Are there any other literary references that come to mind in regards to the "I swear..." moment. Even any other important examples of unfinished statements in literature or poetry?
I love that you brought this up, Amanda. Everyone has an instinct of what Ennis meant when he broke off, though we would all fill in somewhat different words. Many in this thread have written very eloquently of what Ennis would have said had he been able to put words to intense feelings. CaseyCornelius' wonderful discovery about the literary antecedent in the Aeneid puts some of the most eloquent words ever written to that silence, in a beautiful translation.
But what really makes the effect in the film is that it is broken off. Powerful effects are powerful in part because they have within them armies of different, even self-contradictory feelings and experiences, jabbing at us from before and behind.
I cast around in earlier literature and couldn't think of a really apt precedent for this, although I'm sure they exist at least in twentienth-century literature and film, which started using naturalistic effects like this.
Shakespeare was at once the most artful and the most naturalistic writer of his period. He knew of a Latin device used by Roman orators, who would sometimes interrupt themselves and break off mid-sentence for effect. Shakespeare used this for a new, more naturalistic representational purpose. He uses it, for example, in Macbeth's last scene in his castle, Act 5 scene 3, when we get the effect of the king's world crashing slowly to broken phrases, sentences that don't need to be finished because the reality they address may not be around much longer, the retainers who should listen all deserted. Macbeth is overtaken by a great fatigue that can't remember the original point he meant to make with his sentence, or with his life ambition for that matter:
MACBETH:
Take thy face hence. Exit Servant.
Seyton! --I am sick at heart
When I behold -- Seyton, I say! -- This push
Will cheer me ever, or disseat me now.
I have liv'd long enough.I bring up this scene for contrast, not for comparison, although Ennis too might feel that his best years are all behind him at this moment. I know people have different feelings about that.
The contrast I am referring to? Shakespeare left the phrase 'I am sick at heart when I behold...' unfinished but he did not leave the speech unfinished and he certainly would never have ended a play with an unfinished sentence.
In Shakespeare's time, the eloquence was all put into the words. Silences were simply the absence of anything. If silence was to be depicted, it was put into blank verse. In Lear, when Cordelia hears Goneril pouring on flattery in order to get 'a third more opulent than her sisters' she is not silent, she is made to speak the words to herself, 'What shall Cordelia say? Love and be silent.'
However, once tools are invented they are almost always adapted for other, evolving purposes. The Latin rhetorical trick could have another life and purpose under a new way of looking at the world.
By the nineteenth century, Europeans started discovering Asian art and how it uses silence and empty space as positive entities.
Stories started to be written which had no formal beginning or end. Dialog started to use unfinished sentences.
With the invention of film even more naturalistic effects were possible than in literature. And strong unfinished effects seem natural in film when they might seem artificial or formalistic in written stories. There is the visual side to film which helps fill the void. Ennis' words are not the very last words of Proulx's story.
The effect of 'I swear...' is very different from anything in Shakespeare because it is a modern effect. I can think of many reasons Ennis might have broken off here, and they are self-contradictory and therefore act more powerfully on our feelings:
- The memory of Jake's constant love for him and determination to work for a fulfilled life were like an unanswerable reproach to his own fears and evasions, so he breaks off as if acknowledging the unanswerability, the smallness of anything he could swear aloud now.
- He knows he is not the swearing type so he stops before he can say anything he doesn't know how to put in words.
- "Jack had never asked him to swear anything" so he can be true to Jack's memory and just think it.
- He has just been speaking with the very much living Alma Jr, the other being he loves the most. Mid-sentence, he suddenly knows that it is no longer necessary to speak aloud because his communication with Jack is spiritual.
- He is just overcome with tears. He is filled with the contrast between the wearer of the sweater he has folded and put away, who has just left, and the wearer of the shirt in the same closet, who will never come back in the flesh.
Somehow, breaking out all these elements seems to demean the one powerful effect, like picking off one by one the individual members of the emotional army who are jabbing at me before and behind.
I like Ang Lee's refusal to be overly verbal about this film. I think of analogies from Asian art.
There is the deliberate choice in ink painting to depict certain parts of the subject and leave others alone. In a book on Chinese brushwork Kwo Da-Wei discusses a painting of tadpoles in which the water is just white paper. "It is not necessary for the artist to create that space by adding pigments to the background. It is more subtle to let the onlooker fill in the space through his imagination. If I had created the water by adding colors, or lines, the result would have been like painting 'a snake with feet.'"
In the same style of ink painting, a line is sometimes drawn with a brush which lifts slightly lifts off the paper before returning to it. The part of the line which is not physically seen is referred to as 'Body absent, spirit present.'
