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Narrative Structure in Annie Proulx's

Accordion Crimes
Rodney Stenning Edgecombe
Published online: 12 Sep 2008.

To cite this article: Rodney Stenning Edgecombe (2008) Narrative Structure in Annie Proulx's
Accordion Crimes , English Studies, 89:5, 552-570, DOI: 10.1080/00138380802252941

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 English Studies
Vol. 89, No. 5, October 2008, 552–570

Narrative Structure in Annie Proulx’s

Accordion Crimes
Rodney Stenning Edgecombe
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Like the Nile, the novel had two distinct sources in its epic ur-life—the austere,
monothematic design of The Iliad and the agglutinative, picaresque shape of The
Odyssey, full of diversions and twists and resting points. These elements
persisted during its romance instar too, when it functioned as an altogether baggier
and inclusive form than the integrated narrative it was destined to become. Even in
the nineteenth century, long after the novel had embraced the hypotactic plot, and
braided itself into connectedness, the regressive Odyssey/romance gene still surfaced
from time to time, counteracting the centripetal urge for integration with breakages
and stoppages and pausings on the way. Little Dorrit, for example, is as inter-looped
and as cross-referenced as a novel can be, and pretends to disclose a teleological
purpose behind the random interactions of life:

And thus ever, by day and night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the
dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by
sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and act and react upon one another,
move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life.1

But even though this sense of providence and pattern is far removed from Annie
Proulx’s aleatoric narratives (‘‘the future was crouching at a dark side road on the
path of events’’2), the choice of ‘‘pilgrimage’’, while it tries to imply a purposive
design, can’t help evoking the loose, suite structure of The Canterbury Tales. And
indeed, while it aspires to be a packaged whole, Little Dorrit accommodates the
heroine’s tale of the princess3 and also Miss Wade’s ‘‘History of a Self Tormentor’’—
both attached only tangentially to the braid of plot and subplot. Big forms, like broad
churches, can’t escape fissures and schisms, and once you pack them, they often burst
at the seams.
Some writers have chosen to break them open voluntarily, however, and seek out
those regressive genes in a quest for interesting hybrids. Novelists traditionally see

Rodney Stenning Edgecombe is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape
Town, South Africa.
1
Dickens, Little Dorrit, 27.
2
Proulx, Accordion Crimes, 129.
3
Dickens, Little Dorrit, 292 ff.

ISSN 0013-838X (print)/ISSN 1744-4217 (online) Ó 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/00138380802252941
 Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes 553

their mandate as closing on experience and processing it; romancers to gather their
half-related materials in a loose, sequential arrangement. Novels favour the prehensile
fist above the open palm, and the meshed portcullis of a Venus Flytrap above the
gaping disclosures of a pomegranate. Both these options, it goes without saying, are
evident in the astonishing fiction of Annie Proulx. Many of her short stories aspire to
(and achieve) a novelistic breadth and scope, an effect she characterizes as
‘‘sostenente’’:

‘‘Brokeback’’ was constructed on the small but tight idea of a couple of home-
grown country kids, opinions and self-knowledge shaped by the world around
them, finding themselves in emotional waters of increasing depth. I wanted to
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develop the story through a kind of literary sostenente.4

The key here lies in squaring the density of ‘‘tight’’ with the amplitude
‘‘sostenente’’—a smooth legato arc of storytelling that prevents any sense of hurry
or skimp even though Proulx is covering two decades in a handful of pages. But she
has also ‘‘novelized’’ the short story in other ways. Following the template of
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Proulx anchors Heart Songs in Vermont and
Close Range and Bad Dirt in Wyoming,5 creating a pod-like spatial matrix for
independent narrative seeds; while in Bad Dirt, we have the additional linkage of
recurring characters, and by a specific hamlet setting, even more closely locative than
the Chopping County of Heart Songs. In Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson had used a
generic or modal uniformity to reinforce the unity of place:

You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the eyes of the
writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer had ever
known had become grotesques.
The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful,
and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness.6

Proulx similarly weaves her short stories together into semi-novelistic wholes, bound
by generic and modal links through her focus on the disempowerment of the rural
poor.
And if she novelizes her story collections, she might also be said to have
‘‘shortstoryfied’’ at least two of her novels, breaking spatial unity for the sake of the
picaresque, and braking narrative momentum to set up tableaux and vignettes. While
the self-contained stories are centripetal, seeking a social and topographic context in
the landscapes of Wyoming and Vermont, Postcards and Accordion Crimes are
centrifugal, favouring travel and displacement above a centred and centring
landscape.7 These novels resemble baroque suites, both ringing many changes on
internal form and rhythm, but both kept in orbit by a home key. The rural focus of
4
Proulx, ‘‘Getting Movied,’’ 130.
5
Proulx, Close Range and Bad Dirt.
6
S. Anderson, 23.
7
Proulx, Postcards.
 554 R. S. Edgecombe
the novels might account in part for this decision with regard to form, for the orality
favours the tale above multi-tiered narratives, anecdotes above impersonal annals.
Just as Proulx integrates her short stories spatially, so she disintegrates Postcards and
Accordion Crimes, avoiding the hypotaxis of plot and the parataxis of chronicle, and
choosing instead a pattern of tessellation. The deep structure of all traditional stories
derives from the New Comedy, in which Menander dramatized the syllogism into a
protasis, an epitasis and a catastrophe. It is a formula so inevitable and so closely
connected with the habits of western thought that it has flourished ever since, and
even found its way into western music as sonata form. In contrast, Proulx’s first and
third novels march to the beat of a different drum, and some of their power derives
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from that fact. Unlike That Old Ace in the Hole, a comedy, and bound by that form’s
appetite for artifice, for tidy resolutions and bow-tying finales, they advance a looser,
darker, more open-ended vision of things.8 Try though Proulx might to pull the
threads in That Old Ace, and to leave some of its corners unwoven, it generates an
impression of patness, of being a pièce bien fait. Rather too bien, moreover, to be as
moving or as plausible as its more sombre congeners. Their scumblings and partial
divulgences represent a structural heterodoxy that bears a richer, more astringent
fruit.
Like the Brute potatoes—‘‘dark blue, an inky poison looking thing’’9 that Maureen
forces Perley to eat in ‘‘Bedrock’’, they have more flavour, a flavour that arises in their
ellipticality. We need not, like Maureen, dismiss the blander fare of That Old Ace nor
indeed the dark (but ultimately festive) Shipping News;10 but the fact remains that the
violence and abruptness implicit in the very name of ‘‘Brute’’ are guarantors of
power, and nowhere more so than in Accordion Crimes, the novel to which I shall
devote the rest of this essay.
A crucial Gestalt behind the work’s structure is the ‘‘object biography’’, a marginal
form that we need briefly to consider. So far as I can tell, its prototype is the history
of Agamemnon’s sceptre:

The King of Kings his awful Figure / rais’d;

High in his Hand the Golden Sceptre / blaz’d:
The Golden Sceptre, of Celestial / Frame,
By Vulcan form’d, from Jove to / Hermes came:
To Pelops He th’immortal Gift resign’d;
Th’immortal Gift great Pelops left / behind,
In Atreus’ Hand; which not with / Atreus ends,
To rich Thyestes next the Prize / descends;
And now the Mark of Agamemnon’s / Reign,
Subjects all Argos, and controuls / the Main.11

8
Proulx, That Old Ace in the Hole.
9
Proulx, Heart Songs, 47.
10
Proulx, The Shipping News.
11
Homer, 1:133–4.
 Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes 555

This genealogy establishes both an ‘‘apostolic succession’’ and a ‘‘great chain of

being’’ linking the kingship of Agamemnon with that of Zeus, king of kings. Those
who take it in hand are legitimized by its power. (The Roman church makes a similar
claim for its priests as the inheritors of a Petrine seal of approval, while the Gospel of
Matthew uses a catena of begattings to link Jesus with David, hoping thereby to shore
up his doctrine of the kingdom of heaven.)
The difference between Homer and Mark and the Roman church is that Homer
views the object itself as the source of power, and accordingly tracks it through time.
But one has only to query the mysticism behind that tracking, and possibility of satire
occurs, as it did to Alexander Pope. What better route to lèse-majesté than to slip
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such mysterious claims into a domestic context of buckles and bells, a context where
the doctrine of ‘‘divine right’’ seems rather out of place. And with that slippage from
‘‘ur’’ into calendar time, the ‘‘object biography’’ comes into being:
Now meet thy Fate, incens’d Belinda / cry’d,
And drew the deadly Bodkin from her Side.
(The same, his ancient Personage to deck,
Her great great Gransire wore about his / Neck
In three Seal-Rings; which after, melted / down,
Form’d a vast Buckle for his Widow’s / Gown:
Her infant Grandame’s Whistle next it / grew,
The Bells she gingled, and the Whistle / blew;
Then in a Bodkin grac’d her Mother’s / Hairs,
Which long she wore, and now Belinda / wears.)12

The pleasure afforded by this passage transcends the satisfaction of parody per se,
chiefly because it offers glimpses of social context. Pope mocks the apparatus of rule
by turning those seals (signifiers of feudal office) into a grotesque ornament and then
into toys and pins. The social change implied by these physical mutations are the
raison d’être of the ‘‘object biography’’, a form that Hans Christian Andersen would
make his own. For even if he were ignorant of The Rape of the Lock, he would
certainly have been aware of the corresponding passage in The Iliad, and would
only have had to marry it with the pathetic fallacy he found in, say, Goethe’s
‘‘Gefunden’’ and ‘‘Das Veilchen’’ to forge such masterpieces as ‘‘The Flax’’ and ‘‘The
Bottle Neck’’.13
Which is not to say that there hadn’t been a hint of things to come in the century
that passed between Pope and Andersen. For example, in the ‘‘Ode on the Spring’’,
Thomas Gray had moralized of his odic fable through the insects themselves (‘‘Thy
sun is set, thy spring is gone—/ We frolic while ’tis May’’14), hinting (rather than
stating) the arc of their biography. Goethe’s lyrics likewise sketch the life-stories of
the plants that speak in them: ‘‘‘Und sterb’ ich denn, so sterb’ ich doch / Durch sie,

12
Pope, 240.
13
Fiedler, 66–67 and 95–96.
14
Gray in Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith, 53.
 556 R. S. Edgecombe
durch sie / Zu ihren Füssen doch’’’15). After Andersen, the form would find favour in
primary schools, leading countless children to pen the biographies of pennies and
pieces of chalk, and kicking things off in copper mines or in globigerina ooze as
occasion dictated. Even so, its trivialization hasn’t deterred such writers as Proulx and
Edwin Morgan from essaying it. Indeed, Morgan has pointed out that

Animals are also part of the environment: they are there and why should the poet
not try to give them a voice, as it were. I think a lot of my poetry is either a straight
or in some disguised form dramatic monologue, and I quite often try to give an
animal a voice just as I might give an object a voice as in ‘‘The Apple’s Song,’’ just
to get everything speaking, as it were.16
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At its best, the object biography functions as a variant of the parable. For example,
Andersen’s ‘‘Flax’’ traces the history of the plant from field to cloth to paper to
immolation. At every point it embraces its suffering with such ostentatious meekness
that, were it not for the known fact of the author’s piety, the story seems almost to
satirize the religious doctrine of surrendering to an inscrutable will:

However, one day people came, took hold of the Flax, and pulled it up, root and
all; that was exceedingly uncomfortable; and then it was thrown into water, as
though intended to be drowned, and, after that, put before the fire, as though to be
roasted. This was most cruel!
‘‘One cannot always have what one wishes!’’ sighed the Flax; ‘‘it is well to suffer
sometimes, it gives one experience.’’17

But this fabular function is also complemented by others. As a poet, Morgan treats
the object biography in the context of animizing metaphor, and, within that frame,
can render the ‘‘sentient’’ experience of things. Proulx, however, working in the
traditionally realistic genre of the novel, excises the element of pathetic fallacy, using
the object simply as a structural connector. In this she had been anticipated by
Terence Rattigan’s screenplay for The Yellow Rolls-Royce, and the sense of inanimate
witness to, and continuity through, otherwise unrelated events, in If These Walls
Could Talk.18 Situational irony is a particular forte of the object biography simply
because, like those walls, and like the yellow Rolls-Royce, the participant can’t voice
any connections. In ‘‘The Bottle Neck’’, Andersen denies even this circumstantial
‘‘knowledge’’ to the object so as to sharpen the irony:

Of all the thoughts that came into her mind, this one never came, that just outside
her window was a relic of those days, the neck of the bottle out of which the cork
came with a pop when it was drawn on the betrothal day. The bottle neck did not

15
Ibid., 67.
16
Walker, 77.
17
H. Andersen, 27.
18
Rattigan; If These Walls Could Talk.
 Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes 557

recognise her either, in fact it was not listening to her conversation, partly, if not
entirely, because it was only thinking about itself.19

And if bottle necks can’t articulate their histories and activate the irony of
unperceived pattern, neither, of course, can animals.
There is a parable for the general scheme behind Accordion Crimes in the history of
Messermacher’s horse, of which its owner knows nothing. Two vectors of history
come together, but nothing is disclosed to the other, and even the reader is partly left
out of the loop. One senses that this horse might have some connection to the
Appaloosas in the penultimate section of Accordion Crimes, but Proulx leaves that
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open. The point about life is that we go through it blind, only occasionally
connecting in the way that Howard’s End urges.20 Indeed the most convincing kind of
narrator suppresses any sense of tendentious connection, and so it is that
Messermacher is denied knowledge of his horse’s past in the same way that the
horse lacks knowledge of its genealogy. Human and animal alike remain ignorant of
the bigger picture, for the perception of comprehensive pattern is a function of
omniscience, and omniscience exists only as a narrative convention:

A horse traded, though he did not know it, first from a Nez Percé named Bill Roy
up in the Palouse country to an itinerant dentist and elixir stumpman, to a
Montana holdup artist, to an Indian agent for the Rosebud reservation, to a
succession of ranchers and farmers, never staying with any of them long because of
his crowhop habit which Messermacher calmed out of him. (The grandfather
of Bill Roy had shot from the back of this horse’s great-grandsire and, using
a bow of laminated mountain-sheep horn, had killed a female bison and her flank-
running calf with a single arrow.)21

This biography offers a stenographic account of events in nineteenth-century

America, not least the displacement of nomadic by settled pastoralism. Proulx
underlines this by shifting from the freedom and pace of the Native American horse
to Messermacher’s calming of its inherited spirit. Because he misprizes it and fails to
recognize it for what it is, he anticipates the ‘‘fool purchasers’’ in the penultimate
segment—those who ruined the breed by crossing it with ‘‘anything that walked on
four legs and had a mane’’.22
Proulx often focuses on these displacements and overwritings in the historical
record, and not only in Accordion Crimes. Just as a German immigrant subdues a
native American horse to a wholly different lifestyle, so in one of the stories from
Heart Songs, Vermont is invaded by urban transients who turn a working landscape
into decorative pastoral, and reduce functioning farms into frivolous Petits Trianons:

19
H. Andersen, 292.
20
Forster.
21
Proulx, Accordion Crimes, 71.
22
Ibid., 444.
 558 R. S. Edgecombe
It was a time when people were coming into the country, buying up the old
farmhouses and fields and making the sugarhouses into guest cottages.
‘‘Bill, you look like a character out of Rupert Frost poem,’’ said the woman
who’d bought Potter’s farm and planted a thousand weedy birches on prime
pasture. The new people said Stong was a character. They liked his stories, read
morals into his rambling lies and encouraged him by standing around the feed
store playing farmer—buying salt blocks for the deer, sunflower seeds for the
bluejays and laying mash for the pet chickens they had to give away each fall.23

‘‘Rupert Frost’’ is shrewdly diagnostic here. The flatlander who ruins ‘‘prime pasture’’
and the decades of sweated labour it signifies in pointless homage to ‘‘Riding Birches’’
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has forgotten the grittiness of Frost, and coated him instead with the unfocused,
countrified nostalgia of Rupert Brooke. ‘‘Playing farmer’’ yields in time to
disillusionment, and, in another story from Heart Songs, Proulx sketches the
catastrophic sequel:

We know how quarreling sons sell sections of the place to Boston schoolteachers,
those believers that country life makes you good. When they find it does not, they
spitefully sell the land again, to Venezuelan millionaires, Raytheon engineers,
cocaine dealers and cold-handed developers.24

How telling the displacement of ‘‘cold-handed’’ by the more predictable ‘‘cold-

hearted’’, implying the clumsy ineptitude of frozen fingers as much as it does
indifference to the human issues bound up in the landscape.
Every landscape and every artefact has a history of succession and effacement. The
over-arching ‘‘story’’ in Accordion Crimes—though it’s more like a recurring
Leitmotiv—concerns the instrument manufactured in Sicily at the start, and crushed
in the end by a truck in Mississippi. This state is close enough to Louisiana, where the
second phase of the odyssey begins, but Proulx avoids closing the circle in too
obvious a way. The green squeeze-box becomes the adhesive centre for an otherwise
wide-ranging mosaic narrative, each subsection focused in turn on an American
subculture, and each pleated into narrative panels like the bellows of an accordion.
The independence of those pleats, however, like those of the story, is only partial, for
each section, in spite of being broken into tableaux—skived versions of the chapter
summaries in eighteenth-century novels—remains continuous with the next, just as
the bellows remains a continuous member. The narrative breathes in and out with a
systole and diastole of varying pace, and forges a ‘‘sostenente’’ as it does so.
Proulx avoids the pathetic fallacy that Goethe and Andersen applied to the object
biography, but, even so, the accordion comes close to a notional kind of life:

‘‘You got to think a musical instrument is human or, anyway, alive,’’ said Beutle.
‘‘You take the fiddle now, we say it has a neck, and in the human neck what do you

23
Proulx, Heart Songs, 7.
24
Proulx, Heart Songs, 139.
 Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes 559

find? Vocal chords like strings, where the sound comes from. Now, the accordion,
we have here an instrument that breathes! It breathes, it lives. Jesus Christ!
Even so without a neck. Lungs it’s got.’’25

Sometimes its ‘‘lung’’ becomes the surrogate for the anguished polyphony of the human
voices it accompanies, and Proulx, like Beutle, uses animizing metaphors that make it
instinct with vitality: ‘‘On and on it played, as though it played Abelardo, as though it
were the animate force and he the instrument.’’26 Its ‘‘life’’ begins, after all, in death:

The trenched bellows, the leather valves and gaskets, the skived kidskin gussets, the
palette covers, all of these were from a kid whose throat he had cut, whose hide he
had tanned with ash lime, brains and tallow.27
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All the more appropriately, therefore, it becomes at one point the scapegoat for a
displaced patricide:

Trembling, she stepped back into the kitchen and saw the green accordion on the
table. A knife protruded from the bellows. It was a message that the daughter
wished to stab her father to the heart.28

Later we discover that that same daughter had viewed the slack instrument as the
phallic signifier of her social disempowerment:

his moment of glory, and he would let the accordion hang down, the bellows open,
just let one end go, and I saw that big moldy thing hanging down and I hated him,
and that’s when I knew the accordion was a man’s instrument and men play it like
they fuck.29

Proulx stresses above all the special quality of the accordion’s ‘‘voice’’:

Celestial music washed over him, a voice of melting quality he had never heard
while he was alive.

***

The music was coming from his accordion, not the four-stop, three-row button
Majestic in white pearl with his initials, AR, set out in tiny cut-glass gems, but the
special one, the little nineteen-button green accordion with its rare voice.

***
His anger burned because perhaps it was his daughter who was exceptional. That
wonderful voice coming from the high point of the nose, plaintive and quavering,
all the ache of life in it.30

25
Proulx, Accordion Crimes, 93.
26
Ibid., 146.
27
Ibid., 17.
28
Ibid., 170.
29
Ibid., 196.
30
Ibid, 127.
 560 R. S. Edgecombe
What Abelardo hears in his hypnagogic state is one voice rather than two, his daughter’s
song and the accordion’s, braided into a single vector for the ‘‘ache of life’’. No surprise,
therefore, that, after being connected with human grief throughout, it should give a
squawk of ‘‘anguish’’ just before its ‘‘death’’. This recalls another trope often found in
the object biography, its misprizement and loss of dignity. Andersen’s ‘‘Fir Tree’’ ends
on such a note:

One of the youngest now perceived the gold star, and ran to tear it off.
‘‘Look at it, still fastened to the ugly old Christmas-Tree!’’ cried he, trampling
upon the boughs till they broke under his boots.31
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And so too does his ‘‘Constant Tin-Soldier’’:

The Soldier was melted to a hard lump, and when the maid took the ashes out the
next day, she found his remains in the shape of a little tin-heart: of the Dancer there
remained only the gold wing, and that was burnt as black as coal.32

Learning from Andersen in turn, Oscar Wilde concluded ‘‘The Nightingale and the
Rose’’ with the same trope:

‘‘I’m afraid it will not go with my dress,’’ she answered; ‘‘and, besides, the
Chamberlain’s nephew has sent me some real jewels, and everybody knows that
jewels cost far more than flowers.’’
‘‘Well, upon my word, you are very ungrateful,’’ said the Student angrily; and he threw
the rose into the street, where it fell into the gutter, and a cartwheel went over it.33

Proulx can’t help activating these resonances when the truck crushes the accordion,
the more so since its tyres, like the cartwheel above, have no cognizance of what they
do:

They came abreast of the crumpled instrument in the weeds and the twin in the
dirty striped shirt jumped on it again. Waaaah, the thing sounded and they
screamed with laughter. The one in overalls picked it up and heaved it onto the
highway. A distant black dot on the shimmering road grew larger, rushed toward
them.34

But while the accordion acts as an anchor string for the diverse and colourful
beads of the story-necklace, it’s the diversity and colour of those beads that focus
the reader’s attention. Letting the bigger sequence take care of itself, Proulx breaks
off sections at a time, and atomizes those in turn. The procedure accords with her
primary project, which is to document the ethnic minorities of America before,
during and after their assimilation to the recipient nation. In doing so, she
interrogates the drive to uniformity behind the ‘‘melting pot’’, and the
31
H. Andersen, 232.
32
H. Andersen, 43.
33
Wilde, 296.
34
Proulx, Accordion Crimes, 543.
 Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes 561

industrialism behind that. In the passage below, the juxtaposition of factory and
kettle is crucial, and so too is the Busby Berkeleyan gloss that Hollywood puts on
the process:

They walked into the Palace after the movie had started, on the screen an
automobile factory and in front of it an enormous black kettle. Into one side of the
kettle danced clots of immigrants in old-country costumes, singing in foreign
tongues and kicking their legs, and out the other side marched a row of Americans
in suits, whistling ‘‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’’35

Slicked over with film musical gimmickry though it be, what this passage discloses is
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the Oedipal truth about immigrant America:

Consequently the greater number of immigrants, though they had rejected as much
of Europe as they could, were still incomplete Americans; their own persons, their
characters, their ways of thought, usually their accent, carried the stigmata of the
Europe they had rejected. But though they could not transform themselves, their
children would be transmuted; the public schools, in some cases aided by the
neighbours, would turn their children into the 100-percent Americans they could
never hope to be themselves. And when this transmutation had taken place the
parents themselves would be rejected as old-fashioned, ignorant and in significant
ways alien. The more successful the immigrant father was in turning his children
into Americans, so that they had no other allegiances or values, the more his
foreignness became a source of shame and opprobrium, the less important did he
become as a model and guide and exemplar.36

This idea of symbolic patricide repeatedly figures in Accordion Crimes. It’s implied,
for example, in Silvano’s decision to talk ‘‘American’’—‘‘‘Bob Joe,’ he said quietly in
American, burning with hatred for Sicilians. ‘My name are Bob Joe. I work for you,
please’’’37—the first of many instances in which minorities conceive the dialect of the
dominant culture as an independent language rather than a variety of English. Others
are ‘‘The lessons were in American’’38 and ‘‘trouble started, and this is true, when
they made the kids go to school, talk only américain’’.39 Equally ‘‘patricidal’’ is the
decision of a German farmer’s son to efface the ethnic heritage of his name—Karl
Messermacher—when he embraces an Anglo-American one: ‘‘‘Call me Charlie,’ he
said. ‘I changed my name—Charlie Sharp. That’s me. Listen,’ he said. ‘I’m no
German. I was born right here in Ioway.’’’40 Proulx uses the change to point the
displacement of solid artisanal service (‘‘Messermacher’’ means ‘‘knife-maker’’) with
the self-seeking shrewdness and trickery of ‘‘sharp’’. It goes without saying, therefore,
that the aspiration of the Sicilian immigrants in New Orleans—‘‘Americanizzarti, to

35
Ibid., 114.
36
Gorer, 15.
37
Proulx, Accordion Crimes, 66.
38
Ibid., 150.
39
Ibid., 280.
40
Ibid., 113.
 562 R. S. Edgecombe
Americanize yourself’’41—applies to other immigrants as well. However, being
washed in the blood of Columbia offers no guarantee of redemption, as witness this
bitter outburst of a Sicilian businessman on the eve of his lynching:

Archivi shouted from his cell. ‘‘This filthy America is fraud and deceit. My
fortune is lost. America is a place of lies and bitter disappointment. It promises
everything but it eats you alive. I shook the hand of John D. Rockefeller, yet it
means nothing.’’ He spoke in American.42

Archivi’s ability to speak in ‘‘American’’ (a language as much predicated on cultural

attitudes and values as on phonemes and syntagmas) hasn’t removed the stigma of
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his extra-national identity. Indeed the Anglo hegemony is so entrenched that it even
flattens distinctions that still obtain in Europe. The pejorative epithets ‘‘wop’’ or
‘‘dago’’ elide Sicilians with Italians, and regional variants of the German language also
disappear:

The day the three Germans—a Württemberger, a Saxon and a Königsberger who
became Germans in America, arrived, they found four or five ramshackle deal
buildings . . .43

But even in spite of the novel’s revulsion at the cookie-cut, besuited immigrants
that march from the kettle, Proulx is too shrewd and intelligent to romanticize their
lives before this processing. This mechanized American identity often displaces a
different kind of de-individuation. Again and again she vignettes people so native and
endued to the element of work that they have turned into automata, but without a
scintilla of the comedy that Bergson found in the ‘‘attitudes, gestures and movements
of the human body’’, attitudes that are ‘‘laughable in exact proportion as that body
reminds us of a mere machine’’:44

That poor man a machine for working, the bruised hands crooked for seizing and
pulling, for lifting boxes and baskets, for grasping. The arms hung uncomfortably
when work stopped.45

Here hands have been deformed into callipers, arms into hawsers. One wouldn’t be
surprised, indeed, if this worker spoke only the ‘‘lost language of the cranes’’ that
David Leavitt has recorded in his novel. Sometimes this dehumanization reaches the
point where workers become commutable with their tools, a simultaneous loss of
‘‘labour units’’ and assets: ‘‘he tumbled, with seventy-three others, assorted
wheelbarrows, shovels, poles, blocks and tackles, and lunch pails, into black water.’’46

41
Ibid., 39.
42
Ibid., 52.
43
Ibid., 71.
44
Bergson in Sypher, 79.
45
Proulx, Accordion Crimes, 132–3.
46
Ibid., 207.
 Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes 563

Immigrant women are particularly prone to this self-immolation by labour, and, in

this regard, American technology does indeed offer an escape of sorts, though it’s
seldom taken. Take, for example, the contre rejet in the following passage: ‘‘She was
sewing the hem of a pinafore. A sewing machine—if only she had one.’’47 At first we
read ‘‘A sewing machine’’ as the appositional of ‘‘she’’ (a woman reduced to her
labour by the patriarchy). ‘‘‘A woman’s work is a woman’s work,’ said Beutle. ‘First
carry, then knit and drink.’’’48 But then we realize that ‘‘A sewing machine—if only
she had one’’ is style indirect libre, and that Gerti yearns for a machine that could
halve her pains. Even so, the (mis)construction still hovers above the text like a verbal
pentimento. Proulx also shows that some women help entrench this oppression, as
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when a Polish grandmother leaves her grandson to his own devices, but remarks that
his sister ‘‘was not too young to be enrolled in the dance class and learn the old
dances. She was not too young for a little dustpan and broom.’’49 Polish dances resist
American acculturation, but they elide at the same time with the emblems of
domestic enslavement. To hold out against Coca-cola and Betty Crocker is also, in
this instance, to hold out against the partial liberation of women by machines.
Returning to the larger structural design of Accordion Crimes, we can see that, even
as the novel moves centrifugally towards the cultural margins of America, the
accordion itself becomes an emblem of cultural effacement, chiefly because of the
‘‘allomorphic’’ relation it bears to the various subcultures—Italian, African-
American, German, Cajun, French-Canadian, Hispanic, Polish, Irish, Basque and
Norwegian. Toward the end of the story, it has actually become the vehicle for a
faceless kind of minoritism little different from the old melting-pot. People are urged
not to individuate their repertoire so as to participate as widely as possible in the
circuit of ethnic festivals (‘‘She gave him good advice: ‘try to develop a sound all
nationalities can identify with—that way you’ll never be out of work’’’50). And later
still the green accordion becomes the still centre in a storm of choice, which is, in
effect, a storm of competing equivalences:

He examined it, an old instrument, too old and too small. Leather bellows and still
supple despite the dust. He picked it up and made a couple of chords, set it back on
the counter, looked at the shelves of melodeons, Cajun open-valved diatonics, big
square Chemnitzers, English and Anglo concertinas, a small single-voice
bandoneon, electric piano accordions, Yugoslavian melodijas, plastic accordions,
a Chinese mudan, a bayan from Russia, two Pakistani harmoniums, and row after
row of Bastaris, Castigliones, Sopranis, Hohner Black Dots—god, look at them all,
every immigrant in America must have pawned an accordion here, chrome Italian
names curling along the cracked lacquer and celluloid and wood, Colombo, an
Italotone, the Sonda, the Renelli, a Duraluminum shaped like a harp, who’d play
that?, big chromatics with their five-tier stacks of keys a nightmare to learn, over

47
Ibid., 97.
48
Ibid., 82.
49
Ibid., 359.
50
Ibid., 525.
 564 R. S. Edgecombe
there a lone Basseti like the jazz guy Leon Sash played, and Bach, he played Bach
too, you could do that with an accordion.51

While this passage serves to stress common denominators linking the marginal
cultures of America, its significance doesn’t stop there. Proulx has written it in a way
that points to the general structure of the novel. It enacts her preference for a rich,
tumbled cornucopia of materials above in a spare linear narrative—one of many lists
that recur at nodal points throughout the novel.
Although in his treatise on the topic, Robert Belknap tends to view the list as an
instrument of order—
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Lists are adaptable containers that hold information selected from the mind-deep
pool of possibility. As the Twain list shows, they grow by the will of the compiler,
by whose discretion the number and order of elements are decided. The ability to
select gives the writer enormous power in determining which things to enumerate,
what will appear in the procession, exactly how and in what relations an object will
be perceived.52

—he also acknowledges that it can sometimes have the reverse effect in such authors
as Dickens and Dos Passos:

‘‘The continuator,’’ as Milic terms it, in these passages is used to suggest two
different modes of copiousness. In the first, the accumulation of objects, though
exhaustive, seems incomplete, implying that the scene is so chaotic that it is beyond
language to accurately enumerate and present; it can be evoked only by a kind of
resigned approximation. In the second, by connecting whole clauses, not merely
objects and their descriptors, the writer conveys an unbroken chain of empty talk
propelled by an unchecked mind skipping from thought to thought.53

As it happens, Annie Proulx anticipated this aperçu in the first story of Heart Songs:

The sign in his window read GUNS BLUE SEAL FEED WINE ANTIQUES, a small
part of what he offered, for all his family’s interests and enterprises were tangled
together on the shelves as if he had drawn a rake through their lives and piled the
debris in the store.54

This asyndetic list presents a parable of the raked and tangled chaos of the goods on sale,
the absence of ‘‘continuators’’ opening up connections where none were intended.
Because guns need blueing to protect them from rust, the ‘‘blue’’ of the brand name
‘‘Blue Seal’’ gravitates toward it with no punctuation to ward it off. At the same time,
because ‘‘Blue Seal Feed’’ doesn’t occupy a line of its own, one thinks as readily of ‘‘blue
seal’’ cats as one does of emblems of excellence (which is what the company intended by
51
Ibid., 400–1.
52
Belknap, The List.
53
Ibid., 29.
54
Proulx, Heart Songs, 8.
 Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes 565

its name), and the bizarre possibility of feed for seals rather than for cattle also comes
into being. This signifying chaos mirrors the disorder of the inventory.
Accordion Crimes accordingly falls back on the rhetorical figures of acervatio,
which Scaliger described as a ‘‘prescribed accumulation, although not always in a
particular order’’,55 and congeries or coagmentatio, which he characterized as a
‘‘figure that heaps things up in order to incite to action’’.56 It’s Proulx’s way of
abdicating a too tendentious control. Every so often, she relaxes the reins, and lets the
narrative run without any editorial shaping—as when, for example, she flings down
various conceits evoked by the cochlea, and leaves them to jostle against each other:
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The eye swept along, unable to escape, to the snail of the cochlea—a whirlpool, a
hurricane seen from a cloud, a jelly roll, spinning tops, a fallen strip of orange
peel.57

And here is the reaction of a schoolboy punished by having to sit inside the knee-hole
of a teacher’s desk:

The cheesy stench of Mrs. Pervil’s unwashed private parts filled the dark space.
Crescencio experienced humiliation, claustrophobia, burning rage, sexual excite-
ment, impotence, feelings of injustice, subservience, and powerlessness.58

The disempowered child can only feel; he can’t manage his feelings. And so the
asyndeton and the imbrication of words convey both the complexity of the
experience and the registrar’s inability to order it. In similar vein, the German
immigrants, having initially triumphed over their environment, become the helpless
victims of pathogens in soil, air and water. Once again the style embodies both the
relentlessness of the siege and impotence of the sufferers:

Over the years the children sickened of diphtheria, spinal fever, typhoid, cholera,
malaria, measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis and pneumonia as well as lightning
strikes, injuries, snakebites and frostbite.59

Even science itself sometimes fails to find a purchase on the world. When Dolor falls
mysteriously ill, Proulx floods the page with an irresolute Babel of diagnoses:
‘‘bacterial infection, a hereditary disorder, posthypnotic suggestion, infectious
mononucleosis, depressive hysteria, hypochondriacal delusions, Parkinson’s disease,
multiple sclerosis, brucellosis, or encephalitis.’’60
Since myth provides a way of ordering our random experience—wishful patterns
of coherence shored against our ruin—Proulx incorporates these misprisions of a
design into the very texture of her novel. Not only does this take advantage of that

55
Sonnino, 19.
56
Ibid., 57.
57
Proulx, Accordion Crimes, 148.
58
Ibid., 152.
59
Ibid., 83.
60
Ibid., 260.
 566 R. S. Edgecombe
semblance of pattern that myth can seem to generate, but it also testifies to the
generosity and compassion of the narrator, whose position resembles Thomas
Hardy’s in ‘‘The Oxen’’:

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
‘‘Come; see the oxen kneel

‘‘In the lonely barton by yonder coomb,

Our childhood used to know,’’
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I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.61

When therefore a New Orleans vendor teases Silvano about his appetite for
bananas—

Hey, scugnizzo, your mother must have craved these fruits when she carried you.
You are fortunate you do not have a great banana-shaped birthmark on your face.62

—Proulx displaces one mythic construct with another, prefaced by the guarantor
phrase ‘‘in fact’’ to meld the style indirect libre with her authorial voice:

. . . Silvano did in fact have a birthmark but it was on his belly and in the shape of a
frying pan, the cause of his perpetual hunger.63

By relaying Silvano’s (unvoiced) counter-claim and withholding any hint of

mediation, she seems to inflect it with her own narrative authority, allowing us to
participate in the error even as we reject it. Again and again in Accordion Crimes,
characters read contingent details as meaningful signifiers, and the narrator gives her
silent, compassionate sanction as Hardy would have done if asked to view the oxen
on Christmas Eve. Sometimes she even puts the process on view, shifting from
neutral datum to mythic construct:

Flies clustered in the corner of the ceiling, like nailheads.

‘‘Look,’’ said someone. ‘‘Even the flies are afraid and dare not fly for fear they
will be accused.’’64

And when Silvano’s father commits adultery, a narrative inset about a wife back in
Sicily seems to confirm some local superstition about itching eyes and infidelity: ‘‘In a

61
Hardy, 64.
62
Proulx, Accordion Crimes, 40.
63
Ibid., 40.
64
Ibid., 52.
 Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes 567

Sicilian village, the right eye of a woman no longer paralyzed itched with great
ferocity.’’65
As the providential guarantor of pattern in the novel, Proulx will sometimes
reverse these attempts to impose teleological shape on a dice-driven universe,
inlaying glimpses of the future to confirm our function as ‘‘flies to wanton
boys’’.66 The accordion-maker, for example, is denied any knowledge of long-term
suffering by short-term death, evoking, but reversing, a Gary Larson cartoon in
which a frog watches the birth of a butterfly only to gobble it just as it has exited
the chrysalis:67 ‘‘(Although the accordion maker contracted syphilis from these
adventures, he never knew it.)’’68 The parenthesis around the comment gives it a
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detached editorial quality, placing the narrator at a deific remove from the press
and flurry of the events that moil away below her. It’s at moments such as these
that we have a sense of James Joyce’s ‘‘artist, . . . within or behind or beyond or
above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his
fingernails’’.69
And within the novel, indeed, when a character attempts to reconstruct the history
of the green accordion, his hubris is punished with flaying, blindness and death (in a
compound of the torments meted out to similar presumers in Greek mythology—
Marsyas and Oedipus, for example):

Wasn’t it Rawley who gave money to start the Prank Farm Pioneer Museum and
who moved heaven and earth, hired private investigators, to find the old green
accordion his grandfather played? Weren’t they still searching in 1985 when Rawley
and his wife, Evelyn, celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with an
autumn trip to Yellowstone Park where Rawley, in the West Thumb Geyser Basin,
dropped a roll of film, trod on it, lost his balance and fell headlong into a seething
hot spring, and despite eyes parboiled blind and the knowledge of impending
death, clambered out—leaving the skin of his hands like red gloves on the stony
edge—only to fall into another, hotter pool? You bet.70

So much, Proulx seems to be saying, for our efforts to recover the irrecoverable,
to decipher any pattern beneath the aleatoric surge of life. At some junctures of
the novel, we actually see how myth is adduced to manage and process
unpalatable facts. During the Great War, some German girls, having been drugged
and raped by the townsfolk, refract that reality into a more manageable story
about bears:

Messermacher whipped his daughters to make them reveal everything they had
seen, to force them to recant the story of the bear-dogs, but Gerti shuddered,
65
Ibid., 45.
66
Shakespeare, King Lear, 4.1.36.
67
Larson, 27.
68
Proulx, Accordion Crimes, 45.
69
Joyce, 215.
70
Proulx, Accordion Crimes, 124.
 568 R. S. Edgecombe
remembered an evening, ten years ago at least, when she came up the lane in the
same thick twilight after searching for a broody hen’s nest in the grass and saw
sitting on the wheel of the hay rake an immense black man who shot plumes of
smoke out of both nostrils before vanishing into the air with a sound like the burst
swim bladder of a fish.71

But what are we to make of Gerti’s experience in the codetta? The adversative seems
to affirm the presence of a demonic figure, but Proulx doesn’t say whether the figure
has been generated by an overheated imagination, or whether it has simply mythified
the otherwise unremarkable datum of a vagrant in the dusk.
The German community in Iowa figures as a group of free-thinkers, rational and
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myth-free (‘‘self-confessed agnostics who bragged that there was not a bible among
them’’72), but it is no less prone to mythopoeia than the other subcultures in the
novel’s mosaic. Beutle, for one, falls victim to his sense of fate, and like Macbeth, and
like the man who tries to balk death by riding from Baghdad to Samarra in the Arab
parable, derives a false security from surviving his friends. It prompts the operation
that leads to his death. And when she records that event, Proulx shows that even a
sceptical mind can delude itself in articulo mortis. The deadpan rendering of a
Teutonic heaven recalls her treatment of Silvano’s birthmark:

Yet he was not afraid, but intensely interested, for he heard the wheezing notes of
‘‘Deutschland, Deutschland’’ and thought that at least there was German accordion
music where he was going.73

Accordion Crimes is laced with such moments of false resolution, and with proleptic
cross-references that hint at a pattern even as they revoke it. One example is the
sketch of the guard who grants Silvano his life, and its pendant, the ‘‘locket photo’’ of
the man who imparts life unknowingly to seventy children. The semblance of pattern
vanishes on inspection:

Suddenly they rushed away when someone said ‘‘rum,’’ and the guard wordlessly
thrust Silvano out the door and into the street.
(Decades later the great-grandson of this guard, intelligent and handsome,
enrolled as a medical student; he served as a donor of sperm at the medical center’s
in vitro fertilization program and was the maker of more than seventy children
reared by other men. He accepted no money for his contribution.)74

There is a sentence in Accordion Crimes that provides an epigraph for its enterprise.
In a joyless urban wasteland, the only legible inscription urges oblivion: ‘‘the swollen
monograms of graffiti, letters obscuring letters, layered, jumbled, meaningless except
the words FORGET IT on a viaduct.’’75 That palimpsest has kinship with ways in

71
Ibid., 109.
72
Ibid., 99.
73
Ibid., 121.
74
Ibid., 65.
75
Ibid., 328.
 Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes 569

which the novel abdicates a defining, authoritative narrative course and delegates its
telling to short-storyish subsections, each in turn rendered through vignettes rather
than consecutive, enchained events. Although America later discarded the template of
the melting pot for the maternal multicultural embrace of its Emma Lazarus
inscription, Proulx makes it clear that the damage had already been done. Post the
melting pot, multiculturalism, while pretending to affirm difference, has actually
capitalized on its erasure, turning into a faceless jam, lacking distinctive husks and
flavours:

Everything gets mixed up unless you got a Ph.D. in Polish clogging. It’s no fun. You
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know, I’m not Polish, I’m Czech. What’s Czech these days? It’s boiled down to
kolác pastries and polka. So get out there and play loud, fill the place up with good
fast happy polka. Fast and happy. Show them what it means to be ethnic. You’re
guaranteed three hundred anyway, and if you win—audience response on the
applause meter determines the winners—it’s what, fifteen hundred and the
Missouri Hog Farm Polka King crown’’.76

They might as well have exited a kettle, wearing suits and whistling a Sousa march.

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