The Beauty and Value of Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx

The beauty and value of a poem or literary text is described as the detail in a piece which derives pleasure through aesthetic means. The concept of the ‘aesthetic’ has had it’s meaning narrowed down over the last few centuries to become a word for our sense and appreciation of the extraordinary and beautiful. Other than being a form of entertainment, I think it is important for novels or other literary texts to include aesthetically pleasing elements to conjure a beautiful picture or sense in our minds. With these a reader can then evoke an emotion from the sometimes abrasive and gritty images they take in. This is as true in Brokeback Mountain as can be, as Annie Proulx doesn’t sugar coat the difficult situation of her leading characters, but allows the blunt and sometimes harsh descriptions to give the reader a sense of something far more realistic and identifiable than the average love story. By this she has, in her short story, subverted the stereotypes associated with homosexuals. She forces the reader to perceive the relationship between Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar not as ‘gay’ but as a tragically suppressed love between two human beings.

The first component of beauty in Brokeback Mountain, and of all valued literature, is it’s complexity. Annie Proulx has taken the sense of America’s outback and it’s people and made me, for one, see and feel a place I have never been to. The complexity she uses is most obvious in her descriptions of smells and landscapes. For example, half way through the novel, when the two men are reunited for the first time since they met on Brokeback Mountain and go to a motel, the description of the room is in smell alone. It says ‘The room stank of semen and smoke and sweat and whiskey, of old carpet and sour hay, saddle leather, shit and cheap soap.’ from this once sense me picture the two on messy, twisted sheets with their belongings, the saddles and clothes, strewn across the floor and a room with murky air from smoke and humidity. The mesh of smells that she describes, though complicated, leave no visual description necessary.
This is also an example of Annie Proulx’s ability to know what not to say, a part of the descriptive beauty which is also complex. When there is a lack of wording in the story, it gives the reader a reinforced feel for the concise conversation between characters, the lack of excess in the character’s lives, which are driven by simply surviving as best they can, and of the land itself as being sparse and by no means elaborate. A good example of this is when Ennis’s marriage falls apart in the years following Alma’s witness of Ennis and Jack’s kiss. It says simply, after describing Ennis’s faults in her eyes ‘Alma, Jr., was nine and Francine seven she said, What am I doin‘, hangin’ around with him, divorced Ennis, and married the Riverton grocer.’ Had Alma’s divorcing Ennis and then re-marrying meant anything to Ennis, I think there would have been a lot more than a summery sentence of something which must have happened over a couple of years. The conciseness of Alma’s leaving Ennis subconsciously reinforces the readers belief that he is, by this point, in love with only Jack. With that Proulx leaves out, we understand Ennis’s feeling without them being spelled out, giving the reader a more complex and valuable read.

Proulx’s use of languages is the second element which adds to the beauty of the complete story. Proulx uses a mix of abbreviations and American Outback slang along side intricate vocabulary. The two are combined to emphasise the setting of the story, the vocabulary used mostly for description of the senses, and slang used as an insite to the characters’ ways of thinking. For example, when Ennis goes to visit Jack’s parents following his death, it says of Jack’s father ‘staring at Ennis with an angry, knowing expression. Ennis recognized in him a not uncommon type with the hard need to be the stud duck in the pond.’ Being English and in no way a ranch-running man from Wyoming, I can only guess what this phrase means, but It isn’t really necessary for me to know. The reader can gather that Jack’s father hasn’t taken kindly to Ennis, and that the native expression has been used to demonstrate that the old man is a simple and unprogressive ‘redneck’, which would lead the reader to assume that he is homophobic.
Proulx use of imaginative vocabulary is wonderfully used the story. Sometimes she lists words which are fairly basic, but pairs them so that they have much more grace, for example, the list of smells in the motel room as mentioned above. One of my favourite descriptions in the story is of the campsite at Brokeback Mountain when the two have first arrived. It says ‘Dawn came glassy-orange, stained from below by a gelatinous band of pale green. The sooty bulk of the mountain paled slowly until it was the same colour as the smoke from Ennis’s breakfast fire. The cold air sweetened, banded pebbles and crumbs of soil cast sudden pencil-long shadows…’ In the first sentence, in the description of the sky, the word gelatinous feels so out of place for the description of a sky, or grass, depending on what the green is meant to be. The thought of such a texture in a landscape, along with the orange and green hues, creates the vision of a dream world, which I think is how Proulx wants the reader to remember the Mountain, much as Jack and Ennis would. In the second sentence, in my mind, changes the colours from orange and green to blues and greys and hazy or smoky contortions in the landscape. The wonder of this significant place to the men is reinforced by the different beauties that emerge from it. The final sentence gives less of an image but more of a set of nouns with no more than two syllables apiece makes a beautiful sound, almost regardless of what they mean. The alliteration in the ‘crumbs of soil cast’ and ‘sudden pencil-long shadows’ parts are all very well on their own, but it’s the culmination of words mostly beginning with C’s, S’s and P’s that makes the sentence really satisfying.

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