Immigrant song: nostalgic tensions in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival

ABSTRACT

Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is the surreal wordless tale of a migrant coming to a new and unfamiliar land. It is a graphic novel drawn in sepia tones, that displays a fantastic universe full of imaginary animals, retro-futuristic machineries, and a ubiquitous, unintelligible language. Comments on the work, which enjoyed a large critical and commercial success, notably praised the nostalgic allure of its richly detailed pencil drawings, the author’s vivid imagination and the self-proclaimed ‘universal’ appeal of the tale recounted. This essay uses The Arrival as a case study to investigate how graphic novels can achieve a nostalgic effect, not only through the use of thematic elements, but also thanks to structural and stylistic features. It does so by examining the relation between nostalgia and migration; then, through an investigation of the style, structure and motifs exhibited by Tan’s text, it discusses the strategies it adopts to prompt in its reader a nostalgic reaction; it explores its sense of pastness; it reflects on the symbolic value of Tan’s visual imaginary, full of intertextual references mostly orbiting around the migration theme; finally, it questions the purported universality of Tan’s story.

KEYWORDS:

• Graphic novel
• comics narratology
• nostalgia
• migration
• Shaun Tan

Acknowledgments

I am deeply thankful to Jan Baetens’ many insightful comments while developing the first version of this thesis chapter (later to become an article); to the reviewers’ pointed objections, which I believe have radically improved the quality (and the length) of the article; to Dona Pursall’s patient, but very quick, linguistic revision, and to Chad Harada’s acute intuition. Finally, I thank Dianne Murdoch and everybody at Hachette licensing for allowing me to use excerpts of Shaun Tan’s work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1. A non-exhaustive list should encompass at least Boatright (2010); Bradford (2011a; 2011b); Devos (2011); Foster (2011); Kiššová and Hevešiová (2011); Martínez-Roldán and Newcomer (2011); Ommundsen (2011); Dony (2012a; 2012b); Groß (2013); Bjartveit and Panayotidis (2014); Grilli and Terrusi (2014); Nabizadeh (2014a; 2014b); Hateley (2015); Khailova (2015); Banerjee (2016a; 2016b); Dalmaso and Madella (2016); Earle (2016); and Oppolzer (2016).

2. The intended focus on migration is manifest from the list of sources Tan directly acknowledges (mainly in an ‘Artist’s Note’ at the end of TA): ‘old museum photographs of migrants stepping from ships’ (Tan, in Earle 2016, 11); documents of immigrants arriving to New York from 1892 to 1954, many of which pertain to the collection of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum; ‘anecdotal stories told by migrants of many different countries and historical periods’ (Tan 2006); the books The Immigrants by Wendy Lowenstein and Morag Loh (1977) and Tales from a Suitcase by Will Davies and Andrea Dal Bosco (2001), and T.A.G. Hungerford’s (1997) short story Wong Chu and the Queen’s Letterbox.

3. This ubiquitous, albeit mysterious, language presence complicates an understanding of The Arrival as a silent story. Dony points out how it should instead be read as ‘semi-silent’, occasionally even ‘quite noisy’, for, although undecipherable, there are ‘many signs, advertisements and notes pervading the landscapes of the Nameless Land’ (2012a, 97). The dialectic between this abundance of signs and their undecipherability on the one hand, and the absence of dialogues on the other, reinforces the themes of ‘melancholic loss’ and ‘ontological disorientation’ (Nabizadeh 2014b, 366) that this essay will put in relation to nostalgia.

4. Although it roughly translates as the English ‘home’ or ‘homeland’, the German word Heimat has a stronger link to identity and nostalgia that cannot be sufficiently discussed here; see Blickle (2004) for an in-depth examination of the concept.

5. Conducting an exhaustive analysis of nostalgia (currently a buzzword in academia, with hundreds of papers published on the subject in the last 10 years) lies beyond the scope of this contribution. The reader looking for a better socio-cultural contextualisation may want to see, in addition to the names already mentioned in this section, Davis (1979), Boym (2001) and Wilson (2005), who are quoted later in the paper; see also Stewart (1993); Radstone (2007, 2010). For an extensive overview of the phenomenon from a psychological point of view, see Holak and Havlena (1998); Routledge (2016); for a more anthropological perspective, see Angé and Berliner (2015); Bonnett (2016).

6. Ritivoi develops her theory on the basis of Ricoeur’s concept of identity as having a twofold nature (one’s self as ipse and as idem): see Ritivoi (2002, ch. 2) for a detailed explanation of the concept and the implications related to nostalgia.

7. For a brief, but detailed, history of nostalgia, see Starobinski (1966). Of course, as anyone familiar with the debate over the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis knows, the absence of a word to convey the concept of nostalgia does not imply the absolute lack of the correspondent feeling, but its presence in the collective discourse inevitably multiplied the number of those who felt inclined to perceive it.

8. Several other studies, especially in the psychological or sociological field, link nostalgia and migration; see Volkan (1999) on nostalgia as a ‘linking phenomenon’; Ahmed’s chapter on what she calls ‘melancholic migrants’ (Ahmed 2010, 121–59); Walder (2010) on ‘postcolonial nostalgias’; May (2017) on ‘belonging from afar’. On the matter, see also Frigessi Castelnuovo and Risso, (1982); Duyvendak (2011, ch. 2).

9. On nostalgia as a reaction towards an uncomfortable present, see also Sedikides et al. (2015, esp. 20–44); on nostalgia as a specific coping mechanism amongst migrants, see Sedikides et al.(2009).

10. Although anybody could empirically confirm having experienced such transmission, how it happens, and whether it involves a cognitive or an emotional process, is a much-debated issue and, especially in relation to nostalgia, could be the topic of a whole different paper. For a general overview of the main positions on the matter, see Coplan (2006).

11. I consider The Arrival a graphic novel, although the debate could be long and out of the scope of this paper. For a discussion of the hybrid nature of some Australian graphic novels/picture books, see Foster (2011); for an attempt to differentiate comics from picturebooks, see Sutliff Sanders (2013).

12. For another analysis that exemplifies how graphic novels may use and balance these narrative strategies, see Busi Rizzi (2018).

13. I borrow what I believe to be a hugely useful concept for comics theory from the work on cinematic narratology carried out by Gaudreault and Jost (1999).

14. I owe this brilliant insight to Chad Harada (from San Francisco State University), who shared it with me in a chat during the 2020 Fluid Images – Fluid text conference in Cardiff. I thank him very much for allowing me to use it. Besides, this interpretation would also be consistent with Hirsch’s view of postmemory – in this case, the daughter’s one – as ‘mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation’ (1997, 22).

15. That is, the relation between non-consecutive panels: see Groensteen (2007, 144–58).

16. The colour palette, though, is not as stable as it may seems, acquiring more sombre tones in the (accordingly darker) secondary storylines – whose intericonic blank spaces (usually referred as ‘the gutters’) vary from white to grey to black – and opting for warmer or colder hues following the distress of the protagonist, with the result that the last pages are both warmer and lighter than those preceding.

17. Davis equally mentions ‘a highly filtered quality of light, a photograph-like freezing of movement’ (1979, 83), both features clearly showed by the text.

18. See Martínez-Roldán and Newcomer (2011); Bjartveit and Panayotidis (2014); Grilli and Terrusi (2014); Martínez-Roldán and Newcomer (2011); Tan, in Earle (2016).

19. On the capacity of the gutters to draw the reader in, see McCloud (1993, ch. 3); Gardner (2012). This mechanism has been nonetheless much discussed by several other scholars, who reframed it in terms of panel relation: see Baetens and Frey (2014, 121–22); Mikkonen (2017, 38–40).

20. See Crowell (1999, esp. 95–96); Wilson (2005, esp. 25–27).

21. Object symbolism will be discussed at large in the next section.

22. A possible influence in this semantic metamorphosis is Alfred Stieglitz’ iconic photo The Steerage (1907).

23. This healing function of images over words is staged en abyme in a self-reflexive move in the two episodes where the protagonist lacks the words to make himself understood, and resorts instead to drawing his needs (food and a bed), a scene that clearly symbolises the transformative, remedial power of (comics) art.

24. Moreover, the bird is also an established symbol of hope, and this resonates in the origami bird the man makes for his daughter before leaving, which will return when he folds in the same shape the letters destined to his family, and receives their response in a similar form: here again the bird takes on the symbolical role of keeping the family together.

25. However, the story will close with the daughter giving indications to a new immigrant who carries her own suitcase, reminding us of the cyclic nature of the migration process.

26. On graphic novels as a medium that aims – although not necessarily, and not necessarily in a successful way – to engage with more mature themes in a more complex way (compared to those of comics at large), see Baetens and Frey (2014, ch. 1).

27. Quite on the contrary, Khailova praises the way Tan’s story ‘promotes the nomadic subject as defined by Rosi Braidotti – a fractured, polyvalent form of self not tied to a specific nation, place or ideology’ (2015, 1). See Oppolzer (2016) for a detailed discussion of the two perspectives.

28. See Berry (1986); Williams and Berry (1991); Van Tilburg and Vingerhoets (2007); Phillimore (2011).

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by a PhD scholarship from the University of Bologna to research nostalgia in graphic novels (in a joint supervision with KU Leuven); it was later revised and published while benefitting from a BOF post-doc fellowship by the University of Ghent.

Notes on contributors

Giorgio Busi Rizzi

Giorgio Busi Rizzi is a BOF post-doctoral fellow at Ghent University, and a member of the ACME Comics Research Group. He holds a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies with a joint supervision by the Universities of Bologna and Leuven, focusing on nostalgia in graphic novels. He is interested in comics studies, TV series, digital humanities, humour theory and translation.