Taking the Waters: Abjection and Homecoming in The Shipping News and Death of a River Guide

• Published in: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
• Main Author: Polack, Fiona
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 2006
• Subjects: Clifford; Newfoundland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021989406062920; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0021989406062920

This article compares recent figurations of the Canadian island of Newfoundland with those of the Australian island of Tasmania through close analysis of two significant contemporary novels. It argues that E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News and Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide construct Newfoundland and Tasmania as havens from the disorienting effects of postmodernism. Utilizing a psychoanalytic theoretical frame drawn from Freud’s work on the uncanny and Kristeva’s thesis on abjection, the essay investigates how the two narratives bring their misfit protagonists back to the islands of their forefathers to undergo a traumatic but effective “process” of homecoming. The article concludes, however, that Proulx’s novel, in particular, exemplifies the pitfalls of what James Clifford calls “the symmetry of redemption”.