Alison Bechdel, Fun Home.
Yes, it's thirteen years old now, and was actually turned into a stage show... what can I say, I'm behind the times. I've just read it.
***
The blurbs treated it as complex and subtle and unexpected: by the time I was a bit less than halfway through, I was pleased, but couldn't see what they were talking about. A relatively straightforward graphic novel of a difficult family situation, of a father-daughter conflict, with various literary echoes – yes, clearly intelligent people, but...
Even the drawing, though good, is relatively normal. I didn't see it as lifting off into anything remarkable.
Why was everyone saying this was so special?...
***
it was soon after that, around the midpoint, that I started to think: aha. Sudden pleasure, sudden surprise, at the beginning of a new chapter.
But we're back where we were already in the story, you already told this part, why are we –
Oh. Well actually this is kind of....
***
See, chapters in the second half return to points, return to times, return to subjects. But they change them in the telling, almost before I have time to wonder why we're back in this room, back with this conversation.
It feels a bit familiar, and the second or third time it happens, I think: this is psychoanalysis.
Or therapy, or journals, or self-exploration, but in any case...
***
Because I am still full of being a psychoanalyst – of the past ten years, of returning to the Jungian world, deciding to train in it, of being excited and enthusiastic, irritated and disoriented, passionately involved, disappointed and indignant – and admittedly I am still pompous and aggressive with it all....
(And when I am full of something, everyone for miles around knows it, of course. I exist at a fairly high volume, which is one reason – the other is the ruthless judgmental quality, for which I don't really apologize, at least not enough for many people who have known me – that I am disliked as much as liked. Though of course I can never really know the statistical balance between positive and negative votes, can I? because we never do...)
but in this phase, in what feels like my third life, my being inflated and pompous and aggressive with new power feels like... well, what do you expect, it's what happens.
It's so much easier to forgive myself these days: even when I talk too much in a session, when I leap to an interpretation too early, when I wave my knowledge about like a... oh that's too Freudian –
it just doesn't seem like such a terrible disaster. Not only because so many do it, but because I have spent time articulating it – do you know that my last seminar paper for the Jung-Institut was about the arrogant magician, the analyst who thinks he knows everything? Written later than it should have been done, in the midst of finishing the thesis, and using two of my former analysts as examples. Because I have been lucky in my teachers – not only in their positive aspects, but also occasionally when they appeared as warnings: you don't want to end up like that.
So, because being inflated and arrogant doesn't seem so dreadfully unforgivable now, it is much easier for me to get over it... even in the past year it is easy for me to say, Enough of all that, I'm sorry, let's get back to what happened: tell me again....
And so, of course, I do interpret everything I read or see or talk about as relating directly to what I'm doing right now.
(Of course I did this in the seventies, with gay theory and Foucault, in the eighties with Adorno and the avant-garde, in the nineties with AIDS and illness and death... whatever I'm doing is reflected across the entire world. Again, a forgivable distortion.)
And so of course I would read Bechdel as a psychoanalysis...
It makes sense, though.
But I am only a minor secondary character here, I am just The Reader; Bechdel and her story are center.
***
So, what she is doing is absolutely, utterly psychoanalytic: she goes back to the most charged things, to the stories she has told herself over and over, to the justifications and decisions and defenses that have formed the patterns of her existence –
but as she tells them again (and the analyst, who might be me, thinks, because he has only been doing this a few years and isn't quite alert to the core of things: oh this story again, haven't we already done this one, do I need to pay attention?), the weight of the story changes, a range of other details appears –
the meaning is changed, or really added.
In Bechdel's case: from her father as closed, aggressive, subtly monstrous, and her mother as distant, disconnected – and her early lesbian life as exciting but confusing –
her father is (not instead, but also) fragile and confused, and alive, her mother is honest and trapped, and alive...
her younger self is skittish and increasingly open – and alive.
***
It's beautifully done. The echoes of Proust and Colette, the fragments of other books, start to rise off the page, and suddenly what had been background references from a bookish life become visionary re-applications of techniques, not only techniques of writing but techniques of remembering, of existing:
we go from getting the story of her life, as we would expect it to appear in a story or a movie, to something much more real, much deeper –
it's the same life, but not as one of the simpler movies would do it: this is unfinished and resonant and endlessly incomplete, she is complex and her father is complex and her mother is complex, and they are all changing, in memory and in this moment, and it doesn't even matter that two of them are already dead.
Even dead, they can be – not just forgiven, but re-lived, re-thought.
***
It's also a bit startling that she does so much with Ulysses, which she disliked in college, but has clearly returned to reread... Ulysses was huge for me in high school, where I read it as an independent study, and where Steve, the hot football player who was my chemistry lab partner and occasional friend, kept picking it up and trying to find the notorious pornographic parts. (He remained fairly frustrated... as, from a different angle, did I.)
For me, I loved the mad middle sections of the book. The first three chapters still seem mostly irritating – the kind of male showing off Bechdel finds tiresome – but once Joyce starts to have fun, it turns into something glorious.
And that is of course a cross-link to the ways we identify with remarkable or difficult things when we are in training to become ourselves, and measure ourselves and our goals by... well sometimes rather mad things, but all right that's the nature of it all.
(If Ulysses hadn't been handed to me by Mrs. Hollingshead, would my later failures and successes have spun off in other directions? I suspect that if she hadn't pulled me onto that path, then later when everything was full of failure and chaos, I would have slipped sideways into being a resentful record-store or bookstore employee, stuck forever behind a counter, lacking vision in relation to myself, or other things... it's an interesting question: I suspect that, even with all the other books and plays I'd read, without Joyce, the periods of failure would have seemed more permanent, and would have outlined a future with less possibility. I shudder a bit as I try to peer through the grimy window that separates me from those half-sketched phantoms.)
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Arrogance is also so present because, intermittently over the summer, I've watched most of the first eight years of Frasier. At first it was for fun, something farcical and light, that is also about psychoanalysis. The greatest bits for me are the two especially gay figures – David Hyde Pierce, and Joe Keenan, the wonderful writer who put aside his comedy novels to produce and write for the series.
But the besetting sin is always Frasier's aggressive narcissism, which after some seasons becomes exhausting – is it really possible that a psychoanalyst, even one who isn't seeing patients but only advising radio listeners, would be so blind to his own problems, when they come up week after week after week?...
Intermittent episodes move into something bigger, with more change and even healing, but the demands of the sitcom keep pulling the behavior back. I will probably continue through the last seasons, if slowly, but the repetition is tiring...
and of course it does remind me, caution me, about myself.
***
I think I wasn't quite in focus at the end of the Bechdel; but that's okay. The sense that it was ending, the range of what had happened, the Proustian/Joycean worlds – there really need to be some women writers there, but I've never done the lesbian/feminist reading she did in college, and never will I think – such a lot was happening: a symphonic ending, not only in rhetoric but in overlapping referential complexity.
But that is not a problem. In a few days, I'll go back and look at it again.
... that cold-sweat shock at realizing what the title really means....
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It will obviously be worth it....