Chapter Two opens up with a loaded illustration: a grassy knoll with a human silhouette standing over Bruce's gravestone. It's an image Bechdel created to bluntly diffuse her emotions onto the reader. It's immediate. And then there's that obelisk leering over the grave from its vantage point in the background. It's tall. It's proud. It's strong. It's obfuscating. It's mind-numbingly phallic.
Could Bechdel have been any more obvious about her father's fascination with the male organ? I almost immediately caught on to what the majority of chapter 2 was going to be about - just by looking at the opening illustration for three seconds. I don't know. Maybe I just have my mind the gutter, or it's my own predilections talking, but at least Bechdel presented the potentially crass subject matter in an insightful, humorous fashion. For example, when Bechdel's "mom couldn't convince the monument maker to do it" - that is, create Bruce's obelisk out of "fleshy, translucent marble like the tombstones in the old part of the cemetary" - I snickered pretty hard. What else is abundantly fleshy and occasionally translucent? Not that I'm an expert on the subject, but I'd bet 'fleshy' rivals 'thick' or 'pendulous' for most used adjectives to artfully describe penises in erotica novels. Only the daughter of a phallus-obsessed closeted gay man would use the words 'fleshy' and 'translucent' to describe a tombstone, however. That's not to say it isn't a vivid description, because it is, and Bechdel manages to pull it off without sounding ridiculous, but the connections she's trying to draw between a tombstone and a penis is a little too obvious for my liking. Either way, regardless of Bechdel's surprising lack of subtlety here, there's a lot to be said about Bruce and his connection to various phallic symbols in his life, "a shape in life he was unabashedly fixated on."
Months ago I discovered a religion on Wikipedia called the Church of Priapus. The connections to Greek myth and philosophy Bechdel throws into Fun Home continue here. Named after Priapus, the constantly-erect Greek god of fertility and the male sexual organ, it's a religion predominantly associated with gay men. Bruce would've probably fit in perfectly the St. Priapus Church. According to Bruce, the obelisk "symbolizes life." The Church of Priapus feels the same way. An article from The Advocate says the Church believes the phallus is the source of life, beauty, joy, and pleasure, and is wholly deserving of worship and awe for these reasons. I'm curious to know if Bechdel knows about the Church of Priapus, or if Bruce knew of the church, or was even apart to it - it's an interesting idea to consider. Between Priapus, Daedalus, Icarus, and Sisyphus, Bechdel's incorporation of Greek pantheism into her story is extensive, but accessible and full of allusions and depth which would not be possible without the connections she draws with, for example, Daedalus and Bruce. Her love of mythology deepens our understanding of her perspective regarding Bruce and his death. Bechdel, as shown by the panel of her crying on her girlfriend Joan's shoulder but not really saying anything, would not be able to express her true feelings through raw emotional displays - not without a rationalized veil, like that provided by the linearly written details of Greek myth, to coat them in and act as a sieve. Rationalizing things is something Bechdel has, perhaps even needs, in spades.
Greek myth isn't the only tool Bechdel uses to deepen our understanding, however. She also extends this to literature and pop culture. "Should we have been suspicious when he started plowing through Proust the year before?" says Bechdel. Instead of focusing on the obvious black humor involved in "people reaching middle-age the day they realize they're not going to finish Remembrance of Things Past," a notoriously lengthy work, I homed in on author Proust himself. Like Bruce, Marcel Proust was a closeted homosexual to all but his closest friends. The extent to which Proust exercised his sexuality is unknown beyond unverified accounts, and aside from using homosexual characters in several pieces, Proust never made any known open comments regarding homosexuality - whether his own sexuality, his affairs, nor the affairs of others. In other words, Proust is remarkably similar to Bruce, at least on a superficial level. Neither acknowledged their homosexuality to anyone other than themselves and close friends, although we have no idea why both men chose to do so. We can speculate, however - was Proust just as self-loathing as Bruce is thought to be? His gay characters are remarkably realistic and under stereotyped, especially considering the time they were written, so this doesn't seem like a likely explanation to me. The readers are, with good reason, left totally on the dark here. We're forced to speculate and draw comparisons; Bechdel is encouraging us to think non-linearly. It's not at all like Bruce's noticeably changed appearance on his death bed, for example, which smacks the audience upside the head with its bluntness. "His wiry hair, which he had daily taken great pains to style, was brushed straight upon end to reveal a surprisingly receded hairline," notes Bechdel upon seeing her father's corpse, 'prepared' by a mortician unrelated to the family. Bruce is far more similar than he appears to the previously mentioned "unattractive balding men" Danny DeVito and James Gandolfini from my last blog entry. Beginning his sexual life as a strapping college-aged young man in the military with a full head of hair, he died a balding, hairy middle-aged man who was having affairs with boys. Poetic justice at its cruelest, the loss of Bruce's hair signifies both a loss of attractiveness - certainly of his own self-image and most likely the impression of others - and the death of his sexual existence. Afterall, the frequently namechecked Robert Redford never did lose his hair like Bruce did. Not even death can hide Bruce's lies.
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