By Ella Allan-Rahill

The short story, “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx was originally published in 1997. The story is set in the American West in the 1960s–80s and follows the relationship of two adult men, Jack and Ennis, who are working as ranchers. Much of the story is about the development of a "forbidden" sexual and romantic relationship between them and how it evolves as they attempt to find social acceptance in a heteronormative society. While much of the story is centered around ranching, it is not without energy references. Jack and Ennis’s relationship, along with other parts of the text, are described through similes, some mentioning energy afterlives (things that require energy to create) and others not. Is there a link between these types of similes and the state of Jack and Ennis’s relationship?  

How does this story relate to energy? 

Energy sources appear in the text primarily through obvious mentions of things like kerosene, automobiles, and oil. On top of these direct references to energy sources, material goods that took energy to create or signal an industrialized society (also energy afterlives) abound. For example, there are many mentions of cans, carpets, telephones, and more. The characters interact with these objects on a daily basis.

Less obvious though, is how energy sources are encoded into the text by powering similes. For example, “electrical current snapped between them” is used to describe Ennis and Jack’s relationship early in the story (Proulx 10). Similes in the text also incorporate non-energy language, such as on page 20, where interactions between Jack and Ennis are "like vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter the years of things unsaid and now unsayable” (Proulx). Sometimes similes and metaphors in the text combine both energy afterlife and non-energy words, for example “as an insect moves across a tablecloth”  or the “metal smell of coming snow” both have a word in them that takes energy to create (tablecloth and metal) as well as a non-energy word (insect and snow) (Proulx 3, 7). From these examples, one can see that energy and non-energy similes are used to convey positive, negative, and neutral messages. Furthermore, the entanglement of both categories of words within one metaphor or simile shows the inextricable link between natural and unnatural things in our everyday lives. The built environment and the Wild West are not entirely separate spheres in this story or the language used to convey its messages. Furthermore, the similes in this story signal the difficulty in describing natural phenomena and objects without referencing energy sources.

How was this visualization made?

To represent the ways that energy afterlives make their way into similies in the text, I searched for every simile in the text, coming out with a total of 27. Then, I classified each of these similies as an energy afterlife simile, meaning that it had only energy-related words in it (depicted in red on the visualization), non-energy similies, those that had only non-energy words in them (depicted in green) and those similies that had a combination of energy and non-energy words (yellow). As Jack and Ennis’s relationship is the primary storyline in this text, I wanted to see how these energy references related to the change in their relationship over time. So, I created a timeline of Jack and Ennis’s relationship, representing each character with a blue line. These lines get closer and further away from one another depending on how physically close and connected Jack and Ennis were at that time in the story.

I chose to represent this on a scale of pages because the passage of time is very inconsistent in this story; for example, four years pass in only a page, but it takes ten pages to describe one summer, so representing it on the scale of pages seemed more true to the narration. Along the top of the visualization, I included images to represent key places or things that were relevant between Jack and Ennis at that time in the story, such as the places where they were living or activities that they did together. I annotated key points in the story at the bottom of the visualization to give viewers a better understanding of how the lines represent the character’s proximity. Finally, I incorporated the similes I found in the text into the visualization by creating a multi-colored line between those used to represent Jack and Ennis’s relationship. The line is color-coded as described above and also corresponds to the page numbers. Shorter lines indicate that there were multiple similies on one page, while longer lines indicate only a single simile on the whole page. Empty spaces indicate a lack of similies on the page. 

This visualization shows that there is a relationship between the types of similies used and the state of Jack and Ennis’s relationship. While at the beginning of the story, there are only non-energy similies and combination similies, the purely energy afterlife similies begin to show up in rough spots during Jack and Ennis’s relationship, for example, when they first part ways after their summer on Brokeback Mountain, when their relationship is unstable and they only see one another on occasion for “fishing trips,” and right before and after Jack’s death. However, when Jack and Ennis are together at less complicated times, typically when it is just the two of them in a remote place, removed from the realities of society, energy references in similies are less common.

Not only is Jack and Ennis’s relationship much more strained in public because of the homophobic society that they live in, but the ability to describe this natural relationship using words that do not relate to industrialized society’s energy afterlives is also compromised when the characters move from isolated regions to the public. This visualization emphasizes a key theme in the story, the inability of natural existence in an industrialized society, and how the societal expectations of this age may be a reason for the lack of acceptance of Jack and Ennis’s gay relationship. 

Bibliography

Jacobs, Rita D., and Annie Proulx. “Close Range: Wyoming Stories.” World Literature Today, 

      vol. 74, no. 2, 2000, p. 369, www.taosmemory.com/oscar/BrokebackMountainNovle.pdf, 

      https://doi.org/10.2307/40155639.

Proulx, Annie. ““Brokeback Mountain.”” The New Yorker, 2019, 

      www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/10/13/brokeback-mountain.