Academic Pretension

Fun Home
Alison Bechdel

I was mildly puzzled in class on Monday to hear one of my classmates accuse Alison Bechdel of academic pretension in the writing of Fun Home. This wasn't because she used long, complicated sentences or went off on lengthy discussions of obscure topics for no reason or anything else that I would think of as pretentious. It was because Fun Home was filled with literary references, including references to what some might refer to as "great" works of literature. James Joyce's Ulysses, for example, or the novels of Marcel Proust, or the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus.

Now, this accusation puzzles me because it implies something unpleasant and unfair and unnecessarily restrictive to authors. Maybe the average person off the street, picking up a copy of Fun Home and flipping through it, won't get every single literary reference. But hey, that's ok. Bechdel explains many of them, and what a reader doesn't get, he or she can look up. It shouldn't really be an imposition to ask someone to hop on the computer and search Wikipedia or something. Also, though, saying that making literary references is pretentious places a restriction on authors that they shouldn't have.

True, some people use fancy language and refer to famous books because they want to look smarter. But reading Fun Home, it seemed to me like Alison Bechdel made these references because literature was what interested her. Referencing something because you enjoy and because you feel it's a good comparison is not the same as referencing something so that you can look down on people who don't understand you.

From the depictions of some of the more irritating professors and students at her college, in fact, Bechdel seems to despise that kind of behaviour herself. It's rude to look down on people because they know less than you. If someone doesn't understand something, one should explain it, not be snooty. Snootiness just makes people less inclined to want to learn things.

Anyway, I was also puzzled because making literary references seemed entirely appropriate in the context of the story. Literature was obviously important to Bechdel's father, and it's something you get to see them connecting over throughout the course of the story. Given that this is, indeed, a story about Bechdel's father, it's only right to pepper it with the things he liked best.

The Uses Of Autobiography

Fun Home
Alison Bechdel

I really liked Fun Home. It's a little depressing, but then, what that we read in this class isn't? It was also one of my boyfriend's textbooks for his American Autobiography course last semester, and autobiography came up in class, so that seems like something to talk about.

We came up with a few reasons in class for why something relatively unknown would write an autobiography. To give other people something to relate to, maybe. Because you've got a story you think people should know. Maybe, in the case of Alison Bechdel herself, to provide another book which could be added to a "self-discovery reading" stack like she shows us in Fun Home.

Honestly, though, I think the main reason for any autobiography is the straght Occam's-razor one. People like to talk about themselves. Everyone is, at all times, composing a little autobiography in the back of his or her head. Seriously. That's what your memory is; that's part of what it's for. Not everyone necessarily wants to deal with their little auto-autobiography, but there it is. The main difference between that and a written autobiography is that some people feel like letting everyone in on the secret.

Also, I think people write autobiographies as a personal aid to memory. Alison Bechdel, for example, describes Fun Home as a "memoir of her father." Fun Home seems like primarily an autobiography, but I'm certainly also willing to believe that it's exactly what she says it is. At one point in the book she discusses how uncertain she became, for a while, about the events in her life, to the point of writing "I think" after every statement in her diary. An autobiography is a way to validate your memory: it's easier to prove to yourself that you know what you know when you've got it in solid written form. And not only do you have a solid copy of your memories, you get to make them last even longer by giving them to other people. As long as someone lives who has a copy of your book, people will still know that what happened in your life happened.

I forget where I read this first, but there's...well, I think it'd probably be called a philosophical concept, that says that no one is truly dead unless everyone who remembers them is also dead. Autobiographies keep people alive. So that's also what Fun Home is. Until a time comes when there's nobody alive who's read it, Bruce Bechdel will still be alive.

Isn't that cool?