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by Thomas Hearron?
Saginaw Valley College
As Richard Brautigan says, his first novel, Trout Fishing in America, is "a vision of America." The work is firmly rooted in the American tradition of Twain? and Hemingway?, of works whose theme is that man's only salvation lies in escaping from the complexities of city life into the tranquility of the country. While Huck Finn could "light out for the Territory" and Nick Adams could find peace in the Michigan woods, Brautigan's narrator discovers that escape to the wilderness is no longer so simple. Instead of virgin forests, he finds camp grounds so overcrowded that a campsite becomes available only when someone dies. The problem, of course, is that in an urbanized America the wilderness has become so diminished that the tiny vestiges of it which remain are overrun by crowds of people trying to escape, if only for a weekend, from the city. Yet, if literal, physical escape to the wilderness has become impossible in contemporary America, the imaginative escape is still possible: such a notion is the heart of Trout Fishing in America.
Brautigan presents the idea through a type of metaphor peculiar to him: although metaphor is certainly not his invention, his particular use of it seems unique. The essence of metaphor, of course, is an imagined similarity between two disparate ideas. For example, when Burns writes that his "luv is like a red, red rose," he is implying not that his love is literally a rose but that the two are similar, a similarity which exists only in the mind. In Brautigan's novel however, the tenor and the vehicle of the metaphor become fused: the imagined likeness becomes a literal rather than metaphorical identity. For example, Brautigan describes some trout in a stream as being "like fallen leaves." Immediately afterward, however, he says, "I caught a mess of those leaves for dinner." The progression here is important: beginning with the simile "like fallen leaves," an image of how the trout look in the stream, Brautigan converts the simile to a pure metaphor, "I caught a mess of those leaves." The metaphor, then, dynamically moves from a statement of similarity to a statement of identity: the leaves can be caught and eaten for dinner.
Another example, providing a more graphic illustration of the technique, describes a camp ground as being like an urban hotel: "they charged fifty cents a day, three dollars a week like a skidrow hotel, and there were just too many people there. There were too many trailers and campers parked in the halls. We couldn't get to the elevator because there was a family from New York parked there in a ten-room trailer" (TFA, p.61). In a third example he describes going into a narrow canyon with a creek running in it as being like entering a department store: "Then I went into it as if I were entering a department store. I caught three trout in the lost and found department... We ended up at a large pool that was formed by the creek crashing through the children's toy section" (TFA, p.31). The important element in these passages is that a metaphorical description, initiated by "like" or "as if", moves to a statement of literal identity. Once the camp ground is described as being like a cheap hotel, it becomes a hotel; once the creek is described as being like a department store, it becomes one. The distinctive aspect of this process is that the two parts of the comparison retain their identity in a peculiar synthesis: the camp ground becomes a hotel where campers and trailers are parked in the halls, and the creek becomes a department store where one can catch fish. The two terms of the comparison coexist.
The technique has two implications. It suggests the city's incursion into the wilderness, as artifacts of the artificial world, a hotel and a department store, have invaded the natural one. A more interesting implication is that such a use of metaphor — "Brautigan metaphors" — suggests a particular connection between imagination and reality, that the manner in which one thinks of and describes reality can alter reality itself, that a trout stream can change into a department store if one thinks of it as a department store.
Perhaps the best example of the technique occurs in the chapter, "The Kool-Aid Wino," which, though not explicitly about fishing for trout, embodies a connection between salvation and the imagination. Unable to work because of a rupture, a friend of the narrator's stays home to drink Kool-Aid all day; the language in which his making the Kool-Aid is described suggests an analogy with the Eucharist. To the friend, making Kool-Aid is a "ceremony" which must be performed "in an exact manner and with dignity." The water faucet used to fill the jar emerges from the ground "like the finger of a saint," and when the jug is filled, "like the inspired priest of an exotic cult, he had performed the ceremony well" (TFA, p.9). Thus, the language indicates a link between the making of the Kool-Aid (grape flavor, by no accident) and the transubstantiation of the wine in the Eucharist; that the friend is termed a wino suggests that the Kool-Aid magically turns into wine, an allusion to the miracle at the wedding in Cana.
Making the Kool-Aid is a religious rite for the purpose of salvation, yet Brautigan's noting how the friend turns off the water links it to the imagination: "When the jar was full he turned the water off with a sudden but delicate motion like a famous brain surgeon removing a disordered portion of the imagination" (TFA, p.9). The friend is, then, both priest and brain surgeon, but what is especially important is that he removes "a disordered portion of the imagination." Salvation requires that one have a healthy imagination, and by curing defects of the imagination the priest-surgeon opens the way to salvation. In this way, the friend can survive: "He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it" (TFA, p.10). Magically, almost religiously, the healthy imagination can create a "Kool-Aid reality" which is more congenial than the urbanized reality of contemporary America.
The healthy imagination, then, can change even a "No Trespassing" sign, an indication that the wilderness has been bought, fenced off, and interdicted to the public, into "4/17 OF A HAIKU" (TFA, p.6) — into a product of the artistic imagination. A further example that the imagination can transform reality occurs in "Sandbox Minus John Dillinger Equals What?" Sitting in the hot sun in San Francisco's Washington Square, the narrator perceives that the only shade in the park comes from a statue and falls on a beatnik:
The shade came down off the Little Hitchcock Coit statue of some metal fireman saving a metal broad from a mental fire. The beatnik now lay on the bench and the shade was two feet longer than he was.
A friend of mine has written a poem about that statue. Goddamn, I wish he would write another poem about that statue so it would give me some shade two feet longer than my body (TFA, p.88)
Two ideas are crucial here: the fire from which the woman is rescued is a mental fire, with salvation again depicted as being mental rather than physical; an act of the imagination, writing a poem, can make the statue give more shade, with language, the intermediary through which the imagination acts, altering the reality that it describes.
In the same chapter the imagination shows itself capable of feats greater than changing a creek into a department store or making a statue give more shade when it literally has the power to raise the dead. Watching his daughter play, the narrator muses on her red dress: "Wasn't the woman who set John Dillinger up for the FBI wearing a red dress? They called her 'The Woman in Red.' It seemed to me that was right. It was a red dress, but so far, John Dillinger was nowhere in sight" (TFA, p.87). Soon, however, the inevitable happens: John Dillinger is gunned down in the sandbox: "I was right about 'The Woman in Red,' because ten minutes later they blasted John Dillinger down in the sandbox" (TFA, p.88). Merely thinking about John Dillinger is enough to cause him to appear. The idea that thought alone has the power to conjure up a physical presence is common in the early development both of the individual mind and of human culture in general, for it is basically a magical notion, and "magical" is an excellent description of Brautigan's view of the imaginative faculty, which through language can alter reality by providing a mental escape from its hardships.
Despite its episodic nature, Trout Fishing in America describes the development of the narrator's imaginative faculty, a progression which can best be seen by looking at two chapters, one from near the beginning of the novel and the other from near the end. In the third chapter, "Knock on Wood (Part Two?)," the narrator goes down to a different street corner in Portland and sees what he thinks is a trout stream:
There was a long field that came sloping down off a hill. The field was covered with green grass and bushes. On top of the hill there was a grove of tall, dark trees. At a distance I saw a waterfall come pouring down off the hill. It was long and white and I could almost feel the cold spray.
There must he a creek there. I thought, and it probably has trout in it. (TFA, p.4)
Having gone home to prepare some fishing gear, the narrator returns in the morning, only to discover that what he saw is not a stream at all:
But as I got closer to the creek I could see that something was wrong. The creek did not act right. There was a strangeness to it. There was a thing about its motion that was wrong. Finally I got close enough to see what the trouble was.
The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees.
I stood there for a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing.
Then I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood. (TFA, p.5)
Something interesting results when this passage is juxtaposed with one from "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard?." Having heard that the yard has a used trout stream for sale, the narrator goes to look at it, first at the waterfalls stacked against the wall in the used plumbing department, then at the stream itself:
O I had never in my life seen anything like that trout stream. It was stacked in piles of various lengths: ten, fifteen, twenty feet, etc. There was one pile of hundred-foot lengths. There was also a box of scraps. The scraps were in odd sizes ranging from six inches to a couple of feet...
I went up close and looked at the lengths of stream. I could see some trout in them. I saw one good fish. I saw some crawdads crawling around the rocks at the bottom.
It looked like a fine stream. I put my hand in the water. It was cold and felt good. (TFA, pp.106-7)
The parallels between these two passages should not go unnoticed. They both concern trout streams inside cities, Portland and, presumably, San Francisco. Of the two, the first with its fields and trees seems a more likely place to find a trout stream, but paradoxically the stream is not there; it does exist, however, cut up into pieces in a wrecking yard. The most important parallel, though, is that the conclusion of each passage involves an act of touching. Touching the "stream in "Knock on Wood (Part Two)" clinches the fact that it is really a flight of stairs, whereas touching it in "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard" results in a shock of surprise when the stream is discovered to be, in fact, a trout stream.
In "Knock on Wood" the stream fails to be transformed by a "Brautigan metaphor": it must be either a stream or a flight of stairs, but not both. On the other hand, the stream in the wrecking yard is transmuted by the metaphor: it can be cut up into sections, yet retain its identity as a trout stream. That the two terms of the metaphor can coexist suggests that the theme of the novel is the narrator's development of an imaginative faculty which has the power to change reality. As a boy, the narrator cannot make a flight of stairs become a creek, but as a man he is able to: when he finally encounters the object of his quest, the character named Trout Fishing in America (the essence of the wilderness), the meeting takes place on the Big Wood River (TFA, p.89), a "wooden" stream where he can catch fish. Brautigan names two of his chapters "Knock on Wood" and mentions the Big Wood River twice, a coincidence of names hardly fortuitous.
The novel's theme, much like that of Wordsworth's The Prelude, is the development of the power of the imagination; acquiring such power results in an ability, like that in "Tintern Abbey," to summon imagination to one's aid in times of distress: it provides a way of escaping to nature even in the midst of a city. If Brautigan's novel is "a vision of America," it also reminds us that America is "often only a place in the mind" (TFA, p.72). Through imagination one can still achieve an escape to the wilderness and a salvation from the anxieties of the city — even a mechanized, urban America from which literal escape and salvation have become increasingly harder to attain.
Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction? 16(1) 1974: 25-31
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