Truth, Subjectvity, and Creative Values in Fun Home.

Over the course of Fun Home, Alison’s artistic and literary values, and her relationship to truth and objectivity, are influenced by her relationship with her father. When Alison is younger, she is aesthetically oppositional to him, and values truth in contrast to his interest in façades, but as she grows older, and she becomes closer with her father, she embraces subjectivity more, and their shared interest in literature overall to pull them together, although it also pushes them apart.

When Alison was very young, she diametrically opposed to her father’s artistic values, perhaps in part because they increased her choreload. On page 15 in particular, she describes herself as “utilitarian to his aesthete” above a panel where, as a young child, she complains about the difficulty of dusting a particularly ornate chair to her largely apathetic father. It is likely due to this that she “developed a contempt for useless ornament,” finding that “If anything, they obscured function… They were lies.” (p16). This shows that Alison ties her father’s artistic preferences to his lies, which she holds an early dislike for. Her father seemed “morally suspect,” and young Alison blamed him for his work in making their family seem “impeccable,” which it was not (p16). As proof of his valuing appearances over reality, she shows an instance in which he was so wrapped up in taking the perfect family photo that he almost missed mass. This shows that as a young girl, Alison resented her father for his cumbersome artistic preferences and his perceived deceptive qualities.

Alison not only dislikes her father’s falsehoods, she values truth in her own life. We can see this from the fact that she develops compulsions around it during her experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder. She writes “How did I know that the things I was writing were absolutely, objectively true” and “My sturdy, declarative sentences began to strike me as hubristic at best, utter lies at worst.” (p141). The reason her OCD focuses on it is because she is afraid of being untruthful, much like how her other compulsions center around fear of annihilation. She herself says she was obsessed with making sur her diary bore “no false witness” (p269). She adds the little “I think” addendums because she wants to tell the truth and be accurate, or to at least acknowledge her own subjectivity. To stretch, I think that much like her artistic views rising in part from her dislike of the chores she was assigned, Alison’s interest in the truth was somewhat a rejection of her father’s own perceived falsehoods and incredibility, whether or not she realized it at the time.

However, as Alison gets older, her desire to be objective (or at least to clarify her imperfect objectivity) lessens. She starts and adding opinion qualifiers in her diary, until when she starts menstruation, her entry on it is one where “Truth is barely perceptible behind a hedge of qualifiers, encryption, and stray punctuation.” (p169). Here, Alison is ashamed and disgusted with herself to the extent of adding the rather overwrought “HOW HORRID!” to her entry (p169). This displays a remarkable shift.

Alison’s interest in the truth is also correlated with her homosexuality in the novel, as seen when she muses that she was lying to herself “Since I was four or five.” when she said she didn’t want to look like the awesome, flannel-sporting, truck-driving masculine presenting woman who she saw once in a luncheonette (p117). In the same way, her father is ultimately lying to himself in the same way by creating the façade of the perfect family that she is so skeptical of.

As Alison grows, she becomes more artistically inclined in similar ways to her father (see: the poem they create collaboratively, and her interest in his English class, ironically enough called “Rites of Passage” (close enough to the Coming of Age Novel, no offense meant to Mr. Mitchell) which she describes as “The only class [she had] worth taking.” p199. Books served as “their currency,” meaning we have a fairly large reversal from earlier, because now shared artistic (lumping literary under the umbrella of artistic) interest is what brings them together (p200). However, her father’s overzealousness ends up putting her off English entirely in college, when her going to him for advice leads to his interest for the books she is reading subsuming her own.

Their English readings in turn help prompt Alison’s eventual reclaiming of her truth (namely that she is gay) by virtue of her father recommending she read Colette, which sparks her own literary journey as she reads more lesbian classics like Rubyfruit Jungle. This in turn leads to Alison learning the truth about her father, and reciprocally gifting him Flying to try and encourage his own growth, and to make him face his own truth, as she tries to learn more about him and wheedle it out of him, which he awkwardly and somewhat hesitantly engages with.

In the end, Alison somewhat won over to the subjectivity side, in that she is solidly convinced that her father’s death is a suicide in the face of inconclusive evidence. However, she is still self-analytic enough to judge that she is not an objective observer, and she speculates on the reasons for why she wants it to have been a suicide that she herself may have caused in some way. She is also self-evaluating in other aspects of the novel, as seen in her own description of the photo of Roy, where she questions if she would not have reacted differently if the photo had been of a seventeen-year-old girl, asking why she isn’t “properly outraged.” p100.

From this, we can see that the overall arc is one from initial opposition to her father and to lies, to being more open to the literary and the greys (or in this case blues) of fact and fiction. 

EDIT:  I wrote a nonsensical short blog about the dead boy Alison saw being a metaphorical doppleganger. Adrian's excellent, hilarious, Holden horse post infected me, but I failed to catch the humor aspects. I put the post on my other blog because I want to trick people into reading my other blog and I don't want to clog this blog or the blog feed with "unofficial" posts.