To go back to the beginning where here father is reading, the book he puts down is Anna Karenina and this is an example of a reference that works whether or not the readers are aware of the specific textual connotations of Anna Karenina or not.
Could a narrative so seemingly dependent upon literary reference avail itself to readers without PhD’s in English Literature? In a traditional narrative perhaps the many references would build a wall around the meaning of the text but Bechdel aids and abets her themes with the visual aspect of her work. Specifically the ‘literariness’ of the text, its frequent allusions to Joyce, Austen, Salinger, and Collette, create an interesting difficulty for the narrative. All of these establish her system of referencing outside sources. Encyclopedia and dictionary references are worked in throughout the text-and maps. Since the concept has been introduced the idea of reading a panel of it as an image is simplistic. Though some of diary references are set up in the text, the readers have seen the diary before. If on page 153 Bechdel reveals a page of her diary in a panel she does not have to, as she might in a traditional narrative, explain and then I wrote this in my diary. The readers connect the episodes together, in part because of Bechdel’s text but also because they are accustomed to forging these connections.Īs the episode with The Taming of the Shrew shows not only does graphic narrative manipulate time well, it also opens up the intertextual possibilities of several mediums. In a novel a whole section of the narrative would have to justify such a departure as a flashback, or the episode would be reduced to an anecdote. Bechdel discusses her mother’s roles on stage through text and reveals them through the visual images. For example, a scene from The Taming of the Shrew is worked into the visual narrative with very little work (69). Visually, like in a film, the narration can travel back and forth easily. This works not only on a visual level-piecing together a continuous motion from a set of frozen frames-but also on a narrative level. The fragmented visual structure of the graphic narrative encourages readers to investigate. What Chute argues is that from this they are already engaged in a basic search for meaning. So, the readers of a graphic narrative involve themselves on a much more basic level with the creation of the narratives they read. The in between moments are constructed within the reader’s own visual narrative. For all this, the reader gets four frames. The opening section of Fun Home shows Bechdel’s father putting down his book and lifting her up on his feet. As Chute explains, readers of a comic strip create a continuous visual narrative from the panels that represent only moments within a continued motion (452). These cues deepen the visual and narrative aspects of the text, creating a milieu, In an interesting twist made possible by the graphic content of the narrative, Bechdel can construct a literary milieu often without stopping to quote or explicate her references resulting in a less disruptive immersion of the text in literary reference than would be otherwise possible.Ī gift of the graphic narrative, as Chute notes in her 2008 article, Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative is that the narrative moves “nonsynchronously”(452) among the visual and textual. Bechdel references not only snack companies or wallpaper styles, but also a wealth of literary titles often just by presenting the text in the frame without annotation.
The visual culture, most obviously apparent in her detailed construction of the restored Victorian house she was raised in or even in the surrounding products of childhood: Life Cereal (153, 162) Snyder (147, 108) Pretzels, the can of Pledge (16, 11), functions on a literary level as well. Throughout Fun Home the constant detail and ornamentation of the visual setting-the entire visual universe-that the narrative interacts with plays as large a role in establishing character as the more straight-forward elements of narrative.
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