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John Cooley's essay on 'Trout Fishing in America'
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The Garden in the Machine: Three Postmodern Pastorals

by John Cooley?
Western Michigan University

Trout Fishing in America is already something of a minor American classic, comparable, in both its stylistic achievement and intricate layering of themes, with works like Miss Lonelyhearts, Winesburg, Ohio and "The Bear." More than a decade old now, it survived the peculiarities of the 1960s that it doubtless grew out of and spoke most directly to. It continues to grow in depth and meaning and to draw critical interest. It is a novel in the American tradition of stylistic innovation, presenting us with a voice both compelling and beguilingly original. Trout Fishing is a collection of tiny fictions or perhaps even prose poems, each highly wrought, like exquisitely handcrafted trout flies or lures, most of them with enough interest and hooking power to "work" by themselves. Yet the book, despite its very contemporary antiscale and antistory effects, also makes good narrative and thematic sense once rearranged for readings of plot, character, and theme. Along with these trendy, postmodernist techniques and themes which Brautigan incorporates so handily, there are many connections with the pastoral tradition. Rather like Vonnegut, he seems caught between twin impulses, to show the absurdity of life, and to pose suggestions for survival. One of his greatest achievements is the artful disguise of his ideas through a style and surface texture so imaginative that complex issues are handled deftly and lightly.

Also of interest has been the changing critical opinion of Brautigan's novel. Early criticism, such as Jack Clayton's? essay (North American Review 11, 1971) said that Trout Fishing expressed the voice of an American subculture, "giving people the assurance they can be free and part of a community of free people, now" (p. 66). Terrance Malley, in his book on Brautigan, has provided the most thoroughgoing discussion of Trout Fishing available (and imaginable), emphasizing the narrative and thematic order that underlies the apparent aimlessness of the novel. Tony Tanner devotes a few pages of his City of Words to Brautigan, emphasizing the richness of the imagination at work in Trout Fishing. He argues, quite convincingly, that Brautigan creates a pastoral fantasy, a verbal world not unlike a city (or country) of words - a way of maintaining one's sanity in modern America. Neil Schmitz, taking Tanner to task, emphasizes the ironic voice with which Brautigan invests his narrator, declaring that like Hawthorne, Brautigan "does not write within the pastoral mode as an advocate of its vision." Both are spokesmen for an ironic pastoral pessimism. Schmitz sees Brautigan as essentially "an ironist critically examining the myths and language of the pastoral sensibility that reappeared in the sixties" (p. 125). Each of these essays illuminates aspects of Brautigan's pastoral, and, while seemingly disputatious, their varying interpretations are probably justifiable within the possibilities of this richly textured novel. To them I shall add a further hypothesis regarding Brautigan's use of the pastoral form.

"Trout Fishing in America" is, as others have suggested, a person, a place, an outdoor sport, a cripple, a pen nib, and a book by Richard Brautigan. To these I will add that it is also a religion and a state of mind. In his highly stylized kaleidoscope of little fictions, Brautigan gives us disconcerting glimpses of a badly diseased American wilderness. The narrator, his woman friend, and their baby travel about from trout stream to trout stream, having the most unsettling experiences imaginable. In fact, Trout Fishing is filled with images of violence, environmental disintegration, and futility. It is a novel littered with both human and natural wreckage, the fallout of the twentieth century. There are trout streams for sale by the foot in a wrecking yard, trout killed with port wine, and coyotes killed with cyanide capsules. Brautigan gives hauntingly truthful images of an America in which one can buy and sell absolutely anything, not just the streams and trout, but even the waterfalls and the accompanying birds and insects. We see a country obsessed with commerce, with fishing equipment and camping paraphernalia, a cruel and dangerous parody of real outdoor experience. Through Brautigan's tough clarity we see a society so obsessed with commerce and profit that even the most resistant submit to the lure of "fast bucks." Were he living today, Leonardo da Vinci would probably be turning out trout lures called "the last supper," Brautigan fantasizes. He also hints at the extensive pseudo-naturalism that is another plague of our times. "Jack the Ripper" appears disguised as "Trout Fishing in America," wearing "mountains on his elbows and bluejays on the collar of his shirt" (TFA, p.48). "The Ripper" is clearly, in Brautigan's opinion, not the only embodiment of senseless violence and destruction posing as wholesome, rugged naturalness. From one point of view, Trout Fishing is so crammed with the details of a pastoral tragedy that one comes to feel that Brautigan is not writing a pastoral novel, but, as Malley puts it, "an analysis of why the old pastoral myth of an America of freedom and tranquility is no longer viable" (pp. 151-52).

As we have seen in "Morris in Chains" and Cat's Cradle, it is entirely likely that contemporary pastorals will be laden with images of the death of woods and stream, of the heart and spirit of wildness in America. What remains, for Brautigan and others, is more like a diseased garden contained within a machine. Unlike traditional pastorals, the tone of Brautigan's novel is hardly eulogistic or sentimental over wild America; it is a book that seems verbally high with puns, silliness, deadpan humor, clever turns of phrase, and amusing anecdotes. There are good single liners such as that of the talking outhouse that observes: "I'm a monument to a good ass gone under." And there are sharp, cutting metaphors that linger on, such as the narrator's description of a fishing hole that worked like a pencil sharpener: "I put my reflexes in and they came back out with a good point on them" (TFA, p.56). If this were a book principally about the drawing, quartering, and selling of wild America, there would be a radical disjunction between its language and its theme. The reason one does not feel a grave inconsistency is that we unconsciously sense the two forces - the positive, inventive force of Brautigan's language, and the language of pastoral disintegration - merge with the unity of counterpoint to melody.

Brautigan slowly spins about his narrator and his mysterious "Trout Fishing in America" a mythology and a theology, but so lightly, so subtly does he cast for his readers that we either miss the hook or do not much mind being caught. He has put together a book of individual but related fictions so artful, so irresistibly alluring as to resemble the art of fly-tying, a barbed hook set carefully within the feathers and verbiage of each attractive lure. Fishermen call it a "fly book," a little waterproof volume containing artificial trout flies. Thus we find ourselves in the stream of Brautigan's dazzling or sometimes deadpan language. Some of his lures float on by, looking more like aberrations in a hat shop. But somewhere in his fly book there is a lure or two for most readers. This is the functional element of the novel. The lures must attract, the reader must swallow, and the hook must set. Then slowly this gentle fisherman pulls his readers through polluted and troutless waters into a reality they may not ordinarily inhabit.

In contrast to Hemingway?, Brautigan offers his readers no pastoral paradise. Thoreau argued that we can never get enough wilderness, but in Trout Fishing we can't get any. Nor have Brautigan or his narrator any solution to environmental deterioration. What Brautigan does offer is a state of mind, a state of the imagination so highly refined, so sharply pointed that it can transform experience. More than mere tonic or "kool aid," his book offers a way of imagining and experiencing so altered from the common paths of the mind that it may seem like a religious conversion. This is a fair way of describing the theological references that one finds in Trout Fishing. Brautigan is no more proposing a new religion here than Vonnegut? is with Bokononism. He wishes to suggest that with an awakened imagination and an environmental consciousness one might feel like a religious convert.

The influence of Henry Thoreau hovers significantly behind this novel. This may seem unlikely, since Thoreau's argument for the virtues of wildness was made convincing by the directness of his statements and his unflinching integrity to principle. Brautigan proceeds mainly through indirection, fragmentation, hyperbole, and understatement, Of course Thoreau uses such techniques, but the two books provide a strikingly different reading experience. The great affinity between them lies in their turn inward. Both writers suggest that, as Thoreau puts it, we become "expert in home-cosmography." Despite the loving, painstaking detail devoted to making Walden real, foot by foot, season by season, it is for Thoreau a state of mind and thus a way of life rather than a specific place. Consequently, Thoreau could declare that he had other lives to live and urge each reader to create his or her own Walden. Thoreau wanted us to see that, like the "beautiful bug" trapped many years within an apple tree and then in a table plank, we too can emerge to a new and stunning life. In his own modestly unassuming way Brautigan seems "merely" to be demonstrating that stunning proposition.

Brautigan ties his fishing lures around the appropriately elusive figure of "Trout Fishing in America," perhaps an American expression of Eliot's "Fisher King." And that is one of the cantankerous pleasures of this slippery text; like slick jokes, allusions to Byron, Franklin, Thoreau, even Hemingway come slipping by and are frequently best ignored. TFA (as he will hereafter be called here) was probably a minor deity, a fish-man perhaps, who possessed super-human powers but was also vulnerable to human pollution. He had an Achilles tail, one might say. In "The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America" (and on page 33, incidentally) we learn that our native god-spirit died of asphyxiation, as if "he had been Lord Byron." The reference is presumably to Byron's death while aiding Greeks in their fight for freedom. We also learn that to thousands of young Americans TFA has become synonymous with their opposition to nuclear testing and weapons proliferation. They carry posters which declare:

"DON'T DROP AN H-BOMB ON THE OLD SWIMMING HOLE!"
"ISAAC WALTON WOULD'VE HATED THE BOMB!"
"ROYAL COACHMAN, SI! ICBM, NO!" (TFA, p.98)
Thus the spirit of TFA lives on as an inspiration toward non violence.

"Trout Fishing in America Terrorists" are a small group of sixth graders who hold TFA as inspiration in their battle for freedom of expression and freedom just to be sixth graders. The episode seems to take place in the narrator's childhood, when he has presumably introduced his classmates to the mysterious conspiracy which is TFA. The sixth graders scrawl "Trout Fishing in America" in chalk on the backs of some of the first graders. Their inevitable confrontation with the principal is classic. The principal interrogates, "What do you boys make of it... this 'Trout Fishing in America' business?" Their silence and fidelity to their conspiracy is the proof of their guilt. Their confessions obtained, he declares that "Trout Fishing in America has come to an end." Within a few days all signs of the magic slogan "disappeared altogether as it was destined to from the very beginning, and a kind of autumn fell over the first grade" (TFA, p.40).

Like the elusive Tristero in Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot Forty-Nine, the presence of TFA is sensed throughout this book. Exactly what it means is uncertain. It appears in public briefly, but soon is forced underground again. One gathers that, as with Tristero and Bokononism, many more people swear allegiance to TFA than one would ever imagine.

This theme of pastoral conspiracy is stated another way by Neil Schmitz, when he speculates that "the setting of the modern pastoral is irrevocably the city it seeks to deny" (p. 125). Metaphorically, this speculation rings true. One feels, in reading contemporary pastorals, that the garden is within the machine, or, as John Barth describes it in Giles Goat Boy, within the computer. In such an environment, conspiracies, gothic configurations, and clandestined meetings of armies in green, will be the necessary stock-in-trade of pastoral writing.

But Brautigan and his narrator offer more than the vague possibility of conspiracy. Brautigan gives ample evidence that he has been chosen by TFA as a disciple who has been given encouragement and guidance before the master's death. The most striking revelation of this relationship occurs in "Trout Fishing in America Nib." Here the narrator makes clear that his inspiration as writer comes not from Diana or any other mythological presence, but from TFA. He is allowed to use his mentor's gold nib pen. TFA warns, "Write with this but don't write hard because this pen has got a gold nib and is very impressionable. After a while it takes on the personality of the writer" (TFA, p.110). We can speculate that Brautigan has inherited this pen and has followed the advice to write lightly. He has received through it the style of TFA himself. He writes with lightness and levity to protect the impressionable nib and preserve the line of inspiration.

This metaphor is carried a step further in a fascinating little episode called "Knock on Wood," which occurs when the narrator, still a youngster, goes fishing for the first time. His tackle consists of string a bent pin, and doughballs from a slice of bread. But as he approaches the stream with bated breath and his "vaudevillian hook" baited with a doughball, he realizes something is very wrong. His waterfall is no more than a "flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees" (TFA, p.5). This appears to be both a parody on the seemingly blind enthusiasm of trout fishermen as well as an indication of the narrator's commitment to TFA at an early age. Undaunted by his mistake, he says, "I ended up being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself" (TFA, p.5). How much this sounds like Thoreau's observation, "It's not the berries that count, it's the experience." It also suggests that the pastoral virtues Brautigan gives expression to reside in the imagination rather than in the trout. Of course the reference to a "vaudevillian hook" charmingly suggests the technique Brautigan uses, the short, exquisitely tied little fictions, each capable of catching readers. "Knock on Wood" may thus be seen as a trial run for the narrator's craft and technique. Unable to catch fish, he hooks himself, (Thoreau puts it this way: "It would be nobler game to shoot oneself.") and in a stylized self-communion, Brautigan's narrator eats the bread himself. TFA has not missed a moment of this experience and recalls with amusement a similar incident of his own. ("I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon.")

So much is revealed in this little episode: the relationship of TFA to the narrator, the narrator's comically transforming experience, the implications of religious ritual, and the suggestion of a vaudevillian technique. Soon afterward, in "The Kool-Aid Wino," Brautigan gives further hints regarding his technique. One of the narrator's friends is kept from working by a rupture. Our young narrator brings his friend a nickel, and they set off to buy a package of kool-aid. Carefully they mix it in jars, but without sugar and at half-strength. The ceremony of mixing and drinking is exacting. His friend even turns off the water "with a sudden and delicate motion like a famous brain surgeon removing a disordered portion of the imagination" (TFA, p.9). The two youngsters sit in the chicken house drinking the diluted and grape-flavored kool-aid, eating homemade bread covered with Karo syrup and peanut butter. It is another of Brautigan's little rituals; the "kool-aid wino" even resembles "the inspired priest of an exotic cult." It is here that Brautigan delivers what may be the most delightful and telling line of his novel. About the wino he says this: "He created his own kool-aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it" (TFA, p.10). The young wino compensates for his injury, emblematic of all the injuries and sickness contained in the novel, by becoming addicted to kool-aid. It is merely the vehicle for creating a private reality through which one can illuminate and thus transform life.

As suggested above, Brautigan's "kool-aid reality" is reminiscent of Thoreau's "beautiful bug." Both are reminders of our powers locked within, of the spirit lives with which we can learn to illuminate ourselves. Like the ruptured child-priest, Brautigan also is a surgeon for diseased imaginations, providing the cool and therapeutic tonic of his imaginative fictions. Thus Brautigan invokes not so much the power of nature but of the imagination, under the influence of nature, to heal and transform.

Despite the differences between these three pastorals by Coover, Vonnegut, and Brautigan, their common strands are indeed interesting. As I have suggested, there is in each a pervasive self consciousness, a deliberate, even cliched use of figures and themes from the pastoral tradition. The tone of each is light, the most despairing images of pastoral death being offset by humor and giddy flights of imagination. Never before has pastoralism produced such devastating pictures of the death of Nature, and of the agrarian and wilderness ideals. Yet the tone, in each case, is almost cheerfully gothic.

No longer do images of the machine's sudden violation of natural solitude seem a sufficient metaphor to express our dilemma. Instead, the garden now lies within the machine, or so it seems, in these acute, perhaps paranoid, expressions of the pastoral imagination. Thus is dashed the pastoral hope of a balance, and rich interpenetration between the two great kingdoms: the city and the country. If the "pastoral hope" survives at all in these fictions, it is only through secrecy and conspiracy.

Brautigan more fully articulates the possibilities for pastoral conspiracy than the others. He seems to affirm ancient belief in the power of the word and of the imagination to transform lives, even nations. The "pastoral hope" resides in the power of a "green language." Thus one of the traditional functions of the poet is invoked anew: to warn against violations of natural law, and to create images, metaphors, and myths both ecologically harmonious and sufficiently compelling to protect the natural world. As Octavio Paz expresses this belief, "If art mirrors the world, then the mirror is magical; it changes the world."


Michigan Academician
Spring 1981



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