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by Carolyn F. Blakely?
Richard Brautigan, one among many contemporary writers who have been either ignored or brushed aside by numerous critics as passing fads or as transitory appeals to the fancies of the young generation, should not be dismissed so lightly. One may not assume from a cursory reading of his work that he is shallow or that he has no message to convey. On the contrary, it seems that his message is just as profound and valid as that of more established writers, in spite of the fact that his prose style is revolutionary and that his ideas are couched in a language which is frequently implied rather than overt in its statements. It is sometimes necessary to go beyond what is said in In Watermelon Sugar and concentrate on what is not said, for that is where the statement seems to lie. Some critics ignore this possibility, however, casually dismissing Brautigan as possessing no literary worth but seeing him instead as the response to the Beat Generation's need for a vehicle through which to vocalize its cynical outlook on life.
Michael Feld explains Brautigan as being a writer who is "namedropped in most places where there's lots of sensitivity and modernity and drugs and no common sense going on, where cool languid personalities slump about passing joints like sweaty kisses, speaking of power to the people and freedom and the plight of gypsies [and who] displays above anything else... a distaste for work." Jonathan Yardley's estimation of Brautigan is no higher than Feld's because he says that sooner or later... Brautigan is going to go the way of many minor literary figures, and even some bigger ones... who appeal to the peculiar needs of later adolescence." Apparently these critics see Brautigan as only a response to the younger generation's radical cry for a return to nature in order to get it all together. They think that his style is casual and offhand, but in vogue, creating a certain charm for these youthful readers. In the opposite camp is Neil Schmitz, who labels In Watermelon Sugar a pastoral myth with
^all its objectives in fiction: the denial of history, its passion for loveliness (all those exquisite suns), its desire to represent the normative life, the "natural" way. And yet it is wrong, this perfected world. The balance that suits them, also stylizes them and the result is a disfiguring of their humanity."
Indeed, the perfected world of this novel does not work. Brautigan's silence speaks loudly as he presents what seems to be a parody of the pastoral. This society may represent what modern man might wish it to be — an answer to or a substitute for the mechanistic, profit-seeking, inhumane world of social and moral decadence in which he finds himself, but the distortion in the new society is also obvious and just as unattractive. Viewing this book, then, as a parody of the pastoral, one might consider the ideas that are implied by the silence and attempt to determine what Brautigan's attitude is toward this "perfect" society.
Admittedly the novel does present some of the images of the pastoral tradition when one observes its characters engaged in happy labor, in solitary walks along the river, and in contented existence in little shacks in the hills. Pauline, for example, is the healthy happy maiden who is delighted to whip up hearty stews for the communal workers; and the schoolmaster who leads his pupils into a meadow to study nature is reminiscent of Goldsmith's portrait of the school-master in the pastoral setting of The Deserted Village
.These images, however, seem, to camouflage the weaknesses in a society which is a fantasy or a postholocaustal world set in some idyllic future tense. Initially, this appears to be a nostalgic yearning for a pastoral America which has disappeared or has been destroyed by such elements as crime and violence until we realize that the reality of the past America has been replaced by a dream that is inadequate. Tony Tanner says that it is "a pastoral dream in which the dominance of fantasy and imagination over the Forgotten Works and the wrecking yard is perhaps too effortlessly achieved." A summary of the novel reveals the pastoral dream:
And so the book ends, but the problem remains; this perfect society is void of emotions and as such Brautigan implies that there is much to be desired in this fantasy also. In the delineation of this less-than-perfect society, he uses the techniques of fragmentation, repetition, and juxtaposition in order to establish the prevailing sense of loss. Although it is utopian in atmosphere, it offers no notations of progress, neither materialistically nor emotionally.
In discussing the structure of In Watermelon Sugar, Patricia Hernlund? argues that the book has a fragmented time scheme which focuses on three deaths and that this organization permits the revelation of the narrator's (and his society's) responses to negative elements. The first of these time sequences is the distant past where the Forgotten Works began. The second time sequence concerns the major portion of the narrator's life. The third occurs during the narrator's present years but before the present time and is presented in a flashback to the first sign of trouble indicated by the rumor that inBoil is plotting some scheme, which is almost simultaneous with the beginning of trouble between the narrator and Margaret. Finally, the fourth sequence is the present time of the novel which covers about three days.
Obviously the book does not adhere to a linear, chronological plot, but if it is put to the test, this fragmented time scheme seems to work. In the first sequence the narrator says, "Nobody knows how old the Forgotten Works are reaching as they do into distances that we cannot travel nor want to." But one can speculate, however, that they mark the beginning of this new society that replaces a rejected past society which was plagued by the tigers and which was also the time of the birth of Charley, inBoil, and Old Chuck — a time before the narrator.
The second sequence is a time of the narrator's, Margaret's, and Pauline's childhood and young adulthood, when inBoil told them stories and when the tigers killed his parents and were eventually killed themselves. It is also a time when inBoil drew away from iDeath and turned to the Forgotten Works, when Margaret and the narrator became lovers, and when he began making statues.
It is during the third period that inBoil dies and that the narrator implied some connection between inBoil and Margaret which is suggested to him by her inquisitive delving into the Forgotten Works. He says, "Sometimes Margaret went down into the Forgotten Works by herself. It worried me. She was so pretty and inBoil and that gang of his were so ugly. They might get ideas. Why did she want to go down there all the time?" (p.90). Later, specifically questioning Margaret about inBoil's scheme, Charley asks, "What do you know about this, Margaret? You've spent a lot of time down there lately" (p.95). Although this implied connection is denied by some of the characters, the narrator allows his suspicions to overwhelm him, severs his ties with Margaret, and starts his relationship with Pauline.
In the fourth and final sequence we see Old Chuck recounting a dream about the tigers and the narrator remembering their killing his parents. It is here, too, that Margaret commits suicide, and the citizens prepare for her funeral and a dance immediately after sunset.
The instances of repetition in the novel promote the suggested lack of emotion, sense of boredom, and feeling of loss. The only real sign of emotion of any major kind occurs in the chapter that describes the suicide of inBoil and his followers. The narrator's description of Pauline's rage at their messing up the hatchery with their blood places her in a peculiar light: "Pauline did not act like a woman should under these circumstances. She was not afraid or made ill by this at all. She just kept getting madder and madder. Her face was red with anger" (p.118). There is a total absence of human sympathy or of any type of positive feelings, and this impression is emphasized by Pauline's methodical mopping up blood and wringing it out into a bucket.
In the two-page chapter entitled "My Name?," the narrator repeats the sentence "That is my name" twelve times, establishing a hollowness and a situation that allows him to become whatever the reader wishes him to be. Harvey Leavitt suggests that the narrator is a part of a society in which the individual self is unimportant (I Death), in which the psychological is suppressed by the physiological (Id Death), in which knowledge is no longer desirable (Idea Death), and in which "the first person pronoun is dead in a social order that makes itself conscious of the interdependency of its parts..."
The almost total absence of emotion is even more obvious in the chapter entitled "Arithmetic," where the narrator describes, with alarming and disquieting calmness, his lack of response to the killing of his parents by the tigers. This startling attitude is strongly emphasized as the youth repeats and stresses the importance of learning his arithmetic rather than the tragic death of his parents. In the middle of the disaster he says to the tigers, "You could help me with my arithmetic" (p.39) and continues to reiterate in the rest of the chapter how helpful the tigers were with his arithmetic. To cite a further example of this emotional void and atmosphere of boredom created through the device of repetition, one might note the conversation in the "Meat Loaf?" chapter:
^"Today's special is meat loaf, isn't it?" Doc Edwards said.
"Yes, 'Meat Loaf for a gray day is the best way,' that's our motto," she said.
"I'll have some meat loaf," Fred said.
"What about you?" the waitress said. "Meat loaf?"
"Yeah, meat loaf," I said.
"Three meat loaves" the waitress said.
(p.129)^
Here the boring routine is established: on every "gray day" the special is meat loaf.
The sense of loss is also apparent in other instances. In the chapter "Statue of Mirrors" the narrator describes the visions that he has in the mirrors and the emptiness that he feels as he stands for hours allowing his mind to drain. When the visions begin to occur, he describes them in a repetitive pattern. Half of the sentences in that chapter begin with the same sentence structure, establishing the loss and emptiness that lead up to the climactic ending of the chapter: "I saw Old Chuck on the front porch... I saw some kids playing baseball... I saw Fred directing his crew... [and] I saw Margaret climbing an apple tree beside her shack. She was crying and had a scarf knotted around her neck. She took the loose end of the scarf and tied it to a branch covered with young apples. She stepped off the branch and then she was standing by herself on the air" (p.135). Even then the narrator displays no emotion, in the very next chapter he says simply, "I stopped looking into the statue of Mirrors. I'd seen enough for that day" (p.136).
In what she sees as another of Brautigan's negative statements about his society, Hernlund says that "pleasure is negated by sudden introduction of an opposing emotion." One may point to many instances in which the pleasant is juxtaposed with the unpleasant. In one of those instances the narrator speaks of how beautiful the tigers were in the same sentence in which he mentions the fact that they ate his parents; in another, Fred praises Pauline's good stew and the pleasure he derives from eating it in the same breath that he quietly hints at the displeasure of eating carrots; and in the middle of the whole idyllic scene describing Pauline's prettiness and pleasant watermelon sugar aroma one is suddenly and unexpectedly told how most of the citizens did not like Margaret anymore because they thought that she might be involved in a conspiracy with inBoil and his gang.
In a society where the narrator insists that its citizens take pride in their communal life style, it seems that this style is peculiarly static. It refuses whatever is different from itself, as evidenced by the failure to name the "beautiful" things that Margaret finds in the Forgotten Works. Schmitz thinks that "Margaret's curiosity is the first step toward wisdom ... but wisdom that is destructive of the innocence the writer strives to sustain."
Leavitt, in a very extensive analogy, labels iDeath as "an Eden without the built-in supremacy order that was established for Adam I [He sees the narrator as Adam II] and Eve. Classification begets power, and power begets pride, and pride is an emotion." Since emotion is considerably absent from iDeath, inaction is created through the mundane tasks of existence. Life in iDeath is void of such emotions as pity and joy, the absence of which could be presumed to be worse than anything that could be imagined in the old society. On this same issue, Hernlund concludes that "the delicate balance in iDeath is the delusion that they can maintain a neutral position disjunct from violence and death without also cutting themselves off from life's fullness. The basic error results in boredom, ritual, and sterility devoid not only of pleasure but of all feeling and thus all real curiosity, vitality, or a reason for existence."
Life in the new utopian society is a farce and does not represent a satisfactory escape for man from his tainted, modern world. At the extreme, however, one might view life here as being equal with death. Certainly the one birth recorded in the novel does not offset the twenty-two suicides. At any rate, Brautigan must be reckoned with, not dismissed lightly. He recognizes the problem inherent in society, and this may be his shock therapy to awaken society itself to that problem, much the same way that Jonathan Swift? did in "A Modest Proposal."
CLA Journal? 35.2
December 1991: 150-158
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