Alison Bechdel's
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was named one of
Time
magazine's 10 best books of the year in 2006. Prior to the publication
of her graphic novel-cum-memoir, Bechdel was best known for her comic
strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For," which was syndicated in a number of
alternative publications throughout the country. In
Fun Home,
Bechdel persists in exploring some of the themes she first examined in
her strips, particularly gender and sexual orientation, as well as the
trials and tribulations of a smart and witty young woman in America.
However, Bechdel's memoir is an even more personal and poignant
account--both of growing up gay and simply growing up. Bechdel's book asks us to
look at the future of contemporary American literature. Will the "great
American novel" be something other than a traditional novel? Have we
moved past the genre of the novel onto more hybrid literary forms, such
as the graphic memoirs of Spiegelman and Bechdel?
See below for resources on Bechdel:
Comics Journal
interview
All About Women Festival
interview
Book with great chapter about Bechdel
Announcement of MacArthus Genuis grant
award
Dykes to Watch Out For strip
Musical
version of
Fun Home
Cvetkovich
article on the queer archive in Fun Home
Is the novel on it's way out? A couple weeks ago I was uninterested in reading any more novels for a time. What a long and meandering path to truth novels take. When that path requires a reader to enter a particularly loathsome world the journey becomes more difficult. The graphic novels I've read this semester however carry none of that dread. I think perhaps the graphic novel fits better than the novel in our time - I'm thinking very broadly about the nature of on-demand entertainment and shorter entertainment.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, I think we live in a world which is characterized by very loose boundaries between symbols and context, post-modernity welcomes this sort of "corruption." I don't think suggesting an anxiety about modernity is inappropriate. What potential detriment is done to a system of signification when "all that is solid melts into air?" Bechdel's Fun Home reads as a triumph of manipulating those old stale flattened symbols into a usable past. The dual nature of reading a graphic novels seems to be a particularly useful way to construct other dualities and then examine the nature of their fabrication - (the "fabrication," another post-modern way of thinking).
Perhaps that's only true because these works are emerging from the same climate, their thinking rings true because artist and reader can participate in the same sort of sign logic. But the victory in Fun Home seems to be that the mobility of signs, their vulnerability to corruption, is never seen as inappropriate - in fact, the new system of signs make damn good sense. Is the novel incapable of doing the same sort of work? No of course not, we see that the graphic novel and the novel participate in a lot of the same significations, their logic lends themselves to each other. I think if the novel goes away it won't be because it can't do the work but because people prefer the experience of the graphic novel (and it's participation in other visual entertainment which makes use of shorter, broken, or corrupt systems of imagery (TV, the tweet, the popular meme, the "like," etc.).