Du côté de Fun Home: Alison Bechdel rewrites Marcel Proust

This article reads Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) as a rewriting of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s assumption, which interprets In Search as a complex exercise in decoding signs, the article claims that Fun Home stages the attempt of its protagonists, Alison and her father Bruce, to understand the truth about each other. In particular, it addresses the issues of sexual identity, spatiality, and death as some of the crucial motifs in In Search that Bechdel retrieves in Fun Home. The protagonists’ “experiment in decoding” turns out to be a failure, due to the impossibility of understanding and deciphering the signs of each other’s intimate truths.