Gender Roomours II

by Christian Lassen, University of Tübingen, Germany

1     And if you can't stand it, you have got to fix it. A chief misjudgement concerning "Brokeback Mountain",[1]Quotations from "Brokeback Mountain", the short story, are taken from Proulx's collection <em>Close Range. Wyoming Stories</em>. Quotations from the film, respectively the screenplay, will be indicated by a note referring to all the screenwriters, Proulx, McMurtry and Ossana. both the short story and the movie, probably lies in the widespread preconception that the queering of the cowboy in the American Western tradition is unanimously considered an unprecedented subversion. In fact, this tradition has long been invaded by gay characters, both subtly homoerotic or overtly camp.[2]Vito Russo's <em>The Celluloid Closet</em>, for example, discusses the American Western masculinity of late-1960s buddy films, in particular <em>Midnight Cowboy</em> (1969), arguing that their depiction of the cowboy permanently "calls into question the innocence of this ultimate masculine ideal" (81), even to the degree of an implanted fear, a homosexual panic, whose angst-ridden anticipations predict the erasure of the "difference between the cowboy hero and the faggot on Forty-second Street" (ibid.). More recently, the masculinity of the cowboy has developed into a camp cliché, especially in queer movies such as <em>The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert</em> (1994). Thus, both the fascination as well as the discomfort that engulf a mainstream, predominantly heteronormative, audience confronted with "Brokeback Mountain" must reside in some yet unacknowledged generic crisis. Suppose then: What if this generic crisis results from the undermining force of a totally different tradition? What if the American Western tradition and its model masculinities merely serve as stand-ins that in due course turn out to be insufficiently equipped to completely reduce, and thus tame, the emotional impact of a more overtly homoerotic, and therefore much more patrolled genre? In other words, what if "Brokeback Mountain" first and foremost requires to be understood as a pastoral elegy? Evidently, this generic viewpoint will do better justice to the short story both in terms of its bucolic settings as well as its examination of the dynamics of love and loss. Furthermore, in contrast to other rigorously homosocial genres, such as the American Western but also the seafaring tradition, the pastoral elegy is generically predetermined to suggest a homoerotic subtext, or connotation, exactly because the intimacy between men within this genre is so exceptionally intense that homosocial and homosexual bonding become virtually indistinguishable. By evoking the pastoral tradition, "Brokeback Mountain" testifies to much more than just a homosexual presence in the realm of straight American Western masculinity: It invests this masculinity with both a subversive sexuality and a generic sentimentality, thus exposing what Judith Butler calls "a foreclosure of possibility which produces a domain of homosexuality understood as unlivable passion and ungrievable loss" (135). In other words, the pastoral elegy forces the American Western tradition to admit to the fact that not only is there a homosexual attachment but it is both livable and grievable. This admittance turns out to be indispensable, for it enables us to further examine the short story's sentimental investment. And this examination is all the more necessary, since the sentimental investment within both the short story and the movie is by no means unambiguous. In fact, it polarises the positions of the increasingly gay-identified sentimentality of a pastoral shepherd, Jack Twist, and the tenaciously straight-identified anti-sentimentality of an American Western cowboy, Ennis del Mar.

2     Alluding to a traditional triangular structure, the short story creates two dichotomous spheres, the pastoral space containing the homosexual bond between Ennis and Jack, and the urban space containing the heterosexual bond between Ennis and Alma, or respectively, between Jack and Lureen. In accordance with generic conventions, the pastoral space offers the resources of sublime nature, thus forming a locus amoenus that eventually culminates in the idea of a present-day arcadia not yet ruined by the inevitable experience of loss. And still, even in the very beginning the delineation of the pastoral space is provided with the undertones of doom:

During the day Ennis looked across a great gulf and sometimes saw Jack, a small dot moving across a high meadow as an insect moves across a tablecloth; Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain. (Proulx 256-257)

Plotwise, this passage already anticipates the future estrangement of Ennis and Jack with both its portentous reference to the "great gulf" between them and its mutually telling comparisons. More significantly, however, the allusion to the "dark camp" contains a double entendre that discloses the pastoral idyll to be literary, indeed fictitious. After all, many contemporary representations of the pastoral genre include strategies of camp that playfully evoke an artificial refuge ultimately unavailable to everyone, including both cowboys and shepherds.[3]The link between camp and the pastoral genre has already been put forward by Susan Sontag in her famous "Notes on Camp," first published in 1964. Although Sontag initially argues that "nothing in nature can be campy […]. Rural camp is still man-made, and most campy objects are urban" (55), she nevertheless admits to the fact that "they [campy objects] have a serenity - or a naïveté - which is equivalent of pastoral." (ibid.). Thus, Sontag herself proposes a commonality between camp objects and the pastoral genre that eventually puts her first claim about the absence of camp in nature into perspective. In other words, even though nature, according to Sontag, is essentially un-camp, its representations, including the literary representations of the pastoral genre, may well be marked by the extravagances of this particular mode of perception. More recently, depictions of pastoral camp can be observed in the works of authors such as Alan Hollinghurst, whose AIDS-elegies make vast use of camp in order to simultaneously claim and question traditional routes to grief.

3     These representations deliberately play with the wilful confusion of the literal and the literary, thus aiming to extract what Eve Sedgwick calls a "surplus beauty" ("Paranoid" 150) from the camp tendency to take the allegory for real. Following Sedgwick, pastoral camp can be seen to pursue precisely this, the mobilisation of reparative resources:

The desire of a reparative impulse […] is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self. To view camp as, among other things, the communal, historically dense exploration of a variety of reparative practices is to do better justice to many of the defining elements of classic camp performances […]. (ibid. 149-150).

In "Brokeback Mountain," the awareness of the discrepancy between the allegory and reality is deceptively foreclosed from the start. Both the short story and the movie initially evoke the misleading notion that these two spaces, the sphere of the allegory and the sphere of reality, may indeed be co-existent. Paradoxically, reality even seems to surpass the pastoral promise, offering sexual pleasures whose fulfilment would certainly transgress the strictly patrolled limits of the pastoral. And thus, it is somewhat delightfully camp to learn that after their first sexual encounter both Ennis and Jack "knew how it would go for the rest of the summer, sheep be damned" (Proulx 260). Simultaneously, however, the compatibility between allegory and reality is acutely threatened by a rapid intensification of the mechanisms of homosocial order, whose omnipresence is made manifest both physically, in the policing gaze of Joe Aguirre, and psychologically, in Ennis' disturbing account of the literal castration, and brutal murder, of an elderly gay man presumably conducted by Ennis' father.

4     In fact, these two examples of homosocial policing accurately illustrate the twofold threat occurring with a lack of awareness concerning the discrepancy between reality and allegory, because in "Brokeback Mountain" the literal unpredictably intrudes on the literary and the literary uncannily turns into the literal. Consequently, the resources of pastoral camp undergo an increasingly depressing revaluation, both in terms of a reparative quest for a palimpsest romance whose tenor becomes gradually more melancholy and forlorn and in terms of a paranoid alertness towards discovery and disclosure whose impact eventually initiates the intra-generic fall of the pastoral elegy - with all its dynamics of love and loss now looming over Ennis and Jack like a dim self-fulfilling prophecy. Positioned between these two forces, reparation and paranoia, Proulx's use of pastoral camp indeed grows dark.[4]Sedgwick distinguishes between two camp practices, a reparative imagination that aims at amelioration and the healing of traumatic damage as well as a paranoid imagination that aims at the anticipation and disclosure of the workings of heteronormativity, including its classified gender performances. By using the term "dark camp," I suggest a continuity of these two forces, reparation and paranoia, albeit with regards to a different, a previous, Sedgwickean distinction, namely that between the sentimental and the anti-sentimental. "Dark camp," as applied in "Brokeback Mountain," thus marks a sinister variation of the original distinction, for it eventually depicts both a reparative sentimentality whose struggle for amelioration gives way to constant dissatisfaction and frustration and a paranoid anti-sentimentality whose gender performances, in this case that of the American Western masculinity, no longer anticipate the heteronormative workings in society in order to subvert and disclose them, but indeed in order not to be disclosed by them. In contrast to other contemporary representations of pastoral camp, then, "Brokeback Mountain" illustrates how the characters' incapacity to deal with the incoherence between the literal and the literary denies them the comforting potential of pastoral camp to the uncanny degree that the pastoral elegy is suddenly reinvested with an outwardly uncamp, in fact dead-serious, and thus all the more dangerously melodramatic, (anti-) sentimentality whose impact is especially noxious, since it exposes and intensifies the increasing divergence of two very different masculinities and their conflicting tendencies towards both paranoia and reparation.

5     Ennis' initiation into paranoid processes has been thoroughly accomplished right from the start, beginning with a Freudian landmark, the fear of castration, that is already inherently connoted in his conspicuously abbreviated first name. Bluntly spoken, then, not only does the initial addition of a voiced plosive produce a far more common first name, namely (D)ennis, but furthermore, one might just as well imagine another preceding initial, a voiceless plosive, whose omission eventually suggests that castration has already occurred, especially since the emasculating effect of this very omission results in an audible remainder that comes precariously close, phonetically, to /einəs/. Easily the most traumatic incidence of a literary, indeed metaphorical, fear suddenly turning literal in "Brokeback Mountain," the internalised threat of castration looms over Ennis ever since his father took him to see the corpse of Earl, an elderly gay man, whose violated body apparently had been on display for quite a long time as an affirmation of the Symbolic order and as a rite of passage for boys to visit on their route to proper manhood. Unsurprisingly, this dire socialisation turns out to have been perversely successful, for when Ennis reveals his traumatic experience to Jack the night of their reunion, his paranoia instantly stirs up the policing presence of the Father, literally his father:

"I was what, nine years old and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They'd took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel." "You seen this?" "Dad made sure I seen it. Took me to see it. Me and K.E. Dad laughed about it. Hell, for all I know he done the job. If he was alive and was to put his head in that door right now you bet he'd go get his tire iron." (Proulx 268)

In the course of the short story, it becomes increasingly apparent that Ennis' subjection to the law of the father, the Symbolic order, is indeed too profound to be completely cast off. In fact, the conflict that results from his feelings for Jack on the one hand, and his persistent need to sustain a straight-identified self-conception on the other hand, in time builds up an escalating psychic structure that drives him further and further into the bottomless pit of paranoia. Many references in the story comment on this development.