Deutschlandfunk/Book of the week
Annie Proulx: Aus hartem Holz. Novel. German by Andrea Stumpf and Melanie Walz. Luchterhand 2017, 893 pages, Original: Barkskins, Scribner 2016
Editor: Hubert Winkels
Reviewer Martin Zähringer Copyright Translation Martin Zähringer, only to use on this website
The American writer Annie Proulx, born in Connecticut in 1935, published her first collection of short stories at the age of 53. She received the PEN/Faulkner Award for her first novel „Postcards“ in 1992 (Postcards 1996) and the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her novel „The Shipping News“ in 1993 (Shipping News 1995). Many of her works have been translated into German, most recently three volumes of short stories. In 1998 she received the National Magazine Award and the O. Henry Award for the short story „Brokeback Mountain“.
The story was made famous by a 2-hour film adaptation by Ang Lee: for decades, two homosexual cowboys can only meet in secret in the vast natural landscape of Wyoming; the Wild West is homophobic. In the film, the landscape is a grandiose backdrop and the relationship drama is clearly in the foreground; literarily, the author is concerned with a deeper relationship between man and nature. How she does this on a grand scale can now be explored in the almost 900-page novel „Barkskins“, in German „Aus hartem Holz“.
Martin Zähringer has read the novel for us and sees the themes and issues in the wider context of nature writing. In other words, the lyrical and narrative, scientific, journalistic and artistic discourse on man and nature that has been established in North America since the 17th century. Annie Proulx takes on the history of the North American primeval forests, from the last 300 years to the present day
Author:
The novel begins in 1693, when Charles Duquet from the Parisian slums and René Sel, who worked as a woodworker in the French provinces, emigrate to the colonies. The young men arrive in North America as so-called engagés, where an unspoilt forest area, the French colony of New France, stretches between the Great Lakes and the Acadia Peninsula on the North Atlantic. Here – in what is now the border area between the USA and Canada – Charles and René have to serve their passage with their employer Trépagny, they have to work their way free to get their own piece of land. There is plenty of it, but it needs an axe:
Speaker:
1 „Renè felt the power in this axe, its greedy hunger to bite through everything in its path, so that the juice splashed and white shavings flew away like porcelain splinters. With a sharp stone, he marked the handle with an R, his initial. As he felled trees, the wilderness of the world receded, and the vast invisible web of fibres that connected the lives of men to animals, trees to flesh and bones to grass, trembled each time a tree fell, and one by one the fibres of the web snapped.“
The axe in the forest destroys the fibres of a connecting web, metaphorical references of this kind form a kind of aesthetic compass in the expansive panorama of this novel. Here, in the very first chapter, the message should be unmistakable: don’t expect an epic of the bold pioneer, no neo-pastoral eulogy to Adam and Eve in America, who wrest their agricultural Garden of Eden from wild nature. The main theme is the overexploitation of the primeval forests of North America, illustrated by the example of two families who each participate in it in their own way.
The axe in the network of nature
René, his children and their descendants run the logging business and experience various stages of adaptation to the circumstances as they develop. Without spoiling the suspense, they eventually realise their historical responsibility for the destruction of the forests and become militant environmentalists. But their ancestor René is still undaunted busy laying the foundations for an existence in the colony. Wood is in demand, René toils away, but the work does not bring him any real value:
2 „In its own way, the forest devoured its destroyer, René Sel. The forest was always in front of René. He could not stop hacking away at it, but the countless saplings of tree stumps and intact roots grew vigorously in his face, so that the raising and lowering of his axe became an almost continuous circular motion. New trees seemed to keep appearing on the horizon. He was tormented by the realisation that his countless axe blows could do nothing against the infinite expanse of this prickly crown of the earth.“
René begins with an axe in his hand and will also die with it. He is certainly a hero of labour and conqueror of the jungle, but he becomes significant as the founding figure of a special forest society: his children come from his union with the Mi’kmaw Indian Mari. Mari is a strong woman, she still possesses the ancient knowledge of life in the forest, of the right way to catch eels, of healing with plants, of weaving baskets, of expertly interpreting weather phenomena. In a novel of nature writing, one might well expect the Mi’kmaw woman Mari to be a pioneering symbol of the ecocentric world view. Its principle is that everything is connected to everything else, but in Annie Proulx’s novel the Indians are already history and have given up the leading role, although they still live and fight in the forests and do business with the whites, bad business
In this forest tale, Mari’s children from her relationship with René are the main characters. Involved in their fathers‘ life plan from the very beginning, they fall deeper into the white man’s civilising snare from generation to generation. They usually only find work as woodcutters and raftsmen, constantly sawing at their own branches, because the more wood is harvested, the more settlers build houses and fences, the more forest falls, the more arable land is available. The forest habitat is becoming scarce, however beautiful it may be
3 „After a rainy night, they woke up in a world of glittering spider webs. Heavy mist muffled footsteps and sounds as they moved through the bushes. It was a good morning for hunting, and many more good mornings were to follow. Kuntaw realised that Achille was physically strong, but also strong in his understanding of the invisible forces that bound everything together as one – animals, spirits, people, fish, trees, sea, winter, clouds.“
That would be life in the spirit of Native American philosophy, but the „unity of things“ is fragmented. Original forest dwellers rarely appear on the scene; the Pawnees, the Crew, the Penobscots and even the Mi’kmaw are in retreat. The epic of cosmic unity is broken up into fragments scattered throughout the novel, fragmentary memories of a lumbering society that plays a fatal role in the new economic cycle and has taken its precarious place between cultures.
There will be no return: Achille can still hoist a four-hundred-pound bear onto his back all by himself, but his son Kuntaw can barely manage a canoe in the white water. In winter, the young men go to the logging camps, are proud of the dangerous life and the insane piecework and don’t always get to contribute to the advancement of their community with their wages. Their wives fall into sexual dependencies and the maelstrom of shabby trading posts, marriages are broken before they really begin, family ties are loose and the social fabric is fragile. Meanwhile, the new immigrants from Europe promote the downfall of the disruptive competition with all sordid means and methods; the world view and way of life of the First Nations are alien to them anyway.
Women who marry birds
Annie Proulx stages the hegemonic discourse of the time by drawing on historical documents, but adapting them to fiction. Thus, in the novel we read a letter from the still sensitive missionary Louis-Joseph Crème
4 „They don’t live on a regular schedule like we do. Their rhythm of life follows the times of hunting and ripe berries. One of their strangest peculiarities is the way they regard trees, plants, all kinds of fish, moose and bears and other animals as their equals. Many of their stories are about women who marry otters or birds, or about men who into bears until they want to become human again. In the forest, they talk to toads as if they were acquaintances. Sometimes I feel as if I have to learn from them
But a Catholic missionary does not have to learn from savage heathens, he has to convert them. Towards the end of the novel – and thus at the historical end point of a tragic cultural contact – the children of the Indian woodcutters are not working on his religion, however, but on their life trauma: French missionaries had systematically perpetrated sexual violence on them and alienated them from the last remnants of family solidarity and cultural self-confidence.
In her fiction, the author deals with a real scandal from Canada’s recent history, but ascribes to the missionaries an attitude that is the exact opposite of the Indian and therefore ecocentric view of the world, the anthropocentric principle of the Christian pioneer: subdue the earth. Father Crème puts it like this:
5 „The most deplorable thing is their refusal to realise that the land belongs to him who cultivates it, as we read in the Scriptures. They only fish (the occupation of an idler) and wander about in the forest, where they gather animals and food, but when a white man comes and cuts down the oppressive, overgrown forest, builds a house for his family and shelter for his animals, the Indians complain that he is taking away their land, which they have done nothing to improve, for instead they have allowed more and more trees to overgrow it. They cannot understand that the white man, who fights and labours to put the forest in its place, is exercising his God-given right when he claims the cleared land as his own.“
This is also the political credo of the Puritan settlers who penetrate deeper and deeper into the forests – logging is a God-given right, higher than the treaties between the First Nations and the representatives of the colonial powers. And from the settlers, the loggers of the Sel also learn how white supremacy is justified by racist arrogance
6 „During these encounters, the Sels learnt that they were not Indians, but Métis, or, as one English entrepreneur disparagingly put it, half-breeds. In Maine, their white settler neighbours were confident that they would disappear from the earth.“
A sinful greed for money
As empathetically as the novel depicts the story of the Indian lumberjacks, the contrasting narrative of white America appears ironic. The logging entrepreneurs appear here in their own saga, in a kind of parallel novel, but it is not a dialectical chronicle of the class struggle. The entrepreneurial saga also begins with a mythical founding figure, René Sel’s contemporary Charles Duquet.
Charles Duquet didn’t spend much time with the axe back then as an engagé in New France. In his opinion, his employer treated him improperly and so he rightly left for the deep forests. There, after his first almost fatal failures, he quickly learnt how to cheat his French companions in the fur trade:
7 „He began to buy skins privately; he bribed naive redskins with a few swigs of cheap rum, and, anxious to keep his actions secret from the others, he hid the skins and retrieved them later. He haggled ruthlessly with the Indians, smiling guilelessly at their wild expressions as he traded their heavy bundles of furs for two cubits of cheap cloth and a cup of adulterated whiskey – an incredible profit
Profit is the absolute mantra of Charles Duquet, a figure whose predatory nature seems somewhat exaggerated. But it is a justified literary exaggeration; René Sel, who dies a violent death with an axe in his hand, is also exaggerated as a myth. In a sense, these founding figures are still raw in the equally raw setting of their new environment, while their descendants are more deeply realised as characters and yet are more socially than psychologically drawn. Proulx’s narrative does not focus on individual fate, but always recognises the individual in relation to the social and ecological network. This relationality can be liked or disliked, but at least it makes for a captivating dramaturgy for nature writing. Consequently, the character of Charles Duquet is a grotesque egomaniac:
8 „He only ever talks about his wishes, his plans, his travelling and his money. Anything that goes beyond his personal benefit is largely unknown to him. Yes, I like money too, but not like Duquet. For him, it’s sinful greed. Nothing else matters to him.“
This is how his future father-in-law, a globally experienced wholesaler from Amsterdam, sees him, but he also sees a successful trader who has proven his talent with a risky fur trading coup in China. Duquet has generated solid start-up capital and wants to enter the timber business in the colonies. And he has calculated this market of the future well:
9 „There was one everlasting commodity that was missing in Europe, the forest. Duquet knew as well as anyone that the English settlers in the south made a good living felling pine trees for the masts of the English navy. Could the French not do the same? The forest was unimaginably large and always growing back. It could provide timber and firewood for ships, houses and heating. Profits would never stagnate
This convinces the old Dutchman and his daughter is betrothed, albeit on the condition that she remains in Amsterdam. The former ragamuffin Charles Duquet, who only learnt to read late in life and never had any halfway decent manners, gladly accepts this and rises into high society, gaining a position in the metropolis of European long-distance trade. Duquet really has big plans, he can’t even be content with his own children. The couple adopts three orphan boys so that they can later run the Duquet & Fils branches that have already been planned. Slight doubts creep up on the timber merchant en gros when he returns to the colonies years later and finds huge areas of wasteland:
10 „Fear came over him fleetingly; if miles of forest could be removed so quickly by a few men with axes, was the forest as vulnerable as the beavers? No, the forest came back vigorously, renewing itself from cut stumps, shedding seeds and sending out roots from which new trees sprouted. These forests could not disappear. They were mighty and eternal.“
The North American jungle is immense and eternal, and the irony here is also immense; Duquet & Fils will kill the jungle, decade by decade, a raid that will last for centuries. Grandiose natural landscapes and fascinating forest scenes, which are presented in abundance in this novel, are recognisably narrated from the point of view of the destruction of the primeval forest, the fate of the métis lumberjacks is determined by the ever shrinking habitat, while Duquet & Fils eventually becomes Duke & Sons, a family business on the road to success: With endless square kilometres of forest property, hundreds of sawmills, changing company headquarters in Boston, Detroit and Chicago, a shipyard and railway holdings, even a forest in New Zealand with thousand-year-old Kauri trees and a seed farm in Brazil are all part of it.
All these locations make great stages for a dazzling gallery of characters, but ethically the staff of the Duke & Sons timber company are of a dubious nature. This unsavoury clan keeps 200 enslaved Africans on a plantation in Louisiana, even Native American women perform slave labour in their households, and Duke & Sons is well acquainted with the business of murder. Inevitably almost in the case of the charismatic founder, who has to protect his property from tree thieves in the lawless wilderness, for less pressing reasons – a troublesome husband, unwanted heirs – in the case of his successors
From nature writing to global writing
The morbid and often grotesque has its entertaining qualities, which is one of the reasons why it is so enjoyable to read. Annie Proulx understands the craft of condensed plots and character condensation and develops lively dialogues, initially even adapted to the respective historical epoch or the social setting of the characters. She tones down this naturalism as the story progresses, which is no harm, as the historical diversity of the characters and conflicts makes their verbal uniformity more advantageous. Especially as the story of the two clans is told in two staggered storylines, the chapters of which do not follow the 300 years in chronological order. Even at the level of the plot, the workers‘ narrative and the capitalists‘ saga are not closely linked, and yet it is precisely this daring macro-structure that creates a global perspective. Through this novel, one sees the ecological disaster in the economic process, which is exactly what the critical context of nature writing demands today. The linguistic micro-level remains stylistically influential in this novel, because global spatial depth is also created in vignette-like information of this kind:
11 „A former sailor in his late forties who was missing an eyebrow was one of the four in the camp who could sign his name. He claimed to have travelled distant seas on fifty ships in his younger years, told of elephants and slaves in chains that he had seen before he became a woodcutter.“
Just as inconspicuous are scattered throughout the text: a doctor from India soothing pain with opium; Passamaquoddy Indians enjoying Japanese tea in their rustic pine forest; streams of rum in cheap speakeasies and posh gentlemen’s parlours, rum from the Caribbean, the central hub of the transatlantic triangular trade – and even the crucial start-up capital of the Duke dynasty comes from an American-Dutch-Chinese trade network.
It is this growing economic network of globalisation in which the reader sees the ecological whole disappearing. Now the novel „Barkskins“ does not deal with the issues of overexploitation and sustainability in an outright politicising or obtrusively academic manner. Annie Proulx inscribes human tragedy into natural history with vigour and consistency, turns the North American primeval forests into a memorial to the endangered earth and presents a novel of exemplary importance – especially if you want to follow the eco-critical approach and understand literature itself as an ecological force in a cultural system.