Chapter Six - Choosing Patrimony: Performing for the Father in John Hughes's The Idea of Home

Summary

You will travel far, my little Kal-El, but we will never leave you - even in the face of our deaths. You will make my strength your own. You will see my life through your eyes, as your life will be seen through mine. The son becomes the father. And the father, the son.

—Jor-El, Superman Returns

You see how our roads diverged, my father's and my own. Though I was like him in a way. For what was the road I sought if not a repeat of my father's, but dug out of the depths of another otherness.

—Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni

…he had an inner life that was not declared.

—David Malouf, 12 Edmondstone Street

In summing up the task of his collection of autobiographical essays The Idea of Home John Hughes utters a kind of ‘call-to-arms’ of relational auto/ biography:

In setting out to write about my grandfather, grandmother, mother and father I discover that I have written about myself. The writing of this book can in no way be considered a fulfillment of their expectations, yet it is my inheritance: an exorcism and a love letter to the dead. (202)