I was posting in the dozy embrace topic about the part of the story that was the basis of the filmed scene. A single word slightly changed the meaning of the scene as written, gave it the depth of years.
And I got to thinking about my admiration of the writing. Ang Lee subtly emphasized certain romantic elements, but he was building on a classic foundation.
So I'm copying in a post from way back in another forum about a particular sentence that I have always admired especially. The post follows:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Like other great art Proulx's story feeds on itself and then slowly grows from itself. We need to go back time and time again to reread and see how it has changed since we left it, see how the shadows of sentences we noticed before have shifted, letting a brighter light fall on others.
Annie Proulx is a classical writer. She is interested in facts. Edith Hamilton describes the enormous plainness and simplicity of the ancient Greek writers in The Greek Way and this style informs Hamilton's own retelling of the Greek myths in her best-known work.
Proulx has this plainness. ' "As Annie Proulx said in an interview, we 'added flesh to the long bones' of her
story," says Ossana' - that is from the Variety interview,http://www.variety.com/ac2006_article/VR1117934900
No, Proulx is not only plain. She describes her discovery of herself as a metaphorist while listening to music at a very early age. The metaphors in the story, especially the lyrical nature ones, are easily identified as 'fine writing' and are often pulled out for special notice. But just as the opposites of Jack and Ennis play off each other, each depending on the other's difference, so in Proulx's style the color and the plainness give each other the lift.
This post is about the plainness.
When you go back to the story to remind yourself how Proulx shows the passage of twenty years, the gradual accumulation of the most essential moments in Jack's and Ennis' lives, it is amazing to find the core of it in a single sentence.
Before this sentence, we have the first reunion and the motel scene and then a two-page summary of Ennis' life in Riverton since, without Jack: the 'widening water' between him and Alma, the divorce, the Thanksgiving dinner.
After this sentence, we have a one-paragraph summary of Jack's life in Texas in the intervening years, without Ennis, then a long description of ... the final meeting. Can this be all?
This sentence is in the tradition of the epic writers - Homer, Virgil, Milton - who derived some of the quality of vastness of time and space with catalogs like this of heroes' names, of place names.
By its brevity, along with the vastness it simultaneously gives the impression of a single moment, an entire life reviewed in an instant, a thousand experiences collapsed into one, as happens to people who know they are at the moment of death.
The repetition, the rhythm is like a heart beat.
It feeds my soul to say this sentence to myself with my voice, recreate it here with my hands, to other faraway people.
Years on years they worked their way through the high meadows and mountain drainages, horse-packing into the Big Horns, Medicine Bows, south end of the Gallatins, Absarokas, Granites, Owl Creeks, the Bridger-Teton Range, the Freezeouts and the Shirleys, Ferrises and the Rattlesnakes, Salt River Range, into the Wind Rivers over and again, the Sierra Madres, Gros Ventres, the Washakies, Laramies, but never returning to Brokeback.
