Fun Home Reflections

I really liked Fun Home, but I have to say, the last chapter of the book probably would’ve meant a whole lot more to me had I ever read Ulysses. It’s practically an omnipresent theme right up to the end.

The conversation in the car on the way to Coal Miner’s Daughter says so much through subtle shifts in facial expression and arm position. The uniform, blocky frames barely change, especially where Alison’s father is concerned. It’s a strange way of conveying motion, but I can’t think of a better way, offhand, of depict a conversation taking place entirely in a car on the way to somewhere.

I also identified with Alison’s animosity toward literary criticism. I spent my first semester hating the way people over analyzed every word of stuff like The Dubliners, all of Hemingway’s short stories and pretty much every sonnet ever written. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" was probably the first piece I ever got into on that level, and even then I resented nit-pickiness. It seemed straightforward enough to me and I was not willing to argue over supposed Christ-like references on that stupid urn. As with many other aspects of my life, but here much more appropriately, I blame the new critics, those bigoted elitist sexist ass clowns, for tarnishing the face of criticism as a whole and creating this stuffy world of hidden symbolism and innovative bullshitting so pervasive in the literary world even today as post-structuralism has apparently taken the reigns. Wow, that was a bit of a rant. How horrid!