Discovery and Popular Fiction: A Comparison
The authentic, spiritual crossing over from the blindness engendered by culturally suppressive beauracracy is experienced by venturing across the vast tumultuous expanse of painful memories. Crossing the abyss of today’s collective sufferings as understood in light of the injustices of the past ushers the individual’s self-discovery of cultural identity, more so than an individual’s isolated exertions to discover their self-identity. This precarious endeavor consists not in seeking iconic lands of ancestry not yet experienced, but in participating in a sobering confirmation of notions of ‘home’ supposed to be true. Tara Winch’s episodic novel Swallow the Air, S.E Hinton’s novel The Outsider’s, Shaun Tan’s picture book The Lost Thing and S.E Hinton’s The Outsiders explore this process.
Winch’s novel portrays the relative futility of an individual’s remote labors to discover their identity. May’s frustrationwith ‘waiting for change’ (p.63) in a home-life wherein ‘two puppets of booze trialed their messy, confused violence’ (p.54) eventually led her to believe that these ‘captives…of grog’ were metaphorically ‘standing in the way of other people’s eyes’ (p.63). Initially, her yearning to ‘see’ unobstructed was impeded by her inclination to be ‘seen’ favorably by her absent father as ‘the apple of his eye’ (p.63). Moreover, the motif employed as May classifies the beautiful girl who died of a drug overdose as having ‘no eyes’ (p.73) and her living drug-intoxicated brother as one who ‘had eyes’ but ‘did not awake’ (p.74) leads her to deduce that she indeed does ‘have eyes’…but ‘no mouth’. This subtle authorial voicecovertly communicated through the metaphorical allusion to the helplessness of the indigenous observers of the atrocities perpetrated by European settlers is a reminder of the novel’s debated autobiographical character and political stance (p.74). Unfortunately, May’s vision of a happier family life, a desperate validation of her significance by her remaining living progenitor together with the gradual realisation of her incapacity to articulate her cultural identity for its obscurity is overcome by a deep cynicism. Once more frustrated with ‘waiting for a stupid hero’ and a ‘bullshit happy ending that makes people hope’ (p.95), disillusioned by the discovery of her father to be ‘the monster…she could finally forget’ (p.86), May sees herself monochromatically ‘May Gibson’, a generic ‘fifteen-year old girl…lost and hollow’ (p.97). Ultimately, the furnace of May’s personal sufferings consequent to her search for personal significance and self-expression is encapsulated in the simile describing her entering ‘like a butter cake’ to come out ‘like a steel wall adorned in black tar’ (p.100). Thus, May’s obliviousness to suffering beyond her own hindered her ‘crossing over’ to discover her identity.
Similarly, The Lost Thing by Shaun tan celebrates the enlightenment facilitated for an individual by communal sufferings and shared injustices. The salience of the bright red Lost Thing positioned in the middle of the long shot of the beach skirting the metallic city connotes its obliviousness to its incongruent presence within its surroundings. The human persona’s conscientious observations of its expressions of loss and dislocation as depicted through the multiple frames generated within that particular spread aptly deduce ‘the unhappy truth’ that ‘there was no denying’ its longing for ‘home’. Society’s indifference to the plight of the Lost Thing is symbolically portrayed through the three suited men with top hats and elongated heads, smoking and engrossed in deep conversation with their gaze averted from the incontrovertible presence of the suffering Lost Thing. Only when the lone sufferer is introduced to a plethora of suffering oddities communing in a place ‘you’d never know existed unless you were actually looking for it’, canvassed in a marvelous spread framed by a doorway, does it ‘seem happy enough’. Hence, the participation of the human observer in the afflictions of the Lost Thing in tandem with its own partaking in the pains of its fellow oddities significantly sedated its suffering.
Swallow the Air ardently contends that inner enlightenment is a by-product of acknowledging the interconnectedness of pain. May is somewhat enamored of Charlie’s sentiment of how his ancestral territory is ‘his real home, where his father lives’ (p. 119). However, that she is not entirely convinced of the second clause of his naive definition of home is conveyed by the low modality of her internal monologue as she negotiates, ‘I suppose that’s what makes it, family…our homelands’ (p.123). In any case, personification is utilised to coin May’s first sympathy with the plight of indigenous communities that were being ‘stolen’ (p.101) by drugs, eliciting tears from eyes that ‘began to harden like honeycomb’ (p.94), as she conceded that it was the ‘first time…I cried with the rest of us” (p.105). This first fruit of shared suffering was the catalyst for May’s search for her ancestral territory, unadulterated by ‘the one evil of this country, this government and these bad churches’ (p.171) who would not ‘allow her to be Aboriginal’ (p. 182). May’s confrontation upon her arrival to her ancestral land with the subtle undercurrents of incarceration and a quasi-ethnic cleansing is potently incarnated in the historical allusion to ‘someone’s idea of fancy concentration camps’ (p.167) where ‘every house is exactly the same’. Subsequently, May’s dead ‘hope of a family dinner’ with ‘Family. My People. My Mob’ was as if surgically incised, as alluded to by the sibilance of the ‘stingray spilling at the sides’ (p.7). Finally, May is ‘free’ (p.7) to weep ‘tears not her own’ but belonging to her people with ‘eyes hardened…like brittle, crumbling sugar’ as she discovers ‘what the word home really means’; a place where trust is not ‘lost’, a place that ‘owns our history’…‘the house is still home’. May’s preferment, therefore, was for a cultural identity tied to a ‘home’ that harbored both memories of joy and sadness over an ancestral ‘land’ that promised only misery.
Likewise, S. E Hinton’s bildungsroman novel employs a cyclical narrative to affirm the notion that arriving at a new perspective, and not a new land, is that which clarifies an individual’s identity. Similarly employing the motif of the eye for understanding, Ponyboy describes those whose innocence is yet untainted by the culture of U.S teenage gangster life as having ‘big black eyes like Johnny’. However, for the overwhelming majority of young gangsters who suffer like him the prejudices of society he advocates for them a voice, ‘someone to tell their side of the story’. It is through this very awareness of collective suffering that Ponyboy experiences the profound revelation that the ‘home’ on the streets, that socio-cultural identity that these young people seek after beyond society’s traditional construct of the family home, was a place where ‘you can learn and see a lot…but not the things you want to learn or the sights you want to see’. Finally, through the painful abyss of collective voiceless suffering, Ponyboy ‘emerges from this darkness…into the bright sunlight’ of the ‘HOME’ he had when life was metaphorically ‘rough all over’. Hinton thus diagnoses American teenage gangsters as those afflicted with intellectual blindness, disillusioned until they discover the ‘home’ behind rather than illusively before them.
In conclusion, Winch’s Swallow the Air, The Lost Thing and Hinton’s novel concurrently depict oppressive worlds wherein the individual sufferer in unavailing, apart from sympathy with co-sufferers, to discover or reclaim the dignity of a socio-cultural identity. Though this dignity is understandably sought on a particular physical locality, be it ancestral land or social enclave, of a truth it is a renewed perspective of the individual’s initial state of suffering rather than a perception proceeding the cessation of that suffering.
