Ann Cvetkovich’s “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home”

Ann Cvetkovich situates Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home among extant criticism of other graphic memoirs—namely Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis—in the way they all concern the relationship between historical and personal trauma. Like Spiegelman, Bechdel’s text concerns a kind of family archeology, in her case undertaken by a queer child attempting to trace her queerness back to her closeted father; like Satrapi, Bechdel was an actual witness to events, and is not merely responding to the “postmemory” experienced by the next generation (Cvetkovich 113). But Cvetkovich distinguishes Bechdel’s memoir from the others for its intimate scope and emphasis on queer concerns and problematics. Where Spiegelman and Satrapi pursue precision, Bechdel generates ambiguity; where Spiegelman and Satrapi situate their stories in moments of violent political rupture, Bechdel’s family drama feels deceptively small—one might even call it claustrophobic. All three texts dramatize the difference in scale between the individual caught within the machine of vast global events and the cultural memory that occludes the personal in such events. Bechdel’s cultural rupture is an invisible one, the very violence of which is in its suppression and secrecy. She seeks to be “the sympathetic witness who can make available the rich and contradictory story of [her father’s] life so that he is something more than a pedophile, suicide, or tragic homosexual” (Cvetkovich 113). Bechdel undertakes this task for the good of the queer community, excavating the violence to self and others that comes from living a closeted life: Such suppression, the text argues, is as silently dangerous as louder, more visible cataclysms.

Cvetkovich grounds her observations in a queer theoretical frame, linking queer theory to scholars of historical trauma like Marianne Hirsch, who coined the term “postmemory” to refer to the aftereffects that haunt the children of parents who have lived through trauma. Much of Cvetkovich’s evidence is built on the interplay between image and text: She observes that the combination of words and images in all three graphic novels demonstrate “the effects of growing up in the vicinity of powerful combinations of violence and secrecy, including forms of secrecy that in the interest of protecting children’s innocence seem only to harm them” (Cvetkovich 113). For Bechdel’s text especially, the images create a “visual archive” of what only existed in secret or as symptom—the way her father’s obsession with restoration is a symptom; or his fastidiousness about appearance that he projects onto his daughter in a way that violates her autonomy. Through recreating documents and photographs in a more detailed, photorealistic sketch style than the rest of the illustrations, Bechdel “draws the evidence” in a way that both concedes a subjective read of events—the drawings are not photographs or digital reproductions of documents like they are in Spiegelman—and rhetorically separates them from the rest of the art. Bechdel uses the art to “both enhance and trouble acts of witness” (Cvetkovich 114).

Cvetkovich takes as her prime exemplar the memoir’s “centerfold,” an image of the family babysitter taken during a trip the children took with their father. Bechdel painstakingly reproduces the photograph in detailed crosshatching, but also includes her cartoony style in the form of the narrator Alison’s hands holding the photograph. This produces overlays of reality that complicate rather than simplifying. The more realistic sketch gives the artifact a greater tie to the “real world” than the personal story of Alison’s interiority, while also nodding to her father’s more baroque artistic tastes in contrast to her simple line-art. But, as Cvetkovich notes, the fact that it is hand-drawn concedes that we are not seeing an “unmediated form of vision” (114). She bathes the photograph—which may have been innocent—in an erotic glow, trying to visually imagine her father’s desire when he took the photograph of the almost naked teen lying on the bed, in the hotel room next to his children. The drawn photograph’s “visual elements—its style, composition, layout, and sequencing—underscore its emotional significance” rather than its historical veracity (Cvetkovich 115). Indeed, Cvetkovich contends that the original photograph and the hand-drawn replica tell different stories, each critical to our understanding of a complex and secret history: “Despite their differences—the photograph instantaneous, the drawing laborious; the photograph apparently truthful, the drawing achieving other kinds of verisimilitude—both serve as technologies of memory” (118). This overlay of semantic systems is central to Bechdel’s project of cultural memory’s intersection with personal experience.

Bechdel’s archive interrupts the narrative of queerness in the United States. Her combination of images and text refuses to succumb to dominant trends in “queer witnessing” that idealize and simplify. The trauma of Bechdel’s illustrated world is repressed and compacted, cramped within her father’s need to sublimate and deny, and Bechdel “airs out” the family trauma by outing a parent for whom concealment was a way of life. The graphic form is appropriate to this project, comprising an “insurgent genre” that documents events in ways that hew closer to emotional than historical truth (Cvetkovich 112).  As Cvetkovich notes:

Fun Home's queer witnessing deserves to be part of its highly successful and well-deserved reception, since it provides such a compelling challenge to celebratory queer histories that threaten to erase more disturbing and unassimilable inheritances. (126)

Cvetkovich calls this challenge to the status quo a bold move. She notes that the current state of LGBTQ  rhetoric, at least in the mainstream, is “quite willing to disavow stigmatized identities that might disrupt the clean wholesome image of gay people who just want to get married and have families” (125). Queer theory itself pushes back on this recourse to normativity.

Cvetkovich draws interesting parallels and makes compelling points about Bechdel’s archive of memory and its relationship to the inherited trauma of the closet. Having read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, however, I can’t help but think she might have deepened her argument through an engagement with semiotics: Bechdel deliberately activates different sign systems in her visual and conceptual overlays. McCloud notes how variance along the continuum of realism/abstraction in comics affects reader’s experience of meaning in predictable ways:

By de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favor of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts. Through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without… and through the cartoon the world within. (41)

This insight deepens Cvetkovich’s observations about the Bechdel’s assorted “technologies of memory,” and could be fruitfully applied to her “centerfold,” which shows Alison’s hands (the world within) holding a photorealistic drawing of a photograph (the world without). McCloud notes that comics offer what other media can’t, in that the reader becomes, in a sense, a collaborator. He introduces the concept of the “gutter”—the space between the panels of a cartoon—as a space at once empty and pregnant with meaning. The gutter is the interstice where readers commit “closure”: “Comics panels fracture both time and space,” he says, “offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (McCloud 67). Bechdel’s medium of choice forces readers to collaborate with its author, closing the gaps in memory, both cultural and personal, that have no closure in the real world.

Works Cited

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. First Mariner Books, 2007.

Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women’s Studies Quarterly. Vol. 36, No. ½, Spring/Summer 2008, pp. 111-128.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Postmemory.” https://postmemory.net/, N.D., Accessed 20 Oct 2022.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1993.