Intertextuality and references in Fun Home

Bechdel explicitly references a lot of the texts she mentions to explain herself and aspects of her life with characters when words couldn’t. An example of this would be the first reference and last reference which uses the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. Bechdel uses this myth to describe her father on page 4, stating how “it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky” when her father would raise her up and she would pretend to fly, forming some kind of irony and perhaps dark humour to the scene. This small reference already helps to form the tone of the scene and perhaps even the book, and to what kind of person Bechdel is. The story of Icarus helps explain Bruce flying too close to the sun, a correlation to page 161 when he went searching for his lover and found his brother and offered him beer when the brother was under aged, metaphorically this can be called “flying too close to the sun”. This story is again mentioned in the very last page 232, when “he did hurtle into the sea, of course. But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt.”. This simple reference shows that Bechdel sometimes describes both herself and her father as Icarus as if there are two versions. One where her father flies too close and falls. One where she falls but instead of drowning, her father (as Daedalus) would catch her. This reference shows similarities and differences in the character of herself and her father, builds tones and humour within the scenes and does a lot for their description than a simple narrative explanation would. Bechdel knows exactly how she is explaining and using the references and for what purpose even if she states that she doesn’t know why.

While reading the website, a statement that really stood out to me was “Understanding her life in it’s comparison to fiction gives Alison a way not to come to definitive answers, but to frame questions and understand the possibilities of reality.”. This quote from the site really made me realise that none of the references come to a definite statement, it’s always a “maybe” or a “what if” and I find that very interesting. This could also show the distance between her and her family members. She has to frame possibilities when she doesn’t know the truth about them in order to come to a definite answer. The site also talked about how both Bechdel and her father used fiction as a way to communicate, by “their exchange of homosexual works of literature near the end of Bruce’s life (he gives her Colette’s biography and she gives him Flying by Kate Millett)”. This exchange gives them a chance to talk to each other through someone else’s words about something that they are both struggling with, their sexuality. However, Bechdel’s Mother uses fiction to escape her reality whereas Alison and her father use it to build themselves and communicate which I found was very interesting.