Back To Roots:The Quest Motif In Annie Proulx’s Fiction

Fame came to Annie Proulx relatively late in life. She was already 53 when her first collection of stories was published, and 58 when she won the PEN\Faulkner award as a "new" and first female writer. Yet up to now, she has published eight fictional books which are successful both commercially and academically. Proulx has received various honors for her story-telling artistry. The Shipping News which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award has sent her directly to American literary stardom.Proulx insists that a novel should enable readers to see themselves as living entities in the chaotic and complicated contemporary world. Her writings have exposed the existential predicament of contemporary people living in a post-industrial society:the environment is deteriorating, traditional culture is getting lost and man’s subjectivity becomes unstable and people are relegated to caricatures that fall victims to modernization. Where should man go under such circumstances? How to reconstruct man’s subjectivity? This dissertation tries to interpret Proulx’s deep insight into man’s existential crisis and her quest to find a sustainable way of life, in light of related cultural studies and humanistic geography theories.This dissertation firstly discusses rootlessness of contemporary man. Urbanization and modernization uproot people from their homeland, which leads to place alienation and death of tradition. Along with these rise numerous social ills—dissolving community, alienated and grotesque human beings, as well as man’s indeterminate subjectivity. Such displaced and marginalized characters are often found in Proulx’s fiction. Influenced by French Annales School, Proulx consistently puts her characters against the drastic social and economic changes. Therefore, Proulxian characters find it harder to eke out a living and they are constantly "crashed into the corner" in this chaotic, harsh world. From this peephole, contemporary man’s plight can be seen.Trained as a historian, Proulx seeks remedy for such social ills by questing into the past. Her characters tend to go back to the past and live in their imagination, in order to survive the harsh reality. They attempt to follow the frontiersmen either by staying put on the barren family land or moving from cities to the countryside; they hold on to the traditional folk music as a way to maintain the cultural identity; they insist on living their old way of life by clinging to the traditional food. Proulx believes that understanding history would help people walk out of their plight and solve the social ills. She criticizes those who take a faux attitude towards the past; at the same time, she satirizes those who are obsessive about the past and suggests that they are the modern Don Quixotes acting out the tragedy of Sisyphus. However, such persistence is actually the light that shines through the darkness of their life. During this process, Proulxian characters transcend the gloomy and violent present world, struggle against the predestined fate, and attempt to guard their dignity by guarding the valuable past. Thus, they have endowed their life with meanings. Some characters indeed are transformed during their quest to go back to the past.Involved in the "Back-To-The-Land" movement in 1960s’ America, Proulx also examines the man-place relationship. Like humanistic geographers, Proulx agrees that placelessness or homelessness leads to self-loss. She takes man and place as an inseparable whole, and argues that the existence of human beings depends on place and space. Therefore, questing for an ideal place becomes Proulx’s consistent focus. She, once and again, sets her characters on the way to quest for such an ideal place. Proulx transcends geographical determinism and endows her characters with certain subjectivity. She stresses man’s initiative in the relationship with place. She examines man’s attachment to place, tries to develop man’s sense of place, and advocates forming a real tie between man and place eventually. While she proposes to restore the ecological environment, and reconstruct it to be a more suitable place for man to live in, she even ventures the idea of pastoral utopia in which man and place can cohabit harmoniously.Some critics tend to view her as a pessimist or even a nihilist, but Proulx has proved that she is more than that. Although Proulxian characters are often confronted with hardship and obstacles during their dark journey, a promising future is gradually shown. In such a way, Proulx has pointed out a sustainable way of life for human beings.