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Penelopean aesthetics in Fun Home: drawing queer potentialies

ABSTRACT Alison Bechdel’s 2006 autography, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, is a story about trauma. Yet, stories marked by trauma cannot be remembered, and, as a result, they cannot be easily represented. Indeed, trauma, according to expert in trauma studies Cathy Caruth, can only be accessed indirectly through the stories of other people, and that is precisely what Bechdel does in her graphic memoir: she uses archives that contain the stories of others in order to gain an insight into her own. Notwithstanding the fact that archives are very commonly used in the contemporary graphic novel, Bechdel’s peculiar manner of arranging archives and specific events together – what I have called Penelopean aesthetics – is idiosyncratic. In this essay, I will, first, explore the sources of trauma in Bechdel’s life in order to subsequently work through the reasons that explain her intense urge to represent her father’s and her own life stories; then, I will scrutinise the use to which archives are put in Fun Home; eventually, Bechdel’s peculiar mode of assembling archives into a complex whole will be studied as well as the manner in which Bechdel’s mode of composition proves to be an expression of queer potentiality in its own right.