Alison Bechdel's 2006 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, often described as a 'proustian' comic, is made up of a rich tapestry of cultural reference and a collection of archival material. This article ...attempts to understand the role this collection plays in the book and how it determines its proustian nature. Deleuze's reading of Proust as an apprenticeship in the decoding of signs serves as a starting point, as both Alison and Marcel are driven by the same desire to understand the people around them, to decipher them as signs. The combination of archival material and cultural reference is the textual embodiment of this proustian curiosity in the comics form. References to books and their authors, queer history and thought, as well as Bechdel's reproduction of documents, photographs, maps, pages from dictionaries or books, and other materials represent Alison's attempts to decode the sign that is her father. Both she and Marcel fail in this quest, but Bechdel's archival impulse translates Marcel's curiosity into the graphic novel.
Marcel Proust’s influence on twentieth century literature is broad and has been well documented. This dissertation attempts a comparative reading of À la recherche du temps perdu that places it in ...contrast with Colombian writer Marvel Moreno’s 1987 novel, En diciembre llegaban las brisas, and Alison Bechdel’s 2006 comic memoir, Fun Home. Starting from a Deleuzian reading of the Recherche, this dissertation proposes the notion of the “proustian truth seeker”, a thematic and stylistic phenomenon which can be traced in all three writers. The characteristics of the truth seeker can be used to understand the ways in which the narrators of these novels are driven by a particular sort of desire that determines the novel’s structure, style, and thematic concerns. Ultimately, the concept of the proustian truth seekers offers a way to understand the complex connection between these three writers as well as a powerful tool to study novels that blur the line between fiction and autobiographical non-fiction.
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