Fun House by Alison Bechdel

I read this very intense comic by Alison Bechdel called Fun House and I don't really know what to say about it but I think I ought to say something about it because it is very brilliant but it is also very depressing - well at least it did depress me. It depressed me for 2 days after I had finished reading it. But while I was reading it, I could hardly put it down.

The drawing is something else. There is joy in the drawing. And in the frame there is often signs of joy, or of joyous activity, in the fun house (the house they live in - so to speak). But the story is a tragic one.

There is much tragedy anywhere in art and it often is compelling and this is no exception. This is tragic and compelling.

It is a true story, apparently. I mean it is framed as autobiography. This always registers in a certain kind of way. I don't really know what to say about that certain way. I once was preoccupied with the subject enough that I wrote an MA thesis about it - about the relationship between biography and autobiography and the self as a source of knowledge in intellectual, and more specifically academic, research and critical thinking.

There is an air of intellectual and academic history in the story. This is not directly related to the story (although there is a process of self-discovery that is related to it). But it is a presence none the less. There is a way that things are phrased and analyzed that is consistent with someone from that culture. It was very familiar to me, and I was partly fascinated with the book because of it - because of this association, regardless of how peripheral it is to the story - it is not really at the heart of the story - or maybe it is. It may in some way be an unstated part of the story - a secret heart perhaps. Stories can have secret hearts, and they can have second hearts.

There is a correspondence between the daughter/author and the father in the story, which is more emotional and sexual than what I otherwise suggest. I don't relate to that, although I understand and sympathize with it, but I do relate to the tension between intellectual and creative pursuits at the nexus point of analytic thinking.

Once again - I say this because I have been thinking about a few different comics lately that exhibit or illustrate (if you'll forgive the pun - if it really even is a pun) the following point - the drawing is its own thing registering its own quality, its own character, its own significance, its own life. This aura or resonance is I suppose something like Benjamin's aura of the photograph, but I think it is more like Barthe's idea about the "grain of the voice" and his other idea about the "punctum" in photographs (that thing in a framed presentation that is beyond the control of the author, photographer, or whatever, but which is available to the viewer, reader, listener, audience, or whatever. by virtue of their own complex interest, desire, psychology - that sort of thing). Which is to say that for all the angst and tragedy within the story, the drawing does embody joy. It's kind of like that old paradoxical juxtaposition in blues, which tells, similarly, a tragic tale, but does so with a musical joy that delivers the sufferer from the tragedy. Movies, music and comics (and other things) all have this quality of having a form that can deliver itself (or its visceral partner - its audience) from its "ostensible" content.

The form can be a second heart. The piece, the work, the art, is something with two (main) hearts - sometimes beating in concert, sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes complementing, completing, sometimes silently coexisting whether agreeably or not. But there can also be a secret heart. And I am also intrigued by second hearts and secret hearts.

A friend of mine said that she could read this book ten times. I think that I could look through it that many times and more. And in that respect I would also read it as many times as she, because of course there are different ways to read something, but the text of the story, that tragic heart, would be too much for me to bear again.