Given
her self-described “bookish” upbringing, it’s not surprising that libraries
feature prominently in Alison Bechdel’s coming-of-age/coming-out narrative. Her
own memoir is saturated with other books, which aren’t only referred to in
passing but are fundamental structural elements of the story she tells: we view
the story of the Bechdel family through the lens of Greek mythology, Marcel
Proust, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Henry James, Collette, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert
Camus, and a bunch of others I’m probably forgetting right now. Fun Home is a book that is very much “about”
other books, and Bechdel uses other books as a way to give shape and meaning to
her story. She gets this habit, in large part, from her father. The brief
period of “closeness” between them, in the final years of his life, has a lot
to do with the fact that Alison is now getting into reading, and Bruce clearly
is thrilled at the prospect of sharing his favorite books with her, serving
literally as her teacher in English class (in a coming-of-age-themed course, “Rites
of Passage”), with her as the “only one in that class worth teaching” (199). It
is fitting that her efforts to understand him after his death are filtered
through the books he loved. She hates Ulysses
when she tries to read his old copy in that winter-session course, but she’s
clearly studied it very closely in the intervening years: chapter 7 of Fun Home reflects a deep critical
familiarity with Joyce’s uber-modernist, antiheroic mock-epic, which is itself
an extended ironic riff on Homer’s Odyssey.
Early
in chapter 3 (“That Old Catastrophe”), Bechdel introduces us to Bruce’s library
as a prime reflection of the artificial façade that defines him—the “art” that
the constantly remodeled home represents, which prizes artifice and appearance
and décor over underlying reality. She acknowledges the pretensions reflected
in Bruce’s “library” right away: “For anyone but the landed gentry to refer to
a room in their house as the ‘library’ might seem affected, but there really
was no other word for it” (60). The illustration of the room includes labels
that specify the artful décor—velvet drapes, gilt awnings (or whatever those
tops of window-dressings are called), “flocked” wallpaper (not sure what “flocked”
means either). The room looks like the epitome of Bruce’s “art”—ornate, lush,
baroque, antique, crowded with ornament and accessory, very much a visual
spectacle. Bechdel narrates the room as a kind of stage set for Bruce’s performance:
“My father liked to imagine himself as a nineteenth-century aristocrat
overseeing his estate from behind the leather-topped mahogany and brass
second-empire desk” (60). The “library” appears to be the masterpiece of Bruce’s
carefully curated illusion, a pretentious affectation that (once again)
conceals an underlying reality.
But
Bechdel qualifies this picture somewhat, by acknowledging that, for all its
pretensions, the room is a functional library (“Where’s the atlas?” “In the
Canterbury atlas rack” [61]). “Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so
authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense . . . and becomes, for
all practical purposes, real” (60). Bruce is both playing a role, projecting
himself as a quasi-nineteenth-century aristocrat with a library in his mansion,
and actually being that role. The
image is Bruce’s reality. The room is
a key prop in his “country-squire routine,” which involves “edifying the
villagers—his more promising high school students” by lending them books by
Hemingway and Fitzgerald. And she also notes that these innocent exchanges of
books were often likely cover for clandestine sexual relationships (just about
everything in Bruce’s life could be seen as cover for his clandestine sexual
relationships), a key feature of the “act” through which he seduces his
students: “Such a suspension of the imaginary in the real was, after all, my
father’s stock in trade,” Bechdel narrates, as a “promising high school student”
remarks, “Man, being in this room is like going back in time. What’s this shit?”
(65).
The
primary intertext here is The Great
Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s novel about a man who reinvents himself and creates a
house (an actual mansion) that reflects and projects this invented personality. Gatsby’s mansion on
Long Island prominently features a library as a foundational element of his
fictional origin myth, even if Jay Gatsby (not his real name) hasn’t actually read any of the books
on the shelves—Bechdel alludes to the moment when a party guest marvels at the “thoroughness”
and “realism” of Gatsby’s illusion because his books are “real” and not “cardboard
fakes” (84). Gatsby “knew when to stop,” however—the pages in his books are not
“cut” (which is how you could tell if a book had actually been read or not:
pages used to be in bundles, and you’d have to “cut” the edges in order to
separate the pages). Bruce’s books (most of them) have “clearly been read,” and
therefore his illusion doesn’t go as deep as Gatsby’s, but nonetheless, Bruce’s
library reflects “the preference of fiction to reality” (85). The library in
the Bechdel home is an elaborate stage set designed to bolster Bruce’s “fictional”
self, and a convenient cover for his “secret life,” his surreptitious affairs
with younger men and boys. In chapter 3, it serves as a primary image for Bruce’s
essential dishonesty, sexual repression, and self-evasion, hidden behind a
beautiful façade.
Libraries
(and a co-op bookstore) play a key role throughout Alison’s own
coming-of-age/coming-out experience, and once again we see fundamental
contrasts between her and her father. Bruce’s library is an affectation, window
dressing, a stage set, the creation and maintenance of an illusion so thorough
it becomes “real.” He uses it to push books that he values onto others, and we
see him do the same thing with Alison when she’s old enough to appreciate it—a place
for him to tell others what they “have to” read next. Alison’s library
experience, significantly, is framed as more of a private experience of
self-discovery: she describes her “realization at nineteen that I was a lesbian”
as “a revelation not of the flesh, but of the mind” (74). (Technically, this
scene takes place in a “co-op bookstore,” but the function is very much like a
library: she stumbles upon the book herself and “borrows” it, reading it surreptitiously in the aisle.) She experiences the first “qualms” about her emergent identity at age
thirteen, when she sees the word “lesbian” in the dictionary, and from there,
her journey of self-discovery and self-revelation takes place almost entirely through books. First
she “screw[s] up [the] courage” to buy a book called Lesbian Women at the bookstore (an initial, partial, hesitant form
of public acknowledgment), and then she follows all the references in that book
to find others in the school library. She finds “homosexuality” in the card
catalog (you have no idea what this is, a kind of early prototype of an online
book search using paper cards in alphabetical order), and then she proceeds to “ravish”
a “four foot trove” of books on the subject. There’s an early kind of
coming-out progression, as the initial fear and embarrassment leads to her “trolling
even the public library, heedless of the risks.” This initial course of “independent
reading” leads directly to the moment when she writes to her parents to declare “I am a lesbian.”
The
contrasts with Bruce’s stage-set library are stark: the library for Alison is
functional, practical, a source of nonfiction
information rather than fiction (she reads books of interviews with lesbian
women, psychology, cultural studies, history), and, most importantly, a route
to self-knowledge and a public
embrace of that identity. In chapter 7 (“The Antihero’s Journey”), she frames
this experience as the start of an “odyssey . . . nearly as epic as the
original” (203). To put a fine point on it, Bruce uses his library and
fictional books to construct an elaborate façade; Alison uses the co-op
bookstore and academic and public libraries in order to get to a deeper truth
about herself, which she will then declare and embrace publicly. His library is
private and a reflection of his personal aesthetic (concealment, decoration,
artifice), while Alison’s is public, academic, scholarly. Bruce’s serves to
conceal a fundamental truth about himself; Alison’s serves to reveal a
fundamental truth about herself. One more way that these two can be seen as “inversions”
(or negative mirror-images) of each other.
There
is a sense in which, in chapter 7, we see Bruce’s library take on new potential—as
a possible form of bonding and mutual understanding with his daughter. There
aren’t many points in this book where I identify with Bruce, but the way he
gets so “elated” while picking books off his shelf to share with his daughter
is one of them. He ends up lending her the French feminist writer Collette’s
memoir Earthly Paradise, in part about
gay and lesbian Paris in the 1920s, which plays a key role in her “independent
reading” on the subject of queer identity through the ages. Bruce, in these
scenes, seems more “real,” less performative. He isn’t putting on an act for
Alison, and he is only trying to “seduce” her by inspiring her mind, finding
some common ground to talk about books. As you may know, I too very much enjoy
sharing books that I have found interesting and revelatory with younger people—it’s
really at the heart of what I do for a living. And I admit to occasionally
pressing a book or movie on my kids, telling them they “have to” read or see
it. It is one of the great pleasures of life to introduce someone to a book
that may make a difference to them, and I remain grateful to the people who introduced
me to these same books when I was younger. We see some potential for a
deeper, more meaningful, and more truthful relationship between father and
daughter start to emerge here—but, perhaps predictably, we see Bruce start to
overdo it, getting too excited, talking at
Alison about all the books he’s pressing on her, and generally driving her away
into her own independent-reading course. She’s not as into Ulysses—initially—as he hopes she will be. She’s far more
interested in reading about lesbian culture, and she quickly falls behind in
her course. But Joyce’s novel has clearly made an impact on her, as this whole
final chapter represents an extended meta-riff on Ulysses and its creative refiguring of The Odyssey. Bechdel knows Ulysses
very well, now, at the time she is writing this book, and it’s as if she’s
sharing these insights into “spiritual” and “consubstantial” fathers and
children with Bruce posthumously, to try and come to some kind of understanding
of their complex and ambiguous relationship.
I
can’t help but assume Bruce would be proud of his former student.