“C is for Connection”: Disrupting Reality for the Purpose of Instructionally Reading the Environment in The Lost Thing
Stories and metaphors give life to the dead, the real and the unreal. Cities become living, breathing, animated spaces. A prime example would be New York City. If one were to watch a time-lapse video of any street, the images would depict the movement of its traffic shuffling through the heart of the city, like blood coursing through the veins. The cars on the streets moving forward, emitting their own wastes, like blood cells. The industrial portions of the city would be familiar like organs, pumping vital materials to feed the citizen, like the liver producing bile. The relationship between man and industry, city, and nature all wrapped up in necessary processes to function for societal needs and wants. However, these factories inevitably produce waste products which are tucked away, deemed too unsightly, as it no longer serves a purpose. Some waste eventually gets burned off. On the other hand, litter goes ignored, scattered on the ground, in every nook and crevice it can be found in every public space in the wide open going unnoticed and tended to by humans. Literature has a way of unlocking and drawing attention to the growing divide between these spaces, ensuring things which are seen can never be unseen again.
Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing is a story about a boy who stumbles upon an odd-looking creature during his hobby of collecting discarded bottle-tops littered on a beach. He assumes that the creature is lost and sets out to find out who owns it or where it belongs in the world. However, the protagonist, named Shaun, is met with the indifference of others, who barely notice its presence. Strangers, friends, parents are unhelpful as they are unwilling to entertain the uninvited interruption in his or her day to day life. The boy has empathy and sorrow for the creature and continues to find out where it belongs. The Lost Thing was originally published in 2000 and adapted into a fifteen minute animated short film directed by Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann with narration by Tim Minchin in 2010. The film would go on to win the Oscar for Best Animated Short (“The Oscars”).
Since Shaun Tan’s most prevalently entered the critical conversations regarding children’s literature with the publication of The Arrival, his wordless graphic novel published in 2006, which documents an immigrant's life in an imaginary world which closely parallels reality (Dalmaso and Madella 64). Focus on that particular text has looked at themes of displacement of vocabulary, post colonial issues, and the figuring of the immigrant condition in constructing a horizontal reality (Dalmaso and Madella 63). However, the focus has also been placed on other picture books published by Tan, like The Red Tree, examined in existentialist concepts developed by Soren Kierkegaard through manifestations of despair and grief (Johansen 38).
Tan’s work has also found its way into the classwork, in increasing literacies across various mediums. Specifically, with The Lost Thing, teachers have been able to use the animated film side-by-side with the physical text functioning as a storyboard for close examination by students (Barton and Unsworth 3). In regard to The Lost Thing, the critical conversation has not been as forthcoming, except when examining Tan’s figuring of Melbourne, Australia in a utopian and dystopian-like setting (Dudek 58). Here, The Lost Thing, can start to take shape with focusing on how Tan’s protagonist navigates himself with the familiar, yet also defamiliarized, cityscape which can be unearthed by examining his text through the lens of conceptual ecocriticism.
According to scholar Greta Gaard, even within the discipline of children’s literature, the aims were simple in trying to provide a home for “scholars discovering, discussing, and interpreting, literary texts about the environment” (Gaard 322). However, even critics at first overlooked the aspect of the need to look towards children’s literature as sources for examining environmental literature. From 1995 onward, critical questions began to be raised about “environmental rhetoric” in children’s books (325). The field according to Gaard, would not take shape formally until 2004, with the publication of Sid I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd’s Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism (325). Much of the criticism focuses on the interrogation of relationships between children and animals before eventually giving rise to ecopedagogy, which intersects the unity of theory and practice for ecocriticism which it can promote a sustainable environment (325). Wading into the territory of contemporary ecocriticism can be difficult as there are many schools of thought on how to proceed in linking texts towards the environment and achieving the goal implementing change.
According to scholar Lawrence Buell in his book The Future of Environmental Ecocriticism, there are three areas of primary concern for ecocritics who must be invested “in issues of environmental mental imaging and representation, its interest in reconception of place as a fundamental dimension of both art and lived experience, and its strong ethical and/or political commitment” (Buell 54-55). Within ecocriticism and ecopedagogy the goal is the same in trying to develop a cultural literacy or awareness environmental factors (Gaard 325).
The paper will address and entangle the first two of the three areas set forth by Buell while motioning towards the education of children’s literature as an urgent call to re-figuring the perceptions of youth to simply be aware of the environment, as Tan’s text dismisses political institutions. Awareness is an important first step which the majority of society overlooks and ignores.
Keeping with the goal of ecocriticism, as citizens of this earth all are ethically responsible for its improvement or deterioration. Lawrence Buell’s scholarship of “toxic discourse” informs how environments are under a haze of the threat of toxicity produced by industrialized and how the effects are linked to Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing. Tan draws the attention to the toxicity in attempt to disrupt the reader’s sense of vision, inviting a closer inspection of the fictional reality. Reality is not only intruded upon by a defamiliarized world, by also by the intrusion of a hybrid creature containing both organic material and inorganic material. Timo Moran’s scholarship on biosemiotics will inform the attempt to bridge the divide between the animate and inanimate objects through the use of biomorphism out of semiotics. Specifically, the text will examine the relationship between the protagonist and the found creature, as well as how meaning is constructed by Tan through the relationship between the reader and the text by creating a hybrid zone between reality and Tan’s world. The relationship between the reader and the text relies on the specific way in which Tan re-purposes materials in reality to lay the foundation for the imaginary reality which enacts a recurring urge to revisit and reexamine the text in multiple dimensions by metafictionally toying with the reader’s reality and experience of the text. The text then can be determined to effectively bridge the gap between the textual environment and the physical environment in the reality of the reader through the serious of constructed meanings.
Lawrence Buell introduces his concept of toxic discourse defining it as the "expressed anxiety arising from the perceived threat of environmental hazard due to chemical modification by human agency." (Writing 31-32). He believes, “contemporary toxic discourse” begins with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring which examined the effects of DDT the pesticide’s effects on the neighborhood of Love Canal (“Toxic Discourse” 645). He states:
[Carson] begins with an important discursive motif depicting a "town in the heart of America" awakening to a birdless, budless spring” which does not actually exist she before concluding “it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world," for a grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed.” (“Toxic Discourse” 645).
He finds in Carson’s Silent Spring, depicts an awakening between the environment and its residents. In one particular example, a resident of Love Canal awakens to her environment through the use of a companion or aid, who could smell the contamination in the sewers (“Toxic Discourse” 645). After that moment her impression of the Love Canal neighborhood is disrupting forever, highlighting the encroachment of toxic chemicals. The same disruption can be shifted to the cityscape, as Buell does in discussing how Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, was capable of exposing “industrial toxicology” (“Toxic Discourse” 651). Through tracing elements like Buell, from the country to the city, gaze can turn from novel to children’s picture book in searching for signals of toxicity.
In Tan’s The Lost Thing, images of toxicity permeate the cityscape the protagonist navigates, one through the source of air pollution depicted through the recurring images of smoke. In a two page spread, as Shaun, the protagonist, progresses across a courtyard with his new friend (Lost and Found 48-49). At the same time as Shaun, the illustrator inserts across the top of the pages small frames depicting wisps of smoke (Lost and Found 48-49). The moment becomes significant as Tan’s illustrations become disrupted, signaling the reader to really examine what is going on in the accepted reality of the text.
The smoke is visible in the larger illustrations, however by singling the smoke out, and tracing its movement in small shifts, Tan tips the reader off to where the reader’s eyes should follow. Tan even builds in a fail safe should the reader’s gaze not go towards his intended object by placing signposts, signaling the reader to divert his gaze back upwards before moving down again (Lost and Found 48-49). The text becomes a game in which Tan has alerted the reader to the look again closely at other images of pollution. In doing so the reader finds the wisps of smoke not only in the sky depicted, full of smaller wisps, but also being emitted or released into the atmosphere from other sources. A few examples of those sources stem from the industrialization the city has been built upon (Lost and Found 48-49). The steam creeps out from between disjointed pipes and wafts away from pipes smoked by several city planners (Lost and Found 49). Now, for the reader, his or her attention should not only closely examine the movement of the characters, but should begin question the functions of the wisps of smoke, retroactively, by examining what has come before this particular moment in the text.
By shifting back a few pages towards the beginning of the story, coupled with the first line of the story, before asking the reader, “So you want to hear a story (Lost and Found 43)?” Tan presents a now familiar wisp of smoke, preceding each line of text, each image with their own independent setting, but two distinct environments. The environments are depicted through two contrasting areas suburban homes, which each smoke stack emitting their own smoke, and the industrialized urban environment signaled by dollar signs on business fronts and boilers (Lost and Found 43). The images create a conceptual space where examinations and conversations about the object’s relationship to the real and fiction world can take place. The relationship focuses on progression. The city which the protagonist dwells firmly sees industrialization as an improvement not only for monetary gain but also provides comfort through improvements offered by technology. Just as each picture tells its own story, the reader forms the connection between the text and the image as they navigate and progress through the yarn unspooled by Tan.
The connections formed by creating these models add a new dimension drawing as if the reader is there to accumulate a collection akin to the bottle caps the protagonist (Lost and Found 44). The bottle caps do not inherently tell a story themselves, but they can be refashioned and re-purposed by drawing attention as an aesthetic work of art placed in a scrapbook which the narrator does by classifying the objects (Lost and Found 68). The laying out of the bottle caps draws the reader's attention to how the book itself is a re-purposing of materials to form new material object full of meaning which can be read.
The layout of the text itself adds imposes an order to the reality created in Tan’s fiction. Behind every illustration which Tan has painted is a layer constructed from various pieces of scientific textbooks. However, the images and words are able to form a foundation for the world Tan’s created, just as his protagonist will be able to label and classify bottle caps. The clippings from the textbooks relate to mechanical processes, which are present not only in the heavily industrialized fictional world Tan’s created and his narrator traverses. The clippings form not only a foundation for the illustrations to be layered upon but mirrors how the cityscape itself appears to have been simply improved and physically built upon a foundation of industry, paving over one layer and placing another on top. By tossing in a layer of metafictional references, the domain of constructed meaning between the environment, material, living organisms found in the text and reality can be examined through the examination of biosemiotics.
According to scholar Timo Maran, “A challenge for biosemiotics has been to rethink the dualistic distinction between semiotically active humans and a semiotically inactive nature, as overcoming this distinction appears to be a prerequisite for treating nonhuman biological organisms as having semiotic and communicative capacities.” He believes the “relationship of matter and signs reinforces the argument that matter influences the meanings and interpretations to a great extent” (Maran 143). According to this view, not only human- made artifacts but all natural objects have the potential to direct semiotic processes. However, Moran wishes to turn away from the semiotic representation as defined by Charles S. Pierce who understood semiotics with a sign being a “triple connection of sign [representamen], thing signified [object], cognition produced in the mind [interpretant].” Instead, Moran focuses on turning towards constructing models, and models that semioticians can use (Maran 146). Moran’s argument denotes the basic building blocks of the semiotic universe and argues that the difference between humans and other animals lies in the process of modeling (Maran 146). He believes:
Such an approach would allow us to distinguish and map the semiotic competence of organisms based on the hierarchical complexity of modeling processes and to show later how the process of making sense of the material environment leads to its semiotization. One specific feature of models is that they are created in relation to the object and that they keep their analogy-based linkage and thus can later be applied back to the object. Specifically, in applying the model of “morphism.” (Maran 146)
Morphism allows humans to comprehend things unknown to us, based on their analogies to things that are more common (Maran 148). Other living organisms as bases for metaphoric ascription to make better sense of material processes, or to give to these processes a human or at least an animate dimension. The modeling concept allows for relationships to be created between different structures of matter. For example, the relationship between table and chair. One for physically determining the makeup of objects. On the other hand, they are both can be determined to have a relationship outside of that material by their performance different functions. In staying with the chair example, one is for setting objects down upon, and the other for sitting down. A textual example from The Lost Thing is the creature itself. It eats food likes animals, however, the material fed by the protagonist consists of inorganic matter, namely Christmas decorations (Lost and Found 55). The act of feeding and caring for the creature draws attention to the responsibility of caring for one’s own pet.
The creature alien to our own world, yet immediately recognizable as a familiar object, name a tea kettle, missing a spout. The animal completes the image itself as one of the limbs replaces the missing or lost piece of the kettle, even going as face to whistle and emit a puff of steam (Lost and Found 59). The creature gives life to the inanimate object or shell like a hermit crab would as it outgrows the previous smaller shell. However, by taking up residence within an artificial home, like a tea kettle, meaning can be assigned to a new layer relating to the materiality of the object constructed as a product of industrialization. The creature is able to withstand the testing of animal and material analogies due to being constructed out of organic and inorganic matter. For example, when the creature fulfills dual roles in communication by letting out a spout of steam, it is signaling calling forth two different meanings. The first is linked to the organic nature, in exhaling like any typical mammalian species. The second becomes a little more complex, yet fully engages in Tan’s established imagery of generating smoke and releasing it into the atmosphere similar to the factories which emit their own gases.
The presence of smoke indicates the presence of fire. From here a chain of events can be traced backward establishing a correlation towards a source. From smoke to fire, the leap can be made to materials being burned, whether they drive the industrial complex or stem from the burning of waste products releasing toxic smoke and gases before eventually disappearing before becoming lost for good. The relationship between man, creature, and material objects are illustrated by the animation and combination of the hybrid structure of the “lost thing” which has been condensed into a solitary being. The rendering of the creature as an object bridges the gap between the invisible relationships to the tangible environment, by once again, disrupting the reader’s potential obliviousness other similar objects. Once the disruption occurs the reader awakens and can be allowed access to Tan’s hidden world. Lost among his protagonist’s environment are more products like the creature which are ignored like litter left behind on the ground showing how the Tan’s constructed reality “litterally” connected with our own environment, yet no longer belonging to the purpose it once may have contained.
The combination of images, function as a waypoint or signpost, signaling the access point to a place which society which to forget. The signpost is a gift given leading the reader along, rewarding them if they are able to take the instruction. The text points to the place which reconciles the material, the environment and human element in a safe place. Within the safe place, the position of the reader is re-oriented to see their own world from a different perspective. Tan’s work in the Lost Thing handily gives both the reader another direction to take another avenue to experience.
From Tan’s text, while journeying across the city an unnamed character, finally takes notice, of the human character shepherding the creature along stating “If [he] really cared for that thing, you shouldn’t leave it here…this is a place of forgetting.” giving instead a business card depicting a symbol, another arrow, which the characters begin to seek out (Lost and Found 60). Even though the protagonist himself does not fully understand exactly what it means, it points the way to a hidden wall, opening up an area full of other objects which resemble the hybrid creature that was left abandoned (Lost and Found 64-66). The new creatures not only are hybrids of animal and material objects, they can be categorized further. Some creatures are products of technological advancements, like one displaying microscopic lenses which can be rotated (Lost and Found 64-66). Others are hybrid forms of artistic expression, including an accordion and printer, which Tan glues together with a familiar cat face (Lost and Found 64-66). However, Tan also ensures at the moment this final expression of the text is signaled to the reader, he manipulates the reader into physically reorienting themselves with regard to the object held in their hand. From turning the page, to bring down the wall, the reader must alter his or her own perspective from the landscape to portrait orientation. The narrowing from the wide typically natural landscape to the human element found in the portrait orientation. In the final pages of the book, Tan focus on shifting perspective becomes intensely personal.
For the creature, the journey has been completed, but he is left unsettled as the reader should be, as he concludes addresses the reader directly telling them not to “ask me what the moral is” ((Lost and Found 68). He is left unsure that the creature really belonged where it ended up, and how he still thinks about the creature. Now, that he has experienced a relationship with the creature, he notices more of them, “especially when I see something that doesn’t quite fit” (Lost and Found 69). His vision takes into account a new perspective as he is capable of noticing the by-products of industrialization as his awareness becomes a by-product of his traversal through the streets of Melbourne, which can once again be doubled upon the experience of the reader who completes his or her own journey through the text.
However, Tan leaves the story ends on a downward turn as he admits to “[seeing] that sort of thing less and less these days” as Tan falls back to a broader perspective on that mirrors the coupled images found at the beginning of the text (Lost and Found 70). Instead of smoke, Tan couples the text from the narrator with a focus of the protagonist, which pulls out slowly until he disappears completely from the image and lost among other crowded train cars (Lost and Found 70). The implication of the moment construes how the protagonist will become just like everyone else as he grows older until he forgets as the story collapses into darkness, with the only remnant being the guide that pointed the protagonist and the reader in the right direction (Lost and Found 71). However, as the story collapses into darkness, that does not signify that the reader’s memory will simply collapse or forget the experience of reading the story.
Literature has the staying power to influence perception such as negotiating and being aware of the environment. Though Tan’s attention to the metafictional element of constructing the text highlights, that what the reader holds is essentially a “lost thing” as it’s constructed through the repurposing of materials through industrialized processes, such as the connection from tree to paper, but also finds itself through the formulation of ideas brought from sources of reality through the writer and illustrator Shaun Tan which could have easily been lost.
For the most part, Tan’s work engages with some aspect of all three aspects contemporary ecocriticism Lawrence Buell has set forth in The Future of Environmental Ecocriticism. Tan’s set his reliance on the ethical responsibility which the individual can be aware and bear the burden of responsibly caring for the by-products created through the industrial process. On the other hand, Shaun negatively portrays the ramifications of working within political systems. For example, when the protagonist is still searching for a place for the creature he seeks out a bureaucratic institution which is unnamed. Despite, the lack of a name the institution is clearly denoted by the processes the illustrations and text invoke. In front of an absurdly large desk with many doors similar to a filing cabinet, the creature and protagonist are told: “Fill in these forms” (Lost and Found 59). On the preceding page, the building they enter is large and without windows intensifying the feeling that the bureaucratic process does not wish to be intruded upon and kept secret in regard to objects such as the creature (Lost and Found 58). Authority of the institution is given by setting the obscuring the figurehead partially behind the desk which the protagonist would obviously be unable to see (Lost and Found 59). Tan’s depiction of the unhelpful bureaucracy gives agency solely to the protagonist in his journey, which shortly concluded after being given a new set of directions previously laid out.
Even outside the bureaucracy of the governmental agency, Tan clearly establish that older generations which hold sway and authority want nothing to do with the creature. When the protagonist brings it home, the narrator states “My parents didn’t really notice it at first. Too busy discussing current events, I guess” (Lost and Found 53). The creature is literally the elephant in the room, hovering over everyone. The parent’s unwillingness to notice it, relies on the nature of busyness getting in the way to take a look at them. Shaun also injects more metafictional elements in selecting the phrase “use and abuse of” in the textbook clipping beneath the illustration. This points to how well supplied the protagonists home is filled with the technological comforts they enjoy, which are abused in order to prop of the illusion of being busy when in reality it allows the excuse to ignore one’s own surroundings. The reliance on the younger generation to be able to be aware and draw a connection to his or surroundings is tantamount to the ecopedagogical goal of enabling consciousness of the environment he or she lives in.
However, Buell would take offense to Shaun Tan’s insufficient reconciling or portraying the rehabilitation or change in the social institution within the world of constructed. For Buell, he believes that by “simply changing direction means that you carry the day” (Buell 1315). Some sort of environmental justice reform must take or and motioned towards in the twenty-first century (Buell 1319). Modern ecocritical text must initiate some attempt to push depiction at disrupting the established systems in place and the government level. Tan’s text, simply put, does not accomplish this point at all. This fact does not by any means cancel out the contributions that The Lost Thing adds to the critical conversation with regard to ecocriticism, such as advocating for environmental consciousness.
Literary ecocriticism is still relatively coalescing into a more solid state of interpreting works of fiction. Interests in text like Tan’s relatively young text have trouble in situating up a foundation suitable for an acceptable interpretation slotted into a grid that Buell defines that ecocriticism at this point has to meet. The effect of ecocriticism he has “not changed literary studies” but rather has been absorbed and doled out in the traditional fashion of literary theory and concepts (Buell 1501).
The staying power of Shaun Tan’s volume of work has yet to be determined, however for the moment he is a mainstay in classrooms across the world. However, in trying to determine whether a work of children’s literature could reach the status of a classic, a brief definition pointed towards the conclusion of Kenneth Kidd’s article “Classic.” In his article, put forth novelist J.M. Coetzee that classic status can be attained by “reification,” the ability to make texts real, but also “encompassing the debate that it engenders” (Kidd 58). Coetzee suggests that the threat of constant interrogation over time is part of the “history of the classic (Kidd 58). If a text needs to be sheltered, it can never attain the coveted classic status.
In re-examining the contemporary criticism on Shaun Tan’s work and the themes he incorporates a rough litmus test can be used to estimate the probability that his work will be continued to be critically examined beyond the current moment. The Lost Thing will likely be buried under the weight in favor of his other work The Arrival, for its easy use in discussions of immigration no matter what country it may be read in. The book requires no language basis in order for it to communicate its message. Texts and their messages on immigration will always be a hotly debated topic no matter the time frame, as the text likely could extend to create a timeless quality desired in establishing “classic” work of fiction into the literary canon.
On the other hand, The Lost Thing heavily relies on the relationship to the language and how a particular language gives rise to meanings. The topic of the environmentalism is highly politicized just as the topic of immigration is charged. The spectrum is broad with full believers in how humanity’s interaction and influence on the landscape directly correlates to global warming, while others are in firm denial that global warming or climate change even exists. Institutions are in place which battles with conflictions in the scientific data, leaning in those same polar opposites, depending on political affiliations. However, the text does not push those political buttons. Also, competing for attention is if there is a singular way of interpreting the text in the way that The Arrival speaks to a universal message about immigration. The Lost Thing appears to lack this defining quality. One particular thing favors of the potential for The Lost Thing to be recognized beyond the categorization of just another children’s picture book is the fact that it exists in another medium. However, even then this categorization limited by the small size of its audience. People familiar with short films, which are really only known to hardcore devotees.
Tan’s metafictional elements could potentially detract from a cohesive message. The message varies because the interpersonal relationship between reader and text will vary based on his or her own personal perceptions and attitude towards the environment they inhabit. The instructional aspect can also be limited depending on the skills of the reader themselves. The language itself is just as susceptible to changes in the environment. As time passes, the signification of meaning changes along with the times. Critics have the privileged knowledge construct meaning which serves his or her own ends. Sometimes children’s books are merely read for entertainment and taken as such.
The saving grace for Shaun Tan’s, The Lost Thing, might come in serving as an underling to another text that could be taken in comparison with other texts attempting to bridge the same divide between reader and text, as well as the reader and environment. Simply not meeting the current standard of criteria in depicting ecocriticism could give rise to how well the text complexly entangles meaning between animals and material objects. The text does succeed in depicting how familiar the creature is an object located in the real world, despite its outlandish size and advanced industrialized components. In children’s literature, elements combine to illustrate the regardless of how well they slot in all established measurements.
If a text is to be successful, it must render a world which imagination can take hold. The words on the page have to render a reality which is animated, and not just propped up as dressing on a set. Good literature will allow words and images to spring into motion within the minds of the reader, no matter the setting, city or pastoral, real or imagined. The words that the text speaks and how they speak are all that matter, and give meaning are all that matter.