Literacy, Vocabulary and Sexuality in Fun Home

Alison Bechdel's autobiographical graphic novel Fun Home is one of the more unusual ones I've had the pleasure of reading (right up there with the similarly scholarly Asterios Polyp by David Mazuchelli and the utterly bonkers Grant Morrison funnybook The Filth), owing in no small part to her detached narration and an erudite vocabulary the likes of which I'd wager few non-English major types would find appealing instead of irritating. The upper-level syntax Bechdel employs is not just there to make her prose seem pretentious, however; it serves a rhetorical purpose as well. By linking the discovery of her non-heteronormative sexuality with the development of her literacy and vocabulary, Bechdel comments upon the challenges and joys she experiences through both processes and suggests that, in the mind of a highly literate person, personal growth and the development of literacy are intimately linked.

Part of what sets Fun Home apart from many graphic novels is in its visual elements. While the pictures are never dominated by the type on the page, Bechdel de-emphasizes the art in individual panels by (for the most part) sticking to a 3-panel widescreen design that causes the reader to focus on the words that surround them and the speech bubbles within. This emphasis on the textual elements of the novel's design work to reinforce the themes of the power of literacy on an almost subconscious level- the reader places higher value on the text of this *graphic* novel even before the theme is introduced through the plot.

Bechdel explores her connection between words and sex primarily in Chapter 5 of Fun Home. It begins with the adult Alison looking up the word "queer" in the dictionary and remarking about how her father's death fit with all of the word's many diverse definitions, then describes her parents' marriage using different literary allusions, including The Taming of the Shrew and the works of Proust. Bechdel's use of literature and vocabulary in these parts of the chapter illustrate how a highly literate person grows to view their own life in a way that one could consider an example of intertextuality- relating various works not just to each other but to personal experiences as well.

Later on in the chapter Bechdel recounts how she discovered her sexual identity at nineteen, revealing that books were almost solely responsible for her revelation, which she refers to as "not of the flesh, but of the mind." The author describes not being surprised by the idea that it was reading and not something more sensual that sparked her realization, but rather her "bookish upbringing." By juxtaposing this sequence with earlier ones regarding her parents' relationship and a later one about the ways her father "cultivated" younger men for his own desires, Bechdel illustrates the importance of literacy not just to her own life, but to her parents' as well.

Stereotypes and Persecution in MAUS

I was first introduced to "radical existential humanist" philosopher and writer Frantz Fanon through required reading for my 'Hip-Hop Philosophy' class this semester, around the same time we began reading Art Spiegelman's MAUS for this class. Fanon explores a wide range of concepts relating to racism and decolonization in books like "Black Skin White Mask" and "The Wretched of the Earth," but I found his writings concerning the psychological effects of racial subjugation on its victims to have a special significance to Spiegelman's characterization of his father Vladek.

Fanon's background as a psychiatrist led him to look past the socio-economic effects of colonialism and racism on persecuted ethnic groups and into the ways in which their oppression affected the way they perceived themselves. As part of a far more complex set of theories that I have not the room nor the adequate understanding to elaborate upon, Fanon divided the subjects of his writings into two groups. The "colonists", written here in air quotes because a group designated as such need not literally occupying a foreign country, exploit and oppress another group on a broad, systemic level, and the "colonized" are the victims of said exploitation and oppression. As a result of the colonists' systemic abuse, Fanon argued, colonized people will adopt the mentality of their colonizers, thus subconsciously buying into their stereotypes and hate speech and in some ways becoming the exact thing a racist mind perceives them to be. Regarding the atrocities perpetrated by Nazi Germany, the Nazis would be considered colonizers and Europe's Jews the colonized.

Towards the end of Part One of Spiegelman's graphic novel (pg. 131-2 of the uncollected edition), the author explains the way he characterized his father.

"I mean, I'm just trying to portray my father Accurately!" says Art on the following page.

Even if his wife doesn't buy into the idea, the dialogue in this scene suggests that the reason for Vladek's irrational compulsion to save money is a result of the suffering he endures under the Nazi occupation of Poland, which is in no small way a reflection of Fanon's theories on the psychological effects of racially-based oppression.

This scene, and the association of Vladek's characterization as a man twisted into a stereotype by years of racism-induced self-hatred, is significant to work's overarching theme of the complexities of racism and prejudice, as well as Spiegelman's argument that the impact of the Holocaust is not limited to its immediate victims, but something that resonates through the ages due to the profound effect it had on survivors, the families they would go on to have and the people they would later interact with. The older version of Vladek becomes a reminder that the damage done by the Holocaust was not only unfathomable loss of life, but irreparable psychological harm done to the survivors and the effects of it on loved ones decades later.

From the Mouths of Babes

By penning a story about the hardships and frustrations of migrant workers in the fields of California with her debut novel Under the Feet of Jesus, Helena Maria Viramontes inevitably invites comparisons with John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. While the novels obviously share some subject matter with one another, Viramontes' novel draws inspiration from the legacy of Cesar Chavez and the tradition of Mexican-American/Chicano literature and features themes of growing discontent on both a personal and a demographic level. Viramontes communicates these themes through an unlikely protagonist: a thirteen year-old girl, which allows her to develop them in an interesting and unusual way.

The growth and change that Estrella, the novel's young protagonist, experiences above all reflect the same things in the community of Mexican and Mexican-American migrant workers that she is a part of. In the beginning of the novel, Estrella is still young and innocent, full of curiosity the way only a child can be, and trusting of her family and her faith. Of course, since this is a coming of age novel, that does not last for long.

Viramontes' careful syntax depict the setting of her novel as a toxic place, figuratively and literally, with destructive effects on those who come of age within it that cause the changes Estrella and her loved ones undergo. Her California is still the Sunshine State, but the sunshine of this world beats down on the backs of laborers, browning their skin and making hard work that much more difficult.

Just as the sun prematurely ages her skin, so does the never-ending cycle of hard labor wear down Estrella's innocence. Viramontes' uses the motif of Estrella's hands, described as full of light and gradually obscured by dust from the work, to communicate her accelerated maturation. Estrella's story could be said to be an allegory of the story of migrant workers in America, and her initial innocence reflects the attitude of many of America's immigrants upon arriving in the country: hopeful, and wholly believing in the American Dream.

Likewise, the condition Estrella ends the novel in, frustrated, aggressive, and disillusioned, reflects that of migrant workers just before Chavez united and directed their frustration into the labor movement that seized the nation in the mid-twentieth century. The rise of the labor movement is paralleled in the most dramatic change Estrella undergoes: her loss of faith. This event coincides with her finally understanding Perfecto's insistence that the only people the family can trust is themselves and results in her taking control of her own destiny, the final step a person must take before they can truly overcome adversity.

The kind of growth that Estrella undergoes is only possible to depict in a coming-of-age novel. Viramontes' choice to tell the novel's story through the eyes of a child allows her to symbolically depict the origins of Chavez's labor movement through the journey of a person from childhood to maturity.

Structuralism and Space Aliens

At a glance, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five appears to be something like a normal novel cut to pieces and reassembled at random. Of course, first impressions aren’t always accurate, and anyone who has *read* the novel can tell you that it is in reality a meticulously assembled work that is made to appear random as part of a comment on narrative structure. In the novel, Vonnegut also uses a bizarre race of aliens called the Tralfamadorians to further comment on the structure of novels, particularly the novel they appear in.

The Tralfamadorians, little creatures in flying saucers that look like toilet plungers with hands on top of them, perceive time as happening all at once, without beginning or end. As a result of their peculiar perception of chronology, they view time one moment as being no more important than another, each just another facet in time’s crystalline structure. Beginnings and endings have no importance in the grand scheme of things, and life and death are barely made distinct from one another.

Vonnegut constructs his novel to reflect the way Tralfamadorians perceive time, and in doing so subverts traditional narrative structure. This is evident in the first chapter of the novel, in which Vonnegut (the narrator) tells us exactly how Vonnegut (the author) will begin and end the story of protagonist Billy Pilgrim, and in doing so strips both moments of their significance in a traditional narrative. If the reader already knows how the story will begin and end, then everything in the middle becomes of equal or greater importance.

Of course, simply telling readers how a story begins and ends isn’t enough to be taken as a comment on narrative structure, so Vonnegut also structures in the middle in a wholly non-linear fashion, alternating between moments in Billy Pilgrim’s strange existence with such fluidity that they seem to be happening all at once. The novel has a faint hint of a traditional narrative structure with moments of rising and falling action and a fairly distinct climax, but they are created through the juxtaposition of unrelated events and not one moment leading to the next in chronological order.

Vonnegut takes the comparison between the Tralfamadorians and the structure of Slaughterhouse Five a step further when he introduces the Tralfamadorian novel during Billy Pilgrim’s flying saucer voyage back to the aliens’ home planet as “brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. . .there isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.”

This is Vonnegut’s ultimate comment on the nature of stories: it need not matter what order the pieces are in, as long as they are part of a meaningful whole.

Race and Gender in Their Eyes Were Watching God

In last Friday's class we discussed some critical responses from three black scholars to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God that focused on the book's status as a great work of African-American literature. Two of those responses, written by Richard Wright and Alain Locke, both contemporaries of Hurston, criticize the book for what they perceive to be its failure to live up to their expectations of what a great black novel should be. I would argue that in doing so they have misread the intentions of the novelist: Their Eyes Were Watching God is primarily concerned with issues of gender, not with issues of race.

In having Janie's grandmother refer to the black woman as "de mule uh duh world," Hurston sets up a tale not about the struggle of the black American living in a prejudiced society, but the struggle of a woman to find independence and self-worth in a rural black community. June Jordan is correct when she argues that "whites do not figure in [the novel] . . . white anything or anybody is not important". The only white characters to appear in the novel do so during flashbacks, specifically to times before Janie's grandmother purchased her own property. The rest of the novel is focused purely on Eatonville and the other all-black communities that Janie finds herself in. By choosing her settings in this way, Hurston de-emphasizes racial themes and puts the focus on Janie's quest for self-affirmation as a woman.

Other evidence for this reading of the novel comes from the fact that the hardships Janie faces in the novel come to her not because of her race, but because of her gender. As a woman, Janie is forced to marry the first man her grandmother deems correct for her, then spends the majority of her life being ignored and abused by the men society says she has to rely on. Only through finding her own self-worth does Janie realize that she deserves to live life the way she believes she should live it, and though she chooses to rely on Tea Cake even after inheriting money from Jody, it is made clear in the novel that she is making a conscious choice to do so.

Locke in particular is incorrect in his assertion that Hurston's novel is not one of social document fiction. With Janie's story Hurston presents the ongoing efforts of a woman trying to make her own place in the world and does so in a way that equates it with those of other oppressed groups struggling to claim an equal standing in the society in which they live.

Symbols of Honor and Warfare in The Sun Also Rises

Much of our in-class discussion of The Sun Also Rises has focused on themes like gender and the disillusionment of the Lost Generation, and while those are certainly the topics that have the most depth to explore, the novel also carries a strong, simple anti-war sentiment that should not be ignored. One way in which Hemingway delivers this message is through the motif of statues and medals, which the author uses to symbolize the hollow nature of honor and the glorification of violence.

The most significant of a statue by Jake is relatively early in the novel, a couple pages into chapter IV.

I passed Ney's statue standing among the new-leaved chestnut-trees in the arc-light. There was a faded purple wreath leaning against the base. I stopped and read the inscription: from the Bonapartist Groups, some date; I forget He looked very fine, Marshal Ney in his top-boots, gesturing with his sword among the green new horse-chestnut leaves.

While that passage is part of a paragraph describing what Jake sees as he is walking home from his long night out with Brett, Hemingway's choice to describe this particular part of the Paris scenery in detail marks the sculpture as particularly noteworthy.

The purple wreath that seemingly honors the statue is described as faded, suggesting that it has been left long ago. In addition, the inscription the wreath bears is attributed to Bonapartists. That term, besides originating from France's most famous warmonger, was used by Karl Marx to describe someone who manipulates a revolution in order to gain power for themselves. If we look at the wreath from this perspective, it appears to be a symbol not only of the fading glory that once came to men who went to war, but also of Hemingway's conception of the nature of warfare: persons in power sending men to fight and die for reasons that have little to do with their best interest. In this way the author turns a symbol intended to honor men who fought for their country into one that is mocking and ultimately of no use to them at all.

Hemingway uses another symbol to suggest similar sentiments in the story that Mike and Brett tell in chapter XIII. Mike cares little about his service, and it seems that he would rather forget the whole experience than be honored for it. His apathy towards the medals he earned for his service is representative of the general attitude towards the war held by his generation.

In addition to Mike's lack of regard for his own medals, he also gives away or otherwise disposes of a set of medals lent to him by his tailor. It is suggested that the medals belong to another man who served in a war before Mike's time and that the man valued the medals highly. In addition to highlighting the difference in attitudes towards honors earned by soldiers, the incident also shows the cynicism Hemingway, and by association his generation, has towards the values held by the generation that came before him.