In short, what Alison Bechdel says of the essentialist/anti-essentialist debate applies to wisdom as well: “Clearly, [we] need to rethink this thing.”
Looking back in Fun Home at her 10-year-old self, Alison Bechdel writes of falling deeply into “obsessive-compulsive” behavior, counting the drops from a dripping faucet to avoid odd numbers and multiples of thirteen, reciting “a special incantation” while navigating doorways, even putting her clothes back on and then undressing again if she fails to remove them in the proper order (135ff.). Alison’s OCD, motivated by what she calls “a dark fear of annihilation” and possibly picked up from her reading of Dr. Spock, takes graphic form when she begins to write a small “I think” after banal and incontrovertible facts in her diary (138f.). She then turns these notations into scribbled “blots”, and finally creates a “shorthand version of I think” that she dubs “a curvy circumflex” (142). Hilary Chute rightly finds the “curvy circumflex” echoed in the inverted V of a dead cousin’s split-open chest that Alison’s father Bruce invites Alison and her siblings to witness in the Fun Home’s embalming room (Fun Home 44, Chute 148). The caption to that image—“The strange pile of his genitals was shocking, but what really got my attention was his chest, split open to a dark red cave”—clearly sets up the older Alison’s encounter with another cave-like circumflex. As Alison buries her head in the vagina of her glass-eyed college lover Joan, Bechdel playfully likens her past self to Odysseus on the island of the Cyclops, saying: “In true heroic fashion, I moved toward the thing I feared. / Yet while Odysseus schemed desperately to escape Polyphemus’s cave, I found that I was quite content to stay here forever” (214).
Photo: Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Whereas Alison tended to write “I think” after sentences describing individual actions, however, the “curvy circumflex” begins increasingly to obscure names and personal pronouns: “Dad”, “Mother”, “Molly”, “Bill”, “John”, “I”, “we”, “us” and “the dead people,” then evolves to cover the diary entries of entire days (142f., 148f.). Behind the “dark fear of annihilation” that drove Alison’s compulsive behavior, one might say, lay a crisis of community—not a fear of personal annihilation so much as a crisis of profound disconnectedness, on the part of a young girl who was more than happy to be left alone with her drawing and her books. Behind what Bechdel calls “my own compulsive tendency to autobiography,” I am suggesting, there appears to lie a deep fear that others are, or may become, wholly out of reach (140). Margaret Simon is right to note that, as a result of familial tensions and the ways in which literary texts often “substitute for communication” between father and daughter, “the book does not immediately summon a sense of community at all” and that Alison’s coming out is “not facilitated by communities of people so much as by communities of texts” (145, 148). Alison’s mock heroic connection with Joan is thus not just an initiation into sexual groundedness, it is a first step in solidifying a sense of community that the dysfunction of Alison’s family had tended to preclude. It is of course no accident that a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, with its opening evocation of unhappy families, haunts Fun Home’s otherwise happy opening page (3).
I am more than aware that, in making this claim, I am falling into precisely that critical trap—suggesting that I can “really know what [Bechdel is] thinking”—that she, perhaps tongue in cheek, called Hilary Chute out for. That said, it is striking how closely Fun Home hews to an idea we have encountered in several of the works in this study—in Toni Morrison most explicitly, but also in Ruth Ozeki and Chris Marker—namely, the implication of the reader in the creation of new forms of community. Chute is right to say that “[r]eading is the site where almost everything happens in Fun Home”—not just because both Alison and Bruce live vicariously through their reading, but also because Bechdel draws her hands, as proxies for an embodied reader’s, in two key scenes where the discovery of old photographs serves to reveal Bruce’s sexuality (Chute 184; 100f., 120).
Photo: Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Many of Bechdel’s strongest readers have stressed the ways in which Alison’s evolution in Fun Home—her evolution in wisdom, I would argue—entails the emergence of a new readerly community. Thus Julia Watson writes that
Fun Home calls upon its readers to be literate in many kinds of texts—not only comics and Modernist literature but feminist history and lesbian coming-out stories, as well as many modes of the decorative arts—as a sophisticated and politically impassioned community. (29)
In a strong piece on teaching Bechdel’s memoir, Margaret Simon makes the case for an empathic openness to the complexity of human identities in arguing that Fun Home helps students to “see ways to resist being cast—by others or by their own communities, inadvertently or intentionally—as spokespeople for a group identity, rather than being held to their own quirks and inconsistencies” (151). Fun Home, Simon writes, “offers community to its readers not through stasis and easy affiliation, but through an acceptance of a dialectic of self, of identity as inherently multiple, often in conflict, and moving toward truth” (144).
By the time Bechdel published Fun Home, she had produced her strip Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF) for over two decades. Beginning as a series of one-off scenes, Dykes soon evolved into the ongoing saga of a diverse network of (mostly) lesbian characters who frequent an activist bookstore, Madwimmin Books, that is increasingly threatened by the market dominance of Bunns & Noodle, Bounders Books & Muzak, and medusa.com (Essential 220). Part soap opera and part op-ed, Dykes tracks its primary characters—Mo, Lois, Clarice, Toni, Ginger, and Sparrow—as they negotiate the political, amorous, and ultimately familial challenges of what Bechdel has called “my particular queer progressive slice of life” (Indelible 207). The strip’s wisdom, in my view, resides not only in the way it exemplifies what Simon called a “dialectic of self, of identity as inherently multiple, often in conflict, and moving toward truth,” but also in its “loving, gentle, and amused” tone, which Kirsten Leng likens to Horatian satire (4321).
In the Cartoonist’s Introduction to her 2008 collection, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, Bechdel draws herself reading a number of “Sinister Wisdom” under this caption: “The writers I was devouring seemed able to… apprehend the rich transformational quality of lesbian experience and get it down on the page” (xii). Her goal in “drawing the everyday lives of women like me,” she goes on to say, was “to make lesbians more visible not just to ourselves but to everyone” (xv).
Photo: Alison Bechdel, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For
In an important sense, as Bechdel and her readers have long recognized, Mo is DTWOF’s protagonist and the author’s proxy on the strip’s cast, a “young, white, middle-class, marginally-employed lesbian-feminist” (Indelible 62). And yet, Bechdel goes on to write:
Actually, all my characters are based on me. Mo is my guilt-ridden, liberal superego, Lois represents my secret desire to be one of the cool girls. Clarice is my driven, ambitious, workaholic side; Toni the flip domestic side. Sparrow is the part of me that wonders if my chakras are blocked, and Ginger the part of me that alternates between thinking I’m a genius and thinking I’m an utter fraud, all the while procrastinating hopelessly. (Indelible 62)
Photo: Alison Bechdel, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For
In a 1993 strip entitled “Coming Out Story,” Bechdel speaks of having found “my people” at the “Gay Union” meeting she would later reenact in Fun Home (Indelible 43, Fun Home 76). In Dykes, she gives her people back to themselves. The strip’s main characters may reflect their author’s identity as “inherently multiple, often in conflict, and moving toward truth,” but first and foremost they reflect that same multiplicity, conflict, and movement in the community of Bechdel’s readers, lesbian and otherwise. A common theme among the many readers who have written to Bechdel over the years about what DTWOF has meant to them is that the strip made them feel “connected and validated” and that reading it was “like coming home” (Leng 4318). Others, including a number who “explicitly identified themselves as straight or male or non-American,” praised Dykes for what they rightly perceived to be its fundamental “humanity” (Leng 4326).
Throughout this study, I have stressed the ways in which novels allow readers to engage with the struggles, growing insights, and (in many instances) journeys to wisdom of their principal characters. Although strictly a graphic memoir, Fun Home echoes this novelistic practice by inviting our readerly engagement as Alison wrestles with her sexuality, her father’s expectations of her, and the trauma of his death. But novels, as Bechdel has written, are presented to the reader as a “fait accompli,” unlike the comics form, which allows the cartoonist to “have a creatively interactive relationship with [her] readers” (Indelible 207). Over the course of DTWOF’s run, Bechdel responded to readers’ suggestions by adding a “dyke in a wheelchair”—Thea, on whom Mo has a crush—and a “dyke with a kid”—Jasmine, the single mother of Janis, formerly Jonas (Indelible 214, Leng 4325). Wisely, perhaps, Bechdel ignored many suggestions from readers looking for mirror images of themselves, like the reader who requested “a 40-year-old woods-witch-healer type, who goes from het to bi to lesbo” (Indelible 214).
Margaret Galvan rightly finds evidence of Bechdel’s active engagement with her readers in the very title of Dykes to Watch Out For, which directs readers “to look at this project and be complicit in making visible these new subjects” (414). My favorite instance of this engagement, however, comes at the end of Bechdel’s Cartoonist’s Introduction to The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, where she invokes second- and third-wave feminism’s critique of essentialist thinking; rediscovers an old rejection letter from Adrienne Rich commending DTWOF for seeking “to explode dyke essentialism and explore our real humanity”; frets over the possibility that her work has become “conventional” and “boring” by dint of its proving “that we’re the same as everyone else”; and then holds out a copy of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For to the reader, saying “Here. You decide. Essentially the same? / Or essentially different?” (xviii). In the strip’s final panels, Bechdel draws herself amidst the chaos of her personal archive and tells us, with her fists firmly planted on her hips: “Make yourselves comfortable. Clearly, I need to rethink this thing” (xviii).
Photo: Alison Bechdel, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For
Last Words
We live in a political and social age that devalues cognitive and moral nuance and ignores the value, and the power, of cultural difference. Far too often, we choose to be blind to the lessons of history, to distrust expert opinion, and to seek in our public lives only confirmation of our views and biases. Where concern for the common good is not eclipsed by a rabid individualism, it regularly devolves into a no less insistent tribalism. We are empathic with others like us but fail miserably with those who are different. And our determination not to know, as Mark Lilla puts it, is often only matched by our insistence that we do.
Cultivating wisdom, in ourselves and in others, is patently hard work, made all the more so by technological advances that provide the illusion of knowledge and simulacra of community. But we have no choice but to do so, drawing on the resources of the full range of humanistic study—literature and film very much included. Fostering wisdom has long been a primary goal of human endeavor: in Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy; Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian thought; and Native American spirituality, among others. Recent studies in psychology aside, however, the vast majority of contemporary references to “wisdom” in America today are animated either by new-age spirituality or by theocracy-driven calls for the return to a supposed golden age. And yet, wisdom is to be found in a remarkable diversity of recent literary texts, regardless of whether they thematize it directly. By choosing to read for wisdom, we signal our rejection of the many drivers of unwisdom that surround us today and our commitment to sound judgment, nuanced analysis, and courageous action in service to the common good. By teaching for wisdom, we not only prepare our students to thrive in a world where good judgment and the articulation of collective values will be ever more important, we also reinvigorate liberal education for the age of AI. In short, what Alison Bechdel says of the essentialist/anti-essentialist debate applies to wisdom as well: “Clearly, [we] need to rethink this thing.”
