Proulx Goes Hollywood

Yesterday on the readers/hobby message board I stumbled upon some knowledgeable posts about the origin of the Nominated movie Brokeback Mountain. I found direct quotes from 'Annie' Proulx the author of the short story upon which the screenplay is based.  That short story was published in the New Yorker. Ms Proulx writes that she has in her past direct experience of the milieu, Wyoming, in which the story takes place.  She even says she's observed real life men in Wyoming on which her characters are based.

Why does she bother to published such blather? "Readers" who have read Shipping News from Proulx cite that reading experience, which emboldens them to assert the movie based on that writing is also mighty fine, en masse assert that the movie Brokeback Mountain must be mighty fine also.

Personally I subscribe to a theory of literary criticism that posits all such peripheral support has absolutely zero to do with the with the work in question, in this case the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, and how that screenplay was translated to a movie. 

Lenin, the architect of the Russian Revolution writes all huffed up about how Tolstoy got the War and the Revolution all wrong when he wrote War and Peace. If we're studying Russian political history that might be interesting, but in the domain of literature what he says is meaningless. Dredging up Proulx and places she's lived and the personal opinions she might or might not hold are also meaningless.

": a method of literary criticism that assumes language refers only to itself rather than to an extratextual reality, that asserts multiple conflicting interpretations of a text, and that bases such interpretations on the philosophical, political, or social implications of the use of language in the text rather than on the author's intention
- de·con·struc·tion·ist /-sh&-nist/ noun lookupchange('deconstruction','lookUpDic');" -Websters 

I think Ms Proulx is full of it.

I also have a hunch she published another short story in the New Yorker under another name. If that's true, she may have already decided it's foolish, if one is Herman Melville, to spend enormous amounts of time proving that there really and truly are vicious white whales out there.

Barry