This essay will consider the affective claims of Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (henceforth Charlie), examining the interaction of affect, nostalgia and irony through the image of Lee Kuan Yew in Charlie. Critic Linda Hutcheon considers it impossible for a postmodern text to be simultaneously nostalgic and ironic in effect, suggesting that nostalgia is necessarily invoked in service of irony in Charlie — which has been defined by Philip Holden as a postmodern work of historiographic metafiction. Nevertheless, despite its “elaborate[ly] metafictional” nature, Holden argues that the narrative remains “invested in the redemptive possibilities of storytelling” (511). As an extension of Holden’s argument, this essay will argue that Charlie’s affective claims exceed a purely ironic reading of the text, humanising both the fictional Charlie Chan and the historical figure of Lee Kuan Yew.
Representations of the past in Charlie are rendered in a variety of distinct graphiations by which the past is “crystallized into precious moments selected by memory” (Hutcheon, n.p.), and presented in “decorative” modes (Peeters qtd. in Holden, 520) and “ostentatious” page layouts (Groensteen qtd. in Holden 514) that depict the past with unmediated verisimilitude, encouraging affective engagement and aesthetic appreciation. Similarly, Chan’s recollections, his comics, and the inclusion of “real” artefacts, like news clippings, ticket stubs, and photographs, add to this sense of nostalgia. [1] As Holden notes, these instances of “narrative realism” have “a particular affective power” for audiences (513). Within Chan’s comic — “The Most Terrible Time of My Life” — nostalgic scenes of Singapore’s streets are also used as “establishing shots” to draw the reader in, or to close a scene with affective power. [2] However, for an audience wishing to indulge in nostalgia, the metafictional aspects of the text can be an unwelcome dissolution of their affective engagement with the text.
Metafictional elements in Charlie make the text identifiable as a work of historiographic metafiction — multiple narrative levels overlap, disrupting the continuity of the narrative flow and foregrounding its constructedness. While the reader is ostensibly encouraged to make clever connections between narrative levels, these interruptions often dispel the poignancy of the individual narratives, diverting the audience’s attentions just as they become emotionally invested in the individual narratives. [3] Additionally, narratives in Charlie are mediated by the intrusive figures of Chan and of “Sonny Liew” as “presenter” (Holden 515), who provide interpretations of narratives within the text. Combined with the textbook-style captions that imbue the narrative with “the rationalizing impulse of the catalogue” (Holden 517), these interruptions intercede between audience and narrative to regulate register and meaning. The nostalgic and affective moods created in the text are hence undercut by the self-reflexive interpretations from the “authorial” and authoritative voices of Chan and Sonny in the text.
Like Chan and Sonny, Lee Kuan Yew is an authorial and authoritative presence in Charlie who was remarkably adept at “authoring” narratives in order to gain authority in politics and over history. His image and narrative have effectively become inseparable from Singapore’s history and identity, and contemporary Singaporean nostalgia for an idealised past associates Lee as the political leadership that led to Singapore’s “success” — an image that has scarcely diminished since his death in 2015. As Hutcheon notes, the perception of the present as “complicated” contributes to the construction of the past as “simple” by juxtaposition — and importantly for national historical narratives, as “complete, stable, coherent” (Hutcheon n.p.). If anything, nostalgia for this image of Lee has only increased since his death and coupled with the proliferation of revisionist narratives that dispute dominant narratives of Singapore’s history, has increased the affective impact of representations of Lee. [4]
In Charlie, Lee’s role in Singapore’s struggle for independence from the British is nostalgically represented through the archetypal, clever Sang Kancil from Malay folk stories in “Bukit Chapalang” (126-8), and with Lee as the legal counsel helping humans gain independence from the Hegemons in “Invasion” (114-5). In “Days of August”, the narrative leads the reader to associate the comments and questions addressed to the Prime Minister with Lee, despite Lee’s glaring absence, hence foregrounding the recognisability of Lee’s role in the narrative surrounding Singapore’s development (274-7). These depictions of Lee in Chan’s comics highlight the iconicity of Lee and his political role in pre- and post-independence Singapore, eras that are nostalgically regarded, as periods of valiant struggle for independence from the British, and of unprecedented economic development and social stability respectively — under Lee’s leadership, of course.
However, Hutcheon argues that the postmodern only “recall[s] the past” and “evokes nostalgia’s affective power” in order to “ironi[s]e” it and “acknowledge the final impossibility of indulging in nostalgia” (n.p.). The iterability of Lee’s image in its various forms throughout the text symbolises the impossibility of determining an “original” image of Lee and hence, by extension, of Singapore’s historical narrative. Charlie interferes in this process of image construction by foregrounding its fictionality, through the iterability of the image of Lee — named or implied in drawings, cameos, quotes. For instance, several of Lee’s famous quotes are satirised in “Political Toolkit” (256), a mock propaganda poster; the reference to Lee in “Sinkapor Inks” as “Mr Hairily” also signifies Lee’s strategic re-construction of his identity, from the English-educated “Harry Lee” to the more Chinese “Lee Kuan Yew” (231-44). The text thus foregrounds how an authoritative historical narrative or referent cannot delimit the possible repetitions and implications derived from the images of Lee.
More importantly, this multiplicity of images destabilises the authority of the historical narratives constructed by and around Lee. In “Days of August”, a blurring of the boundaries between reality and fiction, problematises the notion of the presence of a “true” historical referent. In this alternative history, “reality” is presented as the “troubling dreams” of the successful “Charlie Chan” who intuits with preternatural self-reflexivity that “the world [he inhabits] is not the real one” (282-3). The fact that “Days of August” is a work of fiction produced by Chan, who is a fictional character in the diegesis of a frame narrative in Charlie further complicates fiction and reality. Ironically, although the Man in White successfully “force[s] history back onto the path it was always supposed to have taken” (282), the uniqueness of Lee’s political success is undermined by the notion that under Lim, Singapore takes the same path to development. Alternatively, it also highlights the arrogance of the belief that Lee’s Singapore is “the path [Singapore] was always supposed to have taken”. This emphasis on the impossibility of distinguishing reality from fiction thus makes Charlie, in its ironic depiction of Lee, a work emblematic of historiographic metafiction.
However, in contestation of Hutcheon’s notion that any invocation of nostalgia in the postmodern text is necessarily in service of irony, I would argue that the representation of Lee and Chan in the text has an affective impact that escapes the definition of the postmodern text as solely ironic. As Holden argues, irony in Charlie does more than create narratives that “simply invert dominant binary structures”; rather, the text highlights the “redemptive possibilities of storytelling” by “reaffirm[ing] the placing of the individual experience within the construction of larger, collective national narratives” (511). In the case of a figure such as Lee, one might argue that he has already appropriated national history in order to affirm his own narration of Singapore’s history, rendering both the individual and national history synonymous. However, Charlie arguably affirms the individual — both Lee and Chan — in an affective manner, while also disputing the dominant narratives that have been constructed around Lee’s image.
In Charlie, the iconic image of Lee shedding tears while announcing Singapore’s separation from Malaysia on national television is woven into Chan’s personal history, tying his memories and his development as an artist to national history in a seemingly nostalgic fashion. Despite being a moment of public vulnerability and contestably, an admission of failure, this emblematic image of Lee has been incorporated into a national narrative that celebrates Lee’s ability to succeed against the odds. In the present, divorced from that moment of national crisis in the past, this image of weakness arguably has the same nostalgic effect as any other image depicting Lee’s typical stoicism.
However, Chan’s recollections in association with this image are far from idealised: Lee’s iconic image appears twice (Liew 206, 265), both times in association with fallibility and weakness. The image is presented with none of the present triumphalism, but initially with a sense of uncertainty regarding Singapore’s economic survival and with Chan’s realisation of his father’s old age (206-7). This image is then later tied to Chan’s bitter conviction that Singapore —a “sterile country and cultural backwater” — is incapable of supporting an artist of his calibre (265). Chan’s failure to gain international recognition at Comic Con further links the image of Lee to a moment of personal fallibility; the pathetic image of Chan’s father as a dazed-looking old man, wasted away by illness (264-5), is echoed in Chan’s defeated expression in “Self-Portrait in Hotel Room” (273). Both age and fallibility are mirrored in the subsequent image of Lee in “Time and Tide” (296); Lee, “thin, aged, uncertain, staring at us with unfocused eyes” (Holden 520) visually parallels Chan’s father and Chan himself, with their distinctive oval faces, balding pates, and “sloping shoulders” (520).
These implied similarities drawn between Lee, Chan and Chan’s father “link private and public histories and fantasies”, indicating both a “convergence and dissonance” (Holden 520), and a sense of both the ironic and the affective. While the association ironises the indomitable, patrician image associated with Lee, this image of Lee in his last years also serves to humanise him, with the use of the “ostentatious” and “decorative” mode of oil painting “demand[ing] contemplation and an affective response” (520). By linking Lee to Chan, whose self-aggrandising attempts to establish himself as “Singapore’s greatest comics artist” (Liew 208) mirror Lee’s efforts to establish his own legacy, Charlie hence calls upon us to sympathise with Lee as we have with Chan and his father, thus humanising rather than merely ironising Lee.
Perhaps this reading of Charlie emerges as a counter-response to postmodernism, where readers have become tired of the way irony detracts us from emotionally engaging with narratives. Perhaps the stronger the sense of irony, the stronger also the desire to escape into affect, or to cling to any possibility of a more redemptive, optimistic reading of the text. But if Hutcheon argues that irony and nostalgia are not “qualities of objects” but “responses of subjects” (n.p.), Charlie can be read, therefore, as a postmodern text that can deftly engages readers both “emotionally” and “intellectually” (n.p.). It manipulates readers, just like Chan did with “Ah Huat’s Giant Robot”, into sympathising with both Lee and Chan, humanising these men (who are both, in some ways, simultaneously fictional and real) without having to constantly create ironic and “reflective” distance between the subject and text in order to make nostalgia and affect “palatable” (Hutcheon, n.p.) This manipulation of irony and affect is not necessarily a bad thing after all, and as both Chan and Holden note, “Is it manipulative? Sure. But that’s how you tell stories” (Liew 53).
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[1] See The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, pp. 72-4.
[2] See The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, pp. 97 and 100, or pp. 147-8.
[3] See The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, pp. 52-3.
[4] The hordes of people changing their social media profile photos to the iconic image of Lee’s silhouette in a black ribbon bears testament to this.
Works Cited
Holden, Philip. ““Is it manipulative? Sure. But that’s how you tell stories”: The graphic novel, metahistory
and the artist in The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 52, no. 4,
2016, pp. 510-523.
Hutcheon, Linda. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” University of Toronto, 1998,
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html. Accessed 12 April 2017.
Liew, Sonny. The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye. Epigram, 2015.