A Shared Theme in Maus and Fun Home

The two graphic novels, Maus and Fun Home, take the author's fathers as subjects. For Art Spiegelman, Maus is a chronicle of his father Vladek's life in Poland, his capture by the Nazis, and his escape. Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is an explanation of the circumstances surrounding her father Bruce's mysterious death. For both, their respective comics are exercises in understanding, attempts at linking their own existences to the lives of their troubled fathers.

It's essential to the main conflicts in these memoirs that Vladek and Bruce fail to connect to their progeny. Art admits right from the get-go: "I hadn't seen him [Vladek] in a long time-we weren't that close" (I, 11). Vladek's stinginess and fanatical compulsions-like his tirade over Art spilling cigarette ashes on the carpet (I, 52)-seem to have defined their relationship. "He never learned how to relax," Art tells Francoise, his wife, in Book II, hinting that this restlessness has spoiled any chance for Art to connect, or even talk, to his father. This explains Art's insistence on writing Maus, his need to record the story in the face of Vladek's growing heart problems and old age. Vladek tries to undermine Art's goal by dominating the conversations with his usual grievances; "Please pop," Art says at one point, "You always tell me the same things" (I, 67). Art longs for an elimination of the trivial and sees Maus as a channel to a truthful, meaningful relationship.

Fun Home differs in the method Bechdel must work through her father's story: Bruce has already been killed by the truck, or the snake or himself (the question of a potential suicide at the forefront of the story), when Alison begins the novel. Therefore, Fun Home's Bruce thread is a tale reconstructed from a secondhand memory and Alison's old diary entries, which, with their glaring, naive omissions, aren't too helpful. Bechdel depicts her father as a neglectful parent, more interested in the impression of a family than in the genuine upkeep of one, and "indifferent to the human cost of his projects" (11). If the strange way Alison reacts to the news of her father's death (with cheery jokes, like on page 227) is any evidence, she would have never written this "family tragicomic" if not for the news of her dad's sexual connotation that conspicuously materialized with substantiation of her own. Bechdel, in Fun Home, hopes to draw some blueprint of her own identity from the sketches she has of her father's, but she's less interested in the actual sketch itself. That is to say, it is as indistinct to her as the story behind the cross-dressing and sunbathing photos she examines on page 120-pictures she likes to compare to one's of her sexually confused self. As she writes on page 230, "'Erotic truth' is a rather sweeping concept. I shouldn't pretend to know what my father's was."

When Alison has the chance to question Bruce on his past, as Art does to Vladek in Maus, what follows is an awkward car ride and "mortified silence" (220-223). Unlike the barriers existing between Art and Vladek that tend to be quibbles over matches and coats and money, the trench that separates Alison and Bruce is much deeper and is rooted in basic communication problems. Spiegelman and Bechdel don't attempt to demolish the barriers with their comics; instead, Maus and Fun Home recognize the intergenerational conflict and attempt to comprehend why it happened.

For Spiegelman this is a daunting task: "I mean, I can't even make any sense out of my relationship with my father...How am I supposed to make any sense out of Auschwitz?" Art asks Francoise (II, 14). Wrapped up in his fervor to finish Maus is the idea that everything will be illuminated once the story has been told. Of course this isn't true at all, as seen by last piece of dialogue where Vladek mistakes Art for Richieu, Art's "ghost-brother." Instead of this fantastic history-telling leading to grandiose feelings of interconnectedness, the greatest distance seems to present itself, one where names are not even remembered. Yet, Spiegelman throughout Maus is set on getting the story right. On page 132, he admits to Mala of the incompleteness of the story; his mother's side of things "would give the book some balance" he says. Art becomes irate when he learns at the end of Book I of Vladek destroying his mother's wartime journals. Art sees the burning as not only Vladek sabotaging Maus but as Vladek ruining Art's attempt to come to closure with his mother. "Murderer," Art screams, implying that the erasure of the story or the memory is as contemptible as the killing of the body. Of course, Vladek's justification that the papers brought back too many bad memories is probably genuine. Yet, this scene is an example of, again, the expectations of richness or profundity in the family experience: Art is quick to transform the action into some sort of symbol, whether it's misleading or not.

We see this in Fun Home too, with Bechdel's preoccupation in framing her relationship with her father in the context of classic literature. She wants to construct, or at least identify with, a timeless father/daughter archetypical yarn, even if it fails to come to a triumphant end. Though the "sobbing, joyous reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus" doesn't pan out, "fatherless Stephen and sonless Bloom," (a play on the pair's refusal to buy into their gender roles) continue on (221). Bechdel plays with the theme of inversion throughout Fun Home. "While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him..." she writes, "he was attempting to express something feminine through me" (98). Spiegelman has a same sort of moment of reversal in Maus, or more specifically "Prisoner On the Hell Planet," which deals with his mother's suicide. One panel shows Art hugging a distraught Vladek with the text reading, "I was expected to comfort him!" (I, 101). It's hard to read this, from Art's point of view, as anything but a letdown, a breakdown on Vladek's part as father.

Bechdel, however, never outwardly express disappointment in Bruce; it's her position, seemingly, that "He really was there all those years," and "It's tempting to suggest, in retrospect, that our family was a sham...Yet we really were a family" (17, 23). Bechdel has moved past the angst of a messed-up childhood, to the epiphany of a life of reflection. In another switch based on the Icarus and Daedalus mythology, Bruce endures the fall but is there "to catch" Alison, to lend her the strength for her own sexuality. Even if this realization is bogus, if, as Bechdel writes herself, it "is just a way of keeping him [Bruce] to myself," I'm not sure we get such a clear moment of resolution in Maus. This may be because of how Spiegelman handles the story arc: We're given moments where Art expresses remorse over how he's drawn Vladek (II, 44) and apologizes for making him "talk so much" (II, 117), but never a conjectural statement as to the overwhelming link or bond between them. Bechdel's whole novel is based on them, a revealing of convergences "through a vast 'network of transversals'" (102). Maybe Spiegelman has nothing to share-an admission that there was never any hidden mystery to be unraveled through Vladek's past, that they were merely father and son.

Works Cited

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus.