to whatever varying degree they happen to). The process of unpacking these references and deciding what they say about the characters in specific terms is open to interpretation. This allows for a reading of Bechdel’s narrative that is simultaneously grounded in the reality of her life and reliant upon the reference to fictional characters and stories. The tension created by this dichotomy of art imitating life and vice versa is one that can be applied to the story of every person’s life if they so choose.
Outside of the discussion of Fun Home in Joyce’s world, the character of Stephen Dedalus is inherently intertextual in nature as he is derived from the character of Daedalus in The Odyssey, and is presented as the primary character in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Chapter Five of Joyce’s A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is entitled ‘Old father, old artificer’. Stephen Dedalus’ closing lines in the novel which were an invocation to his father named after the Greek legend Daedalus, seeking his assistance in becoming a master artist himself. Much like how Joyce called upon The Odyssey as its artistic ancestor to his modern novels, Bechdel is attempting to do the same. This conscious choice to evoke Joyce as an artistic ancestor frames the entire graphic novel. In the beginning of Chapter Two, Bechdel refers to her father’s death as his ‘consummate artifice’ (p.27) - his greatest creation. This description is directly referring to Stephen Daedalus’s closing lines of his sentiment to achieve artistic mastery.
Here Bechdel is mirroring the choice of death made by her father with Daedalus’s ultimate desire for artistic achievement and ability. In this instance, she is describing her father as Joyce himself and characterizes their relationship as that of the mythologically based relationship between Daedalus and Icarus. “Yet which one of them is Daedalus, and which is Icarus? Bechdel herself continues to contemplate.” (modernism)
As a child, Alison never had a close parental relationship with her father. Early on in the book he is described as never being physically affectionate with Alison. She does recount one instance of physical affection between them in her early life, “We were not a physically expressive family, to say the least. But once I was moved to kiss my father good night.” (Bechdel,19) It is only as a high school student and fellow lover of English that Alison is able to establish this close relationship with her father as an adolescent and young adult prior to his death. It is important to take note of the idea that this relationship they established was essentially an intellectual partnership and friendship between peers. The kind of comradery available within this new adult relationship between Alison and her father is multidimensional.
As a teacher of English Alison’s father is certainly her superior academically. However, as two homosexual adults the young Alison has gained much more maturity than her father at an extremely young age. Although everyone in their family now knew of her father’s homosexuality, he never felt fully comfortable expressing his true identity in the world. Having married a woman with whom he has had several children, the majority of his adult life has comprised of a largely disingenuous existence. Although the ages of the boys are not clear, the legal scare concerning her father buying alcohol for underage boys implies the dark and destructive nature of the expression of his true sexuality in a repressed and limiting setting. His comments about the incident to the child character of Alison capture the dark nature of this repression, “I’m bad. Not good like you.” (Bechdel, 153) Although homosexuality is experienced by both Alison and her father, Alison comes out as a young adult and quickly begins to forge her identity in the world as a Lesbian woman. Unlike Alison, her father never chose to come out and instead opted for a life of secretive shame and unhappiness. Regarding their abilities to express their true nature, Alison is the spiritual leader of her father. In this sense, they switch roles of parent and child. The last conversation that Alison and her father ever truly have while in the car displays her father’s choice to be unwilling to come out and express his true nature. “When I was little, I really wanted to be a girl.” (Bechdel, 221) Examples of these nuances in their relationship express the changing roles between Alison and her father as Bloom and Dedalus, “It was more like fatherless Stephen and sonless Bloom.” (Bechdel, 221)
Not only does Alison use the dichotomy of Icarus and Daedalus to characterize the paradoxical parental relationship between her and her father, but she uses Ulysses the book itself to add another dimension of intertextual symbolism to the implications surrounding her and her father’s relationship. Bechdel herself described in an interview that she experienced a “dichotomous disgust and empathy with Joyce” (Modernism) This feeling is mirrored in Alison’s approach to her father. Although Alison is acutely aware of the range of disturbing conflicts in her father’s personal life, she is nonetheless compelled to engage in a close intellectual relationship with him. Although Alison admittedly did not see her father enough in the years surrounding his death, when they were together the intimacy between them was blatantly obvious to those around them. During a visit home from college, “On our final evening, a family friend remarked admiringly to Joan on the close relationship between my father and me, “It’s really unnatural.” (Bechdel,225) This outside perspective observing the closeness of their relationship is poignant in truly understanding the paradoxical nature of their relationship. As insanely close as they were when together, they were not together nearly enough.
Bechdel uses Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to draw upon the relationship between Daedalus and Bloom to characterize the dichotomy of the intimacy between her and her father with the ever-evolving nature of their bizarre connection. However, the broader framing of Ulysses within Fun Home has more specific implications upon their characterizations. By taking a close analytical look at the way the text describes Alison’s relationship with the subject of English, her father as a person, and the role that Ulysses plays in the development of her personal and academic life, the purpose of this framing is made apparent.
Early on in Alison’s collegiate life as a freshman, she is initially put off by her English class and what she views as the unnecessary practice of imposing abstract meaning upon a text that may or may not have been intended by the author. This of course as stated previously creates irony considering the fact that Alison the character is written into a text which is heavily reliant upon the imposition of abstract concepts from other texts upon her own. This initial reception of college English leads Alison to opt out of taking any more English classes for the next several years or so. Eventually Alison is “sucked back in” (modernism) by the subject of English and decides to take a class devoted entirely to Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses. Alison’s involvement with this class and texts leads to a “rekindling” of sorts in regard to her relationship with her father. The intellectual conversation they share about and through the text is in many ways a hallmark of the deeply loving and intimate yet precarious relationship shared by these two human beings. “As much as she tried to get away from English, the subject sucked her back in, compelled her to study Ulysses, and once her father was gone, I think Bechdel continued to keep the memory of her father, the man she never quite connected with, like Stephen and Bloom, alive via literature. The story of Icarus and Daedalus is retold, and she claims that her father is there to catch her, but really, the roles are reversed, aren’t they? Bruce Bechdel is Icarus, who falls into the sea, and Alison is Daedalus, the inventor. Critics have said that Fun Home is actually a retelling of Ulysses via her own life experience and the medium of the graphic novel; Alison is fatherless Stephen, Bruce is the childless Bloom, not two ships passing in the night, but two old acquaintances who don’t quite know how to stop and greet each other.” (Modernism) Delving deeper into the intertextual parallels between Stephen Daedalus, Leopold Bloom, Alison, and her father proves worthwhile. “Ulysses is a beguiling, modernist tale of a young man and an older man, a son and a father (although they are not actually related, save as acquaintances), traveling through their lives in pursuit of–what? Meaning? Purpose?
Understanding? There are connections between them, in behavior and action, in their relationship, in the paths that they take. And while these paths may intersect, they are still delineated, most of the book focusing on Bloom and his own ruminations on almost everything…” (Gould) In Fun Home, Alison spends a lot of time as a child and young adult ruminating on just about everything. Although she is always connected to her father through out his life, they are never fully engaged with one another for long periods of time. Their relationship is continually wrought with dysconnectivity both physically and mentally at times. Alison the character can be read as Leopold Bloom in relation to her father’s Stephen Daedalus in this respect. Although Alison is quite explicit in her revealing of the most intimate of family secrets, she does so in a way that is divergent from a simple and linear form of story-telling, much like Ulysses itself. Fun Home is not told in a linear fashion. Everything that happens in the story is plausible and connected yet intentionally divergent, much like Joyce’s admittedly confusing writing of Ulysses.
The most engaging exploration of the intertextual dimensions of Fun Home involves looking even deeper at the parallels of characterization between Alison and her father. The dichotomy of tension between realism and fantasy that plagues humanity is also explored through the intertextual framework at the beginning and end of Bechdel’s Fun Home. In the Greek mythology Daedulas and Icarus are trapped in the Labryinth on the island of Crete. The two of them worked night and day to invent something to assist in their daring escape from the island. From feathers and wax they were able to create wings, the wax being used to attach the wings to Icarus’s back. Daedalus warned his son to fly low and close to the water to remain safe.
Icarus was so overjoyed to escape the island that he did not heed his father’s warning and flew high into the sky where the sun melted the wax binding off of his wings, plunging him into the sea where he drowned as his father helplessly watched. This allegorical tale represents the tension between realism and optimism. Daedalus being the realist and Icarus the unthinking optimist, falling into the sea as a result of his lack of connection to the laws of physical reality. In many ways the death of Bruce Bechdel (Alison’s father) was similar to Icarus’s plunging into the sea. (Miller)
The approach of telling her personal narrative through a framework of intertextuality is also a technique that creates an intellectual distance between the life on the page and the real life that Alison experienced which inspired the story. This is particularly interesting in regard to the characterization of Bruce Bechdel, someone who would not face his true-self in his real life and was therefore compelled to see himself through these fictional frameworks. The idea of blurring the purely realistic descriptions of Alison and Bruce by filtering them through the framework of these literary works run in parallel to the idea of Bruce’s identity in life being as blurred as it was. Only by referring to these fictional stories can the depth of his life of psychological deception be fully grasped by the reader and Alison alike.
Although Fun Home is a personal narrative of Alison Bechdel’s young life, the intertextual framework of her story telling actually adds her work to the cannon of modernist literature that she references to throughout the text. In doing so she allows herself as a writer to become a contemporary of the likes of Joyce, Fitzgerald, and others. “Not a literal contemporary, but certainly, a spiritual one. She is acting to legitimize the graphic novel form by placing her work in such esteemed company and daring readers to flex their intellectual muscles.” (modernism) This intertextual approach is a framework for interpreting a person’s life and stories of it.
For Bechdel this intertextual approach has allowed her to make some sense of the inexplicable connection, confusion, and internal chaos surrounding her relationship with her father. Fun Home craft fully uses intertextuality to blur the lines between fact and fiction in this personal narrative, “We have to remember that it is a narrative designed from Bechdel’s own experience in psychoanalysis, learning to view her life as a dream. This is why she once admitted to an interviewer that she could not have ‘told this story without images’, because dreams are as much imagery as they are language.” (modernism) This psychological impulse for intertextuality is interesting because it conveys a need for humans to create deeply conceptual stories of their lives and look upon themselves as characters within those texts that they so revere. By crafting her story through this intertextual framework, Bechdel has entered the arena of critical discussion of these texts through a lens of personal narrative, gender, and sexuality.
Works Cited
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2015. Print.
Gould. “Fun Home, Artifice, and James Joyce.” Fun Home, Artifice, and James Joyce. Serendip
Studio, 13 Sept. 2010. Web. 24 Apr. 2017
Joyce, James. Ulysses. London: Wordsworth Editions, 2010. Print.
Miller, Kaycie. “Icarus: The Boy Who Flew.” Odyssey. N.p., 27 Dec. 2016. Web. 10 May 2017.
“Modernism and Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’.” A study of the Hollow Earth. The Symzonian,
23 Jan. 2013. Web. 24 Apr. 2017.
