In his 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon writes about, among others, a man named Tyrone Slothrop. Slothrop has many sexual encounters in London, and each place at which he does is struck by V2 rockets launched by Nazi Germany after a few days.
A Mild Case of Mass Hysteria, a new graphic novel by Singaporean writer Felix Cheong and illustrated by Ritwick Roy and Riddhi Trivedi, starts in a similar place. It is 1967 and Singapore is creaking to life under the weight of history. But then there is the Koro epidemic, a real event, and Cheong, Roy, and Trivedi are on their way to a rollocking tale that uses sexual and bodily panics as metaphors to make sense of the forces of war and empire, which are otherwise too large to dramatise directly.
The resemblance to Gravity’s Rainbow is fleeting but also enlightening. Pynchon never lets the reader be sure if there is a real connection between Slothrop’s indiscretions and the missile strikes (his 1965 novel The Crying of Lot 49 does the same thing with the Tristero conspiracy), whereas A Mild Case is not ambiguous at all. Its narrative is clear-eyed that the fear of the men in its pages is baseless: the refrain of “there is nothing wrong with you” is the novel flatly stating that it is more interested in why people believe otherwise and less in destabilising our sense of reality.
During the Koro epidemic, mass hysteria led men to believe their genitals were vanishing. The story is told through Wee Tiong, a closeted doctor who trained in London; Soo Tang, a gangster emasculated by a woman; and James, a recruit in the military draft. As women assert power even as the young nation demands discipline, these men face a shared psychological crisis.
A page from ‘A Mild Case of Mass Hysteria’.
Manhood and nationhood
Through Roy and Trivedi’s gritty visuals and noir themes, the graphic novel explores, and reveals, the fragility of masculinity and how easily social order, no matter how stable it appears, can descend into fear and chaos. In fact, the fear transcends class as Tiong, Tang, and James are all found equally susceptible, implying that education or discipline cannot inoculate against a collective panic that is really about one’s identity being under pressure.
That, in a nutshell, described a young Singapore as well. Its new National Service was turning boys into soldiers on behalf of “a nation still coming into its own”, with street gangs and triads giving way to the authority of a new state and shophouses giving way to office towers. In Cheong’s view, Singapore itself was anxious about its own power and standing in the world, and thus produced citizens who were anxious about their own in society.
In fact, the page right after the hospital scenes cut to a moment of national triumph, with crowds, a soldier’s salute, and a wedding, while the national anthem blares. By placing personal humiliation and national pride side by side, A Mild Case dares you to notice that individual manhood and national selfhood are evolving together.
That juxtaposition is also a symptom of the novel’s struggle with subtlety. The scenes where the women explicitly tell the men “the rules have changed” is similarly on the nose. Because the book splits its time between three protagonists in a relatively short format, the emotional arcs also seem a bit rushed. The epilogue does tie the themes together beautifully — but even so, as a “thriller” (which the book claims to be on its back cover), the resolution of Tang and James’s stories feels secondary to the lesson the book wants to teach us.
A picture worth a thousand words
A Mild Case is clever, however. By casting the Koro epidemic as a crisis of identity, Cheong reveals that when traditional power structures, especially patriarchal ones, are forced to ‘shrink’ in the face of modernity, the deep-seated distrust of state authority and scientific logic and the resulting anxiety turn into tinder for panic.
Roy and Trivedi keep these abstract and frankly heavy ideas from descending into intellectual posturing. In A Mild Case, if you took the pictures away, you would still know the story takes place in 1967 — but with the pictures, you feel the heat and the smoky atmosphere of the Great World Cabaret. Many pages pull the text into the art, with a gun firing smoke that forms letters or a soldier’s helmet with the word ‘UNIFORM’ woven into the netting. Silent panels allow moments where expressions of shame or desire tell the story better than a speech bubble could. When the text says, “The night measures out the hours”, the distorted, sweating, wide-eyed faces bring the panic to life.
Without the art, the ‘hysteria’ in the title would be lost. A frequent flaw of graphic novels is that you can take the images away and the novels would be unchanged, but A Mild Case is a true collaboration between writer and illustrator.
A Mild Case of Mass Hysteria
Felix Cheong, illus. Ritwick Roy and Riddhi Trivedi
Penguin SEA
₹961 [ebook]
mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in