Alison Bechdel is one of the most dynamic figures in contemporary literature and popular culture today. Her Fun Home (2006) and Are You My Mother? (2012), offer two new voices from the cutting edge literary genre of “the graphic narrative.” Are You My Mother? (the title derives from the eponymous children's book of the same name by P. D. Eastman) was reviewed in the April 23rd issue of The New Yorker. And Fun Home opened in October at New York's Public Theater as a new musical, directed by Sam Gold. Bechdel earned her reputation as a “comic” book writer in an underground series called “Dykes to Watch Out For.” In what must be music to the ears of many American psychoanalysts, her recent narratives not only credit her psychoanalytic treatments for much of her personal growth and creative capacity, but also dramatize in inviting ways the history and theories of psychoanalysis itself.
As a literary form, the graphic narrative is relatively new to the literary scene. Most readers of The American Psychoanalyst will be familiar with Art Speigelman's Pulitzer Prize winning, Maus: My Father Bleeds History (1986). Told in comic book form, Speigelman's daring, brilliant narrative of the Holocaust captured the attention of the reading public. Since then the graphic novel has been recognized as a serious form of both fictional and non-fictional narrative. With its imbrication of the visual into bold staccato scripts of memory and dialogue, its variegated shapes and folds on the page invite the reader into an alternative reading experience that is affectively arresting. At once jarring and stirring, it is a form given to memorializing history through the telling of one's life story. Its authors typically chronicle a search for an “authentic self.”
Hillary Chute's critical study of this form entitled Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010) notes that this form is particularly given to the depiction of family trauma in the context of cultural history. Quoting Cathy Caruth's assertion that “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or an event,” Chute explains how the graphic life narrative “pushes on conceptions of the unrepresentable that have become commonplace in the wake of deconstruction, especially in contemporary discourse about trauma. Against a valorization of absence and aporia, graphic narrative asserts the value of presence, however complex and contingent.”
As a psychoanalyst and literary historian, I have been intrigued by the ways that this literary form testifies to personal and historical trauma within its pages. This summer I taught a course, “From Trauma to Testimony: the Emergence of the Contemporary Graphic Narrative,” to an undergraduate class at Kent State University in which we looked at the intriguing evolution of this new literary phenomena. Starting with the urtext of Art Speigelman's account of the Shoah, we moved on to Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's record of growing up during the Iranian Revolution, to Gene Yang's satirical rendering of his boyhood as an American Born Chinese, to Lynda Barry's creation of a family archive in One Hundred Demons, finally to the “lies, secrets, and silences” rendered in Bechdel's Fun Home and Are You My Mother?
Photo: Elena Seibert
These life narratives, taken together, constitute the new voices that grapple with domestic dissent within the literary scene today. Because of Bechdel's commemoration of her personal psychoanalytic treatment and virtual memorializing of the place of psychoanalysis in modern history, it is her testimony that, I believe, emerges as the strongest strain in the chorus of these new creators.
Whereas Bechdel calls Fun Home a “Family Tragicomic,” she calls her new narrative, Are You My Mother?, a “Comic Drama.” Her frank sense of generic experimentation and radical innovation takes hold in this recent narrative. If in Fun Home she depicts her mother as a woman whose thwarted creativity and depressed resignation to the secret of her husband's closeted homosexuality ends up embalming the whole family in a suppressed secret, here Bechdel links her own “mother” hunger as a daughter to the transferences she is able to experience within two powerfully transformative psychoanalytic therapies. Indeed, she frames her graphic narrative around psychoanalytic dream interpretations that directly correspond to the major essays of D.W.Winnicott, whose voice thus becomes embedded as a kind of Virgil to her Dante on this journey into the underworld of the unconscious. Thus her chapters are entitled “The Ordinary Devoted Mother,” “Transitional Objects,” “True and False Self,” and the like, each preceded by a graphically depicted dream sequence.
Vera J. Camden Ph.D., is professor of English at Kent State University, training and supervising analyst at the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center, a member of CORST, the Committee on Psychoanalysis and the Arts, and Psychoanalysis and the Academy.
Illustrating both the influence and the impact of Winnicott's work on her psychic and creative transformation, Bechdel inscribes key passages from his essays over the pages of her own journals, strewn amidst the scenes she portrays from therapies with two different female therapists who speak from the pages of her memoir. Cutting and pasting his prose into her book, Bechdel grafts Winnicott's writing into her own, creating her own textual transitional phenomenon. What's more, Bechdel illustrates the imagined history of the young Winnicott's own analysis as he journeys through the London Underground, to his destination on the couch of James Strachey. Bechdel reenacts and records Winnicott's free-associating to dreams about his own depressed mother upon this couch that she has recreated from reading his biography, personal letters, and interviews. In such manner she interpenetrates the history of psychoanalysis itself into her own personal quest and utilizes its vivid, iconic moments to memorialize her own history. In a winsome turn to historical fiction, Bechdel goes so far as to draw pictures of this same young Donald Winnicott passing, en route to his analysis, the figure of Virginia Woolf as she strolls in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, on her way to publish the papers of Sigmund Freud.
Thus creating a chorus of guardian angels to her autobiographical aspirations, Bechdel turns adaptation into a fantasy of adoption as she searches for the lost mother among transference figures of the past. As she sighs, at one point, to her therapist: “I wish Winnicott was my mother!.” Indeed, Woolf and Winnicott, among others become idealized literary parents—bookends—to substitute for the profoundly disappointing and narcissistic parents that she portrays in her autobiographical graphic novels. They provide a creative nursery to foster her nascent self.
Thus Bechdel's new narrative demonstrates how literary and psychoanalytical texts take on allegorical personification in Bechdel's life, even as they populate the pages of her books. Literally walking off the pages of their books onto hers, the dramatic embodiments, drawn in vivid and engaging comic illustrations make a home in her imagination like so many idealized, longed for parental imagos. Are You My Mother? takes up these titans of modernism and psychoanalysis in ways that remind us of the endurance of the embodied self in an artistic and literary tour de force that should tantalize readers of The American Psychoanalyst. She is someone indeed to watch out for by any American psychoanalyst who seeks attunement to our times. Hers is a new voice to heed.