If wisdom requires that we not take ourselves too seriously “as the center of everything,” then it is appropriate to ask whether the absence of self-mockery in both the generative AI essays and our work as literary critics does not mean that they, and we, fall short of wisdom as Bechdel sees it.
As an illustration of how one might teach for wisdom through analysis of a relatively short but conceptually rich text, and to do so by leveraging and assessing the power of AI, I would turn to a reading of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. A groundbreaking text in the medium of comics and the inspiration for a Tony award-winning musical, Fun Home can be read in one sitting but comes alive on rereading—in part because Bechdel structured her memoir as a labyrinthian spiral; in part because, as specialists in the comics genre often remind us, the interplay of juxtaposed image and text in graphic fiction requires a more deliberate and recursive analytic approach (Gardiner, frontispiece).
Unlike many of the works by authors I discuss on this site (Hesse, Achebe, Morrison, Vonnegut, et al.), Bechdel’s Fun Home does not explicitly evoke “wisdom” or its variants. Elsewhere, she occasionally invokes the concept in the title of represented volumes: depicting the pathbreaking lesbian journal “Sinister Wisdom” in the Cartoonist’s Introduction to her 2008 collection The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For and that of Christiane Northrup’s The Wisdom of Menopause in her 2021 The Secret to Superhuman Strength (xiif., 192). A notable page in the latter quotes from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Transcendental Etude” about the need not to transcend the world, as Wordsworth sought to do in his Immortality ode, but rather to transform it, “here, and now” (Secret 231). The page then ends on a frame depicting Bechdel and her wife Holly at their respective work stations while, in the background, a television shows Donald Trump saying “Fraud” and “I won”—all beneath a caption that reads: “As wisdom tends to do, the poem reveals something very simple that’s been here all along: we are not the center of everything.”
Photo: Alison Bechdel, The Secret to Superhuman Strength
To instantiate how one might use Fun Home to teach for wisdom and, at the same time, to assess the challenge that generative AI poses to that project, I will first examine what several leading AI tools have to say about the place of wisdom in Bechdel’s memoir, assessing the strengths and weakness of their readings. The fact that Fun Home does not explicitly thematize wisdom poses an additional challenge to the LLMs, a challenge I was interested in seeing if they could meet. I will then turn to my own reading, as informed by the rich vein of scholarship on Bechdel’s work.
A quick note on methodology. In mid-December 2024, I asked ChatGPT 4.0, Google Gemini Advanced 1.5 Pro, Claude 3.5, and Perplexity 1.0 to write a 1000-word essay on the role that wisdom plays in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. I opted not to upload the previous chapters of this book on both philosophical and intellectual property grounds. I also chose not to further refine my prompts in response to the output received; not to run the prompts multiple times and cherry-pick from the best bits in each of the essays; not to characterize the style of answer I was seeking; nor to engage in “chain-of-thought prompting” by laying out for the LLM a process for assessing the analyses it comes up with (Mollick 170). All of these strategies are best practices in the use of generative AI and would have significantly improved the results. Rather, I crafted the prompts as a time-constrained student seeking a ready-made short essay might and will use the results here, as one might in the classroom, to discuss what the LLMs got right, and wrong, about wisdom and its specific role in Bechdel’s graphic memoir. As a pedagogical strategy, this approach is surprisingly fruitful since it requires students to already have a firm grasp of what we might mean by “wisdom” and of the precise contours of Bechdel’s text.
Here is ChatGPT 4.0’s essay, easily the richest and most nuanced of the responses to my prompt:
The Role of Wisdom in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a poignant exploration of identity, memory, and the complexities of family dynamics. Central to its narrative is the concept of wisdom—not merely as knowledge, but as a deeper understanding born from experience, reflection, and emotional growth. The memoir intricately weaves Bechdel’s journey toward self-awareness with her posthumous efforts to comprehend her father, Bruce, and their shared struggles with identity. Wisdom in Fun Home operates on multiple levels: as a tool for self-discovery, a lens through which to reinterpret the past, and a means to grapple with grief and find meaning in ambiguity. This essay delves into these dimensions, highlighting how wisdom shapes the memoir’s narrative arc and emotional resonance.
Wisdom as a Tool for Self-Discovery
At its core, Fun Home is a bildungsroman—charting Bechdel’s journey to understand her sexuality and identity. The wisdom she gains is not immediate; it is the result of years of introspection and a painstaking process of connecting disparate moments from her childhood and adolescence. Bechdel’s discovery of her lesbian identity is a pivotal moment in the memoir, yet it is not portrayed as a sudden epiphany. Instead, it unfolds gradually, as she pieces together her feelings, experiences, and the cultural texts that resonate with her emerging sense of self.
Wisdom here is portrayed as an evolving process. Bechdel juxtaposes her younger self’s confusion and curiosity with her older self’s reflective insights. For example, her fascination with the gender-nonconforming figures in literature and art—such as Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall—illustrates how cultural touchstones serve as guides in her journey toward understanding. Through her retrospective narrative, Bechdel demonstrates that wisdom involves both the recognition of one’s internal truths and the ability to articulate them within a broader cultural and historical context.
Reinterpreting the Past Through Wisdom
A major theme of Fun Home is the act of looking back—both literally, as Bechdel revisits old photographs, letters, and diary entries, and metaphorically, as she seeks to make sense of her father’s life and their relationship. Bruce Bechdel, Alison’s enigmatic and troubled father, is a man of contradictions: a high school English teacher, a funeral home director, a perfectionist aesthete, and a closeted gay man. His death, which Bechdel suggests may have been a suicide, becomes the catalyst for her inquiry into his life and their parallels.
Bechdel’s retrospective narration exemplifies how wisdom can transform the understanding of past events. As a child, she experiences her father’s temper, emotional distance, and obsessive attention to aesthetics with confusion and resentment. However, as an adult, she revisits these moments with a more nuanced perspective, recognizing the constraints of his closeted existence in a conservative, small-town environment. This shift in perspective is not about absolving Bruce of his flaws but about contextualizing them within the larger framework of societal norms and personal struggles.
For instance, Bechdel explores the significance of her father’s passion for restoring their gothic revival home—a pursuit that, on the surface, seems obsessive and alienating. In hindsight, she interprets this as an expression of his repressed identity, a channel through which he could exert control and create beauty in a life marked by constraint and secrecy. Wisdom enables Bechdel to move beyond her childhood perceptions and uncover layers of meaning in her father’s actions, bridging the gap between their experiences.
Grappling with Grief and Ambiguity
One of the most profound ways wisdom manifests in Fun Home is in Bechdel’s navigation of grief. Bruce’s death is shrouded in ambiguity, and Bechdel’s narrative does not seek to offer definitive answers about whether it was an accident or suicide. Instead, she embraces the uncertainty, using it as a starting point for deeper reflection on the complexities of her father’s life and their relationship.
Wisdom, in this context, involves accepting the unknowable and finding meaning within it. Bechdel draws parallels between her own coming-out journey and her father’s hidden life, suggesting a tragic irony in their shared struggles. While her openness about her sexuality marks a step toward liberation, Bruce’s inability to do the same underscores the societal pressures and internalized shame that shaped his existence. This juxtaposition is not framed as a simple dichotomy but as a testament to the generational and cultural shifts that define their respective experiences.
Bechdel’s grappling with grief also reveals the role of wisdom in reconciling conflicting emotions. She mourns not only her father’s death but also the relationship they could have had if circumstances had been different. At the same time, she acknowledges the limitations of their connection, shaped by Bruce’s guardedness and her own youthful resistance to his influence. Wisdom allows her to hold these contradictions simultaneously, crafting a narrative that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.
The Interplay of Art, Literature, and Wisdom
A unique aspect of Fun Home is its intertextuality—the way Bechdel weaves literary and artistic references into her narrative. Works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus serve as lenses through which she interprets her own experiences and her father’s life. These texts are not merely decorative; they are integral to the memoir’s exploration of wisdom.
For Bechdel, literature provides a framework for understanding the complexities of human behavior and the interplay between personal and universal truths. For example, her comparison of her father to Gatsby highlights his pursuit of an idealized version of life, driven by longing and illusion. Similarly, her engagement with Camus’s existential philosophy underscores her efforts to find meaning in the face of uncertainty and loss. By situating her personal story within this broader intellectual tradition, Bechdel underscores the role of wisdom in connecting individual experiences to larger cultural and philosophical questions.
Visual Storytelling and the Conveyance of Wisdom
As a graphic memoir, Fun Home uses visual storytelling to convey layers of meaning that words alone cannot capture. Bechdel’s meticulous illustrations and panel compositions mirror the memoir’s themes of reflection and reinterpretation. For instance, recurring visual motifs—such as mirrors, photographs, and architectural details—underscore the themes of perception, memory, and the passage of time.
Wisdom is also conveyed through the interplay between text and image. Bechdel’s captions often provide a reflective commentary on the scenes depicted, highlighting the contrast between her younger self’s limited understanding and her current insights. This dual perspective invites readers to engage in their own process of interpretation, mirroring Bechdel’s journey toward wisdom.
Conclusion
In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, wisdom is not a static endpoint but an ongoing process of questioning, understanding, and reconciling. It is through this lens that Bechdel navigates her own identity, reexamines her relationship with her father, and grapples with the ambiguities of his death. The memoir’s intertextual richness and visual complexity further underscore the multifaceted nature of wisdom, inviting readers to reflect on their own experiences and perceptions.
Ultimately, Fun Home is a testament to the transformative power of wisdom. It demonstrates how the act of looking back—armed with knowledge, empathy, and a willingness to confront difficult truths—can illuminate the past and shape a more profound understanding of the self and others. In doing so, it offers a deeply moving meditation on the human capacity for growth, connection, and meaning-making in the face of life’s inherent complexities.
Photo: Stuart Freeser Blog
I suspect we have all experienced the awe of watching a generative AI tool spit out a reasonably accurate, on point, and grammatically correct essay in a matter of seconds. More often than not, that awe begins to dissipate as we encounter overstatements, trite formulations, conceptual fudges, and grammatical misstatements. ChatGPT’s opening paragraph contains examples of each of these. As I noted above, wisdom is by no means as “central to [the] narrative” of Fun Home as it is to that of Siddhartha or Arrow of God. No less overstated are the essay’s subsequent references to “universal” resonances and truths. To call Fun Home a “poignant” exploration—as several of the LLMs do—feels stale and unhelpful, although arguably less so than the subsequent claim that “[a]s a graphic memoir, Fun Home uses visual storytelling to convey layers of meaning that words alone cannot capture.” ChatGPTs reference to wisdom as a “tool for self-discovery,” with its implication of stable possession, flies in the face of its later, more accurate characterization of wisdom as “an evolving process,” and thus as both a tool and a result. Finally, it is hardly likely that Bechdel’s efforts to understand her father were in fact “posthumous.”
All of this noted, ChatGPT does get a great deal right about the role that wisdom plays in Fun Home. It correctly describes Alison’s as a “journey to understand her sexuality and identity,” noting that she attains a “more nuanced perspective” on her father’s sexuality and identity as she matures. It characterizes wisdom not as “a static endpoint but [as] an ongoing process of questioning, understanding, and reconciling,” then links wisdom to Alison’s, then Bechdel’s, struggle to empathize with her overbearing, compulsive, and inherently fragile father and to work through the trauma (ChatGPT says “grief”) occasioned by his death.[1] Unlike several of the other LLMs, it acknowledges the “ambiguity” around Bruce’s death (was it “an accident or suicide”?), rightly characterizes Bruce as a “man of contradictions,” and recognizes how historic changes in cultural norms shaped Bruce’s, then Alison’s, respective abilities to express their sexuality.
Photo: Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Finally, ChatGPT rightly draws our attention to the ”interplay between text and image” in Fun Home, then goes on—albeit in general terms—to show how Bechdel uses the juxtaposition of “her younger self’s limited understanding and her current insights”—in the depicted scenes and captions respectively—to engage readers “in their own process of interpretation.”
Much has been made of generative AI’s outright fabrications or “hallucinations”. I encountered a striking instance of this when I asked the LLMs to use an earlier version of this blog site to inform their analysis. In response, Gemini 1.5 wrote: “Wiscult.com, a website dedicated to the study of wisdom, defines it as ‘the ability to navigate the fundamental issues of life with grace and good judgment.’” I grant you that wise individuals may often be gracious, but the word “grace” and its variants had never appeared in a WisCult post to that point. Perplexity likewise stated that wisdom, “according to Wiscult.com, involves a balance between skepticism and openness to new ideas.” Not only was this not stated in the blog, it is nonsensical, since a fundamental skepticism precisely allows for an openness to new ideas.
One obvious approach to teaching interpretive skills in the age of AI is to turn students’ attention to claims that provide “the illusion of understanding,” that sound good on a quick reading but fall apart on closer analysis (Mollick 26). Here are just some of the claims one might examine:
- In using literature in Fun Home as “a framework for understanding the complexities of human behavior,” does Bechdel actually underscore “the role of wisdom in connecting individual experience to larger cultural and philosophical questions” (ChatGPT)?
- Does Gemini not overstate its case—and, in the process, fall into a false dichotomy—in claiming that “[w]hile the narrative grapples with themes of sexual identity, gender roles, and the weight of secrecy, it is wisdom, or rather its pursuit and its absence, that forms the underlying current driving the narrative”?
- Does Gemini not stretch the concept of wisdom to its breaking point when it claims that Bruce “embodies a particular type of intellectual wisdom,” before going on to state, incontrovertibly, that “his intellectual prowess is juxtaposed with his emotional repression and inability to confront his true identity”?
- Does Alison’s wrestling with the “unresolved aspects” of her relationship with her father illustrate “the importance of emotional regulation in the cultivation of wisdom”—as if the working through of trauma and grief demanded a certain placidity (ChatGPT)?
- What is wrong with Perplexity’s claim that the “disconnect between Alison and her parents, particularly her father, highlights the challenges of transmitting wisdom across generations”?
- Is Perplexity correct in seeing intellectual humility in the young Alison’s obsessive erasure of facts in her diary entries—first with the phrase “I think,” then by striking the entries through with inverted Vs—largely on the basis of the narrator’s evoking an “epistemological crisis” and the line, “How did I know the things I was writing were absolutely, objectively true?” (Fun Home 141)?
Photo: Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
By nearly every measure, the critical literature around Fun Home is strong, as one might expect of a work that has become foundational for both queer studies and comics criticism. Despite the constraints of their 1000-word limit, the various AI-generated essays touch on several of the questions that critics have productively explored, including those of queer identity, the representation of trauma, the play of image and text, and the role of the reader in the comics form.
What those essays tend to miss (or at best allude to in passing) are the ways in which Alison’s coming-of-age story in relation to her father is as much about her coming into her calling as an artist as it is about her coming into her desire as a queer woman. Fun Home is not just akin to a Bildungsroman, as ChatGPT notes; it evokes that specific sub-genre known as a Künstlerroman [artist’s novel]—in this case, the story of a young woman realizing her destiny as a comics artist. In a key sequence around the memoir’s midpoint, Bechdel illustrates the childhood memory of having encountered a huge rat snake on a family camping trip, muses that her father may have jumped into the path of the Sunbeam bread truck that killed him because he saw such a snake, then uses snakes’ mythic association with “cyclicality, life from death, creation from destruction” to speculate that, “in a way, 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” (116f.).
Hillary Chute, arguably the doyenne of Bechdel criticism, has written cogently of the ways in which Bruce Bechdel, “as cruel and petty as he was,” served as “both a disabling and enabling force” for Alison in her development as an artist (207). In this, Chute specifically references Fun Home’s final page, which juxtaposes a spare close-up of the grill of the truck that killed Bruce Bechdel with the final image of a young Alison leaping off a diving board into her father’s arms, under the caption that “he was there to catch me when I leapt” (Fun Home 232).
Photo: Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Along the same lines, Julia Watson links Alison’s destiny as a lesbian and budding artist to her father’s sublimation of repressed homoerotic desire in compulsive aestheticism, tracking the complex interplay “between the erotic and the necrotic” throughout Fun Home and reading its final pages as a perplexing reworking of “the trauma of a tragic death as a literarily comic ‘happy ending’” (35f.).
This working through of tragedy as comedy—plainly signaled in the pun of Fun Home’s subtitle, A Family Tragicomic—was neither easy nor straightforward. Early on, Bechdel speaks of her father’s absence as having “resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him” (23). She then goes on to represent the complex process of working through this absence in the very structure of Fun Home. Rather than adopt the linear chronology typical of coming-of-age narratives, Bechdel gives us a “complex narrative arc” that tracks the paradoxes of her family through what Watson aptly calls “a recursive pattern of returns and reversals punctuated by the rhythmic movement of self-questioning and self-commentary” (34, 51). And she does so through an archival practice that involves meticulously, even obsessively, redrawing by hand images from her past—photographs, letters, memories—even restaging in her own person many of the poses in family photos.
A key moment in Alison’s working through of her father’s example, and ultimately his legacy, comes at the beginning of Fun Home’s final chapter, centered as it is around the work of James Joyce. Now at college, Alison enrolls in a winter semester course on Ulysses, which she would later confess to only “skimming”, on the same day that she “realize[s] in the campus bookstore that [she is] a lesbian” and so embarks on her personal “odyssey” (Indelible 42, 203). Having spoken earlier—in the memoir though not in time—of needing to “leave this academic plane and enter the human fray” by doing more than just reading about lesbian desire, Alison bristles on encountering bloviating professors and students (all men); speaks of “suffocating” when Bruce says of Joyce’s Portrait, “You damn well better identify with every page”; and doodles on her dad’s treasured copy of Ulysses as a “fuck you to my dad and to James Joyce” (76, 201, 206). In short, Alison the college student finds literary criticism to be a “suspect activity,” asking “why we couldn’t just read the books without forcing contorted [symbolic] interpretations on them” (206, 200).
In a 2007 interview for The Comics Journal, Bechdel speaks of having grown into symbolic reading, noting “how hard it was for me to understand symbolism and literary interpretation,” as if this were “a developmental stage… that people need to go through” (Emmert). Thanks to her experience of psychoanalysis, most explicitly referenced in Are You My Mother? and her various interviews, she speaks in 2007 of now being “all about… seeing beneath the surface.” And she incorporates both The Odyssey andUlysses into the very structure of Fun Home, its final chapter especially. Doodling in her father’s copy of Ulysses is thus not just a “fuck you” to her dad and Joyce, it also foreshadows a creative appropriation, most evident in that panel where she paraphrases Joyce to ask of her father and their respective sexualities: “What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Dad’s thoughts about my thoughts about him, and his thoughts about my thoughts about his thoughts about me?” (212).
Photo: Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Has Bechdel thus made her peace with literary analysis? Robin Lydenberg makes an important point in noting that Bechdel makes literary parallels in Fun Home similar to “her professor’s obsessive enumeration of parallels between Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey,… although never without some degree of self-mockery” (142). In a short strip from 2019 entitled “Why Comics? A Question”—Bechdel’s tribute to Hillary Chute as her collaborator and strongest reader—she includes a telling pair of panels. In the first, she muses about “academics going on about spatio-temporality and working themselves into paroxysms over gutters”—the interstitial space between the panels of a comic. In the next frame, she draws herself pulling back the frame of a panel, as if it were a curtain.
My sense is that Bechdel has come to terms with the community of her professional readers—literary critics—but has a residual sense that we take ourselves too damn seriously. I wonder, for example, what she might make of Chute’s claim that “[u]ltimately, Fun Home is not as interested in fixing and preserving death through a narrative of causality as it in in releasing death into timelessness through the open space and gaps of its word and image form” (216)? The practice of literary criticism tends to reward grandiosity, in ways that push us away from intellectual humility. At the end of Fun Home, by contrast, Bechdel undercuts a claim that most of us as professional critics would take to be self-evident—that one of her memoir’s primary aims is to unpack the truth of her father’s erotic life—by writing that “‘[e]rotic truth’ is a rather sweeping concept. I shouldn’t pretend to know what my father’s was” (230)
Photo: Alison Bechdel, “Why Comics? A Question
I read the final three panels of “Why Comics?” as making just this point. In the first, Bechdel raises her hands in a questioning gesture and playfully says: “Despite Chute’s many thoughtful observations on the ways comics can deftly convey interior reality, you can’t really know what I’m thinking.” In the second, we see her looking thoughtfully away under a thought bubble that asks: “Is it lunchtime?”. In the third, she simply looks straight at us. If wisdom requires that we not take ourselves too seriously “as the center of everything”—as the Trump-referencing panel in Secret invites us to do—then it is appropriate to ask whether the absence of self-mockery in both the generative AI essays and our work as literary critics does not mean that they, and we, fall short of wisdom as Bechdel sees it.
[1] Following critical convention, I refer here to the character represented in Fun Home as “Alison” and the book’s narrator and illustrator as “Bechdel”. As this sentence suggests, however, this convention gets dicier as “Alison” matures, though never so much as in reference to Bechdel’s later books, The Secret to Superhuman Strength most especially.
