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by Jeff Crouch?


Whether we understand Richard Brautigan as a nostalgia-worn and sentimental hippie, an eccentric leftover from the 60s, or as a postmodern writer, a writer much engaged in the discovery of fictional forms, taking a ride on his Tokyo-Montana Express, we discover a fool's paradise, what Emerson calls "the indifference of places" (278). The seeming triviality of Brautigan's subject matter, in essence, the lack of the holy, presents itself in a variety of ways. Brautigan does not, however, recapitulate The Waste Land, lamenting the death of God and the loss of meaning in the world, and neither does he declare himself an existentialist, thrown into the act of self-creation. Yet, in "((What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?))" (Tokyo-Montana Express, or TME), he investigates the nature of the abandoned Christmas tree, i.e. the death of God in a capitalist society, while in pieces such as "Football?," "The Purpose?," and "A Reason for Living?," he faces the impossibility and freedom of determining meaning. Brautigan confronts this freedom in The Tokyo-Montana Express by letting go of the idea of the author/narrator as the ultimate center of meaning. He attempts to abandon his own subjectivity as a writer and engage the possibility that what defines his world is a random series of events. Brautigan then creates the Tokyo-Montana Express as a series of events, a world aesthetically united in its incoherence — in short, a fool's paradise.

Brautigan's world contains: "To the Yotsuya Station?," a piece where the narrator, on a subway beneath Tokyo, describes his compulsion for a Japanese woman, reflecting on her beauty, her age, and, with added emphasis, her chin; "Painstaking Popcorn Label?," a piece about reading a popcorn label while getting drunk; and "The Smallest Snowstorm on Record," a piece about a snowstorm with two snowflakes named Laurel and Hardy. What do these pieces have to do with each other? Together they make up Brautigan's world of lists and experiences to be had: strange sensations, old lovers, post-consumer trauma, people out of work, prisoners, and ghosts. While these pieces seem to be reflections upon the absurd, they are, in actuality, the minute details of life. They portray the humorous side, the sadness and beauty, of inevitable loss.

Finding Brautigan's style in harmony with his vision, Michael Mason? makes a similar claim that TME amounts "to a coherent meditation... united by a vision of something which is melancholy and alienated, and which is seeking assuagement of these feelings." Also, Mason finds the book centered around the motifs of "animals, death, memories, dreams, snow and rain, food..., empty or vanished buildings" (483). Variations of "things to do" range throughout the book, along with a kind of perspectivism evident in such pieces as "((A Different Way of Looking at President Kennedy's Assassination))" — a story that relates a 24-hour-a-day breakfast restaurant's sudden whimsy to stop serving pancakes between midnight and 4 AM to President Kennedy's assassination and "((The Menu/1965))," a story about a death-row menu and its apparent absurdity. (Brautigan does not reduce President Kennedy's assassination to the same level of importance as a restaurant's change in venue, but he feels that the disappointment, rage, and frustration are relatively the same for both incidents, lacking in any moral distinction between their sources.) Mason sees this "different way of looking" as Brautigan's comic means to correct the disproportion in our own lives. Indeed, Brautigan makes us aware of the disproportion in our own lives by artfully gathering the fragments that come into our lives and arranging them in the strange, juxtaposed way in which they appear, wholly unassimilated.

The fact that Brautigan assembles 131 of these seemingly unrelated pieces and makes them the chapters of a book (TME) he calls a novel, often befuddles the uninitiated reader. Brautigan shears his book of readily available patterns meaning traditional narrative patterns whereby we can read his "novel," a feat that aligns him with James Joyce in Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio. But Brautigan works through a radical discontinuity, and his discontinuity is the aspect of his novel that most disturbs his readers.

Brautigan gives us several clues as to how we should read his work. Not only does the almost random order of his stories embody the discontinuity of the novel's structure, but the theme of the novel itself is discontinuity. A story such as "Another Texas Ghost Story?" conveys not simply a ghost story but also the randomness of memory, the incongruity of memory, and the when and where memory makes itself present. There is another kind of randomness embodied in TME, too. Life, for Brautigan, often seems to lack direction. "Montana Traffic Spell?" captures this lack wonderfully. Here, the story's narrator and a friend are at the only stoplight in a small town in Montana. The friend, who is driving, cannot make up his mind which way to go at the green light. A line of cars begins to back up. Finally, someone yells, "MOVE, YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH" (100), and that gives the friend the impetus for his decision. In "A Feeling of Helplessness?," Brautigan reiterates a theme similar to randomness aimlessness in a story about eating at a restaurant that does not have enough work for its waitresses. Again, Brautigan focuses our attention on what is lacking.

The title of the book itself, The Tokyo-Montana Express, is a title that calls our attention to the absence of the Tokyo-Montana Express. It is this very absence that informs the novel's structure. In a brief preface, Brautigan gives us the most puzzling clue of all. He outlines the perspective of the book. He says,


The Tokyo-Montana Express and its stations along the track, however, are decidedly absent as the narrative structure of TME. They serve, only in a figurative sense, to give order to the book's odd juxtaposition of stories. This Express and its many stations are only an artificial and Brautigan seems to want us to see it as artificial design stamped, as the Express is stamped at the head of each chapter, on the discontinuity of the book's arrangement. The Express and its many stations provide the conceptual framework of the "novel." Brautigan uses this loose structure to tack together his various pieces of story out of the amalgam of his experience and present them without recourse to chronology.

At the close of TME Brautigan gives us a parallel to the artificial narrative structure created by the Express. "Subscribers to the Sun?" completes the novel and gives it an eccentric strategy. This piece concerns a newspaper "Teletype" that will link Tokyo "with the events of the world as they happen" (257). Brautigan describes the machine's start-up and, in so conveying the material printed out on the teletype machine as it "awakens," conveys to us a message. Brautigan writes:


And, Brautigan finishes with:


Of course, this is a clever metafictional trick on Brautigan's part. It recalls the history of the novel: how short pieces, either short stories or whole or parts of chapters, were once published serially before being published in book form. Brautigan teases us with the possibility that we have received a mistransmission and that his stories might be put together in a coherent way. Though theme and structure have an obvious relationship in Brautigan's work (aimless structure, aimless stories), why attempt a New Critical approach of finding order in this set of stories?

((Marc Chénetier)) claims that his metafictional reading bridges Brautigan's artificial simplicity. He calls Brautigan a "novelist of the instant" (80) and claims that TME is an autobiography: "its unit is the structure of a life-span, itself constituted by a collection of moments, of varying length and interest" (81). The Tokyo-Montana Express is a fiction that produces a series of "arrests," of "refusals to move on," and these arrests, in turn, produce "a fragmented assemblage of places and instants which stand for composition" (83). Chenetier also finds TME's structure exhibits the "inclusion/exclusion" process found in Japanese art. Brautigan's use of this method, says Chenetier, is to capture "an evanescent reality" like the imprint of "tail-lights" on film (89). In sum, Chenetier concludes that TME's structure reveals a "fragmentary unity" to life, "puzzles" that "afford hope and stimulus" (91). Chenetier's reading of Brautigan, then, becomes a reading where the discontinuity of the novel, the "puzzles," depends on the reader for solution.

Yet, the fact to note is that Brautigan begins and ends with formal devices. We are given the explicit narrative structure (vii), "The Route of the Tokyo-Montana Express" (ix-xiv), a literal train in "To the Yotsuya Station," and finally "Subscribers to the Sun." This last piece not only parodies formal closure, saying "GOOD MORNING" instead of "Goodbye," but also indirectly addresses the reader with "END HOW RCVD?" Thus, instead of ending at a train station, TME ends at a teletype machine in the "lobby of the Keio Plaza Hotel" (257), a travel image nonetheless and a similar structural device to that of the Express. So, at least on the level of its artificial narrative structure, TME has some continuity. This artificial structure is deliberately contrived, however. As a contrivance, it forces us to review the way in which we super-add narrative structure into our lives, just as we add narrative to our own personal and disparate fragments of story.

In turn, and quite in contradiction to the fragmentary nature of the work, the preface (vii) serves as a definition of the book's structure. The significance of the book's structure, however, does not rest upon the text of Brautigan's autobiographical experience. Though the discontinuity of TME reflects the piecemeal quality of dream, it is a fictional rather than simply an autobiographical method nonetheless, and Brautigan uses it to address the subjective and mental nature of experience. The "I" of the narrator, as Brautigan says, becomes the event itself, and these events are held together by the circuit of the text.

Reading Brautigan in a more traditional way, Edward Foster? sees TME in light of other American authors, especially Thoreau and Emerson. He reads it also as a comparison of East and West. Foster says, "If a book is 'about' anything... it is about two very different cultures, East and West, American and Japanese, and their effect on each other... with much traffic and exchange of goods, both physical and metaphysical." Foster finds the chapters, though seemingly unrelated, linked together in "metaphor, tone, and a subject" with chapters grouped "according to miscellaneous subjects" such as food or the weather. He sees Brautigan's "more abstract concerns repeatedly surface throughout the book: friendship, communications, suicide, [and] solitude," while Brautigan alternates between, "on the one hand, anecdotes and observations related geographically and/or culturally to Japan and, on the other, those related to America" (118). The Tokyo-Montana Express, says Foster, does not actually exist. As a narrative device, the "I" of the stations of the Express works only as a literary conceit. Foster claims that this "conceit refers to metaphysical travel in the trade of ideas between East and West." Here, Brautigan calls our attention to America as "a place of solitude and silence, the things men must expect if they obey the national imperative and dream of individual freedom" (121). This America stands in contrast to an industrialized Japan. Japan, says Foster, is the place we might expect "Zen solitude and contemplation" (122). Brautigan finds it, instead, in the American wilderness of Montana. (This is the theme that initiates the book in "The Overland Journey of Joseph Francl and the Eternal Sleep of His Wife Antonia in Crete, Nebraska" [1-9], a story which alludes to Willa Cather's? My Antonia and parallels much of her book thematically.) Foster, then, assesses Brautigan as a writer much in the American tradition, writing of individual freedom and the autonomous self (124). The structure of TME serves to emphasize the freedom of the individual and his experience.

Brautigan's kind of humanity shows itself in a piece like "Self-Portrait as an Old Man?." Here, Brautigan recalls buying a German chocolate cake at the Pine Creek Methodist Church for $30.00. The event was an auction, and he wanted the cake. Brautigan excuses himself for buying the cake. He says, "I am not a Christian but neither is the cake" (195). Again, we see Brautigan (rather, TME's narrator or narrative "I" to be precise, since the novel is "fiction") attempt to come to terms with an inconsistent world. Brautigan flashes forward to put the $30.00 cake in a future perspective, when coffee might cost $50.00 a cup. There is, however, no way he can smooth over the obvious disproportion in price. Brautigan, a non-believer in a faithless world of institutions, leaves us to face the problem of belief.

Brautigan refuses to connect what does not connect. Each of his pieces exists unto itself. They are, in a sense, memories and as such, are exclusive. Brautigan gives us the temporality of meaning. He works against plot and gives us, in its place, found life: the sense that life finds its meaning and significance in being lived, as is, without recourse to a beyond. The ordinariness of life and the magical expectations that enliven life and make life heartbreaking are both here. What comes into being is, and for Brautigan, we need not go beyond that presence in order to understand.

The Tokyo-Montana Express functions more as an anti-novel than a novel. The stories have no real lineage, no true timeline. Only a scant chronology exists and that between only a few of the stories. Distinct rhythms are evident here. A few patterns group some of the stories into distinct categories, as the critics have pointed out. Yet, these patterns afford little in the way of structure. They are a kind of rhythm within TME's discontinuity, not much otherwise. The unity of this work seems to lie in its discontinuity. Discontinuity, in part, is TME's major theme. Brautigan attempts to understand that vacuous space that lies behind us. He does not paint over this space with words or color in the blanks with casual links. He refuses to assume a continuity where he does not find one. The literary conceit of his Tokyo-Montana Express is that it serves as a frame for his fragments without overtly forcing them together. In this way, Brautigan frees his novel from all narrative constraints. To expect continuity, Brautigan warns us, is to bring upon ourselves disappointment. Not only does life remain tremendous in its silence, a silence we must learn to bear, but it refuses our expectations. In one of his most beautiful pieces, "Castle of the Snow Bride?," Brautigan chronicles more than the impossibility of sexual fulfillment. Brautigan begins the story with "what is missing here is much more important than what follows" (225). The narrator of the story is watching an erotic movie, a movie which gives him one of the most intense and thrilling experiences in his life. But he has to leave the theater before the movie ends. Of course, he wants to see the end of the movie. The movie is scheduled to show the next day. He goes back to the movie theater, but the theater has literally disappeared. He asks several experts if they know the movie; they have never heard of it. The narrator cannot retrieve what is lost. What is lost for the narrator of "Castle of the Snow Bride" is lost too for The Tokyo-Montana Express. Discontinuity is what remains. We can no longer make sense of life. It is a fool's paradise.

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Midwest Quarterly? 33
Summer 1992: 393-401



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