Were they gay? (Jack & Ennis) - Next chapter

[Paul029]

The ground rules of the story are that we know what Ennis thinks he knows.
If we were interpreting or examining a piece of historical evidence he would be classed as a secondary source.
In the tyre iron attack on Jack,* the only primary sources would be, Jack, if he had survived, the perpetrators, or any first hand witnesses who were actually present. Ennis is none of these, so he is a secondary source.

The primary source is Jack’s next of kin, his widow.
Ennis is not only an upset boyfriend of the deceased, who he hadn’t seen for “months,” but whose direct (and sole) source of information is Lureen, who knew sooner than “months” how Jack had died, being officially told of the actual death once it was discovered, and of the manner in which death had occurred as confirmed by autopsy.

In the case of Earl, Ennis knows what he saw, so in that case he is a primary source, and what his father told him had happened, which may or may not have been the truth, and any images conjured up in his nine year old mind, there fore as far as the actual act is concerned he is a secondary source.

What he may have seen and what he tells Jack are not necessarily the same things.

In his telephone conversation with Lureen, he is a primary source, but his interpretation would still be coloured by several factors, his thoughts of what happened to Earl, the tone of her voice, which he may or may not have misunderstood, the fact that he was in love with her late husband and may or may not have harboured a certain amount of jealousy and resentment towards her because she had what he wanted and needed and knew in his heart he could never have.

I’ve countered your claim that Ennis was the primary source above. That you think Proulx had subtly intimated that his version was possibly questionable is pleasing. 

(Despite your "In the tyre iron attack on Jack" above*, which suggests to me that you're in complete agreement with Ennis on this point.  )

The issue I mentioned, however, was that what he thinks during the phone call appears to be generally accepted as gospel.

As  I am a sometime social historian, nowhere in Annie Proulx's league, it must be remembered that she was a fully fledged social historian of the Annales school before she became a writer and I feel sure that she applies these techniques in her writing.
In fact she says she does, so it is not really like knitting fog!

Annie Proulx is of French Canadian extraction


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_School

I notice that Proulx at no stage included footnotes to “Brokeback Mountain” in Wyoming Stories, which suggests to me that she was well content for her readers to accept her text as it stood.
In other words, it was not dependant upon—without which her story would be incomplete—background research.

Your inclusion of a link to information elsewhere was no doubt kindly intended.
I can only presume that it was made in the hope that I would acquire extra knowledge (as suggested by your “it must remembered”) in order that I would more fully appreciate Proulx's subtle nuances.
 
But I feel no need to undertake any investigation into the “Annales school.”
Whatever techniques Proulx possibly applies in her writing is really beside the point, as is her “French Canadian extraction.” 

Your reference to “knitting fog” was an intriguing one, but unfortunately it’s not a concept to which I referred.   

I’m now going to burn some soothing aromatic Red Rose incense to create a fog of an altogether different kind.  

[janjo]

Ennis isn't a primary source to what happened to Jack, but he is a primary source, and a participant, in what was said in the phone call itself.

What he may have seen and what he tells Jack, may indeed not be the same thing.

With the utmost respect, what Annie Proulx uses as a basis for her writing, is not only relevant, but essential knowledge, when evaluating her writing.
The fact that the Annales School of social history, was based in French culture and adopted by scholars in the USA is also particularly relevant to a person with French Canadian roots too, IMO.

I believe "knitting fog" was one of our dear late Dal's expressions, if I am wrong, or if I wrongly ascribed it to you, then I apologise both to you and to his memory.

Please enjoy your fog of Red Rose incense and have a lovely evening.

We're  off to our local concert hall to see and hear The Grimethorpe Colliery Band, which as it is packed with absolutely top rank brass players, probably contains no one from Grimethorpe, and no one who is a collier, I expect them to be good though!

[AZ.bbm]

-Either possibility sounds plausible...

AP pegged Ennis as gay from the get-go, via the prologue. -There was no such prologue/'pegging' in the film; the audience members supplied their own back-stories, side lines, fantasies, agendas,....

I misspoke here, I think.. AP says that she wrote the story "in reverse" -the ending first, and worked her way backwards to the beginning. Ergo, AP would have written the Prologue last (as Paul indicates, making it in reality an 'epilogue' -Or, did she really write the Prologue first?    ). In that sequence readers were shown that Ennis was having sexualized dreams about Jack Twist and reveling in them in order to "warm his days." -While we can infer from the Prologue that the man is gay -- or in love or otherwise 'obsessed,' or 'possessed' -- it doesn't really authenticate his intrinsic sexuality.

<musings>

AP declared in later interviews that Ennis was indeed "gay," but, as she is admittedly a fan of  Hitchcock the king of suspense, she would see fit to omit direct references to Ennis's innate sexuality from the SS, leaving readers to speculate and come to their own decision about the issue, which was nice... Interesting, too, that the author is able to summarize the entire life of a one of her characters and encapsulate it within a single sentence, we are left to scratch our heads regarding Ennis's childhood fantasies, if any.  -No, I think it was more pertinent to the story to depict Ennis as hopelessly personality-disordered, having been abused by his brother, 'radicalized' by his father, and 'abandoned' by his sister, i.a, than to show him definitively as a (merely) conflicted gay boy/teen who had true homosexual aspirations...


Just as in reality AP couldn't know the true sexuality of the desperate-looking old cowboy in the pool room - after whom she allegedly modeled the character of Ennis - she would not commit to a firm sexuality for Ennis del Mar, either. -Apparently, the door of the rural 'closet' is much more opaque than the one on a 'city' closet, ergo, critters of the subspecies "country gay" are more elusive than that of the ssp., "city gay"...?

</musings>

[lislis]

http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/29/are-men-sexually-fluid/

One thing is clear, though: Society is a lot less accepting of male sexual fluidity.


(maybe this should be in another forum section)

[janjo]

Interesting. I believe there are biological reasons why women are more fluid in their sexuality than men, rather than it just being more socially acceptable.

[Paul029]

The primary source is Jack’s next of kin, his widow.

Ennis isn't a primary source to what happened to Jack, but he is a primary source, and a participant, in what was said in the phone call itself.

How on earth can Ennis be a “primary source” during the phone call?

May I ask what information he provided which was previously unknown to a reader?

As I understand it, he’s simply the recipient of information.

What he may have seen and what he tells Jack, may indeed not be the same thing.

Thank you for concurring.  

[Paul029]

I notice that Proulx at no stage included footnotes to “Brokeback Mountain” in Wyoming Stories, which suggests to me that she was well content for her readers to accept her text as it stood.
In other words, it was not dependant upon—without which her story would be incomplete—background research.

With the utmost respect, what Annie Proulx uses as a basis for her writing, is not only relevant, but essential knowledge, when evaluating her writing.

May I ask, with all due humility, in what way/s readers who lack this “essential knowledge” are thereby disadvantaged?

The fact that the Annales School of social history, was based in French culture and adopted by scholars in the USA is also particularly relevant to a person with French Canadian roots too, IMO.

I suppose this is interesting enough in itself, but what has it to do with a reader’s ability to “evaluate” Proulx’s writing?

[Paul029]

http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/29/are-men-sexually-fluid/
One thing is clear, though: Society is a lot less accepting of male sexual fluidity.

Kerner’s blog puts forward some interesting thoughts. I was especially intrigued by these:

          • Can a gay man who is sexually attracted to women still be gay? And what about straight men who get turned on by other men? Are men “sexually fluid”?

          • Indeed, we seem to feel the need to force men to define their sexuality as “gay” or “straight.”

          • And living life, rather than focusing on labels, is a large part of what sexual fluidity is all about.

[royandronnie]

What he may have seen and what he tells Jack are not necessarily the same things.

I'm wondering here why he would have told Jack anything other than exactly what he saw and understood to have occurred. The point of the scene is to tell us, as well as Jack, why a life together is NEVER going to happen: Ennis has been utterly and fatally traumatized by this experience. And I can't imagine anyone making up the details he recounts.

I don't imagine it would take much pulling over gravel to destroy the face of a dead or unconscious person. He may also have been pulled along by his legs if there hadn't been enough sport after the soft tissue gave way. Let's not dwell on that for too long, anyway.

[janjo]

With the utmost respect, what Annie Proulx uses as a basis for her writing, is not only relevant, but essential knowledge, when evaluating her writing.
May I ask, with all due humility, in what way/s readers who lack this “essential knowledge” are thereby disadvantaged?
I suppose this is interesting enough in itself, but what has it to do with a reader's ability to “evaluate” Proulx’s writing?

A person who reads the story by itself and with no prior knowledge of Ms Proulx's methods of story construction, would not necessarily be disadvantaged, but for us here, or for anyone doing a critical study of her writing, it is essential, because it demonstrates the methods she uses when creating her characters and the situations that they find themselves in.
The fact that the Annales school of social history is based originally in France, but then was a very popular method of research in the USA, is also relevant to AP as a particular historian, because those are associated with her own roots, she is of French Canadian descent, brought up in the USA.
The Annales school, relies for its main methods on intense research into account books, land documents, and other things of this kind.
AP had studied this method intensively, and therefore knew intimately the social structure of the Wyoming that she wrote about. She understood the agricultural realities, the climate, the poverty, the harshness of the life, and also the high level of suicide rate amongst single men in remote places in the state, and that some of this was caused by the homophobic pressures, internal and external ,on some of these men who were probably, and may well have been gay.
Therefore, her work is grounded in what can be a bitter and harsh reality.
This reality creates her characters, what they will admit to, to themselves, and to others, and is the basis of her fiction.
It is not essential to know any of this, in the way it is not essential to fully understand the references in any work of literature or film, but the more one understands the deeper the experience.

[janjo]

Ennis isn't a primary source to what happened to Jack, but he is a primary source, and a participant, in what was said in the phone call itself.
How on earth can Ennis be a “primary source” during the phone call?

May I ask what information he provided which was previously unknown to a reader?

As I understand it, he’s simply the recipient of information.
Thank you for concurring.  

The conversation was between Lureen and Ennis, what she tells him isn't relevant to my point, the way she tells it, and her tone of voice is. Ennis put a certain construction on the way she spoke to him, which under the circumstances may have been influenced by his own and her emotions. Only the two of them know exactly what was said and the way in which it was spoken.

[Paul029]

What he may have seen and what he tells Jack are not necessarily the same things.

I'm wondering here why he would have told Jack anything other than exactly what he saw and understood to have occurred. The point of the scene is to tell us, as well as Jack, why a life together is NEVER going to happen: Ennis has been utterly and fatally traumatized by this experience. And I can't imagine anyone making up the details he recounts.

My statement wasn’t meant to imply that Ennis lied or otherwise twisted the truth.
He saw Earl’s body and interpreted how Earl had died.

We don’t know what Ennis’s father told Ennis and KE (if anything) when he took his sons to see the corpse.
All we know is that, according to Ennis, their “Dad laughed about it,”

The point I was making to Jess was that any man being dragged around by his dick wouldn’t have been dragged very far before it was pulled off and became “bloody pulp;”
and certainly not enough for his ”nose to be [torn] down from [skidding] on gravel.”

What the tire iron did “looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him,” and it would seem rather illogical if his face wasn’t beaten with it as well.
Would his killers refrain from using the tire iron on his face?
I doubt it.

The more I think about it the less likely it seems to me that Earl was dragged anywhere at all.  
He was castrated, beaten to a pulp and his body simply tossed into the ditch.

It’s interesting, too, that when Ennis relays this story to Jack in the motel he’s more concerned about a tire iron than being dragged anywhere, and let alone by what.  

I don't imagine it would take much pulling over gravel to destroy the face of a dead or unconscious person. He may also have been pulled along by his legs if there hadn't been enough sport after the soft tissue gave way.

It’s possible, I suppose, but as neither Proulx nor Ennis mentions it...

Her point seems to be that Earl, for dramatic purposes, should undergo a horrifying death.
She wanted Ennis to make it very clear to Jack why they could never live together, as you said.

Being bashed with a tire iron simply wasn’t enough to get the message across.
The rough pulling-off of male genitals (while being dragged around) is, IMO, particularly horrific.

Had she written about a female character I doubt she would have stopped with bashing and rape by tire iron.
Her victim would also have been dragged around by her breasts until they pulled off.
An equally ghastly demise, I imagine, for female readers to read about.

Let's not dwell on that for too long, anyway.

As it’s a story I would have thought that everything in it was open to discussion.  

Ennis warns Jack about the possible consequences of living openly together.
His warning takes the form of a violent, and gruesome, form of emasculation.

In other words if they lived together they would become less than men, both physically amd metaphorically.
The demasculinisation of any man, irrespective of his sexuality, is abhorrent to him.*

That applies equally to homosexual Jack and heterosexual Ennis.

* I'm aware that I generalise here. Dissidents, including transgender persons, of course, are free to argue their case as appropriate.  

ETA change of "demasculination" to "demasculinisation." 

[janjo]

I feel that your point about Ennis being more worried about the "tyre Iron" than about being pulled around by his genitals "until they pulled off," which as you say wouldn't take long, was a very good one, Paul.

[Paul029]

I feel that your point about Ennis being more worried about the "tyre Iron" than about being pulled around by his genitals "until they pulled off," which as you say wouldn't take long, was a very good one, Paul.

Thanks, Jess. 

I've no idea, though, why he'd worry more about that than about possible castration. 

Hmmm. 

[Cally]

I feel that your point about Ennis being more worried about the "tyre Iron" than about being pulled around by his genitals "until they pulled off," which as you say wouldn't take long, was a very good one, Paul.

Just musing...

Yes, interesting that the adult Ennis does put more emphasis on the effects of the tire iron and gravel. I'm not sure what "bloody pulp" refers to - the overall appearance? But perhaps to a nine-year-old the blood and violence would have had more impact than the castration itself. And certainly the tire iron reappears in Ennis's next speech, and of course in the fact that he "knows" Jack was killed by the tire iron (inverted commas deliberate).

The image of the eviscerated sheep is an excellent additional to the film IMO; we only know later how it must have resonated with Ennis's recollections of Earl's fate, but we can understand at that moment in the film how it is tied up with guilt and possible punishment: what happened with Jack, the suddenness and near-violence of it, and the consequences of dereliction of duty (something which remains important to him later in life - "late heifers still calvin. You don't leave then. You don't" - even at the expense of his relationship with Jack).