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Annie Proulx, classic writer

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Andrew:
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:
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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. 

Jeff Wrangler:
I love that sentence, too, Andrew, especially that "Years on years." It practically seems to encompass an eternity in three little words--and two of them are the same word!

fernly:
Beautiful post, Andrew!


--- Quote from: Andrew ---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.

--- End quote ---
Oh, yes, absolutely, and thank you for doing that with this particular sentence of hers.


--- Quote --- 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.
 a two-page summary of Ennis' life in Riverton since, without Jack: the 'widening water' between him and Alma, the divorce, the Thanksgiving dinner.
 a one-paragraph summary of Jack's life in Texas in the intervening years, without Ennis
 then a long description of ... the final meeting. 

--- End quote ---
Thank you again for this breakdown  - it's so hard for me to stop and study this story, no matter how many times I've read it, because I get swept up in it, every time.

What Proulx does in this story, encompassing material that could so easily be a very long novel, into less than 30 pages, still stuns me.  And one of the ways she does it is by manipulating time, both in how she sequences events and in how fast or slow she describes them.
Someone, (apologies, I can't remember who) in another thread way back was discussing the function of the train in the beginning shots of the movie. That perhaps the glimpses we get of Ennis through the breaks between the train cars are showing that we will be getting only glimpses of his life and what is essential in it. The speed of the train contrasting with the near-complete stillness of Ennis waiting before and while the train is passing, has a lot of symbolic weight, but it can also possibly be seen as one of Ang's visual translations of Annie's words, in this case the varying speeds at which her story moves, for Ennis and Jack both together and apart.

I think the varying pace in Annie's story perhaps also lets us experience in Jack's and Ennis' lives what we do in our own. That parts of our life are so fast no matter how we want to hold on to them, others painfully slow or empty, and some so vivid that they can take longer to remember them each time than they did to live.



--- Quote ---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.

--- End quote ---
The vastness of time she describes is, as you say, matched by the vastness of space. Not only "years on years" but miles on miles, and not just from one point on the map to another, but miles up those mountains, and down. The "headlong, irreversible fall" down Brokeback that in many ways was truly irreversible, but in other ways was reenacted every time on their trips that they came down from the mountains. That evocative list of names could be gone over for why she chose those, and not others, but regardless, each mountain was ascended in the joy of their beginning time together again, and each descended in a repetition of falling, irreversible loss.


--- Quote ---The repetition, the rhythm is like a heart beat.

--- End quote ---

and like the rhythm of their love, over and over again, meeting and parting, meeting and parting

moremojo:
Beautiful insights, everyone. Probing minds and inquisitive souls brought together for love of a masterpiece of literary art.

Toast:
Happy Birthday to
Annie Proulx

born August 22 1935

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