For this week I read Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. First of all I have to admit that seeing Alison's father in substantially low cut shorts in the very first frames of the novel gave me suspicions that were exactly on the mark. As an outside observer those shorts coupled with his love for the decorative arts made his latent homosexuality rather obvious. With that remark out of the way... I thought that the book was clearly well thought out in its literary nature. The allusions and metaphors concerning other writers were overabundant. I do have a little complaint about the words she uses. In just about every page is a word that no one would ever use in conversation, which I felt was rather odd. It seemed distant in that way, while telling a very personal story. I felt that familiar stink that writing can get when an author uses too many rare words. I understand that the author read a lot of books, that's absolutely obvious without the use of words like "dishabille", "mien", and "preternatural" peppered in every few pages. I appreciate the use of words like this, but at a certain point it became a little excessive. I respect the use of the appropriate word, but I don't think that good writing is a matter of diction.
It's makes perfect sense that she would relate to her father through books, since it's the only real continuous connecting element she had to him. It's a very word driven book. I never really felt that the images ever contributed their own form of beauty at all. They just illustrated what the words already present or at best elaborated on them. The images were singular in purpose that way, as I often see them in comics. They alleviate the writer from the necessity to describe the setting or the characters and not doing much more than that. This is completely understandable, but I know that this type of art is not what I am attracted to. It feels stilted. I feel like it's a lopsided compromise. The art is compromised due to time constraints so it's not necessarily as beautiful as the world you'd create inside your own head when reading a description, yet at the same time it is used to replace the words that would make a scene beautiful. It's hard to understand who wins when the art is used like that. Honestly, authors describe characters with great specificity and poignant detail. Visual artists can do so as well. Not once in this novel did I ever see a drawing of a character that wasn't generic. At best the visuals sometimes showed a particular character's emotion or domineering stance, but if that were converted to writing it would be amateurish at best.
I'm guessing this is the evidence of my own conflict with some long form comics. It seems that certain examples of it are wholly shortchanged. At once they avoid filling 300 pages with type, yet get a story across. On the other hand they completely abandon visual beauty altogether. A more simplistic look is fine, but it has to serve some significant purpose, which words wouldn't clearly out do them in. The synergy between word and image is the fertile ground that these comics should explore. I don't think that Fun Home did that. I think it was a good graphic novel. It would probably make a better written novel. There were attempts at what I am talking about. She did have some parallel narrative stuff going on, which was mostly words in captions versus speech balloons. She did have some kids say "spread 'um" when pretending to be cops busting in on some illicit card game, while there was a nude painting of a woman with her legs spread on the wall behind them. I don't think cops necessarily open up with the phrase "spread 'um" when they bust perpetrators. I would think "put your hands in the air" or the more out of date "freeze" would have sufficed. The choice she made seemed a tad forced. I also found it interesting how the author was self critical about her literary connections between her life and those great works. I usually enjoy such self reflection, but at the same time it seemed like an attempt to cover all the bases in a sense. In order to appease the more judgmental of us that would challenge her penchant to connect her and her father's lives to that of literary giants. There is an interesting parallel between how she doubted the reasonableness of the connections her english teacher at college made when studying novels and her own tendency to do the same in her own life.
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