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Sitaram
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Joined: 14 Sep 2005
Posts: 1079
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 Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 4:29 am Post subject: Commencing "The Shipping News" |
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Brokeback Mountain was my first experience with the prose of
Annie Proulx.
I am so impressed that I have purchased The Shipping News and
am just now beginning to read it. I would like to post some of my
thoughts in this thread. This shall be a work in progress, so I shall return
many times to update and append via the Edit function. It helps to
post in degrees, saving and updating, since there is always the danger of
being logged off and losing work.
I seek the tolerance to "think aloud" here about what I am reading.
I am particularly struck by one paragraph early in the work:
| Quote: | It was spring. Sodden ground, smell of earth. The wind beat
through the twigs, gave off a greenish odor like struck flints. Coltsfoot in
the ditches, furious dabs of tulips stuttering in gardens. Slanting rain.
Clock hands lept to pellucid evenings. The sky riffled like cards in a chalk
white hand. |
(As I type the above paragraph, I post it in Yahoo chat PM to a young
medical student in Iran, a woman, hungry for books, ideas and freedom,
who reads her smuggled copy of Asar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in
Tehran and chats with me daily.)
Here I am, basking in one slender passage, a single ray falling through a
darkened forest canopy, with someone at the antipodes, of opposite
gender and alien culture, sharing with me this small pool of light.
The experience of all readers, in its sum total, is part of the fiction, is it
not, a gestalt of all events? How deeply might we descend into this single
paragraph? What is it's depth? Is it a microcosm, a sail to be unfurled and
carry us through the story, or a cameo of reality itself, like the tapestry
of Remedios Varo's Embroidering Earth's Mantle, spilling out from
ivory towered windows, to fill the void?
Or, if not this paragraph, perhaps there is some other paragraph which
serves as fulcrum, a center of gravity.
The fabric descending in this scene is how I imagine the artistic process,
visually.
| Quote: |
The mind is its own beautiful prisoner. - e. e. cummings |
In Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, Varo's painting helps Oedipa to
realize that she is the sort of prisoner which cummings describes.
Varo's painting is the human mind and culture itself, fabricating its world
on the fly, just as our sense of consciousness is fabricated in the brain
from moment to moment. Our world is a heaven or hell of our own
making. Reality is something we devise and there are different kinds of
reality.
The goal of the Surrealist is to capture our imagination. But the
imagination is unique in that it is only in such captivity that it finds
freedom.
| Quote: |
In Mexico City, they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by
the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a
triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls
with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top
room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out
the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all
the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the
earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.
Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had
noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd
wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the
tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She
could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the
world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked
down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she
stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in
her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had
taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape. What did she so
desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to
think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her
ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic,
anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason
at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to
examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure
its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on
superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or
marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of
deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?
--The Crying of Lot 49, end of Chapter 1
|
I have nicknamed my Iranian friend Lady Bug and she calls me
Uncle Wiggly
Ladybug exclaims that Annie Proulx's paragraph is poetic, and reminds
her of Virginia Woolf.
Back to our paragraph: how would the novel be different without it? The
paragraph would certainly be different without the novel, were it to stand
alone!
I tried to find such a cameo paragraph in Brokeback Mountain
| Quote: |
The use of distance.
Both the story, Brokeback Mountain and the movie make good use
of sight at a distance.
During the day, Ennis looked across the great gulf and sometimes saw
Jack, a small dot moving across a high meadow, as an insect moves
across a tablecloth; Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red
spark on a huge black mass of mountain.
This one sentence combines distant vision with a motif of darkness and
light.
Jack is a black speck sometimes seen against a background of light.
Ennis is a small but constant light seen in total darkness.
How do we see ourselves? How does the world see us? Do we see
ourselves as others see us? If and when we finally succeed in seeing
ourselves, shall we like what we see?
Is it possible to understand the entire story from this one sentence?
I do not think Ennis even begins to see himself or Jack clearly until after
Jack’s death.
At face value, our microcosmic sentence is saying that Ennis sees Jack as
a bug. Buggery is certainly a slang word which comes to mind. And why a
tablecloth? A tablecloth is most dependably white and the beginning of a
meal, before the first bite has been taken. So, what does the bug seek on
the white table cloth before even a crumb has been spilled?
Jack sees Ennis as a light in the darkness.
Ennis initially states that he has not yet had the opportunity to sin, and
would go to heaven. At our story’s commencement, Ennis possesses the
purity of virginity.
The Inspired Title
With our every action and inaction, we risk much. The chips at stake in
our gamble are always regret.
Better to die trying than try dieing.
At least our words can become immortal.
The title of the story and movie, “Brokeback Mountain” is brilliantly
inspired. It is a title pregnant with possible meanings in a drama where
conception is not a concern.
A story is like a ship at sea, and the title is a skilled helmsman steering it
though violent storms to calm harbors.
What is this back which gets broken? Broke is past tense, pluperfect, a
fête accomplis.
A camel’s back is broken by the final straw. "Broke" implies the need to
fix.
"If you can't fix it, you gotta stand it."
Time is a passing succession, not of moments, but of windows of
opportunity. Sometimes a window stays open for years, and a refreshing
breeze of possibilities constantly troubles the curtains. But any window
eventually shuts with the sinister vengeance of an atheist’s sepulcher, and
no angels ever come to roll away the stone.
|
Back to our original paragraph:
It was spring is certainly passive compared with spring has
sprung and reminiscent not of Chaucer's nascent"Whan that April" but
of Eliot's evanescent April as "the cruelest month."
The wind is active, but violent, striking. Twigs are not budding branches
but dead, fallen branches.
Slanted rain is merciless, wind-driven, bent on pursuing us even under
whatever frail shelter we might seek.
struck flint is a prelude to fire, but in the past tense, and passive,
suggesting failure; a spark, some smoke, but no fire. Damp, dark and
cold are motives for fire.
| Quote: |
pellucid:
1. Admitting the passage of light; transparent or translucent.
2. Transparently clear in style or meaning: pellucid prose.
|
Yet, the final pellucid thought at the end of day is the recognition and admission of our weariness and desire for sleep.
We may see a photograph of coltsfoot here:
http://www.vitacost.com/science/hn/Herb/Coltsfoot.htm
We notice that the leaf is heart-shaped. A colt is an immature horse. But
horses are said to have a hoof and not a foot. Foot suggests human. A
horse's leg in a ditch suggests a broken leg, and a horse with a broken leg
must be "put down."
Of course, everything that I am saying here is quite possibly the artefact
of over-eager analysis. Yet, still, these phenomena are present in the
reader's field of vision, even if they are only optical illusions, never
intended by the author. And the potential energy of such phenomena are
ever-present, waiting to be harnessed by the author's artistic will.
| Quote: | Coltsfoot contains potentially liver-damaging pyrrolizidine
alkaloids, with much higher levels appearing in the root than in the leaves
or the flowers. Animal studies using amounts of coltsfoot hundreds of
times higher than those used as medicine have shown these alkaloids can
cause cancer in animals.8 A single case of an infant who developed liver
disease and died after the mother drank tea containing coltsfoot during
pregnancy has been reported.9 This eventually led to the banning of
coltsfoot in Germany in 1992. |
The riffling of cards in a single hand (not two hands) suggests a clever
conjurer and his slight-of-hand. The hand is chalk white because it is
death's hand. I am reminded of Wallace Stevens' line from
Sea-Surface Full of Clouds
| Quote: | Beheld the sovereign clouds as jugglery
And the sea as turquoise-turbaned Sambo, neat
At tossing saucers—cloudy-conjuring sea |
furious dabs of tulips stuttering in gardens.
Furious sets the tone of anger.
The artists's dab, like a cook's dash, denotes a minute quantity and
insufficiency of intentionality; a vague afterthought.
What is it that those tulips desire to tell us with such difficulty?
In Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" we read:
| Quote: |
Passing a wolf, a beaver, and a tiger, they came to a wire fence where
ostriches were.
There were six of them. When they caught sight of Tamina and Hugo, they
ran toward them. Now bunched up and pressing against the fence, they
stretched out their long necks, stared, and opened their straight, broad
bills. They opened and closed them feverishly, with unbelievable speed,
as if they were trying to outtalk one another. But these bills were
hopelessly mute, making not the slightest sound...
Tamina gazed bewitched, as the ostriches kept on talking more and more
insistently....
"It was as if they were trying to tell me something very important. But
what? What were they trying to tell me?"
|
Much later in the book, I shall have to search where, a reference is made
to this scene. We realize that for Kundera, the behavior of the ostriches
represents the behavior of the majority of people, mouths moving
constantly, urgently, but saying nothing. The reader is fascinated by the
initial scene with the ostriches, wondering what it might mean and what
Kundera is trying to tell us. We are shocked and amused, much later in
the book, when we realize what it is that Kundera is trying to tell us.
We see an expression of the microcosmic cameo passage in Faulkner's
words:
| Quote: |
"As regards to any specific book, I’m trying primarily to tell a story, in the
most effective way I can think of, the most moving, the most exhaustive.
But I think even that is incidental to what I am trying to do… I am telling
the same story over and over, which is myself and the world. Tom Wolfe
was trying to say everything, the world plus “I” or filtered through “I” or
the effort of “I” to embrace the world in which he was born and walked a
little while and then lay down again, into one volume. I am trying to go a
step further. This I think accounts for what people call the obscurity, the
involved formless “style,” endless sentences. I’m trying to say it all in one
sentence, between one Cap and one period. I’m still trying to put it all, if
possible, on one pinhead. I don’t know how to do it. All I know to do is to
keep on trying in a new way. I’m inclined to think that my material, the
South, is not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and don’t
have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time.
…Art is simpler than people think because there is so little to write about.
All the moving things are eternal in man’s history and have been written
before, and if a man writes hard enough, sincerely enough, humbly
enough, and with the unalterable determination never never never to be
quite satisfied with it, he will repeat them, because art like poverty takes
care of its own, shares its bread." |
Milan Kundera defines a critic as someone who discovers other
people's discoveries.
An eagle is noble, the symbol of churches and nations. A vulture is ignoble
and despised, gracing no flag or carpet. But both eagles and vultures are
flighted scavengers which circle and wait.
Conversation is an art," they say. Reading may be an art or a science
depending upon whether you simply read or read into. When I was a
child, I read as a child; thought as a child; understood as a child. When I
matured, I did not put away childish things, but began to play ruthlessly
with words and ideas. Words are instruments of thought and make a
music more than tinkling symbols and brash prose. Siddhartha upon the
banks learned from a stringed instrument of the middle way that we must
not be too loose or we shall not sound nor yet too tight lest we break.
When we play an instrument just right then we say that it “sounds.” The
sound lurks within, a secret, hidden. When we publish and publicize, it
becomes more secret; more hidden. We supply breath or spirit;
inspiration. A music of the spheres is a circle of fifths on a scale of one to
eight. We play instruments and we play on words. Play is the industry of
childhood and adults are a by-product of concern to environmentalists.
I try to read through this thread from beginning to end each day. My
flights of fancy take a circular path. Vultures such as we must patiently
circle for days or weeks before we can finally land and take a bite from
our corpse or corpus.
Suppose our discussions of literature and authors are like a game. Let's
pretend they are like the game of badminton. How far might we take this
analogy?
The various topics are the birdies, and we swat them back and forth to (or
at) each other across a net which is our theme perhaps.
When I was ten years old, our neighbors set up a badminton net in their
back yard. I watched them playing the game in the traditional fashion. I
decided that there must be a much better way to play the game. I
invented my own game of badminton, a sort of negative badmintion. The
object of my game was to keep the birdie in the air as long as possible.
The first person to cause the birdie to fall to the ground was the loser.
One might only be a real winner as long as the game continued in
progress, and the birdie continued in flight. Now, should we christine our
game of negative badminton as goodminton?
When you are playing traditional badminton, or tennis, or some other such
competitive game, you are playing against your opponent. You attempt to
win by beating or defeating your opponent. When you are playing
goodminton, then the other player is not your opponent, but rather your
partner. Your true opponent becomes yourself, lest you make the wrong
moves and cause the flight of the birdie to cease. This is a game I play by
myself with my flights of fancy.
There are worlds within the words of Annie Proulx and there are other
worlds within me, a particular reader, or in any reader. When she writes
and I read, then, there is a collision of worlds and sparks and smoke
result. At times there may be fire and light.
Let's take a look at the opening pages of Wallace Steven's essays on role
of imagination in art, "The Necessary Angel." (ISBN 0-394-70278-6
Vingate Books)
| Quote: |
In the Phaedrus, Plato speaks of the soul in a figure.
He says:
Let our figure be of a composite nature - a pair of winged horses and a
charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteer of the gods are all
of them noble, and of noble breed, while ours are mixed; and we have a
charioteer who drives them in a pair, and one of them is noble and of
noble origin, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble origin; and, as might
be expected, there is a great deal of trouble in managing them. I will
endeavor to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the
immortal creature. The soul or animate being has the care of the
inanimate, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing; -
when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and is the ruler of the
universe; while the imperfect soul loses her feathers, and drooping in her
flight at last settles on solid ground.
(end of Phaedrus quote)
We recognize at once, in this figure, Plato's pure poetry; and at the same
time we recognize what Coleridge called Plato's dear, gorgeous nonsense.
The truth is that we have scarcely read the passage before we have
identified ourselves with the charioteer, have, in fact, taken his place and,
driving his winged horses, are traversing the whole heaven. Then
suddenly we remember, it may be, that the soul no longer exists and we
droop in our flight and at last settle on the solid ground. The figure
becomes antiquated and rustic.
|
Scales of degree may be recognized in many qualities such as the volume
and pitch of sound, which is sometimes called music, hardness in rocks,
intelligence, temperature, pressure, and so on.
We characterize things as tragic or comic. We place like phenomena side
by side and construct our own scales of measure.
(What follows are some quick notes to myself, to be expanded and
polished later).
It is not surprising if we seek an MCP (microcosmic cameo passage) in
works of literature. After all, we are doing the same thing when we turn
our attention to the nature of space-time and matturgy and seek a GUT
(Grand Universal Theory), a simple formula of relativity or string theory.
The Ashley Book of Knots motif
Speaking of string theory, most chapters in The Shipping
News are headed by illustrations and quotations from The Ashley
Book of Knots.
I feel the urge to give some witty, apocryphal etymology for the word
knot such as "knowing not" how to untie it.
Here is what Clifford W. Ashley says about knots:
| Quote: | To me the simple act of tying a knot is an adventure in unlimited
space. A bit of string affords the dimensional lattitude that is unique
among the entities. For an uncomplicated strand is a palpable object that,
for all practical purposes, possesses one dimension only. If we move a
single strand out of the plane, interlacing at will, actual objects of beauty
result, in what is practically two dimensions; and if we choose to direct our
strand out of this plane, another dimension is added which provides an
opportunity that is limited only by the scope of our own imagery and the
length of a ropemaker's coil.
What could be more wonderful than that? |
node 1572, "a knot or complication," from L. nodus "knot." Originally
borrowed c.1400 in L. form, meaning "lump in the flesh." Meaning "point
of intersection" (originally of planetary orbits with the ecliptic) first
recorded 1665.
knot O.E. cnotta "intertwining of ropes, cords, etc.," from P.Gmc.
*knuttan- (cf. Low Ger. knütte, Du. knot, O.H.G. knoto, Ger. Knoten,
perhaps also O.N. knutr "knot, knob"). Fig. sense of "difficult problem"
was in O.E. (cf. Gordian knot). Symbolic of the bond of wedlock, c.1225.
As an ornament of dress, first attested 1400. Meaning "thickened part or protuberance on tissue of a plant" is from 1398. The nautical unit of
measure (1633) is from the practice of attaching knotted string to the log
line. The ship's speed can be measured by the number of knots that play
out while the sand glass is running.
"The distance between the knots on the log-line should contain 1/120
of a mile, supposing the glass to run exactly half a minute." [Jorge Juan
and Antonio de Ulloa, "A Voyage to South America" 1760]
The verb meaning "to tie in a knot" is from 1547. Knot-hole is from
1726. Knothead "stupid person" is from 1940.
If you enjoy etymologies you may want to visit a handy on-line reference:
http://www.etymonline.com
Well! What can we, the readers, make of all this? What should we
make of all this?
The character Quoyle is certainly described as a large lump of flesh
resembling the Latin etymology of nodus.
P.S. I just now found this link to questions for discussion on The
Shipping News
http://www.simonsays.com/titles/0671510053/RG_0671510053.html
As of this morning, Friday, February 17, 2006, I have read up to page 88
in The Shipping News
I spoke about spectrums and scales and ranges earlier in this post. In
Literature, there is a scale with regard to the implicit, symbolic and
hidden. Perhaps extreme instances of this are denoted by Umberto Eco's
term, semiotics (I must look at it's definition).
Here is an interesting excerpt from one article which defines semiotics:
| Quote: |
An important concept in semiotics is that signs and meaning are unlimited.
Called "unlimited semiosis," this principle makes it clear that one sign or
set of signs can take the place of some other sign or set of signs in a
theoretically infinite process. If this were not possible, then artists would
eventually run out of signs with which to carry meaning, and that would be
the end of art itself.
|
Here is one useful article on semiotics which ends with some curious
statements:
http://www.zhurnal.ru/staff/gorny/english/semiotic.htm
| Quote: |
The pretensions of semiotics to be an universal key lay in the
main-stream of the evolution of Western science (at least, up to recent
times), which has forced out the quality by the quantity, immediate seeing
by "interpretation" of things, loosing its ability of clear vision and proudly
ousting it by the short-sighted dogmas of "positive knowledge". Science is,
of course, of great public benefit. However, as one Indian guru said, "To
think is necessary but not enough. One must know to live also!" Or as one
Russian philosopher said, "Such utterances as 'we live in the world of
signs' or 'man live in the world of signs' are as much unreal as such
utterances as 'man lives in the world of things' or 'man lives in the world
of ideas'. It would be more correct to say that 'man lives in the world
of choice'".
And the last question. Why semiotics is so enduring and attractive? One of
the reasons, I think, is that it makes life more predictable, and,
therefore, more comfortable. It acts as an effective psychological defence
- defence against reality. Reality in its nakedness is too overwhelming
and too dangerous for our limited egos and our cherished "fixed ideas". It
is much easier to deal with it, if first it is reduced to "signs". |
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem01.html
| Quote: | Bricolage, the process of creating something is not a matter of the
calculated choice and use of whatever materials are technically
best-adapted to a clearly predetermined purpose, but rather it involves a
'dialogue with the materials and means of execution' |
Baudelaire wrote:
| Quote: | Correspondences
Nature is a temple where pillars, alive,
Sometimes emit indistinguishable words;
Man passes in there through forests of symbols
Which observe him with familiar looks.
Like lingering echoes that are mingled far off
In a one-ness tenebrous and profound,
Vast as the night and as the light of day,
Fragrances, colors, and sounds correspond.
There are fragrances fresh like the flesh of children,
Sweet like oboes, green like prairies
—, And others, corrupt, rich and triumphant,
Having the expansion of infinite things,
Like ambergris, musk, benjamin, and incense.
Which sing of the transports of mind and sense.
|
Poetry, in its attempt to put beauty into words, is like the attempt of
mathematics to express reality.
If a single integral is an area under a curve, and a double integral is the
volume of a solid, then by analogy and extension, a triple integral must be
the volume of some object in four-space.
The symbols and equations represent the reality as a model of that aspect
of reality towards which they point, just as the poem points to some
aspect of beauty.
We can express mathematically that which we cannot visualize.
We can create a world in which there is a beauty or a love greater than
anything we could experience in the flesh, in reality.
Then, we are wounded by our own creation, since we are exiled from the
picture of a paradise we have painted.
For me, Beauty, like Aristotle's God, is an unmoved mover, but a deity
which is continually begotten by the human mind and imagination.
We human beings have the wonderful and terrible capacity to imagine a
perfection greater than anything which could ever exist; not simply the
best of all possible worlds, but a better than any possible world. This
potency of our imagination is both our blessing and our curse.
What I say to you each day, these thoughts and sentences which drip as
from some alchemist's alembic, drop by drop, day by day, like the
squeezings from some ancient olive press: such thoughts are not my
thoughts in the sense of the me you might sit with at a table and share a
cup or glass. These words are from the virtual self I might have been,
were I to be recast with infinite time and power, and an expansive
consciousness of galactic proportions. The daily me is as mute as those
flowers of Baudelaire. I can only give you familiar glances at the table,
portentous of what I would like to say, but cannot.
It is only through the wine press and alembic of the written word that the
portrait of our virtual self emerges in a painful pointillism of points and
viewpoints, arranged and rearranged upon a canvas stretched, and
framed just in time for our funeral.
I awaken at ungodly hours which such thoughts as these, fleeting, and I
must arise and attempt to capture them in words, or, like timid unicorns
sensing lust, they will elude their author.
There are conversations with the dead which may be overheard only in
seminars with are soliloquies and monologues. There are attentions which
span epochs. Such seminars as these are not infested with the plagues of
ego and sophistry.
A sign or symbol may start out as a euphemism. I am thinking of the
phrase "stem the rose" in Brokeback mountain. "Rose" is most likely a
euphemism for anus. This same euphemism is used by Thomas Pynchon
in Gravity's Rainbow, where it speaks of the "rose bud".
I just now did a string search through the text of BBM on "rose" and "old",
to see if there is any mention of drinking "Old Rose Whiskey", but there is
not. Ang Lee perhaps added that to the movie adaptation of BBM as a
form of humor. By the way, there really is (or was) and Old Rose
Distilling company.
Everything becomes old, eventually, even a rose, even forbidden sexual
intimacy. When hats become old, they are "old hat".
Joyce's Finnegans Wake comes to mind as the most extreme
example of pure esoteric, implicit symbolism, devoid of simple narrative
plot as we understand it. So we might set Finnegans Wake at one
extreme of our esoteric scale. At the opposite extreme is the plain story,
which is all narrative and no symbolism. If I narrate to you some true
event from my life, which has actually happened, in simple, straight
forward language, then we may assume that there are no symbols or
hidden meanings or innuendo. If however, I narrate to you a dream
which I had, then that narrative may contain symbols and hidden
meanings placed their by the subconscious.
I am thinking of the two shirts in Jack's closet in BBM.
Alan Clinton of University of Florida writes:
| Quote: | Pynchon's narrator describes the shirt as having "comic-book
colors"(186), thereby linking the shirt's high visibility to mass media.
Thus, in Gravity's Rainbow characters may appear less than well-rounded,
but Pynchon also makes it clear that, in the novel's world, a shirt is never
just a shirt.
|
Perhaps we might argue that Annie Proulx should be ranked in the genre
of encylopedic narrative along with Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes,
Goethe, Melville, Joyce, and Pynchon.
http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/clinton.html
| Quote: | Edward Mendelson provides a set of criteria for encyclopedic
narratives which extends beyond their exceptional authors:
1) they all include an extensive account of at least one technology or
science;
2) they are an encyclodedia of literary styles;
3) they all provide a history of language (are metalinguistic);
4) they all propose a theory of social organization.
A brief list (both incomplete and debatable in its own right) of postwar
authors who might vie for consideration as "encyclopedic" include Walter
Abish, Kathy Acker, John Barth, Jorges Luis Borges, Octavia Butler,
Douglas Coupland, Evan Dara, Don Delillo, Umberto Eco, Günter Grass,
William Gaddis, William Gibson, Gabriel García Márquez, James A.
Michener, Georges Perec, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Raymond
Queneau, Ishmael Reed, Salman Rushdie, Bob Shacochis, Leslie Marmon
Silko, Phillipe Sollers, William T. Vollman, David Foster Wallace, and
Rebecca West.
|
Proulx certainly seems encylopedic in her motif from the book of knots.
Let us, for convenience sake, refer to our now famous MCP (microcosmic
cameo passage) from chapter 3 of The Shipping News as the
Coltsfoot Passage
The Coltsfoot passage is practically the third paragraph in Chapter 3,
which is an accound of an elderly couple planning their suicide.
BBM centers around homophobia and same-sex romance. TSN (The
Shipping News) has an entirely different focus or center. Let us see if we
put that focus of TSN into words.
(by the way, there is a wonderful photograph of Annie Proulix, standing in
front of a clothes line, at the bottom of this link's page,
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbc...060105/LIFE02/601050320/-1/back01
)
Here is one criticism I encountered while surfing which must be dealt with
at some point:
| Quote: | One annoying habit (actually two annoying habits) Proulx has is
one: not identifying the speaker. After two pages of "he" and "she" the
reader may finally realize who the story is about. Other times, the chapter
may end without any name, and utter confusion. Two: Every ten chapters
or thereabouts Proulx has a "What I See" chapter, which is exactly what
it sounds like. Things the characters see. This is a chance for Proulx to
show off her marvelous description skills, but it can also be tedious.
Especially when most of the rest of the book is description. |
On a more positive note:
| Quote: | I spent the first 55 pages of this novel wondering what could
possibly be interesting about the journalist hero, a failure at everything.
But then, on a long drive with his family and smelly dog, he comes up with
the headline "Dog Farts Fell Family of Four" - and it takes off from
there. |
How much analysis can any given work or author bear?
How much fiction can any reality endure?
Can one abide reality in the absence of all fiction?
I note with some interest that I am not the first to utter "The Shipping
News" and "The Crying of Lot 49" in the same breath:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/10/10/reviews/991010.10steinet.html
| Quote: | The last novel I added to my history was Annie Proulx's ''Shipping
News,'' the story of an extremely unpromising man who becomes, by the
end, something of a hero. He does so not through paroxysms of tortured
irony but through humility, dumb will and fidelity to everyday
responsibility. The book's language begins as boorish as its protagonist,
but stays with him, ending in an inspired, marveling prose -- irony
humanized into a paradoxical hope: ''Water may be older than light,
diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire,
forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the
shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of
knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or
misery.''
Through this lyricism and concern for individual experience, Proulx deals
with existential pain, but differently from the early post-modernists. For
her, the absurdity of life can be met only by the assertion of individual
interest, the same lesson that Pierce Inverarity teaches Oedipa Maas from
the grave in ''The Crying of Lot 49'' -- to keep the ball bouncing, ''to take
on interests.'' For Proulx, however, the appropriate response is not
hyperrationality, paradox and the absurd but a kind of nurturing
steadfastness. She stays with the nonheroic until it is imbued with
grandeur.
- Wendy Steiner, the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and director of
the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania
|
http://academic.reed.edu/english/thesis_titles.html
Thesis Title of a Recent Graduate of Reed College
| Quote: |
Yesica Hurtado
“Gammy Birds”: A Dialogue of Narrative and Nations between E. Annie
Proulx’s “Postcards” and “The Shipping News”
|
I want to search on bricolage. My limited understanding of
the word makes me think of a bird gathering scraps for a nest. I can see
Annie Proulx as such a being, purchasing The Ashly Book of Knots
for twenty five cents at a yard sale and then weaving it into a Pulitzer
prize winning novel.
http://www.spellingbee.com/cc06/Week08/foreign_archive.shtml#bricolage
| Quote: |
bricolage
Definition: construction or something constructed by using whatever
comes to hand
According to French social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the
artist "shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human
life." Levi-Strauss compared this artistic process to the work of a
handyman who solves technical or mechanical problems with whatever
materials are available. He referred to that process of making do as
bricolage, a term derived from the French verb bricoler (meaning "to
putter about") and related to bricoleur, the French name for a
jack-of-all-trades.
Bricolage made its way from French to English in 1966, when
Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind was translated from his native tongue to
ours. Now it is used for everything from the creative uses of leftovers
("culinary bricolage") to the cobbling together of disparate computer parts
("technical bricolage").
|
Quoyle's life certainly sounds like a rich dump-heap ripe with raw
materials for the bricoleur.
The definition of quoyle is a line the ties a boat to a dock. The leftover line
is laid out in a spiral of one layer so it can be walked on if necessary.
There is a very useful review of the movie version of TSN here:
http://www.videovista.net/reviews/july02/shipnews.html
And sparknotes.com has a study guide as well.
From what little I have learned of Annie Proulx through reading, she
strikes me as an independent person of high principles, bent on going her
own way of artistic independence, not to be lured by either fame or
money.
She describes the highly paid speaker invitations as those of trophy
hunters who do not care about her message, or what she stands for, but
only about her fame, making her feel like some piece of meat on a rack.
She seems to choose not to ride out the fame of BBM, but to distance
herself from it so she may get on with other work.
I suppose I would feel that my life has not been lived in vain if Proulx,
Pynchon, and Kundera were to E-mail me and say "Not bad! Not bad!"
Imagine dying and going to heaven, and hearing God say "Not bad! Not
bad!"
"Not bad" can be quite a tribute, coming from the right source.
Here is something very important from sparknotes.com
| Quote: | Proulx seems to be de-privileging sexual orientation as the most
telling part of a person's identity. It is not the one trait that leads a person
to live one kind of lifestyle or another, but for the aunt, it is paradoxically
something everyone understands better not knowing. As long as the aunt
talks about "Warren," Quoyle can identity with her feelings of romantic
love. The aunt suggests that if she said "Irene Warren," Quoyle would not
understand. |
How interesting that Proulx should treat sexual orientation in such a
fashion in TSN, but it becomes such a bombshell of controversy for the
public in BBM.
Here is another great observation from sparknotes.com
| Quote: | The narrative, in the same tradition as Willa Cather or Sarah Orne
Jewett, seeks a story out of a specific geographic place instead of a story
told with a place as backdrop. |
I always thought about a story being placed in a certain geographic
setting. I never thought of a geographic setting as the source and
inspiration for a story.
++++++++++++++++
This is Sunday morning,February 19
Shortly after I awoke, this morning, the thought hit me: Suppose Quoyle
is Newfoundland itself (I mean, symbolically).
I was thinking about how Annie Proulx made all those trips to
Newfoundland, gathering material. The fishing commerce on the verge of
being irrevocably destroyed. The encroachment of modern technology.
Perhaps the modern world sees Newfoundland as homely, ungainly, not
fitting in.
This morning, Monday, February 20th, 2006, I am searching for maps of
Newfoundland, to see whether the outline of the map might in any way be
suggestive of Quoyle's body or face (especially the stress upon the
jutting, shelf-like chin).
During my search, I have found a series of maps of localities in
Newfoundland which may be of interest as one reads The Shipping
News
http://uk.multimap.com/index/CA5.htm
Here is a useful map for my purpose of seeking a characture of Quoyle in
the map's contours.
http://www.sitesatlas.com/Maps/Maps/NF1.htm
++++++++++++++++++++++
It is now 3:30 a.m., Wednesday, February 22,2006.
I had been lying awake for an hour thinking about Annie Proulx, "The
Shipping News", the art of the novel, and, of all things, Somalia. Now, I
dont want to stray too off topic with my mention of Somalia, so I shall
continue by saying that "The Shipping News" seems to have something to
do with existentialism in the sense that Proulx mentions the very
garbage and litter that Quoyle encounters during his outdoor hiking.
Proulx poses for a photograph (quite seductively I might add) in front of a
clothesline filled with laundry. Proulx seems to be able to find a story in
whatever is there, even litter, or litter on a grander scale, if you will, if
you care to think of ecological decay in such terms, the decline of the
fishing industry and a way of life in Newfoundland. Ah, but Quoyle is
forbidden any "Newfie" jokes!
Now, I happened to be looking at the BBC website yesterday, while
searching for the mudslide disaster in the Philippines, when I noticed they
had a link on Africa which led to a link on Somalia, and the lives of
several people in Somalia.
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