Fun Home & Time

            In finishing Fun Home, I found myself wondering how the narrative related to time. Unlike some of the other books and collections we’ve read, time exists in-between the lines and the drawings of Bechdel’s. To me, it’s not as obvious as, say, brown girl dreaming. The time in Fun Home operates in an intimately personal way, related to Bechdel’s grief over her father’s death. The graphic novel jumps all over linear time, beginning in childhood, going back to Bruce’s childhood, going to Bechdel’s college years, and so on. What truly stood out to me was Bechdel’s drawing of parallels between herself and her father, as well as the literature the two read.

            Especially when evaluating books, Bechdel seemingly links her father’s life to something grander—to different points of time outside of his own lifespan. His love of Ulysses or Hemmingway or Proust brings him both into another time and extracts him from his own. In this way, Bechdel can relate to her father. Only when removed from his “usual” setting does he become interpretable for Bechdel. In her childhood memories, her father isn’t as much a sympathetic or understandable figure. But as she matures, as she learns more about her own identity, she begins to see her father in a different light. 

As we’ve talked about in class, time can aid in changing the understanding of past events. This especially connects to the change occurring within the fight for LGBTQ+ rights, which Bechdel often ponders. She thinks about her father’s life if he’d been born when she was or later. Would he have killed himself or died the way he did? Would he have stayed in their little town? Much of Bechdel’s ruminations on her father find grounding in the present—this present, which accepts LGBTQ+ people, allows her to wonder what her father’s life might have been. 

            In reading, I picked up a sense of timelessness that permeated Bechdel’s early life. The town thy inhabit lives in a way untouched by the passage of time—or touched in a way unlike that of more populous areas. This mirrors the function of the titular “fun home”; the town embalms those within, preserving them and keeping them in place. Even the Bechdels’ home reflects this timelessness as her father meticulously maintains the 19th century house even in the 20th century. Only when leaving can they be human, as we see when Alison and her family take trips to places like NYC. To make this timelessness more bearable, there’s a repetition of counting and timekeeping, as seen in her journals and her OCD tendencies for a year. It creates a measure of time that seems to be lost in the mundanity. 

            I found it difficult to pick up on distinct concepts of time at first when reading Fun Home. Bechdel weaves in time to her story much more naturally and quietly, as it usually does in everyday life. Not every moment transports you or shocks you or questions the space-time continuum. Time seemingly exists outsides the characters; they grow and change, but it feels particularly external. Only when Bechdel leaves her town for college can she fully explore her identity—just like her father. And death? While central to the story, it acts not as an end, but a start—a way in which Alison might reflect and reinterpret and change her own past to reimagine her present. 

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