Non-Fictional Prose

  Reading "Fun Home" was my first experience with reading a graphic memoir. I thought that the narration of the memoir was very interested. I specifically enjoyed reading the combination of the pictures and the words. Since English is my second language, I found that the combination of words and pictures was very helpful as I felt that the pictures/images complimented the words and gave them a more in depth meaning and vividness. So I would say that I found this book easier to read and follow compared to Reality Hunger, except for two references Bechdel included that I had to look up on the internet. 

 On Tuesday, we discussed that Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is brimming with literary reference. Bechdel incorporates everything from Joyce to Salinger to Greek mythology in an effort to tell her "own" true story. And many of her allusions are not cited, as she has determined that they are part of culture's collective, general knowledge. I find this an ironic juxtaposition to Reality Hunger, which argues that everything is collective knowledge, yet still cites (albeit begrudgingly) all of its references (we think). In light of this, perhaps Bechdel's work is making a larger point about collective knowledge than Shields' work is, despite that the core intention of Shields' work is to destroy the ownership of ideas. But maybe I'm wrong.

After our discussion about how to read "Fun Home" I began reading the rest of the book, paying close attention to how I had been reading it because I didn't think it was as easy a read as some others in the class had thought. For me the reading is a little stressful because I feel as though I should be reading at the pace that Bechdel would be thinking it as though its a stream of memories. I feel like my attempting to follow her timeline of events accurately might be preventing me from analyzing the text as much as I might be able to. So I'm wondering how Bechdel would want the book to be read. I find that I read all of the text for each panel before looking at the picture..I even read her labels and the spoken words before looking at the pictures so that I don't miss any of the text.

I was on the hunt to figure out how other people reacted to David Shield’s “Reality Hunger,” when I decided to identify for myself why this book was so hard to get through. For me, it wasn’t so much the fact that he didn’t cite the quotes, but that they seemed to have no overarching relation to each other. In class, my professor pointed out that maybe David Shields didn’t think that life was coherent, and thus gave us an appropriate portrayal of reality. However, we’ve been trained to look for coherence, and that’s what we tend to do when reading a book. To top it off, what we’re supposed to understand, once we’ve battled with the incoherence, is that great art makes us redefine our perceptions and ideas of what has been established before.

 I thought our discussion about "playing the game" with Reality Hunger was interesting.  In a way, I think I played Shields' game because I didn't keep going to the appendix to check which segments were quotes and which were his words.  I knew that he included quotes, but it wasn't until after Tuesday's class that I felt the need to flip back and check what he was quoting and what he wasn't more and more.  

Reading Reality Hunger has made me see that any piece of writing is a craft of art, and then the writer rearranges the different parts of the artwork to get a complete picture, as D. Shields said: "What actually happened is only raw material; what the writer makes of what happened is all that matters."

... so what's "real" is emotion and reaction rather than a factual, researched piece of literature (assuming that a map is a form of nonfiction), and reality is defined by the individual and their experiences. I'm not sure if I find that notion refreshing or unsettling.

  Shields' 'work' is clearly designed to make its point not only through what it says, but how it says it. However, I do question if whether Shields went overboard in his experiment, going so far as to make his book unpalatable. His conceit lies in his rejection of traditional form with the 'cut and paste' method he used to assembling his work. He even goes so far as to suggest that we, his readers, remove those citations at the end of the novel that his lawyers insisted he include. But isn't this overkill? I would have preferred him to preserve his form and not hit us over the head with what he was trying to say. If his argument is valid, won't his form speak for itself?