Journey of the imagination ... an illustration from The Arrival
A book with no words winning a major literary award in Australia? And one marketed as a children's book?? What spawn of all that is dumbed down in our literary culture is this? You thought Shakespeare and Milton reduced to txt was depressing? Now we're doing away with words altogether.
The great thing about art and literature is that just when you think you've got it nailed, something comes along that grabs you by the throat and makes you gasp with excitement. Mostly (as I'm sure you'll agree) I am right on matters of literature. But my initial reaction here was (whisper it) wrong. When I finally got my hands on it, I loved Shaun Tan's The Arrival, a wordless tale of immigrant life. It is one of the most moving encounters I have had with a book in a long time.
The Arrival is a beautiful book and many of the images stand alone in their skill and exquisiteness. But it is so much more than a collection of pretty pictures. If your idea of a children's picture book is Meg and Mog (marvellous in its own way, of course) and you think a graphic novel is nothing more than a comic with ideas above its station, then prepare to think again.
It's a self-consciously "existential" book, reflecting Tan's preoccupation with "strangers in a strange land" and drawing on the experiences of European migrants to the US in the 19th century.
In the artist's note he cites the Ellis Island Immigration museum and photos taken between 1892 and 1954. One of the most powerful sequences in the book is the inspection and processing that the nameless arrival goes through when he reaches his new home. Tan's sequential art evokes the indignity, confusion and low-level terror of such bureaucratic tyranny.
Art does not change the world but it can remind us why it needs changing. Tan's inspection sequence reminded me that no one should have to plead to be in the place that they are. As Tan himself has said: "I was reminded that migration is a fundamental part of human history, both in the distant and recent past."
If you are a parent reading this you may well be thinking, "What! - an existential graphic novel about immigration for my six-year old? But Tan's book also reminded me of something else: that the books that stay with you and resonate throughout your life are the ones that unsettle the familiar, that achieve what William Empson describes as "a sort of equilibrium within your boundaries to have been taken outside them".
For me, Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are was one such early book. It is a reminder that reading literature as opposed to an instruction manual always involves a displacement, into another life, another imagination. This is the strangeness and satisfaction of literature. Tan has said of The Arrival: "In order to best understand what it is like to travel to a new country, I wanted to create a fictional place equally unfamiliar to readers of any age or background (including myself) ... That said, imaginary worlds should never be pure fantasy, and without a concrete ring of truth."
The ut pictura poesis tradition has long aligned poetry with visual art. Tan is explicit about the connection: "I'm more attracted to a kind of intuitive resonance or poetry we can enjoy when looking at pictures." Samuel Beckett - some of whose own works were illustrated by the similarly existentially-inclined Avigdor Arikha - described the relationship between literature and the visual arts as "like fire and water they are separated by a zone of evaporation". That zone of evaporation is where the "pure fantasy" and "concrete ring of truth" come together to give a new aspect to what you thought you knew.
The best literary illustration - as opposed to illustrated literature - illumines new meanings, shines a light on the world afresh. Tan's book may not be teaching your children to read - but it will be teaching them how to read literature.
