Doomed to Swallow Our Own Tails?
In Barkskins (Scribner, 2016), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Annie Proulx introduces readers to two Frenchmen beginning a term of indentured servitude in colonial Canada. One of the men honors an agreement to serve his feudal lord as a “barkskin”, or woodcutter, in exchange for land; the other rejects it and flees into the woods. The novel illustrates how these choices affect each man’s line of descent, from the 1690s through 2013.
In a novel that spans 300 years – and more than 700 pages – there is no single protagonist. Each of the main characters’ descendants has a lively humanity and a compelling story to follow. But the characters are rarely the main event.
Speaking to the Missouri Review in 1999, Proulx clarified how characters fit into her artistic vision: “Characters are made to carry a particular story; that is their work. […] I do not indulge characters nor give them their heads and ‘see where they go’.” She uses characters to draw the reader into a grander narrative of history and place.
This narrative, 10 years in the writing, centers on a forest, which feels as vivid and personal as any of the human characters. It has a mystic quality. Remarking on the infinitude of the forest early in the story, one of the human characters says, “It is the forest of the world. It is infinite. It twists around as a snake swallows its own tail and has no end and no beginning.” The forest entangles itself in the fates of generations of Americans, and we begin to understand the forest as a metonym for wilderness.
Like her “ouroboros forest”, Proulx’s history unfolds in cycles, and by the time readers meet the third-generation descendants, a pattern has emerged: children grow up to make their way in the world, but eventually feel a destructive, futile impulse to go back home. Call the feeling “absent presence”, as when “you pry a sunken stone from the ground the shape of the stone is still there in the hollow.” Their histories stay with them; the mark is indelible.
Much the same as the mark colonists left on America’s boreal forests. Proulx does not mince words. Like one of her characters, she bemoans “the American clear-cut despoliation, the insane wastage” of industrial-era forestry. “Rapine had been a force in the affairs” of American colonization since the beginning. A memorable episode has one elderly father of a lumber company eyeing a tapestry that depicts a hawk diving on a heron. “[His] sympathies lay with the hawk,” as he reads the caption: Exitus in dubio est. Escape is in doubt.
This captures the central concerns of Barkskins – whether we can escape our personal and historical legacies, and whether the wilderness can escape our rapine inclinations. Maybe the absent-presence is too much; we’re doomed to swallow our own tails. And as for the forest, maybe “it was already too late when the first hominid rose up and stared at the world.”
But Barkskins is not just a grand, literary take on The Lorax. Proulx offers more than a simplistic environmental cautionary tale. Her 300-year study of the American character demands a mature reckoning of humans' long relationship with the wilderness. In the end, she asks for something reasonable: to not inflict on our children what our ancestors inflicted on us.
