The Shell Collector (Criticism)

Criticism

Melodie Monahan

Monahan has a Ph.D. in English and operates an editing service, The Inkwell Works. In the following essay, she explores the central theme of how knowledge is obtained and how it is handled in "The Shell Collector."

Anthony Doerr's "The Shell Collector" explores how people learn about nature and what factors determine how they react to and interpret what they come to know. The story also suggests how print and broadcast news media change information by interpreting it in certain ways and shrinking it to fit their delivery formats, and how preexisting belief systems can impose meaning, too. The events of the story highlight the risks of living in a remote natural environment and how learning can occur through accidental injury. The story raises questions about the price involved in the acquisition of knowledge and who is responsible for its mismanagement. In all, the story addresses how these characters learn about the saltwater shell creatures, what happens as a result of the information they gain, and how that information affects those who acquire it.

At the center of the story is the unnamed protagonist, who at the age of twelve meets an intuitive ophthalmologist, who knows he can do nothing medically for the boy's blindness and yet who knows enough about shells to introduce the boy to mollusks. Though the child gets only a vague idea of beach and sea, "the blurs that were waves the smudged yolk of sun," he perceives acutely the mouse cowry in his hand, "the sleek egg of its body, the toothy gap of its aperture." So much information comes to the child through handling the shell that he concludes, "He'd never seen anything so clearly in his life." As the world available through sight closes for him, the world of conchology opens brightly. The boy learns Braille and studies books on shells. He adds to this book learning the firsthand experience of working as a sailboat crewmember, traveling through the tropics. During these formative years, "his fingers, his senses obsessed over the geometry of exoskeletons." Blindness heightens the young man's other senses, making him all the more able to perceive through touch and smell because of the one disability. Through the following years, during which he acquires a B.A. in biology and Ph.D. in malacology, the protagonist gains much theoretical knowledge of shell creatures. He has an academic career, his scholarship based on his discoveries of "new species of bivalves, a new family of tusk shells, a new Nassarius, a new Fragum." After his marriage dissolves, he retires to an extremely remote and shell-rich location on the Kenyan seashore near Lamu, where he lives like a hermit.

The retirement to Kenya and daily work collecting shells presents the protagonist with what he does not know; "malacology only led him downward, to more questions." In this practically pure natural setting, he faces with wonder "the endless variations of design" and ponders what factors cause different types of shell formation. Studying the diverse, beautiful shell creatures in solitude is a privilege, bringing him face-to-face with the "utter mystery," which elicits in him "a nearly irresistible urge to bow down." The protagonist is slow-paced, diligent, mindful of what he does not know and in awe of nature's complexity. Alone, working quietly and methodically, he is able to maintain an inner equilibrium. However, this peaceful solitary life is disrupted when newcomers arrive.

The collector's deliberate, conscientious ways of learning are contrasted with the ways information travels and transforms through gossip and news media. The sensational report of cone shell venom being used to cure malaria in Lamu spreads through "the daily gossip of coastal Kenyans," who know full well the constant threat of malaria. Always in a rush to get the most recent news, journalists report from a distance and through brief interviews on the newsworthy incidents. The Daily Nation covers the occurrences in "a back-page story," and KBC radio devotes a "minute-long spot" to them, which includes "sound bites" of Dr. Kabiru's boasts that he has done research on this new application of cone venom and is "confident" of its efficacy. The actual events suggest a different interpretation of the local doctor's role, however. As the events unfold, Dr. Kabiru concludes that medically he can do nothing to save Nancy and is surprised by her inexplicable recovery after he pronounces her case terminal. The doctor's involvement in the second case amounts only to his acquiescence in bringing the mwadhini to the collector. As he is quoted on the radio, the doctor suggests the credit for these events belongs to him; in the safe after-the-fact glow of the positive outcomes, he claims to have researched the venom and anticipated the cures. In actuality, Nancy's sting was accidental; her recovery a complete surprise. The mwadhini's insistence that his daughter be stung comes out of the father's desperate leap of faith in the face of his daughter's imminent death and Nancy's surprising recovery. But these aspects of the events are not reported in the local news. The third incident regarding the collector's son, Josh, is omitted entirely.

The first round of reportage is picked up by global news services: "A BBC reporter came, and a wonderful-smelling woman from the International Tribune." The protagonist advises them and other people who collect around his kibanda that cone venom can injure and kill. Though the journalists are "more interested in miracles than snails," he begs them "to write about the dangers of cones." Still, the media emphasize the cures and give no space to the venom's danger. The protagonist's son, Josh, comments on a U.S. journal, The Humanitarian. This publication prints a blurb "about the miracles [the collector has] been working." One accident and one desperate experimentation based on it are transformed in this publication (whose title suggests its slant) as ongoing miraculously effective philanthropic work performed by an altruistic scientist. The truth of the actual events, along with the motives of those involved, is distorted as the report is slanted toward the sensational conclusion. Ironically, as the news media and its readers jump to conclusions about a miracle cure, the collector himself becomes more focused on the risks, worrying about the pilgrims who follow him into the lagoon and who may be stung or fall against the fire coral and be injured. He even worries about his son's safety and that of the boys who go along the shore with him.

Perhaps the most striking contrast to the collector's slow-paced, sustained, and respectful acquisition of knowledge is made by the "two big Jims" sent by a New York tabloid to get the scoop on the miracle cure. These men blunder into the seashore environment of Lamu with no preparation or understanding but well equipped with foregone conclusions. They have ten thousand dollars to offer for an interview and assume the money gives them the right to spend a couple nights in the collector's kibanda and traipse after him out onto the coral reef. The proverbial bulls in a china shop, they lumber and huff after him, irritated by siafu and pricked by thorns.

In contrast to the superficiality of the journalists, the shell collector's knowledge of his environment runs deep. He is at one with it, but always aware of its dangers. As he searches for shells while "the Jims" look on, he thinks of the venom of various nematocysts (jellyfish) and their acute and immediate effect on humans stung by them, how the "weeverfish bite bloated a man's entire right side." He finds a cone shell and lifts it up for the Jims to see. One of the journalists dismisses the cone, after all his "pinkie's bigger," as though size determines strength. The collector informs him: "This animal has twelve kinds of venom in its teeth. It could paralyze you and drown you right here." These city men observe the water through their snorkeling masks, while the collector inches his way, barefoot, finding the undersea world through the immediacy of touch.

The following night, under the dulling intoxication of hashish, the Jims carelessly wonder how the sting of a cone shell feels, and the collector, led astray by them and similarly intoxicated, thinks temporarily that their dying that way would not be such a bad idea. People see the world differently in drug-induced states and while natural beauty comes through, the dulled senses increase human vulnerability. Ironically, the stoned Jims make it back to the kibanda, but the collector becomes disoriented and is stung by the cone he holds while being tempted to satisfy the journalists' dangerous curiosity. The Jims leave with enough of what they came for to write the marketable lurid story; the collector is left to struggle through the effects of the sting.

Nancy's naïve quest into this region, seeking the elusive "inner peace and equilibrium" promoted by some "neo-Buddhist," and Josh's idealistic Peace Corps sojourn to Africa suggest two other ways the unknown world is experienced and interpreted. Seattle-born Nancy, urban, moneyed, with husband and children yet in midlife crisis, wanders along some self-referential mission into Africa, placing herself at risk and quickly acquiring sunstroke and malaria. Josh, even at thirty, is in some ways a child at heart. The Peace Corps appeals to his patronizing altruism, and clouded by both his American culture and a distorted view of his father's work, he comes to Kenya ready to see his father's miraculous deeds. Josh's uninformed enthusiasm, untempered idealism, and careless efforts to help put at risk the boys who follow him about the lagoon and ultimately cost him his life when he foolishly picks up a cone because it is pretty.

Add to these inexperienced Americans, the local Muslims who confront the ravages of malaria, cholera, and other physiological problems, and find that community-wide prayers are unhelpful. The faithful mwadhini is so afraid for his acutely ill daughter, he is willing to jump to the conclusion that if one person can recover from malaria after being stung by a cone then perhaps his terminally ill daughter can, too. To the extent that these local people are uneducated about their environment and without the necessary medicines to treat injury and disease, they are daily at risk. The irony here is that the blind faith of the mwadhini brings about the lucky cure of his daughter, literally restoring her to health within a day.

What is the shell collector's responsibility in all of this and what is the story's ultimate message? The first question is raised yet left unanswered. As the shell collector goes about his reclusive work, collecting shells and boxing them up to be sent off to universities, events happen which he does not design or control. Nancy and then Josh come to him; one recovers inexplicably by accident, the other gets a lethal sting and dies though he has been warned repeatedly. The shell collector has to wonder if these events inevitably swirl around him like a shell forms, creating out of its own nature an enclosed world to armor the shelled creature inside. It seems to be a spiral of events "at once inevitable and unpredictable." A hermit by choice and profession, the collector wants to be left alone. Yet for awhile all the world finds a way to his door, locals plagued with disease and seeking cure and journalists bent on reading in his crusty, sinewy nature and lifestyle the sensational story that sells yet unwilling to provide space for the cautionary note. Josh's death serves as a warning for those who take time to hear the meaning in this story. One point to Doerr's story is that people in this kind of environment need to tread gently, acquire information objectively without preformed belief or agenda, and take the necessary time to learn. Still, accidents happen for good and for ill. The same substance that can paralyze and kill in a moment may in another application have medical benefits. Science explores, and sometimes accidents confirm that investigation or redirect it.

Source: Melodie Monahan, Critical Essay on "The Shell Collector," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Thomson Gale

In the following essay, the critic gives an overview of Anthony Doerr's work.

With his first collection of short stories, Anthony Doerr at age twenty-eight achieved immediate recognition from coast to coast. "Doerr's prose dazzles," wrote Nancy Willard in the New York Times, "his sinewy sentences blending the naturalist's unswerving gaze with the poet's gift for metaphor." Tamara Straus, a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, characterized Doerr's literary ancestry as a combination of "Henry David Thoreau (for his pantheistic passions) and Gabriel García Márquez (for his crystal-cut prose and dreamy magic realism)."

The publication of The Shell Collector: Stories not only earned Doerr comparisons with Flannery O'Connor, a master of the short story, but also resulted in his being credited with the revival of the American short story itself. "In his first collection of short stories, young Anthony Doerr shows the big kids how it's done," Nancy Connors wrote in the Plain Dealer. "And he goes a long way toward cleaning up the bad reputation some of his elders have given the short story." Connors observed in her review of The Shell Collector that the genre had of late given way to stories that were "pretentious, silly, or meaningless." Doerr's stories, however, "are polished jewels," she continued.

Doerr, who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, lived in Africa and New Zealand before moving to Boise, Idaho. All these landscapes come into play in this collection. In the title story, a blind man, self-exiled to an African archipelago, discovers a potential cure for blindness in a poisonous snail. In "The Caretaker," set in Liberia, a man leaves home to search for his mother, who is late coming home from the market, only to stumble into a nightmarish world where he is forced to kill a man. Eventually, he escapes to Oregon, where he finds work as a caretaker, but he cannot escape the torment of his memories until five whales become beached nearby and his response to them redeems him. "The Hunter's Wife," set in Montana, tells the story of a relationship between an outdoorsman and a woman whose supernatural abilities allow her to commune with dying animals.

No matter where these stories are set, they are all grounded in nature. Straus wrote, "This Nature, with a capital N, is what marks Doerr's people. The thick green forests and whispering shores, cold rivers and jungles offer refreshment away from the pressures of contemporary society and popular culture. In their place are starker universal confrontations with fellow man and the self." Nature is the main theme in all of Doerr's tales. They are set outdoors and revolve around themes of hunting and collecting, gathering and letting go, and living as an outsider. His characters are exiles and refugees, people living on the fringe of society, like the woman who follows the sideshow metal-eater in "For a Long Time This Was Griselda's Story." The Shell Collectors "is a paean to the exquisite universe outside ourselves," wrote Gail Caldwell for the Boston Globe. "Perilously beautiful, as precise and elegant as calculus, that wider place of Doerr's imagination is so commanding, so poetically rendered, that it informs and even defines the characters who wander across its stage."

Doerr also seems to understand America's predominant and yet excluded place in the world. In "July Fourth" he tells of a challenge posed by a group of wealthy American fishermen to a group of British anglers. The contest is to see which group can catch the largest freshwater fish on each continent. The losing team must walk through Times Square naked. The Americans aren't really up to the challenge but remain relentlessly optimistic. "They would map out routes and make contingency plans," Doerr wrote, "and the boundless resources of America, its endless undulant swale, its nodding wheat and white silos gone lavender in the twilight, its vast warehouses and deft craftsmen, would unfurl to help them. They would not lose, they could not lose; they were Americans, they had already won."

The elements that recur in Doerr's short stories are also present in his first novel, About Grace. The protagonist, David Winkler, is a hydrologist and meteorologist whose career is dependent on the structure and rhythm of nature, which he understands and with which he seems to be at peace. In his personal life, however, Winkler is frightened by his gift for premonition; he is able to see the future but not to fix it. He foresaw his marriage and accepted it. When he foresees the accidental death of his baby daughter Grace by his own hand, he flees the country, hoping to avert the tragedy. After many years of self-imposed exile, Winkler returns home, unable to resist the need to learn of his daughter's fate. His "loneliness, regret, and guilt are painfully palpable," wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Though the critic found the conclusion less than satisfying, the reviewer concluded that the novel "possesses a seductive symbolic intensity, and abounds with gorgeous descriptions and metaphors," In the Spectator, reviewer Robert Edric found this novel of the wandering outsider "compelling, balanced and anchored to the solid ground of the story being told; and yet with a finesse, flair and precision equally suited to its grander themes."

Source: Thomson Gale, "Anthony Doerr," in Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2005.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• About Grace (2004) is Doerr's first novel, which tells the story of a man whose dreams foretell the future and who attempts to avert the fruition of a dream about the death by drowning of his infant daughter. Readers who enjoy The Shell Collector: Stories will enjoy how Doerr handles this Cassandra theme with a twist.
• Caldecott Medal winner Snowflake Bentley (2004), by Jacqueline Briggs and illustrated by Mary Azarian, tells the story of the photographer Wilson Bentley, who set out to record snowflakes on film. One of Doerr's science heroes, Bentley had an interest in the fine details of the natural world that is similar to Doerr's own.
• The eight stories in the National Book Award winner Ship Fever (1996), by Andrea Barrett, tell stories that braid together a fascination with science and the natural world with an examination of the professional and private lives of people who study them. The stories are set in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. In an interview, Doerr remarked that Barrett's writing showed him how to write.
• The Sea around Us (1951), by Rachel Carson, introduces readers to marine life and topographical features. This poetic and scientific book inspired an award-winning documentary and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for thirty-one weeks.