Hello literary friends and fellow Maritimers. I come to you today to discuss the Pulitzer Prize-winning Great Canadian Novel, E. Annie Proulx’s (pronounced like true) The Shipping News (1993). I did not like it very much, but I gave a mini seminar on it last week, so I’ve summarized my thoughts here. Since this is ostensibly a lit blog. And I haven’t posted about lit things in a minute.
By the way, The Shipping News also won the U.S. National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and made Proulx the first ever woman to win the PEN/Faulkner Award. You may also know her as the author of the short story “Brokeback Mountain” (1999) which was made into a film of the same name (read the full text here).
my reading of the text, part 1: elemental dichotomies
The Shipping News is about Quoyle, a 36-year-old with nothing left to lose. He moves from New York all the way to Newfoundland for a fresh start with his aunt and two daughters. His family, the Quoyles, have a reputation as inbred, pillaging freaks, but they are nearly all dead; only Quoyle and his cousin Nolan are still alive. On the rock Quoyle gradually develops a backbone with the help of his family and community, while navigating the tides of industry and grief.
“Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he survived childhood; at the state university, hand clapped over his chin, he camouflaged torment with smiles and silence. [...] At thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love, Quoyle steered away to Newfoundland, the rock that had generated his ancestors, a place he had never been nor thought to go. A watery place. And Quoyle feared water, could not swim” (Proulx, 1).
From the first page Proulx starts building these elemental or metaphysical dichotomies that serve to separate Quoyle from his heritage and the world around him. Right away we have the contrast of Quoyle as a rather weak person [see above] with “a great damp loaf of a body” who fears and cannot survive in water; he is associated with wetness in this pathetic way, he’s “watery” by nature but has no agency over his wateriness (2). His name and everything else about his introduction as a character reinforces his lack of agency and his malleability, like a yet-untied coil of rope or an amorphous water blob that must be given shape.
Newfoundland, by contrast, is “the rock,” and Quoyle thinks of it as “watery” because of his fear of water. But he’s confused at this stage about the dichotomy that defines his character. The narrator tells us that
Nothing was clear to lonesome Quoyle. His thoughts churned like the amorphous thing that ancient sailors, drifting into arctic half-light, called the Sea-Lung; a heaving sludge of ice under fog where air blurred into water, where liquid was solid, where solids dissolved, where the sky froze and light and dark muddled” (3, emphasis mine).
His thoughts are this muddled, impossible, self-contradictory co-existence of states of matter, like “liquid is solid.” Quoyle is and is not an agent/himself/his heritage. I think from this confusion we can also derive a soft-hard dichotomy. Quoyle is soft, moist, passive; his father, his ancestry, and Newfoundland itself, are hard and active. (Obviously there’s also a gendered/sexual reading of all this, but I’m not getting into that). When Quoyle follows the aunt to the rock, the narrator says, “the idea of the north was taking him. He needed something to brace against” (Proulx, 31). Passive, soft language of being “taken” transitions to a desire to be close to hardness, not to be hard himself but to find a hardness that he can make use of. Here we have the barest hint at agency to be found on the rock.
The island, literally nicknamed “the rock,” and its institutions, continue to be associated with hardness/difficulty: “But it was what he wanted. Storm and peril. Exhaustion” (Proulx, 50). “Gammy Bird was a hard bite” (Proulx, 63). Everyone’s skin is hard: “it was like clasping a leather pot holder” (63); “skin was like asphalt, fissured and cracked, thickened by a lifetime of weather, the scurf of age” (79).
Bunny (Quoyle’s eldest daughter) and Wavey Prowse (the love interest) inspire Quoyle to synthesize his soft and hard sides. Wavey’s name is all about having direction in choppy waters (wavey + prow). Her skin is constantly described as dry, but she’s always walking in the rain (Proulx, 56, 195, and many more pages). She has a stoicism, a balance - literally her posture is what draws Quoyle to her - that inspires Quoyle. She stays tall and upright whereas he is typically hunched, hidden behind his hand. Bunny sees the necessary flexibility, and Quoyle’s early adaptation to it, early on. She says “Dad is the water and these are my ferryboats. Dad, you are the water” (Proulx, 127). Bunny has some supernatural or divine ability, like Jack Buggit; she has insight that other characters do not, and she sees her father’s watery nature as a strength in this new place, hinting that it’s not a solution just to close oneself off to vulnerability.
Bunny is hard but adaptable, like Wavey, and like Quoyle will be eventually.
“‘This is heavy,’” said Bunny [...] “‘Yes,’” said Quoyle, “‘but you are very strong.’” His stout, homely child with disturbing ways” (101). “Across the room Bunny damned all three with killing eyes. Quoyle’s smile signaled his disinterest in glares. But it seemed to him the sounds of his children were screaming and scraping. When would they start to be gentle?” (123).
He is concerned that she’s corrupted or inherently too hard, from trauma or as a reaction to Quoyle’s innate corruption.
“But she was, in fact, different. Something was out of kilter. She was like a kettle of water, simmering and simmering, or in noisy boil before the pot goes dry and cracks, so sometimes cold, with a skim of mineral flowers on the surface” (Proulx, 132).
What Quoyle calls “off kilter,” however, others in the community call “buoyant;” Bunny is adaptable, staying afloat even in an uneasy ocean: “‘And that maid they got is a real Quoyle, tilted like a buoy in a raging sea’” (Proulx, 179).
“As Quoyle sat down Bunny threw herself at him as though he had just arrived after a long, dangerous voyage, hugged, rammed her head against him. Nothing wrong with her. Nothing” (137). Bunny teaches Quoyle to be strong. She excels at school, stands up for her friends, loves fiercely.
part 2: magic and madness
There’s a magical realist element to the text that associates madness with magic. Bunny has a prophetic nightmare about the house before it vanishes from the Point. Jack Buggit has an ability to find people who are lost at sea, inexplicably sensing where they are. And Nolan Quoyle, the owner of the white dog Bunny alone seems to see, is able to control the wind with his knots. When Quoyle finds Nolan’s shack, it’s described as follows:
“‘Some stinking mess. Poor old bugger’s starving. Christ in the early morning, what a mess. He’d better go into a home, don’t you think? He’s off his rocker. Burning the walls of the house, there. You see where he’s ripping the boards off? He’s your kin, so it’s up to you. What to do with him. They take him away, I’ll come back over, drown the old dog. Half dead anyway.” (282)
Nolan is somewhat supernaturally gifted, as seen by his “wind knots” and the house eventually blowing away. Notice how his little white dog is treated as though it ought to be put down. Once Nolan is placed in a mental hospital, he becomes obsessed with how white everything is:
“Oh! Wunnerful! Wunnerful food! They’s ‘ot rainbaths out of the ceiling, my son, oh, like white silk, the soap she foams up in your ‘and. You feels like a boy to go ‘mongst the ‘ot waters. They gives you new clothes every day. White as the driven snow.” [...] “I tied knots ‘gainst you. Raised winds. The sheep is dead. Whiteface can’t get in.” (296)
The white dog (“Whiteface,” we assume) and all of the whites in the hospital symbolize an Other than was previously threatening to Nolan and to the Quoyles more generally. Why can only allegedly crazy people (Bunny, Nolan) see the whites? It’s because, as the unstable but thereby uncorrupted and unassimilated, they haven’t given up on seeing it: hope.
part 3: imagination and hope
Proulx calls imagination “the human mind’s central life strategy”; “For many people—for me, certainly—the life of the mind, the realm of the imagination, is a more brilliant and compelling one than the world we live in [...] Imagination is the central pivot of human life” (Varvogli, 15).
Note that Proulx calls imagination the “central pivot.” What she calls imagination, I argue maps on to the madness experienced by her characters. Bunny and Nolan are able to imagine; they are able to conjure hope for their own lives. This imaginative ability, this hopefulness, is the “pivot” that lets them move between the dichotomies we established in part 1. Bunny can be hard and soft, liquid and solid; Nolan, too, has at the very least endured life in Newfoundland for a long time. His ability to see magic connects him to the next generation of Quoyles via their shared ability to synthesize, to pivot, to adapt and overcome grief, and to learn to love again despite hardship.
final thoughts
Is this a good book? No. It’s fucking saccharine; it devolves into sentimental drip the moment Quoyle reaches the Rock and all of the dark parts are over with. Proulx basically employs the Magical Negro trope, but instead it’s Magical [redacted slur for the cognitively disabled here]. Her style really impressed me for the first few chapters, and then it seemed to fade away over the next 300 pages, becoming toothless and indistinct.
I’m sure in 1993 this was charming, but as a literary work it’s just… not very deep. The conceit with the knots is clever, and she writes some banger lines, but overall it’s not dark enough or funny enough to be a dark comedy. It’s just a novel about a family overcoming trauma together, except the trauma has zero consequences for the characters, except a few magic nightmares. Everyone discovers how to hope for a better life for themselves, against some vague odds that are established in the early chapters and then never dealt with again. The fucking end.
Anyways, if you like 90s movies, check out the trailer. TW: Kevin Spacey, but it also has Julianne Moore and Cate Blanchett. Phoebe and I will be watching this together eventually, if we can resist Too Hot to Handle for two consecutive hours.
Btw if you’ve read Proulx, I would really love to know your thoughts on her work. I hear her story collection Close Range is fantastic (“Brokeback” is in that one) but I was so disappointed by this, her supposed great work, that I don’t know if I’ll read anything else by her. Which is really too bad because I love dark maritime literature.
Thank u for reading <3 Shan
Works Cited
Proulx, Annie. The Shipping News. Touchstone, 1993.
Small White Dogs With Crusty Eyes | Know Your Meme
Varvogli, Aliki. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News: A Reader’s Guide. Continuum, 2002. https://books.google.ca/books?id=GrIf21y8quwC&lpg=PA7&ots=4HQeoc0FoB&dq=the%20shipping%20news&lr&pg=PA15#v=onepage&q&f=false