Speech Patterns That Join Them
From “Brokeback Mountain,” by Annie Proulx:
“I’m commutin four hours a day,” he said morosely. “Come in for breakfast, go back to the sheep, evenin get em bedded down, come in for supper, go back to the sheep, spend half the night jumpin up and checkin for coyotes. By rights I should be spendin the night here. Aguirre got no right a make me do this.”
“You want a switch?” said Ennis. “I wouldn’t mind herdin. I wouldn’t mind sleepin out there.”
“That ain’t the point. Point is, we both should be in this camp. And that goddam pup tent smells like cat piss or worse.”
“Wouldn’t mind bein out there.”
“Tell you what, you got a get up a dozen times in the night out there over them coyotes. Happy to switch but give you warnin I can’t cook worth a shit. Pretty good with a can opener.”
“Can’t be no worse than me, then. Sure, I wouldn’t mind a do it.”
Ennis and Jack’s dialogue throughout “Brokeback Mountain” feels as natural as real life. Annie Proulx must have molded them from the Montana dirt and pressed them into her pages.
Montana Staccato
Proulx shapes this back-and-forth between Ennis and Jack primarily through pointed statements. She does better than to make everything a full stop sentence, however.
The ways in which she lets her characters spout their staccato gives you a deeper look at their individual perspectives on the moment.
Take Jack’s first statement. He talks about breakfast, sheep, sleep, food, sheep again, and predators in a single line. He doesn’t (Proulx doesn’t let him) expand on those moments which come across in the text as looking pretty unimportant. Because do you really want to hear more about breakfast, supper, and sheep? Probably not. And I’d say Jack doesn’t want to tell you any more about it.
Jack wants to move on, so he does, explicitly (“That ain’t the point” almost reacting to himself more than Ennis) and through subject matter (taking note of the smell of the tent, and after that the number of times you have to wake up, and after that his poor cooking skills).
The whole time, Proulx lets Ennis admire this bullet-point sort of rambling and in return gives Ennis a few notes of his own.
Wouldn’t mind bein out there.
I think he could have said that exact statement three times in a row. It feels like he did. He knows to skip thinking about Jack’s stated particulars. He only wants to help.
The entire time, there’s this long-short-long-short battle taking place between them. To me, it felt like the long parts were simply frustration and indecision covering the points that matter. Then the short parts were the focus on what does matter. Ennis and Jack both know the core problem and the answer, and what you get the pleasure of reading are the different ways they use their natural language to reach the heart of the matter.
Individual Words
Within those styles of overall speech lie the individual words that fill this conversation.
Often, I see writers insert apostrophes to mark shortened words in speech, like if you were to write warnin’ or bein’.
Proulx leaves them out almost entirely, and with their absence she dramatically effects the flow of dialogue between her characters.
In this scene, you can look again to the first line and feel the staccato of Jack’s frustration. If he were to speak in apostrophes, you’d see this instead:
…spend half the night jumpin’ up and checkin’ for coyotes. By rights I should be spendin’ the night here.
To me, these marks cause your eyes to consider each word for a moment longer. It’s like they’re highlighted. Yet if you subscribe to the theory that Jack wants to move away from these petty ideas — that he’s rambling only to search for the greater concern — you don’t want more attention paid to those words. They’re unnecessary pointedness in a speech that’s already happening in bursts.
Proulx’s approach feels much more fluid. She lets Jack slide past his minor grievances. She also lets Ennis’ nonchalant manner take a bigger step forward. Ennis can say “I wouldn’t mind herdin,” “I wouldn’t mind sleepin” without any undue effort.
The words and phrases combine to create an overall story that’s rich with the style of these two men. You can see their passion and consideration of their circumstances. Yet, they hold back or gloss over much of the detail of their lives. I think it’s in those gaps of information that the fluidity of their speech (of Proulx’s writing) steps in. Conversations become more than their sum of their words. Further, the story becomes more than the sum of their shared experiences.