Alison Bechdel is In Search of Lost Time

  The graphic novel Fun Home is filled with constant literary references. One of these, and the one I will be focusing on, is the novel Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. Alison Bechdel spends many pages unpacking metaphors for her relationship with her father that can be found in the novel, such as the concept of “inverts.” Alison and Bruce are not only “inverts” in Proust’s sense (that is to say, homosexuals who express their gender oppositely to their sex), but they are also inversions of each other, and through that they have a connection, though it causes many conflicts between them. She ends this comparison to the novel by talking about the new title for the novel, translated more literally from the French: In Search of Lost Time. I believe that the entirety of Fun Home is Alison’s own Search of Lost Time.

The original French title is A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Alison explains, however, that Perdu does not just mean “lost,” as it had been translated. It also means “ruined, undone, wasted, wrecked, and spoiled” (Bechdel 119). I believe that Alison’s time with her father was both lost and wasted, or at least that she feels so. She acknowledges multiple times throughout the book that by ruling her father’s death a suicide, she may be trying to make a connection that doesn’t exist in order to feel more connected with her father. She says, “The idea that I caused his death by telling my parents I was a lesbian is perhaps illogical. Causality implies connection, contact of some kind” (Bechdel 84). At this point in the novel, we do not know about the level of connection the two have at the end of his life. She may just be grasping at straws, but she wants to believe in their connection—thus she is In Search of ways their lives connect.

But she’s not just searching for connections—she’s searching for time. I think this becomes really apparent when you think about the timeline of the events as they were happening. For a long time, she and her father did not get along. Once she reached high school they got closer, and this continued once she was in college. After she comes out, she learns about his homosexuality (or at the very least, relations with men) and the two actually have a conversation about it, and try to go to a gay bar together. When her father shares that he dressed in girls’ clothes as a child, she jumps onto the connection, saying “I wanted to be a boy! I dressed in boys’ clothes!” (Bechdel 221). For the first time in her life, she has this explicit connection with her father—their shared attraction towards their own gender. Their relationship is improving. She is getting along with him in a way she hadn’t before. But they don’t get to talk about it that much before he dies, and any future conversations they could have had never do happen. They run out of time to be close.

Throughout the novel, Alison Bechdel is exploring and re-examining her childhood with the knowledge she has at the present. She is searching for connections between herself and her father that she acknowledges might not be there. I believe that she is trying to find moments from her childhood that imply this connection they had—moments that could be recontextualized into displaying their bond and as examples of ways in which they were close. I believe that Alison Bechdel is In Search of Lost Time with her father.