Paper: The Interplay of Hermes & Mnemosyne in “The Shipping News”
Kris Seraphine
Archetypes in Cinema: MS 626, G-II
Ginette Paris, Ph.D.
Summer 2004
The Interplay of Hermes & Mnemosyne in “The Shipping News”
The opening images in the film “The Shipping News” impress the heaviness of sinking and drowning into the viewer’s psyche. A young boy’s father pushes him into a lake to teach him how to swim. At first he struggles to stay at the surface of the water, but then relents and sinks down underneath. Strangely, once underwater the young boy, who calls himself “Quoyle” (his last name), seems to float effortlessly with gentle undulations as if he is hovering in the air. His eyes are open, his face peaceful, no longer grimacing in fear as he had been while splashing and sputtering on the surface of the lake.
Water and drowning are presences returned to throughout the film, as both dream and memory sequences. This is a film about an outer world journey over and within water to return to the ancestral home, as well as an inner journey to retrieve the lost self by releasing the soul buried deep underneath memories of the past.
Many archetypes materialize in this film. “The Shipping News” possesses an epic sensibility in which many gods and goddesses make their presence known. The film mythically ties into The Odyssey and many of its mythological figures, including Odysseus, Poseidon, and Calypso. However, the archetypal energies of Hermes and his second mother (Illich 33) Mnemosyne direct the movement of the film from behind-the-scenes.
[Chapter 1, 1:30 - 4:00] Boy Sent Plunging into the Depths
Quoyle remembers the drowning event from childhood as “the first of many failures,” and as such, his soul remains in the dark, cold depths, unattainable, unreachable. Poseidon was thrown into the ocean after his birth by his father Cronos (Grant & Hazel 280) and Uranos threw his Titan children into Tartarus, the depths of Hades (Guggenbühl-Craig 23). Quoyle fears the water and the watery element of emotions–both are dangerous and are mythically linked to the god Poseidon, “Odysseus’ elemental enemy” (Adorno 309).
The father is cast in a sinister light. Quoyle looks up from the bottom of the lake and sees the watery silhouette of his father above, the glaring sun filtering through the water’s refraction. The sun is reminiscent of Odysseus’ conflict with Helios, the sun god, in The Odyssey. After being warned by Circe and Tiresias in Hades not to harm the cattle of Helios, Odysseus’ men still slaughter them, bringing wrath and death upon them all. Odysseus is punished for a crime he didn’t commit, and consequently is kept away even longer from his home, Ithaca.
The urge to return to the ancestral home–over water– is a major theme in both “The Shipping News” and The Odyssey. Quoyle intuits that he doesn’t belong to his family and desires a connection to his true people; wherever they are, this is home. “I used to imagine that I’d been given to the wrong family at birth. Somewhere in the world, my real people longed for me.”
Hermes is Odysseus' great-grandfather and frequently aids the hero in his quest to return home. Hermes is a guiding force and transformative element initiating Quoyle into uncharted areas of his psyche: “a place of radical change through descent, through immersion and submersion in the inner, underworld of emotions, of personal and mythic memory” (Meade 173).
[Chapter 1, 4:11-7:20] An Invitation that Leads to Entrapment
Quoyle’s expressionless face after his frightening initiation into the watery underworld pervades much of the film. His day to day existence is dull and dreary: “I stumbled into adulthood learning to separate my feelings from my life.” Being completely detached from his emotions, his soul is thirsting for the waters of life.
Quoyle is a bored ink setter at the Poughkeepsie News whom no one notices or cares about–“I got used to being invisible.” Quoyle has been immersed in the river of Lethe; the dark, slow-flowing waters of forgetfulness: “the water has the power to strip those who cross it of memories that attach them to life” (Illich 30). He is a ghost, a shade, wandering through life sad and alone.
Fatefully, he is noticed by a woman. The most beautiful, sensual, sexual being he has ever seen. Petal has all the Aphroditic qualities to seduce Quoyle, and to awaken his dormant sexuality for the first time in his life. Petal’s true character is quickly revealed to be devouring and dark, much like his father. Although she repeatedly beats him down verbally and emotionally, Quoyle is drawn into a seven-year relationship.
Like the memory of his father pushing him into the dark waters, Quoyle’s relationship with Petal keeps him from experiencing his true self. In Book V of The Odyssey, Odysseus laments his fate on Ogygia imprisoned by the beautiful nymph Calypso. Acting as Zeus’ emissary, Hermes travels over the ocean, into the cave of Calypso, entreating her to release Odysseus. He doesn’t find Odysseus in the cave with the goddess:
The man was weeping, seated on the beach where he had been before,
Shattering his heart with tears and laments and groans.
He was looking out on the barren sea, shedding tears. (Od. 5. 82-84)
Similar to Odysseus’ plight, Quoyle is stuck in Petal’s calypsonic world of timelessness and placelessness for seven years. His story is waiting somewhere out in the world and he needs to remember in order to return to his true home, his true self.
The name “Calypso” in Greek comes from the word kaluptein , to conceal, to cover. Derivatives include the words “hell”, “a covered place”, “the underworld.” Calypso, a divine and demonic presence, represents both the psychological and geographical space of the underworld, its forgetfulness, its concealment.
Such are the dead in their “hiddenness”; and this being hidden is the “fields” or the “house” of Lethe. Both of these mythological images, house and fields, are well suited for this no-longer-flowing condition which for the dead- of more especially for their former Gestalt-represents finality. (Kerényi 121)
Kerényi goes on to describe how in Orphic religion there are two springs that flow very close to one another–Mnemosyne and Lethe, memory and forgetfulness. The Greek word “Lethe” not only means “being hidden” and “to hide oneself,” but it also signifies “not noticing what is hidden” (Kerényi 121).
This action of storying and thereby storing one’s history, be it personal or collective, may be, within the epic tradition, the surest safeguard against the onset of a cultural amnesia that threatens the existence of the goddess Mnemosyne herself. (Slattery 331)
In the modern world of the written word, Mnemosyne has been forsaken and mostly mistaken with a concrete image of a fact bank. “Memory is not merely the repository of experience but the constructive activity that creates our sense of time as a sequence of events and forms our sense of order” (Austin 396).
The philandering Petal abuses Quoyle continually and ignores their child Bunny. Quoyle lapses back into his deathlike, invisible existence, in which he feels no self-love or self-respect. He imagines himself drowning in his own bedroom. He wants to forget everything [Chapter 3, 1:30-1:38].
[Chapter 3, 3:25 - 4:20, Chapter 4, 00:00-4:10] The Breakthrough
In a matter of twenty-four hours, Quoyle learns that his father and mother have committed suicide; Petal kidnapped Bunny and sold her to a black market adoption outfit and has been killed in a car accident when her boyfriend drove off of a bridge into the ocean.
For the first time in many years, Quoyle weeps. The breakdown of his life leads to a breakthrough of his emotions. Fortunately, his father’s sister Agnis has come to visit her brother’s ashes, or actually to steal them, and she talks Quoyle into moving back to his ancestral home in New Foundland, “What place on earth could be better than the place your people came from?” Like Hermes, Agnis has the transformative energy of a trickster and connects Quoyle to his ancestral wisdom, to Mnemosyne, Goddess Memory.
Mnemosyne is a Titanid, and the mother of the Muses. “What bubbles up from Mnemosyne is “thought” and “verse” and “remembrance” in a connection so close as to be understood, of necessity, as the muses’ song” (Illich 33). She adopts Hermes and provides him with the gifts of lyre and soul.
Hermes is a complex deity known by many names: Messenger of the Gods, God of Liars and Thieves, and Psychopomp, guide of souls into the underworld, to name only a few. Hermes is a master of narrative and storytelling, communications over borders and on the computer. And in the Homeric Hymns, Hermes is recounted as the follower of Mnemosyne:
And the first of the gods
that he commemorated with his song
was Mnemosyne, Mother of Muses,
for the son of Maia
was a follower of hers. (Paris 84)
Hermes also represents an aspect of the motif of hiddenness because his invisibility cap allows him to travel unseen.
With Agnis’ (and the unseen Hermes’) assistance, Quoyle opens up to change, transformation, and most importantly to human connections. Through working as a reporter he learns how to spin a yarn, tell a tale that goes beyond reporting the facts. He practices the art of communication and becomes more like Odysseus, “the man of many turns.” Both Odysseus and Quoyle have their own stories to remember and pass on, despite the pain associated with their memories.
There is no one story in which we can take up residence, living it out and learning all about it. Instead we wander like Ulysses from place to place, story to story, trying to find home. (Meade 297)
[Chapter 4, 2:24-7:05] Homecoming
Agnis describes her birthplace as a dwelling place of “omens, restless spirits, magic.” After traveling in a ferry over the ocean, Quoyle, Bunny and Agnis reach the old family home. The house has been empty for forty-four years, rocked daily by strong gales, yet it still stands. Surrounded by mist and standing alone on a rocky cliff overlooking the ocean, the house casts an ominous personage of ghosts of the Quoyle family past, soon to be discovered by Quoyle and Bunny.
They enter the ancestral home and it is in an unlivable state of disrepair and decay. When Agnis states, “it’s all fixable,” she is not only speaking of the house, but of her own painful past as well as Quoyle’s and Bunny’s. Through a dream sequence, Quoyle revisits his memory of drowning and finds a new ghost has worked its way into his psyche: he dreams of a lifeless Petal being dragged to the surface. She opens her eyes, gasping for air. She has not left and will not yet be forgotten.
The house is a repository for the family history, its memories and secrets. At night, Bunny hears the house moaning. The cables holding it down are being stretched to the limit and appear to be ready to snap at any moment. Her apparent psychic and intuitive abilities allow her to be empathetic to the house, which she senses is trapped, bound to memories of the past, just as she, Quoyle and Agnis are. “The house is sad. You should let it loose.” Again, the house parallels the image of a weeping Odysseus wishing for his release from the island of Ogygia. The only way out of Calypso’s cave is to go deeper within, spiraling backwards to connect with the past.
Old cousin Nolan, whom Bunny mistakes for a ghost, keeps leaving pieces of rope with magical knots on the doorstep to protect Agnis, Bunny and Quoyle from the evil in the house. Elsewhere in the film, Hermes is hidden within images of tying and untying knots in shipping rope symbolize binding and unbinding secrets, memories, emotions. “Hermes is literally the God of keys and doors, of fishing nets and fishhooks” (Paris 106).
[Chapter 6, 2:00- 5:40] Quoyle Finds his Muse and his Voice
After landing a job at the local newspaper, The Gammy Bird, he continues to face the specter of his past. He initially is hired to cover auto accidents in the area, bringing him too close for comfort to his freshest psychic wound, Petal’s death by car crash. His two cohorts at the newspaper help him learn to write in the style expected of a reporter, counteracting the insults and oppression of the paper’s managing editor, Tert Card. Billy Pretty, tells Quoyle that to be a good reporter is, “Finding the center of your story, the beating heart of it.” Billy is not only giving sound career advice, he is explaining how to be alive. Go within and find the center, the self, here lies the lifeblood of the soul.
Finally, after writing an intriguing feature about Hitler’s boat, Quoyle’s boss Jack notices him and orders Tert to obtain a computer for him–he no longer needs the old typewriter and can finally claim his own space. Quoyle walks over to Tert and says “I.B.M., I.B.M.” Underneath this line in the script lies the bold, empowering statement, “I am, I exist.”
[Chapter 14, :53-5:08] Resurrecting Ghosts
Quoyle follows cousin Nolan and learns the secret that his aunt Agnis has been holding onto since age 12; she was raped by her older brother, Quoyle’s father, and became pregnant. Agnis is also on a journey to make peace with her past. When she finds out the Quoyle knows, as well as cousin Nolan, about her rape she is released from the burden of holding onto her shameful secret. It’s as if hearing your own story through another’s narration brings up the emotions tied to the event and heals the wound. Mnemosyne heals the psyche through the spoken verse, weaving all the threads of a life story together into a beautiful tapestry.
Quoyle meets an intelligent, beautiful woman, the widow Wavey Prowse. Her husband was drowned at sea, leaving her to raise their son alone. As much as he wants to open up to her and fall in love, he still is tied to the ghost of Petal; when they kiss, he opens his eyes and sees his dead wife smiling back at him. But, like Agnis, Wavey also has a secret and Quoyle confronts her directly (while drunk and out of control) with the question, “When were you going to tell me about your fucked up marriage?” [Chapter 15, 3:20-6:50] She admits her husband didn’t die; he left her after eight months of pregnancy and ran off with a fourteen year-old girl. In rage and despair she sunk his boat and made up a story that he drowned at sea in order to conceal her shame.
[Chapter 16, 00:00-5:10] Release from the Past
A huge storm rolls into the seaside town effectively opening up and transforming all of the characters. Stormy weather is brought on by the god Poseidon when he is angered; just as any other god or goddess in Greek and Roman mythology, if he is not given his hecatombs, his due, he flares up destructively, shattering anything in his path. When emotions are withheld for too long, Poseidon’s power is not being respected. Eventually there will be an explosion to release the clogged emotions, allowing the ocean of feelings to flow once more. Quoyle dreams that he falls into the water, but this time he swims to the surface and takes a large gulp of air. He has finally released himself from the binding nightmares of his father and Petal and he immediately jumps in his car to go to his love, Wavey.
Bunny astrally travels in the spirit world to the old house and watches as the storm tears it apart. First the wind pulls away the cables binding the house to the cliff and then the walls come down, popping out doors and windows. The spell has been broken, the curse of the Quoyle family is undone.
[Chapter 17, 1:00-3:50, 5:10-5:25] The Not Dead Reawaken
The one casualty of the ferocious storm is Quoyle’s boss Jack. The whole town is attending his wake–all of a sudden he wakes up from a coma and stuns everyone. Bunny is overjoyed and tells her father that she wants to have a wake for her mother, Petal. Quoyle has to tell her he lied to her about Petal being asleep. “Petal is dead.” Both Quoyle and Bunny had been keeping her on life support in a comatose, Lethe-like sleep. Now that they have faced the reality of her death, they can rise up from their trip to Hades, the underworld, and at the same time leave behind the dead in the underworld where they belong.
At last Quoyle has recovered his lost soul. “If a piece of knotted string can unleash the wind and a drowned man can awaken, then I believe a broken man can heal.” Hermes and Mnemosyne worked conjointly to help Quoyle “revision” his life; first by Hermes guiding him to the place where, through the poesis of Mnemosyne, he could re-member his story.
Works Cited
Adorno, T.W. “Odysseus, or Mythos and Enlightenment.” The Odyssey. Trans. Albert Cook. New York: Norton, 1993. 307-313.
Austin, Norman. “Intimations of Order.” The Odyssey. Trans. Albert Cook. New York: Norton, 1993. 391-402.
Encyclopedia Mythica. 24 August 2004..
Grant, Michael, and John Hazel. Who’s Who in Classical Mythology. Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 1993.
Guggenbühl-Craig, Adolf, Sidney Handel, and Gary V. Hartman. From the Wrong Side: A Paradoxical Approach to Psychology. Woodstock, Conn.: Spring Publications, 1995, 23-38.
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Albert Cook. New York: Norton, 1993. 3-268.
Illich, Ivan. H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985.
Kerényi, Karl. “Mnemosyne-Lesmosyne: On the springs of ‘memory’ and ‘forgetting’.” Spring 1 (1977): 120-130.
Meade, Michael. Men and the Water of Life. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993.
Paris, Ginette. Pagan Grace: Dionysos, Hermes, and Goddess Memory in Daily Life. Trans. Joanna Mott. 2nd ed. Putnam: Spring Publications, 2003.
The Shipping News. Dir. Lasse Hallstrom. Perf. Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett and Scott Glen. Miramax, 2001.
Slattery, Dennis. “The Narrative Play of Memory in Epic.” The Epic Cosmos. Ed. Larry Allums and Louise Cowan. Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 2000. 331-352.
Appendix
Plot Outline
An emotionally-beaten man with his young daughter moves to his ancestral home in Newfoundland to reclaim his life.
Plot Summary for Shipping News, The (2001)
An inksetter in New York, Quoyle returns to his family's longtime home, a small fishing town in Newfoundland, with his young daughter, after a traumatizing experience with her mother, Petal, who sold her to an illegal adoption agency. Though Quoyle has had little success thus far in life, his shipping news column in the newspaper "The Gammy Bird" finds an audience, and his experiences in the town change his life. Then he meets the widow Wavey...
(From IMBD.com, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120824/)
Archetypes in Cinema: MS 626, G-II
Ginette Paris, Ph.D.
Summer 2004
The Interplay of Hermes & Mnemosyne in “The Shipping News”
The opening images in the film “The Shipping News” impress the heaviness of sinking and drowning into the viewer’s psyche. A young boy’s father pushes him into a lake to teach him how to swim. At first he struggles to stay at the surface of the water, but then relents and sinks down underneath. Strangely, once underwater the young boy, who calls himself “Quoyle” (his last name), seems to float effortlessly with gentle undulations as if he is hovering in the air. His eyes are open, his face peaceful, no longer grimacing in fear as he had been while splashing and sputtering on the surface of the lake.
Water and drowning are presences returned to throughout the film, as both dream and memory sequences. This is a film about an outer world journey over and within water to return to the ancestral home, as well as an inner journey to retrieve the lost self by releasing the soul buried deep underneath memories of the past.
Many archetypes materialize in this film. “The Shipping News” possesses an epic sensibility in which many gods and goddesses make their presence known. The film mythically ties into The Odyssey and many of its mythological figures, including Odysseus, Poseidon, and Calypso. However, the archetypal energies of Hermes and his second mother (Illich 33) Mnemosyne direct the movement of the film from behind-the-scenes.
[Chapter 1, 1:30 - 4:00] Boy Sent Plunging into the Depths
Quoyle remembers the drowning event from childhood as “the first of many failures,” and as such, his soul remains in the dark, cold depths, unattainable, unreachable. Poseidon was thrown into the ocean after his birth by his father Cronos (Grant & Hazel 280) and Uranos threw his Titan children into Tartarus, the depths of Hades (Guggenbühl-Craig 23). Quoyle fears the water and the watery element of emotions–both are dangerous and are mythically linked to the god Poseidon, “Odysseus’ elemental enemy” (Adorno 309).
The father is cast in a sinister light. Quoyle looks up from the bottom of the lake and sees the watery silhouette of his father above, the glaring sun filtering through the water’s refraction. The sun is reminiscent of Odysseus’ conflict with Helios, the sun god, in The Odyssey. After being warned by Circe and Tiresias in Hades not to harm the cattle of Helios, Odysseus’ men still slaughter them, bringing wrath and death upon them all. Odysseus is punished for a crime he didn’t commit, and consequently is kept away even longer from his home, Ithaca.
The urge to return to the ancestral home–over water– is a major theme in both “The Shipping News” and The Odyssey. Quoyle intuits that he doesn’t belong to his family and desires a connection to his true people; wherever they are, this is home. “I used to imagine that I’d been given to the wrong family at birth. Somewhere in the world, my real people longed for me.”
Hermes is Odysseus' great-grandfather and frequently aids the hero in his quest to return home. Hermes is a guiding force and transformative element initiating Quoyle into uncharted areas of his psyche: “a place of radical change through descent, through immersion and submersion in the inner, underworld of emotions, of personal and mythic memory” (Meade 173).
[Chapter 1, 4:11-7:20] An Invitation that Leads to Entrapment
Quoyle’s expressionless face after his frightening initiation into the watery underworld pervades much of the film. His day to day existence is dull and dreary: “I stumbled into adulthood learning to separate my feelings from my life.” Being completely detached from his emotions, his soul is thirsting for the waters of life.
Quoyle is a bored ink setter at the Poughkeepsie News whom no one notices or cares about–“I got used to being invisible.” Quoyle has been immersed in the river of Lethe; the dark, slow-flowing waters of forgetfulness: “the water has the power to strip those who cross it of memories that attach them to life” (Illich 30). He is a ghost, a shade, wandering through life sad and alone.
Fatefully, he is noticed by a woman. The most beautiful, sensual, sexual being he has ever seen. Petal has all the Aphroditic qualities to seduce Quoyle, and to awaken his dormant sexuality for the first time in his life. Petal’s true character is quickly revealed to be devouring and dark, much like his father. Although she repeatedly beats him down verbally and emotionally, Quoyle is drawn into a seven-year relationship.
Like the memory of his father pushing him into the dark waters, Quoyle’s relationship with Petal keeps him from experiencing his true self. In Book V of The Odyssey, Odysseus laments his fate on Ogygia imprisoned by the beautiful nymph Calypso. Acting as Zeus’ emissary, Hermes travels over the ocean, into the cave of Calypso, entreating her to release Odysseus. He doesn’t find Odysseus in the cave with the goddess:
The man was weeping, seated on the beach where he had been before,
Shattering his heart with tears and laments and groans.
He was looking out on the barren sea, shedding tears. (Od. 5. 82-84)
Similar to Odysseus’ plight, Quoyle is stuck in Petal’s calypsonic world of timelessness and placelessness for seven years. His story is waiting somewhere out in the world and he needs to remember in order to return to his true home, his true self.
The name “Calypso” in Greek comes from the word kaluptein , to conceal, to cover. Derivatives include the words “hell”, “a covered place”, “the underworld.” Calypso, a divine and demonic presence, represents both the psychological and geographical space of the underworld, its forgetfulness, its concealment.
Such are the dead in their “hiddenness”; and this being hidden is the “fields” or the “house” of Lethe. Both of these mythological images, house and fields, are well suited for this no-longer-flowing condition which for the dead- of more especially for their former Gestalt-represents finality. (Kerényi 121)
Kerényi goes on to describe how in Orphic religion there are two springs that flow very close to one another–Mnemosyne and Lethe, memory and forgetfulness. The Greek word “Lethe” not only means “being hidden” and “to hide oneself,” but it also signifies “not noticing what is hidden” (Kerényi 121).
This action of storying and thereby storing one’s history, be it personal or collective, may be, within the epic tradition, the surest safeguard against the onset of a cultural amnesia that threatens the existence of the goddess Mnemosyne herself. (Slattery 331)
In the modern world of the written word, Mnemosyne has been forsaken and mostly mistaken with a concrete image of a fact bank. “Memory is not merely the repository of experience but the constructive activity that creates our sense of time as a sequence of events and forms our sense of order” (Austin 396).
The philandering Petal abuses Quoyle continually and ignores their child Bunny. Quoyle lapses back into his deathlike, invisible existence, in which he feels no self-love or self-respect. He imagines himself drowning in his own bedroom. He wants to forget everything [Chapter 3, 1:30-1:38].
[Chapter 3, 3:25 - 4:20, Chapter 4, 00:00-4:10] The Breakthrough
In a matter of twenty-four hours, Quoyle learns that his father and mother have committed suicide; Petal kidnapped Bunny and sold her to a black market adoption outfit and has been killed in a car accident when her boyfriend drove off of a bridge into the ocean.
For the first time in many years, Quoyle weeps. The breakdown of his life leads to a breakthrough of his emotions. Fortunately, his father’s sister Agnis has come to visit her brother’s ashes, or actually to steal them, and she talks Quoyle into moving back to his ancestral home in New Foundland, “What place on earth could be better than the place your people came from?” Like Hermes, Agnis has the transformative energy of a trickster and connects Quoyle to his ancestral wisdom, to Mnemosyne, Goddess Memory.
Mnemosyne is a Titanid, and the mother of the Muses. “What bubbles up from Mnemosyne is “thought” and “verse” and “remembrance” in a connection so close as to be understood, of necessity, as the muses’ song” (Illich 33). She adopts Hermes and provides him with the gifts of lyre and soul.
Hermes is a complex deity known by many names: Messenger of the Gods, God of Liars and Thieves, and Psychopomp, guide of souls into the underworld, to name only a few. Hermes is a master of narrative and storytelling, communications over borders and on the computer. And in the Homeric Hymns, Hermes is recounted as the follower of Mnemosyne:
And the first of the gods
that he commemorated with his song
was Mnemosyne, Mother of Muses,
for the son of Maia
was a follower of hers. (Paris 84)
Hermes also represents an aspect of the motif of hiddenness because his invisibility cap allows him to travel unseen.
With Agnis’ (and the unseen Hermes’) assistance, Quoyle opens up to change, transformation, and most importantly to human connections. Through working as a reporter he learns how to spin a yarn, tell a tale that goes beyond reporting the facts. He practices the art of communication and becomes more like Odysseus, “the man of many turns.” Both Odysseus and Quoyle have their own stories to remember and pass on, despite the pain associated with their memories.
There is no one story in which we can take up residence, living it out and learning all about it. Instead we wander like Ulysses from place to place, story to story, trying to find home. (Meade 297)
[Chapter 4, 2:24-7:05] Homecoming
Agnis describes her birthplace as a dwelling place of “omens, restless spirits, magic.” After traveling in a ferry over the ocean, Quoyle, Bunny and Agnis reach the old family home. The house has been empty for forty-four years, rocked daily by strong gales, yet it still stands. Surrounded by mist and standing alone on a rocky cliff overlooking the ocean, the house casts an ominous personage of ghosts of the Quoyle family past, soon to be discovered by Quoyle and Bunny.
They enter the ancestral home and it is in an unlivable state of disrepair and decay. When Agnis states, “it’s all fixable,” she is not only speaking of the house, but of her own painful past as well as Quoyle’s and Bunny’s. Through a dream sequence, Quoyle revisits his memory of drowning and finds a new ghost has worked its way into his psyche: he dreams of a lifeless Petal being dragged to the surface. She opens her eyes, gasping for air. She has not left and will not yet be forgotten.
The house is a repository for the family history, its memories and secrets. At night, Bunny hears the house moaning. The cables holding it down are being stretched to the limit and appear to be ready to snap at any moment. Her apparent psychic and intuitive abilities allow her to be empathetic to the house, which she senses is trapped, bound to memories of the past, just as she, Quoyle and Agnis are. “The house is sad. You should let it loose.” Again, the house parallels the image of a weeping Odysseus wishing for his release from the island of Ogygia. The only way out of Calypso’s cave is to go deeper within, spiraling backwards to connect with the past.
Old cousin Nolan, whom Bunny mistakes for a ghost, keeps leaving pieces of rope with magical knots on the doorstep to protect Agnis, Bunny and Quoyle from the evil in the house. Elsewhere in the film, Hermes is hidden within images of tying and untying knots in shipping rope symbolize binding and unbinding secrets, memories, emotions. “Hermes is literally the God of keys and doors, of fishing nets and fishhooks” (Paris 106).
[Chapter 6, 2:00- 5:40] Quoyle Finds his Muse and his Voice
After landing a job at the local newspaper, The Gammy Bird, he continues to face the specter of his past. He initially is hired to cover auto accidents in the area, bringing him too close for comfort to his freshest psychic wound, Petal’s death by car crash. His two cohorts at the newspaper help him learn to write in the style expected of a reporter, counteracting the insults and oppression of the paper’s managing editor, Tert Card. Billy Pretty, tells Quoyle that to be a good reporter is, “Finding the center of your story, the beating heart of it.” Billy is not only giving sound career advice, he is explaining how to be alive. Go within and find the center, the self, here lies the lifeblood of the soul.
Finally, after writing an intriguing feature about Hitler’s boat, Quoyle’s boss Jack notices him and orders Tert to obtain a computer for him–he no longer needs the old typewriter and can finally claim his own space. Quoyle walks over to Tert and says “I.B.M., I.B.M.” Underneath this line in the script lies the bold, empowering statement, “I am, I exist.”
[Chapter 14, :53-5:08] Resurrecting Ghosts
Quoyle follows cousin Nolan and learns the secret that his aunt Agnis has been holding onto since age 12; she was raped by her older brother, Quoyle’s father, and became pregnant. Agnis is also on a journey to make peace with her past. When she finds out the Quoyle knows, as well as cousin Nolan, about her rape she is released from the burden of holding onto her shameful secret. It’s as if hearing your own story through another’s narration brings up the emotions tied to the event and heals the wound. Mnemosyne heals the psyche through the spoken verse, weaving all the threads of a life story together into a beautiful tapestry.
Quoyle meets an intelligent, beautiful woman, the widow Wavey Prowse. Her husband was drowned at sea, leaving her to raise their son alone. As much as he wants to open up to her and fall in love, he still is tied to the ghost of Petal; when they kiss, he opens his eyes and sees his dead wife smiling back at him. But, like Agnis, Wavey also has a secret and Quoyle confronts her directly (while drunk and out of control) with the question, “When were you going to tell me about your fucked up marriage?” [Chapter 15, 3:20-6:50] She admits her husband didn’t die; he left her after eight months of pregnancy and ran off with a fourteen year-old girl. In rage and despair she sunk his boat and made up a story that he drowned at sea in order to conceal her shame.
[Chapter 16, 00:00-5:10] Release from the Past
A huge storm rolls into the seaside town effectively opening up and transforming all of the characters. Stormy weather is brought on by the god Poseidon when he is angered; just as any other god or goddess in Greek and Roman mythology, if he is not given his hecatombs, his due, he flares up destructively, shattering anything in his path. When emotions are withheld for too long, Poseidon’s power is not being respected. Eventually there will be an explosion to release the clogged emotions, allowing the ocean of feelings to flow once more. Quoyle dreams that he falls into the water, but this time he swims to the surface and takes a large gulp of air. He has finally released himself from the binding nightmares of his father and Petal and he immediately jumps in his car to go to his love, Wavey.
Bunny astrally travels in the spirit world to the old house and watches as the storm tears it apart. First the wind pulls away the cables binding the house to the cliff and then the walls come down, popping out doors and windows. The spell has been broken, the curse of the Quoyle family is undone.
[Chapter 17, 1:00-3:50, 5:10-5:25] The Not Dead Reawaken
The one casualty of the ferocious storm is Quoyle’s boss Jack. The whole town is attending his wake–all of a sudden he wakes up from a coma and stuns everyone. Bunny is overjoyed and tells her father that she wants to have a wake for her mother, Petal. Quoyle has to tell her he lied to her about Petal being asleep. “Petal is dead.” Both Quoyle and Bunny had been keeping her on life support in a comatose, Lethe-like sleep. Now that they have faced the reality of her death, they can rise up from their trip to Hades, the underworld, and at the same time leave behind the dead in the underworld where they belong.
At last Quoyle has recovered his lost soul. “If a piece of knotted string can unleash the wind and a drowned man can awaken, then I believe a broken man can heal.” Hermes and Mnemosyne worked conjointly to help Quoyle “revision” his life; first by Hermes guiding him to the place where, through the poesis of Mnemosyne, he could re-member his story.
Works Cited
Adorno, T.W. “Odysseus, or Mythos and Enlightenment.” The Odyssey. Trans. Albert Cook. New York: Norton, 1993. 307-313.
Austin, Norman. “Intimations of Order.” The Odyssey. Trans. Albert Cook. New York: Norton, 1993. 391-402.
Encyclopedia Mythica. 24 August 2004.
Grant, Michael, and John Hazel. Who’s Who in Classical Mythology. Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 1993.
Guggenbühl-Craig, Adolf, Sidney Handel, and Gary V. Hartman. From the Wrong Side: A Paradoxical Approach to Psychology. Woodstock, Conn.: Spring Publications, 1995, 23-38.
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Albert Cook. New York: Norton, 1993. 3-268.
Illich, Ivan. H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985.
Kerényi, Karl. “Mnemosyne-Lesmosyne: On the springs of ‘memory’ and ‘forgetting’.” Spring 1 (1977): 120-130.
Meade, Michael. Men and the Water of Life. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993.
Paris, Ginette. Pagan Grace: Dionysos, Hermes, and Goddess Memory in Daily Life. Trans. Joanna Mott. 2nd ed. Putnam: Spring Publications, 2003.
The Shipping News. Dir. Lasse Hallstrom. Perf. Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett and Scott Glen. Miramax, 2001.
Slattery, Dennis. “The Narrative Play of Memory in Epic.” The Epic Cosmos. Ed. Larry Allums and Louise Cowan. Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 2000. 331-352.
Appendix
Plot Outline
An emotionally-beaten man with his young daughter moves to his ancestral home in Newfoundland to reclaim his life.
Plot Summary for Shipping News, The (2001)
An inksetter in New York, Quoyle returns to his family's longtime home, a small fishing town in Newfoundland, with his young daughter, after a traumatizing experience with her mother, Petal, who sold her to an illegal adoption agency. Though Quoyle has had little success thus far in life, his shipping news column in the newspaper "The Gammy Bird" finds an audience, and his experiences in the town change his life. Then he meets the widow Wavey...
(From IMBD.com, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120824/)
