getting hit hard by offhand revelations (story discussion)

[Front-Ranger]

Too late! She's gone. So, all of you who want to talk about fanfiction on this story thread, I capitulate. Now don't get excited. Copulate and capitulate are two different words!

[Phillip Dampier]

We have a forum for fan fiction already, so I'm not sure why this one needs to take a turn away from Proulx's own story.  I personally am not a big fan fiction reader either, but mostly because my time to read much of anything is so limited.  There is a place for both and fans for both.

[Front-Ranger]

I have been writing a paper on Hunter Thompson and the evolution of the Romantic tradition in American literature. Now, after meeting Annie Proulx, I am tempted to include her as one who carries on the Romantic tradition. I would be interested in your thoughts on the subject.

[Front-Ranger]

One giveaway that AP is a Romantic IMO is when she writes, "Nothin he'd done before but no instruction manual needed." That implies that the sudden turn of events in TS1 was not due to any cultural or educational expectation, but was attributed to something outside of Ennis, such as the influence of nature, instinct, or perhaps even extrasensory in some way. This passage follows the same traditions of even the earliest American Romantics like Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson.

[serious crayons]

• “Ennis, weather-eyed, looked west for the heated cumulus that might come up on such a day” -and- “On the third morning there were the clouds Ennis had expected” -- Jack might control the weather, but it’s Ennis who can predict it.

Yes. I always interpret this as saying Ennis is pessiimistically looking ahead to a future problem. Eventually, he's right -- the clouds come. While Ennis is busy worrying about the bad times to come, Jack is enjoying the present -- a sky so "boneless blue" that he "might drown looking up." Which later, of course, he does. 

[Front-Ranger]

Great insight (sorry I couldn't resist) Katherine and Barbara!!

[Front-Ranger]

In reading through old stories and myths, I am struck by how often the phenomenon that nakymaton brings up here is used. For want of a better word, I will call it the denouement...the message contained in the afterclimax part of the sentence or story. For instance, the story of Theseus, which I've been rereading because he was the first bullrider in recorded history and the ancestor of Jack, IMO, ends with a strange afterstory where he and Ariadne, who helped him vanquish the Minotaur, sail back home to marry, but Theseus instead leaves her on an island because Zeus has taken a liking to her and wants her for himself. And then when Theseus sails into home port, he forgets the agreement he had with his father to change the sail color to signify victory. His father, thinking the mission had failed, jumps to his death in the sea without waiting for Theseus to appear. Thanks to Mel's insight, I'm paying a lot more attention to these afterstories.

[Front-Ranger]

After Mel called this phenomenon to my attention, I began to listen more closely to the parting words of people when I was having a discussion with them. To my amazement, she is absolutely right about the moment of truth coming just as they are about to walk away or even after the conversation is over! It has gotten so that when I shake a person's hand just as we are about to part, I sometimes grab hold of their hand and won't let go as I look them in the eye and ask if there's anything else they want to tell me!! Try this, it works!!

[Noviani]

It's like being slammed, over and over, with the realization that these weren't just two guys who enjoyed having sex with one another -- this was an incredibly profound love. And we don't learn the depth of it until Jack's dead.

I know enough about the short story form to know about O. Henry's stories, and about the way the plot always goes off in an unexpected direction at the end. I guess, in a way, Brokeback Mountain follows that form. But it isn't Jack's death that's the surprise, or at least, it isn't the biggest surprise. It's the discovery of the love we had missed noticing all along. Love, not just sex -- that's the twist.

And I think the whole story structure is part of the characterization of Ennis, as well. We're never allowed too deeply into Ennis's mind. We're allowed to see some of the events, and we're allowed to see the sex. But the love... the details that point to it are mentioned in offhand comments, as if they are pushed out of mind, until Jack's dead and the realization all comes together.

And then, going back and reading the story again, all those details that add up to the love start to stand out. Pawing the white out of the moon. The headlong, irreversible fall. Trying to puke in the whirling snow. "Little darlin." "This ain't no little thing that's happenin here." Reading the story for a second time is like dreaming with Ennis.

And those shirts were there, all along, in the second sentence of the story.

HI NAKYMATON, GREAT POST!!

so that is why this short story can't leave my head and i start remembering the lines off by heart.

i don't know how it works but it sure does slam ME!

no i know. thanks, do you happenv to major in literature?

[nakymaton]

  Thanks, Noviani.

no i know. thanks, do you happenv to major in literature?

No. Actually, I'm so far from having a degree in literature that I might as well be on another planet. Classical allusions, references to other important works of literature... they blow right past me.

(And to Lee... and then do the conversations ever end? I think that, if I did that, most of my conversations would be longer than the original story.)