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

Abstract

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.