TAN's The Arrival: Discussion Questions

With The Arrival we come to the list’s most literal interpretation of The Stranger, not only in the hero's story of immigration to a strange new land, but with the graphic form itself: devoid of known languages, inviting us as readers along on the experience.

I heard Shaun Tan speak this past June at the enormous & excellent Sydney Writer’s Festival.

He came across as funny, candid & totally unpolished, a very likable, humble fellow, who talked about the four-year process of producing the 120-page, unnumbered The Arrival. Shy of over-burdening his family & friends, he used himself as the model for the principal character.

(There was a funny moment during his talk when someone in the audience asked him who he’d used, while Shaun Tan—standing right there, not far away—looks just about exactly like his character).

To find the most fluid movements & natural expressions, Tan assembled some of his panels from stills taken from video. He’d go out in his backyard, say, wearing a hat & long coat, set the camera rolling & then pick up a suitcase, walk a few steps, put it down, look up. He’d draft his friends & family to perform similar sequences, over & over again. His neighbors, who held to varying degrees of understanding what he was doing, would sometimes watch him in his yard.

His Chinese father immigrated from Malaysia to Australia in 1960. Tan grew up in Perth, where he was in different ways both a born-&-bred native & a stranger there himself. In part the book is inspired by his father’s stories, but The Arrival is far more universal.

Some images are adapted from people he’s interviewed. Some are taken directly—& recognizably—from sepia photos of Ellis Island. Others are based on things like a Tom Roberts' painting of a migrant ship bound for Australia, ‘Going South'. One of the project’s many origins was in the double-page illustration near the start—titled “The Old Country”—of dragon tails looping through a city, the family walking below. He didn’t know what it was about, but he wanted to find its story.

Tan’s excerpted essay HERE--found at the bottom of the page under “Comments on The Arrival”--is worth reading & pertains to our theme.

Shaun Tan has won the Australia’s prestigious New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for 2007 (a true feat for a wordless book) & the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist. Since its US release in October 2007, it’s enjoyed such popularity that it was hard to find on shelves over the holidays.

Have fun discussing this one! I’ve included a short note about approaching Midnight’s Children at the end.

--A. Campisi

______________________________________

Discussion Questions & Suggestions

• Favorites. Which is your favorite illustration or detail & why?

• Strangers. What does it mean to be a Stranger here? Discuss our hero’s challenges toward finding himself at home in a strange land.

• Alienation to Home. That's a basic arc here. What are the crucial events & elements that eventually allow him to transition from total alienation to finding himself more at home?

• Cross-overs. For all his adaptation & assimilation, what (if any) images follow him from his Old Country to the New?

• Readerly Empathy. Discuss the specific ways the form puts the reader in the hero’s shoes, as it were, making us better empathize with the protagonist / immigrant’s experience. Which did you feel were most affective?

• Universality. A single immigrant’s story can’t be entirely universal, though the book makes a good faith attempt. What are some of the assumptions & choices it makes with respect to the immigrants themselves, the Old Countries, the New Country, the decisions to leave, and being a Stranger?

• Transitions. One of the geniuses of this book is Tan’s ability to transition (wordlessly!) into & out of other people’s stories, fluidly changing narrators / point of view & even tense. The blond grocer tells our hero his story, for example, fleeing The Giants with big boots, vacuuming people up. The old man at the assembly line also tells his war story. Talk about that technique & those side stories.

• The Fantastic. Elements of the aliens lands are merely different shapes (hats, stamps, snowflakes). Others are alien but guessable (food, animals, the postal system). Still other fantastical & allegorical (dragons, giants). Tan tries to walk a fine line between giving us something at once familiar & simultaneously alien. He’s snowed the protagonist (& us!) with elements we don’t recognize & yet must navigate. Talk about the use of surreal or fantastic imagery.

• Other Choices. What other authorial choices did you find particularly interesting? Were there moves that didn’t work for you?

• What is it? What do you think of this form: a wordless graphic novel? Is this book for adults? Kids? Is it literature? Do you think it deserved to win a general literary award in a category including all traditional books of adult literary fiction?

___________________________________________

A Note for Approaching Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

This book won the Booker of Bookers, judged to be the best Booker Prize winner in the award’s first 25 years.

1. Start reading now.

This is a fantastic book, in all senses of the term. Rushdie writes some incandescent prose, imagery dense, intensely erudite, lyrical & passionate. It's not without flab, but what's good is well worth the extra pages. Suffice to say, this is not a book you can happily rush through in the last week without missing some crucial points & real gems.

2. With this book in particular you might find it fruitful to keep an eye out for short passages as you’re reading—say, between a sentence to 3 pages or so, settling on a single image, exchange or event—then do a very close reading of your selection & bring it with you as a personal contribution to the meeting.