Summary:
How death signifies a 'retreat from the global', literature assessed includes 'The Shipping News', by Annie Proulx, and advertisements from HSBC bank.
Death and Retreat from the Global by dominique hage
Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, and Seamus Heaney's collection of poems, both consider the theme of death. There are many ways in which death is used in these texts to signify a retreat from the global. Both authors describe deaths which are logically, emotionally, or apparently caused by the effects of global culture - technology, communication, government, etc. In both texts there is an element of assigning blame to the global to signify the retreat, also using death to portray negative aspects of global culture, in particular the global force of economic exchange, and global value versus local value. The commoditisation of people and things, which, in globalisation, replaces personal value. This essay will also describe the way that death has been used in both the texts to show aggression or battle between the global and the local.
One major incident in The Shipping News which expresses the global's (generally economic) value for people and things, is Petal Bear's car crash. Petal, Quoyle's promiscuous, cruel, mercenary, and pretty wife, is found dead in a car crash on an expressway, with her real-estate agent boyfriend. Prior knowledge throughout the text generates a preconceived view that she already symbolises many aspects of the global: her selfishness; her sex appeal; her big city, harsh, fun, and glamorous life ideals, etc. However, this death scene alone places her as showing the unforgiving elements of the global, thus causing Quoyle to retreat from it to the local. From her boyfriend, a realestate agent, turning land into monetary goods; to her car crash on an expressway, this scene represents the global. Even the way she has run off with her boyfriend, speeding down a road with a purse full of money is a plausibly global cliché. The incidents prior to her death - where she sells her two children to a paedophile for seven thousand dollars - represent perfectly, how, in our global culture, people and objects are valued according to their global wealth, whether economic or otherwise. I.e. the children are treated by Petal as resources to sell and make money from; as opposed to Quoyle, who loves both his daughters despite there eccentricities and brattiness.
This issue is less explicitly addressed in Heaney's poems. However he does express a sense that he values those who have passed in a 'local' way. For example, Heaney admires his dead father and grandfather on their personal abilities to dig with talent, persevere, and work hard.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog
Heaney's personal values of the departed express his retreat from the global by embracing the local.
Other references to death continue in the 'retreat from the global' theme. Some do this simply by comparing global-type deaths, to local-type deaths. In The Shipping News global-type deaths include: Petal's car crash, Quoyle's parents double suicide by modern medication, the Vampire Lesbian trial commented on in the Gammy Bird's foreign news (pg. 156), Mrs Melville's murder of her husband to run off with her ship's steward to Hawaii (pg. 288, "I did it for love"). Local-type deaths include: deaths by tuberculosis (pg. 44 "Aunt Eltie. She died of T.B.", pg 181 "Liz was dead of T.B. before the summer."); moose collisions (pg. 87 "Two dead. And the moose"). Most significantly local are the drownings which have affected the whole local community in Newfoundland as an entirety whose history, way of life, and culture is almost inextricably involved with the ocean (pg. 221 "Going out on the sea that claimed his father and grandfather, two brothers, the oldest son, and nearly got the younger?"). The local deaths are noticeably less technological, less controlled and more directly related to the local environment.
While again Heaney doesn't directly compare local deaths to global, one can draw similarities between the deaths in his poetry, and the local deaths from The Shipping News. The major similarity is the connection in local communities between specifically local culture and local death. In, for example, 'The Tollund Man', Heaney shows the man being sacrificed to the soil, the livelihood of that local farming community, with a stomach full of crop-seeds. This draws parallels with the drowning deaths of the fishing community in Newfoundland.
Finally, the deaths in The Shipping News and Heaney's poems insinuate simple aggression between the local and the global. Deaths (of people and ways of life) in The Shipping News, are often blamed by the victims and locals on the global symbols. Quoyle's parents blame their cancers on the nearby power station (pg 18 "The father blamed the power station. Two hundred yards from their house sizzling wires, thick as eels, came down from northern towers."); Samuel Plimsoll's fight against the corporate vessels owners, sacrificing their crews for insurance money (pg. 207), etc.
Heaney refers to the death and aggression between the global and local in his poem 'Requiem for the Croppies':
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August barley grew up out of the grave.
It may be perceived that both these texts express a certain view that the global is a negative force, causing deaths, etc. However it is substantial to note that both Annie Proulx and Seamus Heaney do not glamorise the local in comparison. Both Authors express to the reader that life in the local is hard and harsh, and the deaths there, though different can be equally bitter, grievous, and disturbing.
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