Aesthetics of Cicada by Shaun Tan

This semester, San Diego State University is offering an “Aesthetics of Children’s Literature” graduate seminar taught by our very own director, Dr. Joseph Thomas Jr. Of course, I signed up for it as soon as I could, hoping to get answers to the simple question of “what makes certain texts better than others?”  – only to be told that such explanations would not be given. Instead, we discussed Terry Eagleton’s concept that “part of what we mean by a ‘literary’ work is one in which what is said is to be taken in terms of how it is said” (3). Our goal this semester would be to look at how things are said – the technique or methodology that goes into the final product. As we wrapped up our fourth class session, heads heavy with the discussion of six published articles, Dr. Thomas urged, “Go find out what your aesthetic values are!”

Cicada by Shaun Tan

Emboldened by the challenge, I reread a picture book that had shocked me with its content a few weeks prior: Cicada by Shaun Tan. During the first read, it was easy to see the thin varnish of the cicada protagonist, which glossed over a forthright tale of the difficulties of Asian American assimilation into the American workforce. The parallels were clear: the diminutive, hardworking, unacknowledged main character is cast as subhuman, denied resources and a living wage, and endures it all without complaint. All of these observations deal with the book’s content, an aspect much too easy for me to home in on given my concurrent independent study work reading Lisa Lowe and James S. Moy.

Yet in class, Dr. Thomas had lectured on the two outlooks currently dominating literary criticism. The direction that most critics are taking is that in which texts are studied ideologically. When analyzing, they ask, “How does the text’s content reflect the culture in which it was written, and what would modern ideology have to say about it now?” Clearly, this is the methodology I used to examine Cicada on my first read, hastily drawing a conclusion from Tan’s personal ethnic background and eagerly impressing my own interpretation onto the cicada’s journey to molting. I hadn’t considered the other outlook, the one our graduate seminar emphasizes, which is a focus on the aesthetics of texts. Scholars using this lens would ask, “What makes a text pleasurable and beautiful?” Throughout this semester, this complex question will become my own. Therefore, I decided to test it out right away. Equipped with a few articles’ worth of information, I tackled Cicada once again to extract its aesthetic features. 

Pages 1 and 2

Pages 3 and 4

First, the artwork. Aside from a double-page spread at the beginning and three at the end, most of the spreads are split with the text on the left and a full-page image on the right. Most of the color is made up of shades of gray that never quite turn into black. This provides a strong contrast for the main character, the cicada, who is green aside from his gray suit. The cicada himself stands at half the height of humans, stretching to reach the elevator button but just small enough to fit into the office wall space he calls home. While he is always just off-center in each page, humans are always in the periphery: either walking away, turning their backs, or – in the one case a human is looking at the cicada – headless. As he goes to the roof to molt his office body and emerge as a red, winged insect, the cicada casts aside the whole narrative that he had just built. No text is needed here, for the striking visual of the red distinctly marks a rebirth and shedding of the discrimination that his green, suit-clad body had endured. Truly, the story could have been conveyed through the artwork alone. But it is not. Somehow, the narration is necessary.

Pages 22 and 23

The text itself is bland on the surface – even the cicada seems apathetic about his situation as he describes being overworked, beaten by coworkers, and ostensibly walking to the roof to commit suicide. It’s not so much that the message is hard to understand; rather, the delivery itself is short, clipped, and direct. Subject-verb agreement is rare, if both subject and verb even make into the sentence. Tiny and centered, the isolated lines connote a loneliness that elides the question of whom the cicada is telling this story to, despite his informative tone. Each page of text has three lines, followed by the mantra “Tok Tok Tok!” which makes the visual image of a quatrain. Each line has no more than two periods in it, one of which is always at the end of each line. After reading the haiku above the book details in the back, one is led to wonder if the text is made up of haikus with the “Tok Tok Tok!” added at the end, but the syllables do not match up. 

A discreet haiku

Pages 29 and 30

It is not until the very end of the book, in which a double-spread of text on a white background separates the “Tok Tok Tok!” from the three lines that always proceed it, do readers understand that it is a laughing sound. The emotionless, drab tone that had characterized the text is revealed to be the result of the “Tok Tok Tok!” sapping away all emotion into itself. On a second read, the cicada is reenvisioned as unbothered by his horrible work conditions because he himself reflects upon it with a laugh. Those three syllables obliquely contain disdain, jubilance, and an air of superiority. The cicada gets the last word and the last laugh.

Being unfamiliar with poetry and art makes approaching picture books with an aesthetic eye difficult. Yet Cicada’s direct language and underwhelming illustrations easily lent itself to a fruitful analysis. I could see how information-rich the images are, while extracting the necessity of the text for its visual impact and the change of tone that occurs between a first and second read. As I continue searching throughout the semester to figure out what makes a text aesthetically pleasing, I can add “unapparent, buried tone” and “color contrast” to my list as a result of studying Cicada by Shaun Tan.

- (AN)

Works Cited

Eagleton, Terry. How to Read Poetry. Yale University Press, 2013.