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by Jeff Foster?
For as long as there has been the quest for social order, there has been the quest for the perfect social order, or utopia. While this search for and development of the ideal community is not, of course, an exclusively American venture, the American contribution has been substantial and, at times, profound. From the settlements of the Shakers, Dunkards, and Amana Society of the Huterian brethren to the utopian social experiments of the nineteenth century, such as Brook Farm and New Harmony, to the communal living popular during the 1960s and 70s, America has produced some impressive examples of the model community. Equally impressive are the studies into the aspects of utopia by such American writers and social reformers as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, Robert Owen, Albert Brisbane, and B.F. Skinner. Notwithstanding the scope and fervor of the utopian experience in America and abroad, however, the search continues as it always will. Therefore, we must remain open to all theories concerning the establishment of the ideal society. And some of the more important and creative ideas can be found in an often overlooked work of American literature: Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar.
In Watermelon Sugar, a novel that sprung directly from the counter-culture of the 1960s, depicts a commune, iDEATH, which is based on the philosophy that man must lead a passive existence, remaining detached from strong emotional bonds to people and all worldly things. With this philosophy as its foundation, iDEATH proves to be a truly functional utopia. Some critics, though, insist that In Watermelon Sugar portrays a misguided and faulty society. But, in fact, iDEATH is a highly successful community in that each of its members, in acknowledgement and acceptance of man's intrinsic inability to understand or control the world, looks to nature for guidance. Each member becomes what Harvey Leavitt calls "an instrument of nature" (20). It is this understanding and acknowledgement and transformation which is the mission of iDEATH. So, when Patricia Hernlund? states that "the delicate balance in iDEATH ... is the delusion that they [the communal members] can maintain a neutral position disjunct from violence and death without also cutting themselves off from life's fullness" (16), I must disagree. Life, for the men and women of iDEATH, cannot revolve around a person's thoughts, emotions, and desires because these can only lead to deception, betrayal, and disappointment. Therefore, the denizens of the commune turn away from the temporal, illusory, and transitory world, looking instead to nature as the higher authority that will lead them into the perfect order and peace found only within the natural process. 1
The narrator of In Watermelon Sugar is the quintessential member of the commune. In his character we see contentment, gentleness, honesty, and the detachment from extreme emotion that is the foundation of the iDEATH philosophy. All these traits are possible because of the deliberate killing of the "I," the self, as suggested by the name "iDEATH." With this destruction of the self, the individual can "enter a finer existence" (Foster 86). This existence is a collective one, which includes not only all the other members of iDEATH, but everything carried by the flow of nature. A significant point of this philosophy is that individual death is not an issue because nature's cycle of birth and death guarantees the regeneration of the species. 2 This regeneration of life is illustrated in the novel by the construction of the trout hatchery on the exact spot where the tigers had been burned to death: The walls of the hatchery "went up around the ashes" (109). So, the willful annihilation of the ego is not an act of destruction because at iDEATH, life springs from death.
The narrator demonstrates his allegiance to this philosophy by surrendering his name in the chapter titled, "My Name?," in which he says, "My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is on your mind" (4). He adds:
^"If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.
"That is my name.
"Perhaps it was raining very hard.
"That is my name." (4)^
The narrator's desire for anonymity suggests the objectivity with which he can recount the events of iDEATH. Because he remains emotionally detached from the world, and because he, like the others at iDEATH, does "not understand envy and hate" (Foster 81), he can be trusted as an honest and reliable narrator. Says Foster:
^Thoroughly disinterested and detached from the confusion and expectations of our conventional world, he [the narrator] is able to see and record experience with an honesty few of us could match. And he has his reward, for if he experiences no great emotion and does not know the "meaning" of the events he reports, he is a genuinely contented man. (87).
Foster also writes:
This gentleness, which is a reflection of man's placid and peaceful acceptance of his place in the natural order, comes up often in In Watermelon Sugar: "The Gentle Cricket" (14), "sweet and gentle" (57), "a gentle fragrance" (33), "arms gently resting" (22), "a gentle life" (2), a very gentle statue" (14), and "cold and gently at rest" (145). And we see this gentleness when Margaret, after hanging herself from the apple tree, is "gently" lowered by Margaret's brother and the narrator (144). So, when Patricia Hernlund suggests that the inhabitants of iDEATH are "devoid not only of pleasure but of all feeling" (16), I must respond with this statement: The gentleness that lies at the core of iDEATH is an expression of love toward all of existence. Gentleness arises naturally from man's acceptance of his relationship to the universe, of his place in the cosmological order.
While gentleness represents a peaceful acceptance of the state of things, it does not necessarily mean that there is a profound emotional tie to the people or community. The members of iDEATH, while always tending toward gentleness, are still emotionally detached from the individual components of nature and the universe; their love is for the whole of existence—or for "commonplace and trivial things" (Foster 86), which don't require an emotional element. Specifically, Brautigan focuses on food.
In Watermelon Sugar contains numerous food-oriented chapter titles: "Vegetables," "Dinner That Night," "Strawberries," "Until Lunch," "Bacon," "Good Ham," "Apple Pie," 3, and "Meat Loaf." We glimpse in the "Meat Loaf" chapter the lack of strong emotion that characterizes the people of iDEATH:
^The waitress came over and asked what we were having for lunch.
"What are you boys having for lunch?" she said. She had been the waitress there for years. She had been a young girl there and now she was not young anymore.
"Today's special is meat loaf, isn't it?" Doc Edwards said.
"Yes, 'Meat Loaf for a gray day's the best way,' that's our motto," she said.
Everybody laughed. It was a good joke.
"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. (129)
The repetition of "meat loaf" and "said" 4 may suggest to some that the people of iDEATH are extremely bored and unemotional. However, considering the peacefulness and contentment which they enjoy, boredom clearly isn't the issue.
Besides, iDEATH, "[l]ike other utopias, ... creates a sense of boredom or inaction" (Leavitt 24).^
The danger of not keeping this distance from the world becomes obvious when we look at the lives and suicides of inBOIL and Margaret. Both of them reject the philosophical foundation of iDEATH by allowing themselves to become attached to a past they wish they could resurrect. inBOIL wishes he could "bring back iDEATH" (111), the true iDEATH when the tigers were alive, and Margaret, who cannot forget her love for the narrator, has a "broken heart" (130). Such strong bonds to the past can lead only to disappointment and, in these two cases, suicide.
Margaret's and inBOIL's attachment to the past is made clear by their obsessive interest in the symbolic Forgotten Works. It is here, where inBOIL lives and Margaret spends "a lot of time (77), that the dead past lay, a past which includes all of man's errors, all of his unkept promises to himself, all of his delusions of power and knowledge, and all of that wisdom that brought him nowhere. Harvey Leavitt puts all of this into biblical terms:
^The original tree of knowledge led to a civilization remote from nature, but Adam II puts temptation outside his gates; the contamination cannot come from within, for a conscious act must be made to pass through the gates with the warning to the Forgotten Works. (24)^
Leavitt adds that the Forgotten Works stand for "knowledge and curiosity," which can only lead to the destruction of iDEATH, just as they led to the fall of Eden (23). Man cannot profit from the junk in the Forgotten Works, and most of the people of iDEATH don't care to try: "Nobody knows how old the Forgotten Works are, reaching as they do into distances that we cannot travel nor want to" (82). Although inBOIL and Margaret often venture into the Forgotten Works, they always return empty-handed.
InBOIL believes that his suicide will bring back iDEATH — the true iDEATH. But his belief is based on a perverted sense of the philosophy of the commune. To inBOIL, the death of the self is physical, but to those who understand what iDEATH is really about, this death is psychological. When inBOIL kills himself by cutting off all his sensory organs except his tongue, he is saying, according to Patricia Hernlund, that "the people of iDEATH have cut themselves off from reality of the senses, except taste, to avoid being bothered by life" (12). While this certainly is part of inBOIL's message, the people of the commune, as we've discussed, are not trying to avoid life; they are merely attempting to avoid the extreme sensory stimulation that can lead to an attraction and addiction, as it were, to the temporal world. Emotion should not come from the excitement of the senses and the brain. Instead, it should flow from what Harry Leavitt calls "natural determinism" (23). That is, any emotion that rises from man's illusory abstraction of the world is forbidden. This includes man's foolish love of a past he believes he can somehow relive.
In contrast to the tragic implications of being hopelessly entwined in the deceptive world, we see the benefits of remaining detached when the commune's members witness inBOIL's suicide. Pauline "was not afraid or made ill by this at all"; she only got "madder and madder and madder" (113). And all Charley has to say is that he doesn't think that inBOIL has "proved anything" (113). Other people of iDEATH, upon hearing the news of inBOIL's death "were relieved," and the air was filled with a "festive Spirit" (118). Everyone realizes that inBOIL was a threat to the security and peace of iDEATH. Patricia Hernlund notes the community's lack of concern:
^That Brautigan intended the reader to feel disgust as inBOIL and his followers mutilate themselves is obvious — the scene is memorable, particularly when juxtaposed to the inhuman lack of pity shown by the people of iDEATH ... What we do not expect are onlookers with no response except anger. (12)^
Respectfully, I must once again disagree with Hernlund. Brautigan has set up inBOIL as the antagonist of the novel. As Marc Chénetier puts it, "inBOIL preserves codified knowledge, violence, [and] perpetual reference" (38). Just what should our feelings be, then, no matter how bloody the end, when the enemy of a peaceful community gets what's coming to him, especially when it is at his own hand? And why should we expect no response but anger? The entire novel supports the necessity of distancing oneself from those emotions which cause dangerous feelings of attachment to worldly things and events. It should be no surprise that the denizens of iDEATH react the way they do.
So, too, should we not be surprised when the narrator displays no emotion as he watches, via the Statue of Mirrors, Margaret's suicide. The narrator's unwavering ability to separate himself from the events of the world is witnessed not only in the matter-of-fact tone of his narration of Margaret's hanging, but also in the fact that the suicide comes to us as just another event in a series of "normal" events at iDEATH:
^One of the kids pitching had a good fast ball and a lot of control. He threw five strikes in a row. I saw Fred directing his crew in the making of a golden plank of watermelon sugar. He was telling somebody to be careful with his end.
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 her 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. (135)
The narrator's lack of emotion should not anger us, and it should definitely not surprise us. Extreme human emotions only lead, as Margaret's suicide tragically demonstrates, to disappointment and depression — which may well push one to suicide — But the detachment of the narrator and the other members of iDEATH protects them; it allows them to turn away from the deceptive and ephemeral world. They are then free and open to receive the guidance of nature. Again, it is this passive subordination to the natural process that is the basis of the iDEATH philosophy.
This philosophy is not just iDEATH's; it is also Brautigan's. His friend, Keith Abbott, tells us about Brautigan's view of life:
Indeed, this "transitoriness of things" is at the core of In Watermelon Sugar. Brautigan created characters who believe as he believes: the world is not for man; man is for the world. That is, man must subordinate his emotions, his desires, and his intellectual curiosity to the will of nature if he is to live harmoniously within the cosmological order, and if he is to face death with dignity and without struggle against the natural process.
Another important issue of In Watermelon Sugar, says Abbott, is the Buddhist "sense of the world's endless capacity for misleading us" (172). Really, we mislead ourselves. Through our intellects, we foolishly believe we can understand and shape the world around us. But our minds are fallible; we are fallible. To demonstrate this intellectual impotence, Brautigan gives us the tigers. Harvey Leavitt explains their significance:
^The tigers incorporate the human qualities of rational discourse and instinctive survival. The tigers symbolize the destructive ambiguity of man, his instinct for survival and the rational nature that allows him to explain his acts of violence in terms of survival(19-20).^
One of man's problems, then, is feeling the need to create and destroy simultaneously, and he attempts to rationalize this but falls short because his mind cannot handle contradiction. So, man should not try to explain anything because his mind is faulty. The tigers, in explaining to the narrator that they had to kill his parents in order to survive (39), reflect man's need to explain away his violence in terms of self-preservation. Also, Brautigan uses the tigers to illustrate how man's brain can be in error, even concerning simple matters. When the narrator, as a child, asks, "What's eight times eight?" a tiger answers, "Fifty-six" (40). The only way to avoid making mistakes is to give up the self to determinism, to the flow of nature. This is one of Brautigan's main concerns in the novel. Man must accept his subordinate, passive role in the workings of nature; he does not have the power to create anything on his own but illusion.
This passive role will lead to a gentle and contented life. But some critics, as we've seen, see things differently. Brooke Horvath, for example, calls In Watermelon Sugar "a book that implicitly gives the lie to the utopian triumph over death this world seems to represent by showing watermelon sugar as the restricted, dehumanizing, hopeless, and deadly place it finally is" (446). And once again we have Patricia Hernlund who says, "Brautigan reminds us that a worse thing than violence and death could be a life without pity or joy" (16). Finally, Neil Schmitz believes that this "balance that suits them also stylizes them and the result is a disfiguring of their humanity" (120). My contention has been that Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar presents the view that there are benefits to distancing oneself from the world and, conversely, that there are dangers of becoming too attached to the past.
While one can identify Brautigan's philosophy as Buddhist in nature (as Keith Abbott states above), his vision may also be called Christian:
^The road to Christian salvation, we are told, begins when we turn our backs on the world about us, and that is exactly what the good people in Brautigan's novel [In Watermelon Sugar] have done. They have taken all the violence, evil, and cruelty of civilization and shut it and its history away, forever, in the Forgotten Works. (Foster 88)^
Whether or not iDEATH presents a religious statement or not, we can see that the members of the commune have willfully forfeited some part of what makes them human, and they have given up their individuality, in keeping with the tenets of iDEATH, in order live a collective life with all people and with all things of nature. By detaching themselves from strong emotional ties to the world, they are protecting themselves from illusory enticements and accepting their place in the natural process. Because they are not struggling to alter the facts of life and death, they are at peace. Because they accept both life and death equally, the people of iDEATH lead gentle, placid, and contented lives unburdened by fear, denial, and guilt.
Such is Richard Brautigan's utopian vision. Although In Watermelon Sugar may never (unfortunately) have the impact of Thoreau's Walden, and although Brautigan may never (though he should) be considered a Thomas More or a Ralph Waldo Emerson, the value of Brautigan's novel should not be minimized. Indeed, as long as the pursuit of the perfect social order continues, and as long as man wishes to live in pure harmony with himself, the human race, and nature, no contribution should be overlooked.
Connecticut Review? 14(1)
Spring 1992
Copyright note: My purpose in putting this material on the web is to provide Brautigan scholars and fans with ideas for further research into Richard Brautigan's work. It is used here in accordance with fair use guidelines. No attempt is made regarding commercial duplication and/or dissemination. If you are the author of this article or hold the copyright and would like me to remove your article from the Brautigan Archives, please contact me at birgit at cybernetic-meadows.net.
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