In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews

by Joyce Carol Oates

  All her life she had heard and felt the Wyoming wind and took it for granted. There had even been a day when she was a young girl standing by the road waiting for the school bus when a spring wind, fresh and warm and perfumed with pine resin, had caused a bolt of wild happiness to surge through her, its liveliness promising glinting chances. She had loved the wind that day. But out at [her husband’s] ranch it was different and she became aware of moving air’s erratic, inimical character. The house lay directly in line with a gap in the encircling hills to the northwest, and through this notch the prevailing wind poured, falling on the house with ferocity…When she put her head down and went out to the truck, it yanked at her clothing, shot up her sleeves, whisked her hair into raveled fright wigs.

  With a similar sympathy for her young protagonist in “Them Old Cowboy Songs” in Fine Just the Way It Is, Proulx evokes the forlorn and lonely life of the “cowboy”—not the romance of Hollywood westerns but the drudgery of rural hired labor:

  For Archie the work was the usual ranch hand’s luck—hard, dirty, long and dull. There was no time for anything but saddle up, ride, rope, cut, herd, unsaddle, eat, sleep and do it again. On the clear, dry nights coyote voices seemed to emanate from single points in straight lines, the calls crisscrossing like taut wires. When cloud cover moved in, the howls spread out in a different geometry, overlapping like concentric circles from a handful of pebbles thrown into water. But most often the wind surging over the plain sanded the cries into a kind of coyote dust fractioned into particles of sound.

  Archie’s young wife Rose, giving birth unassisted in the couple’s wilderness cabin, wakes from a bloody stupor

  glued to the bed and at the slightest movement [feeling] a hot surge she knew was blood. She got up on her elbows and saw the clotted child, stiff and gray, the barley-rope cord and the afterbirth. She did not weep but, filled with an ancient rage, got away from the tiny corpse, knelt on the floor ignoring the hot blood seeping from her and rolled the infant up in the stiffening sheet. It was a bulky mass, and she felt the loss of the sheet as another tragedy…Clenching the knot of the dish towel in her teeth, she crawled out the door and toward the sandy soil near the river where, still on hands and knees, still spouting blood, she dug a shallow hole…and laid the child in it…It took more than an hour to follow her blood trail back to the cabin.

  The bloody sheet lay bunched on the floor and the bare mattress showed a black stain like the map of South America. She lay on the floor, for the bed was miles away, a cliff only birds could reach…Barrel Mountain, bringing darkness, squashed its bulk against the window and owls crashed through, wings like iron bars. Struggling through the syrup of subconsciousness in the last hour she heard the coyotes outside and knew what they were doing.

  It isn’t clear whether Archie survives a terrible Wyoming winter but Rose is found dead at the cabin, rumored to have been luridly “raped and murdered and mutilated by Utes.” The story’s wisdom is simple frontier logic: “Some lived and some died, and that’s how it was.” It’s only to those who haven’t been listening closely that “Them Old Cowboy Songs” sound sentimental.

  Though in most of her fiction Annie Proulx has focused on the hardscrabble lives of men, two of the more fully realized stories in Fine Just the Way It Is are told from the perspective of young women. In “Testimony of the Donkey” a young couple are similarly “suffused with euphoria” for the wilderness: “They had shown each other their lapsarian atavistic tastes, their need for the forest, for the difficult and solitary, for what [Catlin’s] father called ‘the eternal verities’”…Each is fiercely independent, obsessive:

  The real focus of their lives was neither work nor clutching love, but wilderness travel. As many days and weeks as they could manage they spent hiking the Big Horns, the Wind Rivers, exploring old logging roads, digging around ancient mining claims. Marc had a hundred plans. He wanted to canoe the Boundary Waters, to kayak down the Labrador coast, to fish in Peru. They snowboarded the Wasatch, followed wolf packs in Yellowstone’s backcountry. They spent long weekends in Utah’s Canyonlands, in Wyoming’s Red Desert Haystacks looking for fossils. The rough country was their emotional center.

  Casting off her lover, and in defiance of the Wyoming Forest Service which has closed the trail she intends to take, reckless Catlin persists in hiking alone in the Old Bison range; the reader waits for the inevitable to happen, an accident that leaves Catlin pinned by a heavy rock, helpless as she sinks into hallucination and lethargy, dying of thirst:

  Her entire body, her fingernails, her inner ears, the ends of her greasy hair, screamed for water. She bore holes in the sky looking for more rain…

  By morning the temporary jolt of strength and clarity was gone. She felt as though electricity was shooting up through the rock and into her torso…Apparitions swarmed from the snowbanks above, fountains and dervishes, streaming spigots, a helicopter with a waterslide, a crowd of garishly dressed people reaching down, extending their hands to her. All day a dessicating hot wind blew and made her nearly blind.

  Reduced to sheer appetite and terror, poor Catlin who’d imagined herself so independent tries to call out her spurned lover’s name—“but ‘Marc’ came out as a guttural roar, ‘Maaaa…,’ a thick and frightening primeval sound.”

  “Tits-Up in a Ditch”—the provocative title refers to a cow that has wandered off to die in a ditch, in this contorted position—is the final story of Fine Just the Way It Is, and the most ambitious and sympathetic. Narrated in an intentionally flat, repetitive prose shorn of the metaphor-laden language for which Proulx is known, the forty-two-page story is an extended elegy reminiscent of “Brokeback Mountain” in the bleakness of its characters’ lives and the implacable nature of their losses, including those losses of which they are scarcely aware. The young female protagonist is Dakotah Lister whose rebellious teenaged mother has run away, leaving the fatherless Dakotah for her embittered grandparents to bring up on their run-down “trash” ranch: “Since [pioneer times] the country had become trammeled and gnawed, stippled with cattle, coal mines, oil wells and gas rigs, striated with pipelines. The road to the ranch had been named Sixteen Mile, though no one knew what that distance signified.”

  Dakotah’s grandfather Verl Lister, like many another rural male in Proulx’s Wyoming, once aspired to be a rodeo performer—

  a bareback rider who suffered falls, hyperextensions and breaks that had bloomed into arthritis and aches as he aged. A trampling had broken his pelvis and legs so that now he walked with the slinking crouch of a bagpipe player. [His wife Bonita] could not fault him for ancient injuries, and remembered him as the straight-backed, curly-headed young man with beautiful eyes sitting on his horse, back straight as a metal fence post.

  —now a sort of macho-invalid on his deteriorating ranch close by the far more prosperous Match Ranch owned by villainous Wyatt Match—“a sharp-horned archconservative with a hard little smile like a diamond chip”—whose consuming vision is “maintaining the romantic heritage of the nineteenth-century ranch, Wyoming’s golden time.” Neither Verl Lister nor Wyatt Match is much more than a caricature sketched in broad slashing strokes, but Dakotah acquires a measure of depth and dignity as the story develops, despite her passivity and barely average intelligence; seemingly by chance Dakotah becomes involved with a high school classmate named Sash Hicks who marries her, impregnates her, breaks up with her and runs off to join the U.S. Army, leaving her to raise their infant son alone. Proulx’s unembellished account of the young couple’s failed marriage has the summary tone of the heavily ironic “Job History” of Close Range, in which a similarly luckless young married couple of an earlier generation try desperately to make a living in a rapidly changing rural Wyoming.

  With naive idealism—imagining that she might study to become a “medic” of some sort—Dakotah herself enlists in the U.S. Army, but scores low on tests and winds up in the Military Police where, with seeming inevitability, given the grim contours and chute-li
ke possibilities of Proulx’s cosmology, she is seriously injured in an explosion at a checkpoint in Iraq, where she has been assigned the task of searching Iraqi women. Shipped back home with a prosthetic right arm, Dakotah discovers that her infant son has been killed in a vehicular accident caused by her ignorant grandfather Verl and that her husband Sash—from whom she was never divorced—has been shipped back to Wyoming too, in far worse shape than Dakotah:

  Sash Hicks had disintegrated, both legs blown off at midthigh, the left side of his face a mass of shiny scar tissue, the left ear and eye gone…He had suffered brain damage. But Dakotah recognized him, old Billy the Kid shot up by Pat Garrett. More than ever he looked like the antique outlaw.

  In fact, in an ironic gender reversal, it isn’t the disillusioned Dakotah but the damaged young veteran Sash Hicks who winds up—to use Wyoming’s crudely poetic figure of speech—“tits-up in a ditch.”

  So too with much of the “old”—“rural”—Wyoming, Proulx suggests. In virtually every story in these three Wyoming volumes there is an acknowledgment, sometimes explicit, more often implicit, that—as the owner of the Harp Ranch concedes, in “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?”—“the old world was gone.” Young people flee their parents’ ranches, preferring to live urban lives; ranch hands and “cowboys” are scarce, as able-bodied men prefer to work out of state, for more money; the once-Wyoming “paradise” is now

  [a] vast junkyard field of refineries, disturbed land, uranium mines, coal mines, trona mines, pump jacks and drilling rigs, clear-cuts, tank farms, contaminated rivers, pipelines, methanol-processing plants, ruinous dams, the Amoco mess, railroads, all disguised by the deceptively empty landscape.

  All that remains of the glory days of the nineteenth century are theme-park ranches for tourists and hokey Wild West celebrations like the “Rodeo Days” parade in “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?” in which a motley assortment of locals march as “pioneers,” teenaged boys dress as “Indians,” costumed “cowboys” trot past on horseback twirling six-shooters, and not a single rancher is represented: “It was all pioneers, outlaws, Indians, and gas.”

  Fine just the way it is is a smug expression used with dogmatic frequency by Wyoming residents like the archconservative rancher Wyatt Match, meaning that Wyoming is “fine” as it is, without the intrusion of despised outsiders like federal politicians and policy makers and anti-cattle/anti-beef agitators who want an end to the open-range grazing that has proven to be ruinous to the ecology of the West; ironically, fine just the way it is also happens to be a phrase used, in Proulx’s satiric story “I’ve Always Loved This Place,” by Charon, in reference to his own habitat, Hades.

  ENCHANTED! SALMAN RUSHDIE

  The Enchantress of Florence

  by Salman Rushdie

  A graceful fool…or perhaps no fool at all. Perhaps someone to be reckoned with. If he had a fault, it was that of ostentation, of seeking to be not only himself but a performance of himself.

  —SALMAN RUSHDIE, FROM THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE

  In Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2001), a novel of Swiftian dyspepsia published the very week of 9/11, the fifty-five-year-old misanthropic Professor Malik Solanka, “retired historian of ideas,” has enjoyed an unexpected popular success for having created a BBC-TV series called “The Adventures of Little Brain” in which a doll called “Little Brain”—handcrafted by Solanka himself—interviews a series of “Great Minds” dolls in a familiar history-of-philosophy format. “Little Brain” is a sassy, spiky-haired Candide who, in contemporary talk-show fashion, goads her interviewees into surprising revelations:

  the favorite fiction writer of the seventeenth-century heretic Baruch Spinoza turned out to be P. G. Wodehouse, an astonishing coincidence, because of course the favorite philosopher of the immortal shimmying butler Reginald Jeeves was Spinoza…The Iberian Arab thinker Averroës, like his Jewish counterpart Maimonides, was a huge Yankees fan…

  In deep disgust with his contemporaries, especially his fellow academicians at King’s College, Cambridge, Solanka becomes entranced by the possibility of seeing the world “miniaturized”:

  It was a trick of the mind to see human life made small, reduced to doll size…A little modesty about the scale of human endeavor was to be desired. Once you had thrown that switch in your head, the hard thing was to see in the old way. Small was beautiful.

  As Jonathan Swift demonstrates in the savage comedy of Gulliver’s Travels, “humanity” is but a matter of scale: rendered as dolls, miniaturized like the Lilliputians of Gulliver’s first voyage, we are reduced not only in size but in stature; our ideals, our suffering, our most grievous quarrels are revealed as ridiculous, and our “Great Minds” become comic characters to be exploited by the media. When Swift’s Gulliver ventures into the land of the Brobdignagians, he is revulsed by the giants’ physical ugliness even as, a doll-like Lilliputian in their eyes, his race is condemned by the King of Brobdignag in the most pitiless Swiftian terms:

  I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth. [Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to Brobdingnag,”]

  Set primarily in New York City—a city “boiling” with money where the very harness bells on the horse-drawn carriages in Central Park jingle like “cash in hand”—Fury exudes an air of personal grievance and rage that seems disproportionate to Solanka’s experience as a professor, historian, husband, father, minor celebrity; virtually everyone Solanka has known or encounters is despicable, given to embittered ranting monologues in confirmation of Solanka’s conviction that “life is fury.”

  Fury—sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal—drives us to our finest delights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover.

  Typically in a novel by Salman Rushdie, the protagonist falls in love with a femme fatale (here, named “Neela Mahendra”) so ravishingly beautiful that strangers stagger up to her to gape at her; he becomes “deeply enmeshed in her web…The queen webspyder, mistress of the whole webspyder posse, had him in her net.” Soon, however, Solanka discovers that “this beautiful, accursed girl” is “an incarnation of a Fury”—

  one of the three deadly sisters, the scourges of mankind. Fury was their divine nature and boiling human wrath their favorite food. He could have persuaded himself that behind her low whispers, beneath her unfailingly even tempered tones, he could hear the Erinyes’ shrieks.

  Greeted with a mixed critical reception in 2001, Fury is best appreciated as a machine-gun volley of Swiftian indignation, at its highest pitch fueled by a powerful charge of self-loathing like a cri de coeur from the beleaguered author whose life as a private citizen ended with nightmare abruptness on February 14, 1989, when the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or death sentence for Rushdie’s alleged blasphemy in his pyrotechnic-Postmodernist surreal black comedy The Satanic Verses (1988); one feels the author speaking through the beleaguered Solanka in terror of the Erinyes—the Furies of ancient Athens—“Serpent-haired, dog-headed, bat-winged” hounding him for the remainder of his life.

  Where the strategy of Fury is to miniaturize by way of corrosive satire, the strategy of Rushdie’s new, tenth novel The Enchantress of Florence, an elaborately allegorized “romance-adventure” set in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Florence and in Fatehpur Sikri, the capital city of India’s Mughal empire, is to inflate in the more genial, disingenuous way of fables, fairy tales, The Thousand and One Nights as narrated by the archetypal storyteller Scheherazade. Because The Enchantress of Florence is simultaneously a postmodernist work of prose fiction, highly self-conscious and stylized, variously influenced by predecessor metafictionists John Barth (Giles Goat-Boy, Chimera), Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler), Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred
Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch), among others, the inflation of Rushdie’s characters and the story in which they participate is presented in comic-epic terms; here is a “historical novel” that is also an artful parody of the genre, by a master storyteller not unlike his audacious protagonist Niccolò Vespucci who mesmerizes the despotic Mughal emperor with his storytelling skills: the magician-charlatan-imposter-artist who is “not only himself but a performance of himself as well.”

  Rushdie’s storyteller-hero is by no means an ordinary individual, even a somewhat extraordinary individual: this bold traveler from the West—we will learn, in time, that he is one Ago Vespucci of Florence, who has renamed himself Niccolò Vespucci after his closest boyhood friend Niccolò “il Machia” (Machiavelli)—rides in a bullock-cart standing up “like a god” when we first see him; his hair is a “dirty yellow” yet flows down around his face “like the golden water of the lake.” The Western traveler to exotic India has an “overly pretty face”—in fact, the traveler is “certainly beautiful, and knew that his looks had a power of their own.” Somehow, he has acquired seven languages: Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English, and Portuguese; he has been “driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life.” As in the oldest and most enduring of young-male-quest tales, the youthful traveler seeks an audience with the ruler of the strange new land he is visiting; the ruler will be a patriarch, an older man likely to be tyrannical, yet drawn to the young man for his very brashness and cunning; if the young man seeks a father, the older man seeks a son: it is inevitable that the Mughal emperor whom the traveler encounters, Akbar the Great (1542–1605), will have sons who have disappointed him, and will long for a young man he can trust: