It was fun to teach this again, and a pleasure to re-read it. It’s interesting to me that my students hardly complain about how difficult it is, though it is really quite difficult! Not only because it’s fascinatingly elliptical, but also because it’s so dense with literary references. I found this very annoying the first time I read it, even though I was already familiar with many of the references by then — my students know almost none of them, and yet, they don’t seem to mind. As they mentioned, mostly, it didn’t actually matter — Bechdel explained the connection enough that they understood the point anyhow. Sometimes, they said, they’d look something up (What did you look up, I asked, plot summaries, or something else? Their answers were vague.). So then what did the references really add? I asked. Are they a form of misdirection, an elaborate artifice that parallels her father’s construction of his house? This seemed appealing to them.
What I love about this book is how it constantly call into question and tries out the relation between two things (mostly between Alison and her father) as opposite, the same, or causally linked. Or just contiguous, or arbitrary. My favorite example of this is early in the book, where Alison’s father asks her to bring him scissors while he’s working on a body, and she wonders if he’s repeating his own rite of initiation, or trying to elicit a reaction in her that he no longer feels capable of, or whether he just needed scissors. What does this scene mean? she asks, narrating the scene. It’s a nice example of the kind of meta-narration that the book is doing all the time.
Is this smoke and mirrors, that defer or deflect the harder questions the book is ostensibly probing? That the book is arguably asking, or rather dancing around, that very question (does this actually mean something??) doesn’t mean it isn’t also answering it. But I really think Fun Home courts reticence in an interesting sort of way, especially when you consider how much the current era seems to fetishize transparency and disclosure. I guess this is why I’m surprised that my students are so gamely accepting of it — it’s that the stereotype of their generation is call-outs and canceling and “living your truth” and this book really flies in the face of all that. Maybe the musical packages it differently? Or maybe I should know better than to buy into these stereotypes… But maybe also, they just accept (as indeed I seem to do) the book’s invitation to not press it too hard, and accept the superficial messages it’s offering, without really thinking through the deeper point? Was it my job, teaching this text, to press it more? Why didn’t I do it?
Kasia Reads 