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Josephine Hendin mentions Brautigan
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English
Experimental Fiction

by Josephine Hendin

Novels of passivity refuse to believe in the traditional American values of effort, perseverance, and striving. In Richard Brautigan's lyric stories Revenge of the Lawn (1971) can be found cautionary tales, warnings against trying to be the old-time, hard-working American hero. "Corporal?" is a touching account of humiliation at the heart of an American dream of success. A poor schoolboy during World War II yearns to be a general in a paper drive his school organizes like a "military career." He scrounges for scrap after scrap of paper, hoping to bring in enough to spiral from private to general. But after an incredible effort, he finds all his work will make him no more than a corporal. (Only kids whose parents were rich enough to have cars and to know "where there were a lot of magazines" get to be officers.) Crushed and humiliated, he takes his "God-damn little stripes home in the absolute bottom of (his) pocket... and enter[s] into the disenchanted paper shadows of America where failure is a bounced check or a bad report card or a letter ending a love affair and all the words that hurt people when they read them."

Suffering makes Brautigan's people gentle and cold. The evanescent In Watermelon Sugar (1968) describes appetitive America as a fantastic ruin where there are mile-high remains of skyscrapers, books, remnants of technological achievements, and ghosts of appetites which do not exist in the new world, iDEATH. This iDEATH is a commune in which the assertive "I," the ego, is subordinated to the harmony of a group in which nobody competes with anyone else, sexual jealousy is taboo, and nights are lit up by sugar lanterns in the shape of a trout and a child's face. Only misfits fall in love or become possessive of a beloved. In Trout Fishing in America (1967) Brautigan's luckiest character is the Kool-Aid wino, a poor kid who is thrilled even by the Kool-Aid he must ration so sparingly that he has to dilute it in a gallon, instead of a pint, of water. The people who survive in Brautigan's books are in control of their appetites but out of control of their illusions, able to make the dream of fullness, sweetness, and peace do the work of reality. Brautigan is a spokesman for the disenchanted, seeking to allay anxiety by blurring the distinctions of status, wealth, and ambition which exist in the real world.

Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing
Harvard University Press, 1979: 260



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