‘I Contain Multitudes’: The queer chronotopes of Annie Proulx’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’

This article will explore Annie Proulx’s treatment of the expansive Wyoming setting and the characters’ traumatic lives in ‘Brokeback Mountain’ as factors that would seem to militate against the generic limits of the short story form. Through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, I will argue that Proulx represents memory and geography in images in which time and space coalesce or are torn asunder to signify a love that literally dare not speak its name because it would be lethal to do so. The story’s central theme of queer love between two novice shepherds has a concomitant effect on what constitutes the normative in Wyoming’s fiercely patriarchal and machismo world. This results in a range of chronotopes in which heteronormative space and time undergo queer revision. Drawing upon queer theory tropes such as futurity and counterpublics, I suggest that Proulx’s queering of the literary form of the pastoral recalibrates notions of domesticity and the family. Proulx’s imagery thus reveals an alternative ethic secretly at work in the story’s milieu that narrative discourse opens to the reader even if its secret significance is sullied and even silenced by rural myth and history in its represented world.