Through the Filmic Maze Blindfolded: Navigating the Spaces between Science and Superstition Nosferatu: Through the Filmic Maze Blindfolded

GERM 365: Modernity and the Moving Image

Professor Michael Cowan

12^th December 2011

Through the Filmic Maze Blindfolded: Navigating the Spaces between Science and Superstition

The vampire, in Nosferatu, can be seen as a shadowy index to a world beyond the immediately legible. It posits the existence of an ontologically vague dimension of knowledge not graspable by the human mind. Murnau’s film, through frequent cuts between scientific footage and the supernatural events in the plot, draws a link between scientific knowledge and premodern folk beliefs. The scientist figure, in Nosferatu, is not a pseudo-God attempting to master the world with his gaze through a totalizing system of classification. Rather, he is a sage-like figure who speaks in arcane riddles, dispensing sacred truths about the “secrets of nature” to a secular audience within the scientific lecture hall. Murnau, by collapsing the seemingly disparate realms of science and superstition within the same unfolding diegesis, suggests a monastic vision of the world in which the inexplicable lies under every facet of reality.

By enforcing a dualistic view of the world, Murnau suggests, one oversimplifies reality's complexity, bringing about a 'plague' in the form of a returning repressed consciousness- Nosferatu's Count Orlok, who constantly walks between binaries. The film, ultimately, theorizes a mode of knowing the universe beyond epistemologies and schemas. Instead, it suggests a rhizomatic world in which all elements on every level of existence has an equal ability to affect and influence each other. Count Orlok, in this light, can be seen as a potentially integrative figure who arrives at a "metaphoric crossroads, as the embodiment of a certain cultural moment... incorporat(ing) fear, desire, anxiety and fantasy... (and) giving them life and an uncanny independence" (Cohen 3). He is the “third term that problematizes the clash of extremes” that connects science and superstition, as well as the natural and the preternatural, reminding society of its unescapable primal roots. In Nosferatu, characters have to relearn the premodern mode of ‘knowing’- knowledge they obtain by interpreting the Book of Vampires correctly

- in order to dispel this newly arisen monster of the past.

Freud, in his essay “The Uncanny”, imagines a progressive linear ontology of the mind, in which mankind develops from an “infantile psychology” (145) characterized by “the narcissistic overrating of one’s own mental processes… by the attribution of carefully graded magical powers (mana) to alien persons and things” into an age of rationality. The tools of reason promised to make explicable all natural phenomenon. Under an Enlightenment schema, folk knowledge is reminiscent of a type of primitive magical thinking. However, a tension remains between past and present forms of knowing. Science’s seemingly all-encompassing system failed to conquer the ancient cosmic terror Bakhtin identified as the “fear of that which is materially huge and cannot be overcome by force” (335). The invention of the microscope and the telescope- new technologies for seeing- aggravated this by opening up a new visual dialectic of uncertainty. The ability to master new realms (exemplified by the single ‘eye’ of the microscope’s eyepiece) was always countered by the opening of a new dimension that continually evaded the scope of human vision.

In Nosferatu, Murnau introduces these newly emerged conflicts by crosscutting between scenes of natural phenomena (the rats on the ship, a waterfall, the wild dogs), science shots (the polyp, the carnivorous plant), and the supernatural plot (Nosferatu’s arrival, Ellen’s sleepwalking episodes, Knock’s asylum). From the start, science’s grip on reality is questioned by the continual occurrence of seemingly inexplicable events. The use of montage editing, here, makes it seem as if a third element- Chance (in actuality the filmmaker’s hand

)- has penetrated the binary between the logical and the illogical. Coincidence seems to be the mastering force that draws these supposedly disconnected themes of science and magic together, suggesting a continuity between supernatural events and natural phenomena. This theme is alluded to early in the film. Before Hutter prepares to leave the village, Bulwer delivers a warning to him, stating that, “you can’t escape destiny by running away”. Bulwer suggests that Fate- the ultimate principle of uncertainty- has the power to unravel all attempts at mastering its superseding structure. As such, he advises Hutter that he must accept his position of epistemological vulnerability, as to do otherwise would be futile.

The various spaces within the film also draw metaphorical lines between the known and the unknown, as well as the man-made and the natural. Examples of the former include the lab, the crowded pub, and the domestic interiors of the house. The latter is populated by Nature and beasts, and thus naturally hostile to the presence of humans. Often, these spaces are in close proximity. Bulwer’s laboratory- a space where Nature is mastered- is surrounded by a garden, which can be seen as a liminal space between wilderness and civilization where Man only has limited control. Maps and word-of-mouth stabilize reality by acknowledging the existence of spaces that man has not mastered, such as the night populated by spirits and the Count’s country. Hutter, in the film, crosses a symbolic boundary between the secure lamp-lit ‘daylight’ of the pub and the night where “the evil spirits” are “all-powerful”. By entering the Count’s carriage, he leaves the secure space of the known, traveling into the shadowy valley of the unknown, exemplified by Count Orlok’s castle and its surrounding regions.

Bulwer, in the film, acts as the viewer’s guide between these spaces of increasing uncertainty. He initiates us into the realm of science by bringing us into the secure, known space of his lab. In this realm, scientific equations and diagrams explain natural phenomena. Here, the scientist has secured a position of mastery over the natural world via classification and collection. From this wholly explicable station, Bulwer tells us that the mysteries of nature have “strange correspondences to human life”. He acknowledges that the security the lab offers is easily undermined by the entrance of the third element- that of Chance. Causality, Bulwer suggests, is not always co-relative to logic; there is always an element of uncertainty that governs all of life.

Bulwer acts as both sage and scientist, teaching us a right mode of seeing. This occurs during Bulwer’s lecture scenes. The face of Nature that Bulwer reveals is intrinsically vampiric. Halfway through the film, Bulwer introduces his students to the “vampire of the vegetable kingdom”, the insect-eating Venus Flytrap and the “vampire-like polyp” which consumes its prey with its winding tentacles. Predation, Murnau suggests, occurs on all levels of reality, penetrating even to the macro-worlds of the unseen. Nature is governed by a principle that does not necessarily hold the human interest at heart: the will to live leads each organism to consume at the expense of others. The vampire, thus, has a natural root- its spirit incarnates upon every facet of the universe from the ‘vegetable kingdom’, to the micro-worlds of microorganisms. As such, Nosferatu's predation upon humans is not peculiar in-of-itself, as it can be read as the human incarnation of this overarching principle. Nosferatu’s entrance into the film, likewise, is marked by a slew of natural metaphors: his arrival brings a plague to the town; he has to travel in “earth-filled coffins” taken from “unhallowed ground”; he brings with him a plague of rats

, and himself resembles a rat. Nosferatu's world may seem inexplicable like the “mysterious ways of Nature”, but it is overall natural.

Furthermore, the shot of the polyp has a phantom-like quality to it. The microscope abstracts the polyp so it seems to be floating within a realm displaced from any spatial coordinates. The microscope, here, opens up a dimension of seeing that continuously evades efforts at mastering the image. Like the microscopic shot of the polyp, the establishing shot of Nosferatu below the arches has no familiarity- he is an imposing silhouette swallowed by a mass of white space. Nosferatu emerges from an unknown world: this abstracted, foreign space outside the map’s grids. His castle is suspended above the scenery surrounding it under a blank sky, emphasizing its separation from quotidian reality. The ascending pillars that totter above him in his introductory shot curve to a point, reflecting a collapsing of all binaries between the straight/crooked, day/night

, and natural/supernatural. Nosferatu’s presence as never certain; he is a shadow, a figure in-between binaries. In his very existence, he represents a type of knowledge that cannot be easily contained in categories.

The film then cuts from the scenes in Bulwer's lab to the destabilizing space of the madman's cell. The shot of the polyp consuming its prey is followed by a shot of a spider consuming a fly, and then to Knock’s grotesque figure reaching out into the air, catching flies with his claw-like fingers. An uneasy comparison is drawn between the “polyp with claws”

and the mad Knock who exhibits animalistic characteristics. Count Orlok, likewise, with his elongated neck, pointed ears and consumptive gaze condenses the animal and human within the space of his body. This unearths the root of the viewer’s feeling of unease: when we see the binary between human and beast blur, our ontological sense of personhood is undermined.

In addition, by crosscutting from the lab to the asylum, Murnau transports the viewer from a scientific, discernible space to the uncertain spatiality of the mad mind where our coordinates are suddenly destabilized. From this point, we are told that “Nosferatu held Knock under his influence from afar”. The viewer is momentarily disassociated, and unable to make sense of the connection between Knock, the polyp, the spider and the Venus flytrap. By bringing in the intertitle about Nosferatu’s immaterial ‘influence’, Murnau provides a caption that interprets these series of images for us. In his schema, the vampire’s existence is not supernatural, but preternatural. Nosferatu’s ability to affect the human psyche

stems from a deeply embedded connectivity between nature, animals and humans. The vampire, here, embodies the return to a premodern way of understanding the world, in which man is an arbitrary being, a mere element of a cosmos vastly greater than himself. In this frame, the ‘vampire’ represents how this deeply-embedded principle can express itself in a form of madness within the modern mind when repressed. The roots of the seemingly inexplicable, here, are overly natural.

In contrast to scientific knowledge, the Book of Vampires provides folk wisdom that proposes to free the town from the thrall of the vampire. It is a bridge between science and magic: folk superstition presented in a legible form as cure. It establishes the vampire as a premodern phenomenon with a distinct historical precedent. It tells us that “it was in 1443 that the first Nosferatu was born. That name rings like the cry of a bird of prey. Never speak it aloud”. Nosferatu's arrival strikes fear in us because he is our predator, thus threatening our supremacy at the top of the food chain. Nosferatu’s cry is like a ‘bird of prey’; his name has an autonomy from its body, able to instill fear the hearts of man. However, Murnau is also quick to establish Nosferatu’s natural origins. The book tells us that “Nosferatu drinks the blood of the young, the blood necessary to his own existence”. Like the vampiric forms of Nature Bulwer shows us, he is merely trying to preserve his own survival by predating on humankind.

The knowledge the book distills to Hutter promises to save him from the vampire’s spell- if only he takes its contents as fact. However, Hutter’s rational worldview prevents him from correctly interpreting the significance of the document. He laughs in glee, shaking the document with a comical intensity. His rejects the idea that folk knowledge holds any authority and, in doing so, becomes thrall to the vampire.

Ellen’s curiosity, however, drives her to open the book. She does so twice. Upon first reading it, she experiences a visceral convulsion as if struck by lightning

. The knowledge the book contains has a physical effect upon her beyond the words on the page, pointing to the magical quality of the words within it- do they signify something beyond their letters, just as Nosferatu’s name alone has the ability to strike fear into the body? On the second occasion, a look of illumination dawns upon her face as she realizes that it is she who must sacrifice her blood to Nosferatu upon daybreak. She moves past fear into knowledge, authenticating the document’s validity by accepting its authority. Ellen’s successful reading of the book- she follows its instructions- emphasizes the importance of interpreting each text the right way. She ‘breaks the spell’, saving Bremen from the specter of the shadowy past- Orlok. The magical ability of the Book of Vampire’s words to effect change outside its materiality points to a premodern understanding of language, in which words have the power to directly affect reality and the fates of men. Words, here, have effects that supersede their signified meanings. Also, Ellen’s ability to interpret the book frames the female as the guardian of this premodern, magical way of knowing. The true Other, in the film, is the woman, who- with her intuition and subconscious visions- has a direct connection to the shadowy realm of the vampire.

However, the film also posits a third type of ‘knowledge’- that which cannot be known. Knock’s manuscript full of inscrutable symbols appears to be written in the ‘language’ of alchemy. Each character seems to relate to an interior reality that cannot be accessed, whether in the human psyche, or in nature. Alchemy is a ‘science’ bridging modern science and premodern magic. It seeks an overall structure underneath all elements in the universe through the drawing of a cosmic ‘map’. The meaning of this document in the film, however, is never interpreted for the viewer. Its representation is in itself a cipher to its true meaning. It proposes that there is interiority to all texts, a privateness that cannot be penetrated. However, the document’s existence points to an ingrown need to make legible all reality using whatever tools one has, no matter how inadequate.

Knock is our interpreter to this realm, but he is also a false guide. The interpretative act is, here, contingent upon an ideology that does not take into account the ‘greater good’. He controls our understanding of the document by re-appropriating its meaning to his own ends. He delivers false advice, telling Hutter “not to be afraid if people speak of Transylvania as the land of phantoms”. He dismisses the superstitious beliefs of the common folk, while paradoxically consulting a document that points to a sacred knowledge beyond the natural. He instills in Hutter scientific skepticism, causing Hutter to falsely interpret the Book of Vampires. From the start, the viewer is warned not to trust figures who propose to deliver to us the sole meaning of a text. This points to a key issue with all acts of making meaning: in the wrong hands, the power to interpret can be used for ill.

Murnau proposes that all forms of language- filmic, written, scientific, alchemic- has a natural relation to invisible worlds. The filmic script, in a way, is the hieroglyph that has to be correctly interpreted with the adequate tools by the viewer. However, there are different modes of vision that one has to utilize for different situations. If Hutter had read the Book of Vampires as a scientific text, he would have been saved. Likewise, by being able to interpret the book correctly, Ellen saves the community from the returning preternatural knowledge the vampire represents.

However, the willingness to admit the futility of any efforts at grasping the ineffability the universe through the powers of comprehension is equally as important. Knock’s script is never decoded, just as Nosferatu’s intentions are never revealed. The scientist-figure, however, sweeps us into an alternate understanding of the world wherein the “land of phantoms” exists within the controlled environment of the laboratory. He guides us with truths that do not have any logical meaning, suggesting that the separation between natural causes and supernatural effects is at best illusionary. Rather, it is by navigating these vague, shadowy regions in-between (the spaces where meaning is made) that we arrive at any kind of truth at all.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, M. M.. Rabelais and his world. Cambridge, Mass.: M. I. T. Press, 1968. Print.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster theory: reading culture. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Print.

Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny Trans. McLintock, D. New York: Penguin, 2001. pg. 121-162. Print.

Nosferatu (Motion picture) Nosferatu [videorecording] : a symphony of horror / Prana-Film ;

screenplay by Henrik Galeen ; directed by F.W. Murnau. Chatsworth, CA : distributed by Image Entertainment, c2002.

The Architectural Maze in Fun Home: Mirrors, Shadows, and the Space of Memory The Architectural Maze in Fun Home: Mirrors, Shadows, and the Space of

Amy Goh #260354243

ENGL 492

Professor Sean Carney

15^th February 2012

The Architectural Maze in Fun Home: Mirrors, Shadows, and the Space of Memory

Fun Home, as its namesake suggests, is a memoir built spatially around the confusing corridors of memory. The book, like the Bechdel house, is a “fun house of mirrors” (Watson 123) cast full of shadows, in addition to being the stage for Alison’s story. Each chapter resembles a maze Alison creates in order to transform the seeming meaninglessness of her father’s death into a meaningful pattern. Or, in her words, to “link (her) senseless personal loss to a more coherent narrative” (Bechdel 196). Like an origami box, each chapter folds a different dimension of their relationship into a larger structure that only rises fully-fledged with the reader’s construction of each individual part into a whole. With each crease, a different connection is forged between her father’s death and her present life as an artist

. Alison’s memoir, however, exists in an uneasy relation to her father’s ‘art’- the Bechdel family home; an infrastructure which, metaphorically, represents a shared familial heritage. By creating and publishing Fun Home, it can be said Alison attempts two paradoxical acts: a memorial of her father, as well as a symbolic Oedipal killing of the looming patriarchal figure the shadow of the house represents.

The act of telling the family memoir can be considered an act of attempted narrative mastery. By writing Fun Home, Alison revises the ‘family story’ to include her own struggle as an art-maker. By examining the book’s “architecture of narration” (Watson 124)- how it is both like and unlike Theseus’s labyrinth

- and exploring the various forms the ‘minotaur’s shadow’

takes on, a complex portrait of Alison rises through the ashes of her father’s death. This portrait is more akin to a mirror artfully placed at an angle, revealing the uncanny congruencies between Alison and her father’s seemingly divergent selves.

Nebulous, shadowy presences often lurk about the maze-like walls in each chapter of Fun Home

. This shadow takes on various forms throughout the novel: the larger-than-life father who reverberates with a mythic resonance, the Bechdel house, and eventually Alison herself. This recurrent shadow can be taken as a loose metaphor for the disconnect between reality and perception present in all representational forms, an anxiety that continually assaults Alison both psychologically and artistically. By undertaking to write a history of the Bechdel family, Alison attempts an act of self-mastery by creating a ‘fixed’ self on the page. However, she does so while having to contend with the mobility of identity and the violence her narrative may do to her family members. Here, the house is the mythic stage linking blood and creativity from which the self attempts to emerge underneath the “generational, personal, psychosexual, and political entanglements of family life” (124). It is the site on which the familial drama takes place, in addition to being the foundation Alison builds her story upon.

Alison’s father Bruce experiences a similar internal need to balance his constructed self with his ‘intrinsic’ self. His architectural ambitions exists in tandem to his ‘artificial’ performance of heterosexual gender identity. Being of an older generation, he perceives society to be segmented on the foundational level. Thus, he chooses to fit into the normative social structure by ‘compartmentalizing’ his interiority to accommodate the social standard. However, this is always done in tension to his repressed individuality, which manifests in his obsessive decoration of the house. The various shadows within the book are a signal of the ‘trace’ or disconnect between Bruce’s two selves. Linguistically, the title of the first chapter “Old Father, Old Artificer” mirrors this, showing the relation between the genealogical- which cannot be controlled- and the creative- a controlled pursuit. The title holds a multiplicity of meanings: Bruce is the aged father (to Alison), the conscious creator of his identity (to himself) and a skilled craftsman, building and managing the family home. Like the visual trope of the shadow, Alison reveals that language is malleable, capable of being molded according to the meaning-maker’s intent.

The first appearance of Bruce’s shadow on page 12 as he reprimands Alison for breaking a lamp emphasizes Alison’s father’s monstrous, minotaur-like aspect. As a child, sensuous reality is amplified: her father appears larger-than-life and incomprehensible to her childish mind. However, on page 7, panel 4, we are shown another image of Alison’s father, this time silhouetted by the house. In this image, the shadow of the mansion is an extension of her father’s personality, an element of his psyche he constructs to gain agency over his own convoluted interiority. The elaborate interiors of the Bechdel’s Gothic Restoration house exemplifies the tension Alison perceives between Bruce’s private and public personas. It is an anachronistic building, signifying an era of social repression. Incarnated in ‘70s Suburbia, it becomes a cipher to a milieu that has lost its significance for the younger generation, but still continues to haunt the present like an oppressive shadow. Bruce’s architectural shadow, here, expresses the impenetrability of Bruce’s psyche to Alison, as well as a fracture in time: it is the spatial manifestation of an age-old conflict which Alison senses, but never fully comprehends.

On page 12, the shadow morphs again, taking on the shape of the Bechdel house’s portico. Alison leaves the silhouetted pillars of her family house and walks into a scene of open fields only for the landscape to merge back into the structured porticos of the Bechdel house. Even though she seeks to escape her father’s influence- represented by the sombre pillars of the Bechdel house-, her efforts initially fail. Lastly, on panel 3 of page 21, the shadow takes on another meaning. It sings Alison to sleep in the shape of her father, easing her into the nebulous dream realm. Bruce, here, stands at the threshold between darkness and light and Alison, nervously, tells him not to turn out the light in the hallway. In this act, she both embraces his inscrutable interiority and implores him not to abandon his role as caretaker. Within the first chapter alone, the shadow metamorphoses from being a menacing presence to being the harbinger of the repressed self, to being a mediator between familiar and foreign realms. Her father, from the very beginning, is multi-dimensional. He is shown not only as the negligent paterfamilias, but also as an impassioned creator and a benevolent father guiding his children into life’s darker regions. By refusing to inscribe a set meaning to the shadow trope, Alison accounts for the multiple facets of reality, allowing the reader to build his associations and recollections upon the vehicle of the metaphor. Just as the political is always personal, the autobiographical can be paradoxically collective. Similar to a shadow show, Alison’s comic relies on an “interplay of views… in the reflexive exchange of hand, eye, and thought” (Watson 124), the strings of which she hands to the reader.

Fun Home itself resembles a piece of architecture, mirroring the Bechdel home not only literally in its namesake, but also figuratively in form, content, and methodology. The act of opening the pages of the book is akin to opening the doors and windows of the Bechdel home. By flipping the book artifact open, we enter spatially into the Alison’s narrative maze. On the textual level, the pages function like the corridors of the Bechdel house, hiding family heirlooms (archival photographs) buried in the dust of disuse and silhouettes that distort as soon as the eye seeks to possess it. These abundant human and architectural shadows blend the figurative and the literal, the subjective and the objective, the mythic and the intimately personal. They make binaries non-existent: an image can be read both ways. The act of reading is, with Fun Home, always a collaborative effort between reader and writer. While it offers a privileged glimpse into the components that make up Alison’s artistic and psychological self, it also calls upon a readerly engagement wherein one has to piece together, like Alison, a story out of archival photos and literary fragments in an attempt to make sense of the past chapters in light of the present.

Alison’s motley technique is a manifestation of a need to tell her story using whatever means possible. Like her father, Alison is only able to express herself using the tools her father hands her- in acts of building spaces. Just as the Bechdel home is constructed from furniture collected from varied sources (some literally from the garbage heap), Alison accumulates literary, mythic and photographic references to build a fictive reality. She is a conscious creator using “descriptive devices” (67), rather than mortar, frames and furniture. Her use of the comic format combines time and space, so architectural corridors become symbolic intersections in which characters meet alternative selves, figures from the past, or their own memories. By arranging spaces upon the page in a deliberate manner, Alison expresses the interiority of characters through their interaction with the spaces they inhabit within the panels. Like her father, Alison seeks connections with those around her through the act of creating, “retelling personal histories that replicate the non-linear, open-ended, associative clusters of memory itself” (Watson 127).

Alison also uses the architectural metaphor to depict her personal struggle to express emotion, a trait her father shares. The child Alison is unable to express her love for her father both because he is emotionally inaccessible and because she lacks the tools to do so. She builds this “embarrassment” about expressing feelings spatially, as “part (of) a tiny scale model of (her) father’s more fully developed self loathing” which “inhabited (her) house pervasively and invisibly” (Bechdel 20). Ironically, the defensive wall Bruce builds around himself incarnates in his daughter in her attempt to express emotion. It is one of the threads connecting her to her father within the network of personal and spatial relations of the house, in which her father will always be a corridor away.

The rest of Fun Home explores this dialectical connection and fracture between Alison her father. A tenuous thread persists through the web of each chapter connecting Alison’s life to her father’s death like a double helix. As Alison concludes later on, “you could say that my father’s end was my beginning/ or more precisely, that the end of his life coincided with the beginning of my truth” (117). Although Alison states she was “spartan to my father’s Athenian/ modern to his Victorian/ Butch to his nelly/ utilitarian to his aesthete” (15), these are, in the end, permutations of the same binary, only in reverse order. Alison is her father’s mirror image. The book’s structure mimics this: it begins with the mythic image of the father holding up his daughter

which is then inverted at the book’s end, mimicking the cyclical temporality of Alison’s narrative: things inevitably end up where they begin.

The scene in front of the mirrors on page 98-99 visualizes this relation. In this panel, the Bechdel family is shown dressing up in front of a massive mirror that takes up most of the frame. They are choosing the way they want to present themselves to the world. Bruce’s dainty adjustment of his tie is mirrored by Alison’s defiant frown and boyish stance. An arrow points to Bruce’s coat and to Alison’s dress: his is velvet, hers is the “least girly dress in the store”. Furthermore, Alison and her father are dressed diametrically opposite: she is in white, he is in a dark suit. The father/daughter duo are shown as “inverts… inversions of one another” (98) not only linguistically, but visually. Linguistic expression, here, is inseparable from outward displays of dress and behaviour. One’s personality is both expressed verbally and performed socially. Alison goes beyond the homogenous definition of ‘invert’ as ‘homosexual’ to a larger distinction that accounts for the differences and similarities between Alison and her father. Even though they are visually (in dress and stance) and compositionally (upon the page) presented as opposites, they are symmetrical in the method in which they choose to stage their life and express their interiority.

In addition, Bruce, Alison and her mother do not look at the mirror, but at each other through the mirror. The mother, here, is an intruder into the father/daughter relationship- she is posed at the edge, as a mere footnote in the familial drama. She states dryly “you’re going to upstage the bride in that suit” (98) at the edge of the page, whereas Bruce and Alison’s speech bubbles are at the forefront, diametrically framed as symmetrical opposites to each other. This reveals a disturbing truth: Alison’s writing of her story about her relationship to her father is told at the expense of her mother. In choosing to privilege her relationship to her father, she also commits a violence by eliminating her mother’s side of the story. By building linguistic and visual mirrors into the ‘corridors’ of her narrative maze, Alison is able to explore the tension between the illusional fixity of architectural spaces and the fluidity of life. She allows greater flexibility of meaning, lessening the violence her story inflicts in eliminating her family’s perspectives.

In the resulting chapters, Bruce’s shadow diminishes in size as Alison gradually finds herself through the text’s various subtextual mirrors (Joyce’s Ulysses, in particular). Congruently, the house metaphor widens to include literary and geographic landscapes, reflecting how Alison’s growth as a human being is accompanied by the expansion of her horizons. On page 128, Alison is shown in focus holding a camera against the silhouette of the landscape. By taking a picture of her environment, she also masters it with the camera’s single eye. Finally, on page 209 of the last chapter, Alison is shown returning to the silhouette of the family home. However, this time, she is the same size as its shadow, signaling her newfound narrative mastery over her father’s legacy.

When Allison is portrayed in conversation with her father on pages 220-1, they are on level ground within a series of three by four square panels. This signals a newfound similitude between father and daughter gained through the accumulation of shared literary and personal interests in the prior chapters. The resolution of the shadow conflict takes place in an ironic ‘face-off’ between Alison and her ‘doppelganger’ father. Alison, here, is able see an uncanny double of the self she would have been had she been in her father’s position by measuring her experiences against her father. However, father and daughter are unable to connect through sexual identification: the captions state “It was not the sobbing, joyous reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus” but “like fatherless Stephen and sonless Bloom” (221.7-8). Even though they are connected visually through their similarity in posture, expression and dress, the panels separate Alison and her father into tight boxes, so a heightened tension persists between them both dramatically and textually on the page.

Within these series of panels, Alison questions “which of us was the father?” (221.10). This rhetorical question is answered by the images themselves, that show Alison and her father looking ahead with the same wry expression towards a hazy destination: Alison has become like her father. However, this transition into her father's role is not an obstacle-free one- Alison still fears being out-staged by her father, and the arrival at their destination (the theatre) does not bring along an epiphany. Rather, the sentimental endnotes of the movie they watch is openly bathetic- Lynn cries out "yes you will, Daddy" when her father mourns “I ain’t never gonna see you again” (1.222). After the fraught complexities the comic has addressed in the father/daughter relationship, this simplistic ending is hardly satisfying. Like Alison, it results with the reader driving back in “mortified silence” (223.4).

In a way, Bruce’s hidden ambition to become an artist successfully incarnates in Alison’s creation of the family memoir. However, this warrants a sacrifice of the father figure as his death rejuvenates the foundations of the Bechdel home. The ending Alison proposes is not a joyous one, but rather open-ended, requiring the reader to provide his or her own closure.

In writing Fun Home, Alison paints a complex picture of a man who both father, lover, and impassioned creator. Like the shadow, her characters hold an ambiguous form, needing the reader to give them form in the act of interpretation by holding the strings of the figures behind the textual screen. Likewise, the placing of mirrors within Alison’s architectural maze allows for a flexibility of meaning. Dead ends act as a convergence point in which Bruce and Alison’s differences are mirrored, providing a locus of vision for the reader. By refusing to inscribe a fixed meaning onto her tropes, she weaves her story into a larger, infinitely more complex history that will always be in the making. She accounts for the multiplicity of real life, allowing the reader to build his or her meaning upon her ‘set’ history. The final juxtaposed images we are left with are jarring: an imagined truck hurtling towards us as Alison’s body falls (away from us) into her father’s arms. In combining these images in a mirror-like fashion, she suggests death and life are inextricable, and it is our imperative to make sense of it by contributing to a collective mythic and interpersonal history, or get hit by a truck.

Works Cited

Bechdel, Alison. Fun home: a family tragicomic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.

Watson, Julia. "Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home." [cluster on graphic memoir, ed. Gillian Whitlock] biography 31:1 (Winter 2008), 27-56. Reprinted in Graphic Subjects, ed. Michael A. Chaney, University of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming 2010.