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by Malcolm Bradbury
The effort to use experimental fictional forms to reach towards and recover a spirit of American innocence can also be seen in the work of Richard Brautigan, another author very insistent on intruding his own presence and tone into his storytelling. A younger writer whose roots lie in the California hippie scene and in Sixties radicalism, Brautigan has been too readily cast as a writer of naive fictions, and as a celebrator of that California beach and hippie life-style that followed on from the worlds of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac. Brautigan certainly exploits that connection; his first novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), plays solid images from the American past, above all those arising from the Civil War, against the latter-day skirmishings of his contemporary 'confederate general', Lee Mellon, as he battles with hippie irony against ideology and system. But Brautigan's effort is also to create a modern text, dissolving old national narrative. He writes about the ironizing of the world, the waning of pastoral myths of innocence and of escape from social constriction into nature; he shows the power of old images and then of the endeavours of the imagination to dissolve them, both through the struggles of his fictional outsiders, and of the poetic imagination itself. If the world wanes, the writer's exuberant comic imagination thrives; form in its collapse promises recovery, the fixities of time, space, and ideology dissolve, and A Confederate General ends both in a characteristic sadness and in hyperactivity of the creative imagination, as it generates 'more endings, faster and faster until this book is having 186,000 endings per second'.
The same notion of dissolving the solidity of the world through the freedoms of imagination dominates Brautigan's next book, or 'writing', Trout Fishing in America (1967), 47 brief chapter-essays cast in the mode of the angler's notebook, an old pastoralizing form that permits Brautigan to celebrate his West Coast world. But on that world a mechanical age has imposed itself, generating mechanical images; from their juxtaposition come strange mergings and contrasts, a new discourse. Old linguistic sets generate new fantasy and invention: thus the title phrase itself, 'Trout Fishing in America', keeps transforming, becoming place, person ('Trout Fishing in America Shorty'), and an essential principle of imaginative independence. Mind and metaphor can recover the animate from the inanimate — as when. in a marvellous passage, the narrator visits the Cleveland Wrecking Yard? and there buys a used trout stream. Signs thus detach from their systems, grow indeterminate, generate invention; phrase becomes dreck, redundancy, and reforms as a new basis for textual creation.
Brautigan's effort to recover an animate from the inanimated world is yet more evident in his next book In Watermelon Sugar (1968), a surreal fantasy set in a peaceable community called iDEATH, where, amid the remnants of a technological America, the inhabitants make a gentle world of watermelon sugar, much like a fiction itself. With its apparent restitution of an innocent pastoral world, the book is open to sentimental reading; but it is also about the decentreing of the subject, the death of the self (iDEATH), about consciousness fading and changing, objects displacing into pure phenomenal existence, then being recovered as random icons. As in other postmodern texts, words lose their fixity and attachment to things, becoming fluid, just like watermelon sugar. Brautigan is parodying fixed writing and solid forms, and his next books mock the generic fixities of fiction itself The Abortion (1971), sub-titled 'An Historical Romance', attempts to collapse the library of literature itself, which now includes Brautigan's own past books; The Hawkline Monster (1974), sub-titled 'A Gothic Western', merges two seemingly incompatible forms, the classic adventure Western and the Gothic novel of horrors, displacements, and estrangements; Willard and His Bowling Trophies (1974), sub-titled 'A Perverse Mystery', dissolves all the suspense and expectation of mystery writing to create a text for fictional play. These books are attempts at the dissolution of forms, the breaking of serial orders, the collapse of nominative processes and identities, the substitution of free invention for static mimesis. More recently, The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) has emphasized the poetic and conceptual underpinnings of his work — its emphasis on the instant, the sense of severance from the past, the awareness of the dissolution of classic identity, the claims of the fluid moment. It illuminates the serious postmodern 'game' of his work, a work that proposes the wasting of old forms and orders, the exhaustion of writing, but the powers of recovery the image offers to the imagination, as intertextuality generates new forms, parts without wholes that invite radical re-connection. Brautigan has proved vastly more than an innocently hippie writer, rather an author of gnomic knowledge and imaginative discovery whose spirit of saddened yet finally optimistic imaginative hope would pass on to a number of literary successors in the Seventies.
The Modern American Novel
Oxford University Press, 1983: 169-171
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