Landscapes of Liminality by Dara Downey Ian Kinane Elizabeth Parker

Author:Dara Downey,Ian Kinane,Elizabeth Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Book Network International

Section II

Liminal Identities

Chapter 6

Figures in a Foreign Landscape

Aspects of Liminality in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival

Melanie Otto

Much of Shaun Tan’s work revolves around the question of what it means to belong, a central concern also in the making of The Arrival (2006). Tan’s mural The Hundred Year Picnic provides a useful framework for his approach to this topic. The mural shows

a stylised, dreamlike interpretation of figures in a “foreign” landscape—one at odds with the European heritage evidenced in the family’s clothing, objects and body language. The two worlds seem inconsistent, but are not necessarily incompatible: against the accidents of historical circumstance, there are often opportunities for individuals to reconcile differences. Connections made to a new place can be deeply felt without being clearly articulated, much like a composition of nebulous colours, shapes and textures on canvas.1

Tan gestures towards the settler and immigrant experience of Australia here but suggests that migration more generally and the resulting cultural displacement in a foreign environment creates a sense of the liminal, a mental state of confusion and disorientation that is at once discomforting and creative, much like the act of making art. In an essay on the making of The Arrival, Tan compares the often disorientating experience of immigrants in a new country to the process of artistic creation: “The experience of many immigrants actually draws an interesting parallel with the creative and critical way of looking I try to follow as an artist. There is a similar kind of search for meaning, sense and identity in an environment that can be alternately transparent and opaque, sensible and confounding, but always open to re-assessment”.2

The Arrival is a seemingly simple fable about the experience of emigration and settling in an alien land. Told entirely in visual images, the format of The Arrival resembles a graphic novel. Hatfield and Svonkin argue that the graphic novel is “neither a book nor an art object in the usual sense, but rather deconstructs the form, utility, and cultural authority of the book itself. The genre invites an embodied and material reading practice, one that refuses the transparency which convention dictates is essential to reading, and thus encourages a critical and subversive reading attitude”.3 Already in its form, The Arrival mediates between two poles, between art object and literature, and as such moves in a liminal zone of generic and disciplinary classification. Its subject matter equally deals with liminality. Tan has stated that as a young boy growing up in Perth in Western Australia, he experienced a sense of profound displacement and alienation. In a personal essay, he observes that Perth was a liminal place to him, isolated on the western fringes of the Australian continent. In addition to being half-Chinese during a time when the white Australia policy was still in place, Tan also had a professed sense of Aboriginal displacement that added to his feeling foreign in the Australia of his childhood and that complicated the notion of “homeland” for him.4 These personal experiences of liminality that Tan explores

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