Loading...
 
Charles Hackenberry's essay on 'The Abortion'
Print
English
Flash player not available.


Click on the covers for more information on the various editions, including their availability.
If you cannot view the image, download the most recent version of Flash Player(external link)

Romance and Parody in Brautigan's The Abortion

by Charles Hackenberry?

Richard Brautigan's longer works of fiction present various difficulties to reviewers and critics, and one of the most troublesome concerns their genre. Witness the problem of one critic: "Trout Fishing in America is not an anti-novel; it is an un-novel." Even less informative is another's comment, which calls Brautigan's books "prose pieces (one can't call them novels or even fictions — they may well go down in literary history as Brautigans)." One might also speak, presumably, about Hemingways and Donnes as well. That each writer makes a form his own is well understood. What seems less clear is his debt to the tradition or traditions he chooses.

The difficulty of analyzing Brautigan's works of fiction and comparing them to similar works is complicated by his habit of projecting the outlines of various established forms upon his own: The Hawkline Monster (1974) is subtitled A Gothic Western; Willard and His Bowling Trophies (1975) is also A Perverse Mystery; Sombrero Fallout (1976) calls itself A Japanese Novel. His recent book-length fiction, Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1977), continues the practice. By examining the first of Brautigan's excursions into sub-titling, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971), I intend to explore here the degree to which the work is an actual romance and the degree to which it is not, obtaining from such an analysis an interpretation of the work that considers its form to be an essential part of its meaning.

In one sense, asserting that a book that has An Historical Romance 1966 on its cover is indeed a generic romance seems a bit too easy, yet it needs saying. Romance is widely used, especially when dealing with popular fiction, to designate any kind of love story. That The Abortion is a love story, in addition to whatever else it is, only muddles the matter — as does a curious sentence on the cover of the paperback edition: "This novel is about the romantic possibilities of a public library in California." The effect of this ambiguity and funning is to hide the fact that many features of The Abortion show characteristics of the romance.

The theories of the Northrop Frye, especially those which deal with myth and archetype, seem especially relevant to an explication of the romance qualities of this work. Frye's interest, in contrast to that of much recent criticism, is often generic in nature, and the problem of genre is, to a large degree, the main problem raised by The Abortion; his is a broad critical system that is relatively well known and widely understood. Furthermore, his work in both Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and The Secular Scripture (1976) is detailed, current, and specific. For example, Frye notices that one of the essential differences between the romance and the novel is a matter of characterization:

The romance does not attempt to create "real people" so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes. It is in the romance that we find Jung's libido, anima, and shadow reflected in the hero, heroine, and villain respectively. This is why the romance so often radiates a glow of subjective intensity that the novel lacks, and why a suggestion of allegory is constantly creeping in around its fringes.

The unnamed narrator of The Abortion, though distinguished by eccentric attitudes and gentleness, is never fully realized. While he is admirable for his view of humanity, a self-imposed isolation and his chosen role tend to reduce him in stature. This double nature is important for the construction of the story and will be discussed later. Estranged and remote, he lives a life apart, both in the depths of the library and in the labyrinthine rooms of the Mexican abortion doctor who performs the requested surgery on the relentlessly beautiful heroine, Vida. The stereotype of the mayhem-producing beautiful female has been traced from Katrina Van Tassel in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Cecily Burns in George Washington Harris' Sut Lovingood tales, Eula Varner in The Hamlet, and Griselda of God's Little Acre to the public image of Marilyn Monroe. Vida, as a character name, has also been derived from the Latin vita, meaning life. If such interpretation is correct, the symbolic characterization thus produced tends not toward individualization but toward stylization and allegory. A similar feature of characterization has been observed in an earlier work: "Brautigan has no interest in character, in introspection or psychological insight, in inter-personal dynamics." While such observations are as applicable to The Abortion as they are to Trout Fishing in America (1967), the comment on psychological insight must be defined as that sort of self-analysis and self-discovery that is usually associated with the novel. Brautigan is, indeed, working toward psychological insights, but of a nature quite unusual in modern book-length fiction — that is to say, in contemporary novels.

Identifying a shadow figure is more difficult. At first glance, the Mexican abortion doctor may seem to serve, but although he is the agent of a certain degree of death at a set fee, he is not ultimately suited, for he is in no sense an adversary of either hero or heroine. The Abortion lacks an individual villain, but evil does exist in the narrative. The harshness of life outside the library is the shaping force on those who bring their pitiful volumes to be catalogued, and the strictures of law and society, as they prohibit abortion in American, necessitate the quest. What has clearly happened here is displacement, "the adjusting of formulaic structures to a roughly credible context." Some degree of displacement is also seen in the character of the librarian who seems libidinous only in relation to Vida, demonstrated chiefly by his reaction to her body and in contrast with his former existence: "I had never in my life seen a woman graced with such a perfect body whose spell was now working on me. As certain as the tides in the sea rush to the shore, I showed her my room."

The very real subjective intensity of The Abortion is best explained by the explication of Centroversion, a theory which finds "the gradual identification of the ego with the conscious rather than the unconscious" to be the underlying psychological pattern of the romance. Four stages in the evolution of the ego can be identified: stage one is a passive perfection which begins before birth and continues into infancy; it is a period of harmony, security, and stasis. Pain and want do not exist, and all the needs of the ego are catered to. The gentle librarian of The Abortion has his needs met by some unseen force in the beginning of the story; Foster brings him food, and his pay arrives, mysteriously though irregularly, from the America Forever, Etc. The narrator has drifted on in passive bliss for the past three years. His only responsibilities are to collect the manuscripts of America's losers, catalogue them, and be nice — all of which may be accomplished without leaving his womb-like place of employment. The work's first two sentences suggest a parallel between the library and the subconscious: "This is a beautiful library, timed perfectly, lush and American. The hour is midnight and the library is deep and carried like a dreaming child into the darkness of these pages" (11).

Stage two of Centroversion consists of the "ego's struggle to free itself from domination by the unconscious" and is a period of the learning and testing. The ego now is able to discriminate between the conscious and the subconscious. Brief tentative flights into the broad world would seem to precede total separation, and the narrator has two such experiences outside the library. The first is very brief, because he forgets to take money to make a phone call. The second is more successful; he functions well enough to call Foster, a fellow employee of American Forever, Etc., who arranges the abortion and generally fills the traditional role of the hero's assistant. For The Abortion, the second period of Centroversion also includes the van ride, the flight to San Diego, and the bus trip to Tijuana — the start of the quest. The narrator begins to break free from his comfortable, confined world at the expense of the safety and security that the library offered.

The new balance that marks stage three of Centroversion seems to occur during the period of the three abortions. A final break with the subconscious is not immediately recognizable as such, but a subtle change takes place in the narrator's character. He notices women other than Vida sexually for the first time. Apparently, the separation of the ego from the subconscious is final, for on attempting to return to the comfortable numbness of his former occupation, he finds himself permanently expelled. Although the experience disturbs him deeply, his expulsion into the world is welcomed by both Vida and Foster, characters whose egos have already completed the voyage. They celebrate the protagonist's complete separation from the unconsciousness that the library represents.

In the last chapter, entitled "A New Life" the narrator becomes an activist. He collects money for American Forever, Etc., and takes joy in his contact with others — as he did in the library, certainly, but now that his ego is loose from its former confines, he is positive rather than conciliatory. Though his efforts are for the same cause, and this seems to be important, he has now entered society. His life with Vida, Foster, and Foster's Pakistani girlfriend is much richer than his former existence. The process has produced a hero — at least in Berkeley of the sixties. The movement from isolation to society is, incidentally, opposite to that noticed in Trout Fishing in America and other social novels of the 1960's in America.

Much of the subjective intensity of The Abortion comes from the reader's recognition, probably at some deeply subliminal level, that the drama enacted in the romance has its counterpart in the history of the individual perceiving ego. Like members of the original audience at a classical Greek tragedy, we are not really very interested in the major turns of the plot, for we already know what must happen. Rather, we attend with a keen eye to see how the details will fall into place, to apprehend how the uncompromising universal law will influence this particular situation, these unusual people. Brautigan is interested in psychological insights at this level, and such struggle generates the unquestionable tension of the work. That "the situation is so fraught with the possibilities of hideous misfortune that one is spooked on every page by phantoms of multiple catastrophe" is a measure of the intensity, though somewhat overstated.

Other characteristics of The Abortion also mark it as romance. Northrop Frye has suggested in the passage already quoted that the genre has an allegorical dimension. On one level, this story can easily so be read: "the library is a metaphor for America itself, and... its sequence of timid, strange, insecure librarians are the comic equivalents of American presidents." Even if such interpretation is valid, the allegory is still only partial; though the narrator is the thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth librarian, which corresponds to the numbering of presidents at the time the work was written (Cleveland's terms accounting for the confusion), the allegory is primarily peripheral. It is not a point-for-point allegory. While the library / America symbolism applies neatly for some levels of the story, the shaping force outside the library, which produces emotional cripples, must still be reckoned with — and it, too, is America.

Characterization and subjective intensity are but two of Frye's criteria for romance. One of this most important qualifications concerns plot, and here as well The Abortion stands close analysis: "The completed form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle... and the exaltation of the hero." The preliminary adventures of The Abortion begin with the narrator's contact with those who bring manuscripts to him. They are a varied lot: the old and the young, the confused and the bizarre. Among the group is a character named Richard Brautigan who brings a story entitled Moose which he describes as " Just another book" (27). For the most part, this seems to be another of Brautigan's jokes on himself, but we are never quite sure how to take him. Does he mean to identify himself with broken and confused "writers" that America has produced? Does he mean to separate himself from the persona of the narrator? A similar situation occurs in Hawthorne's Blithdale Romance where Priscilla is compared to Margaret Fuller... the author apparently wanted to deny the connection which he knew his readers would make between the two." Hawthorne seems to have been fond of the device, for he used another variation of it in the ending of A Wonder Book, where Primrose remarks:

Have we not an author for our next neighbor? That silent man, who lives in the old red house near Tanglewood Avenue, and whom we sometimes meet, with two children at his side, in the woods or at the lake. I think I have heard of his having written a poem, or a romance, or an arithmatic, or a school-history, or some other kind of book.

The speech by Eustace which follows makes the outline of the author standing behind the draperies even more distinct. Given Brautigan's specific parody in Dreaming of Babylon, the coincidence may be no coincidence at all. In The Abortion such self-references form a low-level platform of irony. We see the writer concerned with and almost in the practice of writing — as in Tristram Shandy and In Watermelon Sugar (1968). When Vida asks the narrator what he will do after he quits the library, he answers: "Maybe I'll find another job or find a woman to support me again or maybe I'll write a novel and sell it to the movies" (53). The reader is invited to amuse himself with speculations on the kind of fiction this character would produce; the step which follows is the impossibility of The Abortion as a film. The preliminary adventures are enlivened by arresting sketches of minor characters and intellectual games played on an ironic field.

The principal feature of these preliminary minor adventures, however, is the introduction of Vida into the narrative. Although she is present at the beginning of the tale, her history is gathered together in the first chapter of Book Two as a flashback which details the first meeting of the narrator and the nineteen-year-old heroine whose exquisite face does not match her voluptuous body, a further irony on the romance form, for the heroine's chief problem is her extraordinary beauty. Their first sexual experience provides the core of the initial adventures. While the perilous journey is certainly the trek to Tijuana, the peril, other than that associated with the abortion itself, is unusual, for it consists of nothing more than life in the outside world. The narrator's fear of this world and his unfamiliarity with it reinforce the Centroversion theme, for the struggle consists of the hero's coming to terms with the harshness of external reality. For his pains, the "Library Kid," as Foster calls him, is rewarded with a life that is richer than that of the narrow and confining subconscious. That he becomes a hero is, I believe, an authorial comment on the rarity of the completed transformation.

What Brautigan appears to have done in The Abortion is to construct a story in a traditional form, the romance, using its conventions, its abbreviated characterization, and its plot structure rooted in the emergence of the ego — while exaggerating and distorting romantic elements. One example of such playful manipulation is Brautigan's use of monster imagery. He takes a feature of older romances, their dragons and beasts, and uses the imagery in figurative language: "The jet was squat and leering and shark-like" (117). Often the imagery is visceral and anachronistic in order to evoke the tone of the older forms that it simultaneously follows and makes fun of: "A medieval flap was hanging down from the wings as we took off. It was the metal intestine of some kind of bird, retractable and visionary" (119). A parade of animal images troops through the quest portion of the narrative almost to the degree that may be found in Swift's "The Battle of the Books." Horses, buffaloes, dinosaurs, and unnamed prehistoric animals flock together in ironic configurations. So, too, is heroism scattered randomly through The Abortion; not only are the arches through which one passes on the way to Mexico heroic to the narrator (135), but the sight of Vida and Foster together before the journey brings forth the same term (105). While The Abortion appears to be a genuine romance when viewed from the perspective of Frye's observations on the form as a genre and a vehicle for mythic content, the book is, at the same time, a minor-key parody of romance.

Frye's definition of parody as "the mocking of the exuberant play of art by suggesting its imitation in terms of 'real life'" has import for The Abortion, for while Brautigan relies on the conventions of the romance to provide the structure of his tale and possibly the vehicle for one level of the work's meaning, he suggests that life rarely, if ever, parallels art, especially the art of romance. Unlike a reader's expectations for a story-book hero, the narrator accepts the abortive quest as an alternative to parenthood. The "gentle necessity" of the abortion even seems to be suggested by the "lady in distress," the heroine. Life, Brautigan implies, works out quite differently from fiction: "Alas, the innocence of love was merely an escalating physical condition and not a thing shaped like our kisses" (149). Life's struggles are more concerned with the frequently unpleasant requirements of existence than with notions of heroism that often get tangled around what needs to be done and who we think we are. Villainy exists to the degree that it forces compromises between the heroic, a product of fiction and the imagination, and the real — which cannot be escaped.

One of the strongest elements which turns the tale toward parody is the object of the quest, the abortion. In terms of story values, it is entirely opposite to our expectations of the romance form. Brautigan's handling of the action, however, displays his balancing of romantic and parodic elements. The acceptance of abortion as a solution to the unwanted pregnancy is prepared for by a scene in Book One, where a character identified only as Doctor O. brings his work entitled The Need for Legalized Abortion to the library (30); the attitude of the author of this work is easy to accept because, as nearly as the reader can determine, his motives are right. A second balancing that makes the abortion less of a ludicrous quest-object is the rational discussion of the matter that the librarian and Vida conduct before the reader (67). Their arguments concerning the right time of life to have children seem valid, especially since both are sympathetic characters. Neither has done anything previously that evokes moral censure, and the language of their decision has few reminders that what they intend is, in the eyes of some, the taking of human life. Brautigan's skill in handling imagery, following formulaic structure without seeming to, and creating ambiguity while defusing potential reader unrest allow him to interweave romance and parody, to fabricate a not-quite-polished texture that is nevertheless true to his narrator's voice and personality — and not unpleasant to read despite its often disjointed quality, its superficial incongruity.

Quite another method of examining the relationships between parodic and romantic elements in The Abortion is possible. Not recognizing a separate mode for parody, Frye includes parody as a part of the ironic convention. Works of parody, by their intention, are necessarily ironic, but not all ironic works are parodies. The ironic mode may be seen here because the narrator qualifies on one level as an ironic personality; modes are based on the stature of the hero. The action of The Abortion falls into a plot category for romance: "The successful hero returns as a master of two worlds: that of the beginning of the story and the larger world within which he has completed his quest."

In terms of Centroversion, the narrator completes the evolution of the ego. Even though he may not return to the library, he is a master of that inner world, as evidence by his continuing work for America Forever, Etc. and, more importantly, by his freedom. His activism and, to a degree, his heroism at Berkeley are the successes that the free ego may achieve. He cannot return, but he is not denied achievement in the institution which he still finds valuable — only the form of his contribution alters to fit what he has become. In effect, the hero, from his less than average stature in the beginning, rises to a new height. Toward the end of the story, the narrator's description of his activities, which shows his love for the students and his sense of being needed, reminds us of the comic side of his character in the library, but now his attachment is to the outside world. He is much the same, yet something important about him has changed, for he is finally at home in the outside world — and at peace.

While the action of The Abortion fits very neatly into one plot category for romance, it fits just as well into an ironic slot: irony "essentially treats the individual isolated in a hostile or indifferent world. Ironic mode personalities... may be so fragmented that the reader has little sense of coherent character." The narrator's fragmentation has reached the stage, by the beginning of the tale, that he has difficulty in dealing with the world outside the library. Such alienation has begun before the opening of the story and continues through the rising action; it abates only after the quest is completed and his life inside the library is finished, after his ego is freed from the subconscious. Seen this way, the balance of ironic and romantic elements is a shifting equilibrium — more ironic toward the beginning and more romantic at the end. Though, ironically, the narrator still works for America Forever, Etc., the conclusion has none of the bitterness of many ironic endings. Life is worth living; freedom and fulfillment are possible, though certainly neither easy nor complete.

That both of these categories may be met by the same work without damage to its texture does not indicate a weakness in definition. Instead, the anomaly is a further demonstration that Brautigan has made a successful blend of the two modes. Some argument could be made that an ironic parody should fit the form which it makes light of — and indeed it should, but Brautigan's ending is too positive, too optimistic for an interpretation that The Abortion is only a parody of the romance form. Frye, for all his classification and separation of types into their appropriate cases, clearly recognizes the blending possibilities: "Once we have learned to distinguish the modes, however, we must learn to recombine them. For while one mode constitutes the underlying tonality of a work of fiction, any or all of the other four may be simultaneously present. Much of our sense of the subtlety of great literature comes from his modal counterpoint." While Frye's statement deals with modes and not genres, the observation is still of value, for if the constituents of any theory may be recombined, genres will probably allow the same treatment. Even without taking this step, one may examine the protagonist in light of Frye's statement on mixed modes. The librarian is "superior in degree to other men and to his environment," a characteristic of the typical hero of romance, if compassion or capacity for gentleness are accepted as the criteria for superiority. He, more than anyone else in the narrative, is sympathetic toward the battered souls of the larger world, and his gentleness, a quality of all Brautigan's heroes, wins the heroine. His ability to put people at ease is a motif that runs through the entire work. Certainly, such qualities are not what is usually meant by superiority, but why these qualities, rather than violence or a stern moral code, are unsuitable for a contemporary hero — if indeed they are — is unclear.

The librarian, of course, is not without limitations. Only with the utmost effort is he able to function in society at large. Too, he is somewhat the bungler; his ineptitude at the Green Hotel is one example among many. The quest itself is not of heroic proportions even though it results in a limited degree of heroism for the librarian, whose abilities and convictions — other than those associated with compassion and gentleness — are not above those of ordinary men, and whose accomplishment is at best minimal in the greater world's view. From this perspective, his is an ironic heroism.

Finally, one must ask what is the value of sorting stories into appropriate bins and recognizing elements of various modes: "The reason is that a great romancer should be examined in terms of the conventions he chose... If Scott has any claims to be a romancer, it is not good criticism to deal only with his defects as a novelist." Hawthorne's "Preface" to The House of the Seven Gables sounds much the same note: "When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a novel." The comments of Frye and Hawthorne have evaluation of the author as their primary concern; certainly, the kind of analysis performed here could be put to such purpose. Brautigan has yet to receive the kind of critical attention he deserves. He is either praised to extremes by those who suppose they hear their own voice in his narrators or characters, or else he is dismissed as an opportunist who panders to popular taste for the money. Brautigan needs a re-evaluation, for his fiction has more complexity than has yet been seen, and rarely is he viewed in terms of the genres and modes that he selects and so often mingles. The subtitle for The Abortion asserts that the work is an historical romance. Normally, we would expect to find figures of history side by side with fictional characters, but we do not — unless the librarian / president symbolism is strained to an uncomfortable point. Furthermore, 1966 is too close to the date of composition of the work for the sort of candle-lit distancing that historical fiction usually trades on. Historical fiction, however, gets a lot of mileage from the differences between the setting of the story and the present; such, surely, is the nature of the point that Brautigan would make.

As a romance The Abortion may be interpreted as Richard Brautigan's record of how American idealism, in the course of a particular year, began to move outward into the light of day and away from its more self-conscious concerns. On one level, Brautigan's romance is his portrait of the peace movement's heroism and efficacy, its solution to the unwanted pregnancy of American intervention in Asia. Such interpretation rests heavily on the romance's capacity for allegory, but it is not an unlikely interpretation when viewed from from the perspective of the parodic elements of the work. To the degree that The Abortion is parody, it becomes a statement of self-doubt, a realization that the power of a minority, no matter how gentle and well-intentioned, is dependent on its activism. The ability to change the course of American thought is the point of difference between 1966 and the time of composition.

As in most of Brautigan's long fiction (one need only recall In Watermelon Sugar or A Confederate General from Big Sur), The Abortion is the story of a man strongly influenced by the literature he has read and obviously absorbed. To a large degree, the difficulties experienced by Brautigan's central characters are caused by their belief that life is — or ought to be — like literature. From Jesse of A Confederate General from Big Sur (1965) to the down-at-the-heels detective of Dreaming of Babylon. Brautigan presents characters who try to fashion their lives according to literary creation. In some works, the literary model is specific, as in Dreaming of Babylon and Willard and His Bowling Trophies; in others, the model is more general or has yet to be identified. Literary forms, Brautigan suggests, provide a framework for thought. They create, too, expectations for life — but The Abortion is a measure of how cockeyed a life based on these expectations can become if a too literal transposition is attempted. How and what we think are strongly influenced by these structures, but such thought is limited, perhaps limiting. The greatest strength of The Abortion is that it is not just parody. The work is also a testimony to the enduring truth of literary forms, however incomplete and imperfect — their power to shape human behavior and render psychological reality in dream-like sketches. The Library Kid continues to work for America Forever, Etc., but little indicates that much has changed except his relationship to the world and Vida's condition. The narrator's heroism is unquestionably limited, but it is a heroism of the self, able to reach its goals while laughing at its own peculiar foibles.

Brautigan apparently feels that he has not yet exhausted the possibilities of infusing established literary forms with his own values. Nor is he done with the idea of steeping his compositions in the colors extracted from the work of others. The first piece? in his recent The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) examines and comments on the diary of Joseph Francl: "His diary is written in a mirror-like prose that is simultaneously innocent and sophisticated and reflects a sense of gentle humor and irony. He saw this land in his own way." Here, if anywhere, is Brautigan's manifesto. "There is no Dignity, Only the Windswept Plains of Ankona" in this recent collection is probably the (...) incomplete....


Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction? 23.2
Winter 1981-1982: 24-36



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.