Kym Brindle Wish I Was There Economies of Communication in Annie Proulx’s Postcards and “Brokeback Mountain” “I went to the little two-by-four post office and wrote my aunt a penny postcard.We went back to the gray road.” Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957) Abstract: Annie Proulx exploits the narrative possibilities of the picture postcard in the novel Postcards (1993) and in the celebrated short story “Brokeback Moun- tain” (1999). Ideas of place, landscape, journeying, and longing for home are en- capsulated in picture postcards that symbolise geographic distance and emo- tional alienation. Postcards, freighted with extra-textual meaning derived from picture and place, symbolise spatial and emotional distance between sender and addressee: they are testimony to restless fragmented lives on the road. Proulx exploits structural irony with messages that symbolise the inescapable pull of home and a need to connect whilst remaining largely empty of any truth of experience. Avoidance and liberation from conventions of epistolary ex- change are necessary functions for Proulx’s regional narratives of exile and ali- enation. 1 Introduction American novelist, Annie Proulx exploits the narrative possibilities of the picture postcard in her first novel Postcards (1993), which was the first novel written by a woman to win the PEN/Faulkner award. A postcard is also significant in Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain”, which became part of the 1999 collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories and was then adapted for film in 2005.¹ Both novel and story develop the pictorial and souvenir possibilities of postcards. The form’s self-reflexive potential is more prominent in the novel and is therefore more extensively explored in this essay. Postcards may, as Jeffrey Meikle ob- serves, be “an ephemeral category of material artefact” (Meikle 2009: 112), but as an embedded epistolary strategy they serve two essential narrative functions for Proulx. Firstly, they subvert iconographic ideas of an American landscape tamed and reduced to national images or romanticised pastoral settings and,  The story was originally published in The New Yorker in 1997. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110584813-006