by Kathryn Hume
Critics have interpreted Brautigan as experimentalist, hippie/beat, and neurotic. The author of this essay constructs him as narrative aesthetician, whose Zen-based strategies let him balance extreme emotional tensions with simple form and encourage an unusual kind of reader response.
Richard Brautigan's novels rouse readerly uneasiness. Now accustomed to the gigantism of Don DeLillo's? Underworld and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, we wonder whether slender books can offer anything but wispy charm. The violent emotional substrate is also disquieting, tainted ex post facto by the author's suicide. Add to that the strangeness: Brautigan offers no authorial guidance on how we should respond to a trout stream described as a series of horizontal telephone booths. Is this a bizarrely accurate simile, or does it physicalize the metaphor of wilderness being commodified and reshaped by technology?
The current critical picture reflects our difficulties. In addition to readings of individual novels, we have many attempts to relate Brautigan to the American tradition, as if this will make his weirdness safer because more familiar. William L. Stull? and Edward Halsey Foster? derive a genealogy from Thoreau. Ancestor status is granted to Melville (Stull; Vanderwerken), Hemingway? (Vanderwerken; Locklin and Stetler), and Fitzgerald (Locklin and Stetler; Willis). Terence Malley identifies beat precursors, Kerouac in particular. Marc Chénetier?, more concerned with unique than derivative elements, makes the case for Brautigan's experimentalism. Psychological approaches explain the strange by other means. Josephine Hendin's observations on repressed anger in the early works could be extended to all the novels, and Brooke Horvath? traces Brautigan's fear of death throughout the corpus. Revealing and persuasive though these psychological approaches are, they tend to read the books as by-products of neurosis and emphasize the implicit author at the expense of his or her literary effects. In this essay, I construct Brautigan as an aesthetician and writer, as a conscious artist who used Zen principles rather than simply becoming the victim of psychic furies. Overall, I ask, What is the nature of his narrative enterprise? I disentangle the artist from characters and view what he does as a series of narrative experiments in portraying emotions and in working out the philosophical and political dimensions of certain strong feelings that interested him. The emotions that fascinate him naturally stem from his own experience, but my concern is what he constructs from them artistically. The eleven novels (the last one published posthumously) constitute a series of battlefields in which he sets up emotional conflicts and tries to find narrative forms appropriate to his vision. Hence my term psychomachia, for in formalized schema he tests certain feelings and kinds of narrative much as medieval writers formalized into allegory the temptations besetting a Christian soul. In the course of tracing the artistic projects that Brautigan sets himself, I show how he invites an unusual sort of reader response modelled upon Zen observation and why two radical shifts take place in his method of plotting stories.
Brautigan's name flared vividly into national popularity in 1967, the publication of Trout Fishing in America: A Novel coinciding with media curiosity about hippies and the Haight-Ashbury phenomenon (Abbott, ch. 1). The first four novels constitute a group defined by several shared features: dissatisfaction with America, passive male protagonists, Zen as a philosophy for handling emotions, and an unusual kind of reader response provoked by deliberate lack of affect.
America's shortcomings surface in Trout Fishing in America (published second, in 1967, but written first, in 1961). Like trout, however, those faults do not hang around to be analyzed to death. The narrator of the novel occasionally implies an opinion - as he does about the hungry being given spinach sandwiches (2) - but that deadpan description is demonstrably judgemental only because he invokes Kafka immediately thereafter. Most of his musing observations are delivered without overt evaluations. He ponders poisoned coyote bait and deformed trout, winos and wilderness hermits. He mentions drawbacks of being poor. Vignettes like these provide a largely unarticulated rationale for the narrative movement in the following three novels, for in these books Brautigan imagines three forms of withdrawal from America. A Confederate General from Big Sur is a late beat reprise of Walden (E. Foster 63-64) and of Leslie A. Fiedler's American pastoral involving two men together in the wilderness (Malley 93). In Watermelon Sugar tests a communal group retreat. In The Abortion: An Historical Romance, 1966, the librarian retreats within the social structure rather than outside it. The lack of overt emotion in these four books has been explained as neo-Transcendentalist (Putz 105-29), but Chenetier (86-98), Claudia Grossmann (90-104), Edward Halsey Foster (16-24), and Jeffrey M. Foster (89-90) all persuasively link it to Brautigan's interest in Zen. Zen masters claim that defining Zen in words is impossible, but, as part of Brautigan's aesthetic, Zen can be said to provide a habit of meditative observation applied to everyday experience. The person meditating centres on the here and now and observes emotions and thoughts that ripple through the mind but does not try to control them (Suzuki 31-34). Guilt or desire to change have no role in this dispassionate observation. Maintaining an analytic focus empty of judgement can protect one from being overwhelmed by the emotions being observed, and Brautigan seems to have embodied versions of this detachment in his main characters because it seemed to him a philosophically helpful approach to emotion. Brautigan as writer can be flashy - as he is when imagining trout streams stacked in a wrecking yard - but his narrator remains calm throughout this fantasia.
Readers become uneasy when the narrator observes but offers no guiding response. Robert Adams, for instance, complains that Brautigan's "art lies in making things out of a scene, and the things he chooses to make aren't moral judgments, they're not even compatible with moral judgments" (26). Implicit is the question, Why read the works at all? Ideally, by contrasting their own response to that of the disturbingly bland focal figure, readers could learn something about their own motives and beliefs. This is the reader response I think Brautigan was aiming for. What critics have done, though, is pour their own reactions into the carefully constructed voids rather than analyze their responses against the neutral ground.
An episode in Trout Fishing in America will illustrate what happens when Brautigan's neutral narrator offers readers no guidance. The narrator describes Worsewick Hot Springs without showing any response to the green slime attached to the edges and bottom of the pool, the orange scum growing in the hot-water stream, the dead fish, the relaxing warmth, and the aquatic act of coitus interruptus (43-44). The narrator accepts what he finds, but unsanitized nature goads critical rejection. Gretchen Legler (68) invokes a passage from Walden in which "crystals" and "pure" and "fairer" serve to denigrate these springs. However, the dead fish have died from swimming too close to a natural hot spring, not from morally troubling pollution. Pulling out rather than risking an unwanted pregnancy need not be discredited as "fertility gone sour (Tanner 408). The description of the swirling spermatic fluid satisfies idle curiosity as well as the demands of painstaking observation. Distortions in critics' analyses of the seminal event betray the acute uneasiness caused by lack of narrator response. Tanner calls the springs a "lake coated with dead fish and green slime" and the sperm a "stringy mess (408), although a wide spot in a stream is no lake, the slime does not coat the water, and the narrator also reports the sperm to be "misty" and "like a falling star" (44). Neil Schmitz places the lovemaking "beside" the creek, which has been "carelessly" dammed, and the sperm hangs in the "green scum" "beside" the dead fish, none of the terms being accurate (123). Because the narrator refuses to relieve readerly uneasiness by displaying his own emotions, the critics reflexively pour theirs into the vacuum and thereby relieve the pressure of their judgemental reactions rather than study those feelings.
Responses to In Watermelon Sugar are more diverse. The passive narrator and his commune are condemned for creepy inhumanity (Blakely; Hernlund; Horvath; Schmitz) or hailed for flower power serenity or Zen detachment (Clayton; Leavitt; Grossmann). Michael L. Schroeder? grants both interpretations and explains the contradictions as reflecting Brautigan's divided personality. The so-called Confederate general, Lee Mellon, is sadistic, a borderline psychopath (Horvath 441, 435), cruel but true to his own nature (E. Foster 30, 41) and unneurotic (Tanner 406). When Brautigan gives us a trout stream being sold by the linear foot in a wrecking yard, Clayton? enjoys the bravura vision (57); Kenneth Seib latches onto the adjacent plumbing fixtures and identifies the scene as a satiric critique of the American pastoral (70); and Tanner identifies this and other junkyards as signifying the end of the American dream (410).
All these readings are worth considering, but they reject the narrator's careful voids. Critics who find the emotional blankness most repulsive are those who show no awareness that detachment has been considered culturally and psychologically admirable. Classical Stoics, Christian monks, and Zen meditators need not be rejected as neurotic for distancing themselves from frantic emotions, desires, and obsessions. In Brautigan's case, the philosophical justification comes from Zen, and the aesthetic experiment involves creating such voids to initiate a reader response. In their haste to assume the universal humanity of certain attitudes and emotions, critics lose the chance to compare their own reaction analytically to the neutrality of Brautigan's presentation and learn to understand their own assumptions better.
If we consider the novels as a loosely linked psychomachia, the first novel written shows the writer attempting to present a narrator who is detached from emotions, many of those emotions provoked by America. Brautigan achieves his effect by focussing his narrative on individual observations and by projecting as neutral and unjudgemental a stance as possible. The next three novels (in order of writing) continue to explore dissatisfactions with life in America, and in each a different social configuration for detaching oneself is tried out. In A Confederate General from Big Sur (actually the first published), Lee and Jesse hang out in a hut on the California coast. One might expect that the emotional payoff for abandoning society would be ecstasy (the beat/hippie reading). If Walden is the prototype, then the hermits ought to enjoy their labours and self-sufficiency. Should they not soar mentally when they throw hundred-dollar bills into the Pacific, a ritual shown in one of the alternative endings? In fact, that moment is carefully emptied of any such feeling, and so are many other moments where the reader might anticipate elevated emotions - sex on the wild beachscape of Big Sur, for instance. Transcendence seems called for by the narrative conventions, but the characters refuse to cooperate. We expect serenity, but Jesse only registers confusion and unhappiness. His multiple endings seem calmer and emptier than earlier adventures, though hardly serene. Withdrawal from America did not produce detached stability, and the withdrawal itself does not settle the discontent over America. The two men are no more truly independent of society than Thoreau was, as Manfred Putz notes (127), so, philosophically and emotionally, the book resists closure.
Individual retreat to the primitive offers only short-term sanctuary, so the next novel investigates communal withdrawal. Can one avoid the pressures from American society to enslave oneself to work, family, and suburban life? Most of the tranquil characters in the commune of iDEATH achieve a very even-tempered life and feel no need for bourgeois marriage, split-level ranch, and nine-to-five job. Those whose possessive and aggressive emotions are stronger commit suicide. Such narrative brutality correlates with the emotional substructure of the novel. Hendin (48) argues that the narrator's uncanny calm in the face of tigers eating his parents represents Brautigan's angrily visiting upon parental figures the pain they inflicted upon him. Whatever his plot's source in hot anger, Brautigan tries to transmute such feelings to something else. The narrator shows us the attractions of the tigers as well as their dangers; like romanticized outlaws or gangsters, they do not war on children and do what they must to survive, and they make endearing mistakes with their arithmetic. The setting of iDEATH suggests that the prior civilization, evidently urban America now lost through some catastrophe, has in a sense committed suicide, as do those whose temperaments make them prospect through its ruins. Many readers do not like the Zen ego-death of "I"-DEATH, but the alternative lifestyle of churning emotions and alcoholism leads to gruesome suicide through slicing off one's own extremities.
In the last of these four interrelated novels, the passive narrator tries withdrawing from the pressures and expectations of American life by working and living in an eccentric library. The exigencies of befriending someone who subsequently becomes pregnant by him force this narrator to emerge from his den. His managing to manoeuvre in the big world makes this novel a transition piece toward the next four novels, all of which devote themselves to action. This protagonist gets to keep his gorgeous girlfriend, and he gains a strange reputation as a hero, evidently analogous to Brautigan's own fame as writer, and described here in 1971, just when Brautigan's actual acclaim was waning and he was seeking new ways to attract readers. Critics dispute whether the narrator's heroic status is ironic (Cabibbo) or straight (Hackenberry), but that question is difficult to answer when the puzzle has been carefully emptied of all clues. As usual, all we can really assess is our own reactions.
As I turn to Brautigan's action plots, the next distinct phase in his writing, let me make a point about the politics of his passive protagonists. Their extreme passivity is not necessarily identical to masochism, but such submissiveness and lack of visible affect in a male protagonist runs completely counter to American notions of male individualism, which are based on a man's pursuing male passions and aggressions (Rotundo 5-6). The passivity disquiets readers accustomed to culturally sanctioned patterns. In her article on male masochism, Carol Siegel argues that, by laying aside claims to the power of the phallus, the male masochist undercuts patriarchy and unsettles "the dominant discourse on masculinity. [...] The man who could be king but 'would prefer not to' is potentially powerfully disruptive" (2). Brautigan's experiment with passive protagonists has political implications, and, insofar as America is one evident target for his disaffection, the protagonists are part of that critique. They reject American cultural patterns. While they fail to change America, America also fails to change them, thanks to their quiescence. What happens when someone who has cultivated Zen detachment and passivity takes up action narration? We get a strange hybrid, in which the plot line matches those of various fast-moving popular genres — gothic, western, mystery, love story, war story, hard-boiled detective story — but Zen-like observation produces a series of observed tableaux that freeze motion. Brautigan focusses on non-significant frames, thus rendering the action aimless. In The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, the narrative rush to kill the monster is interrupted by seemingly endless chatter about burying a butler or about gravy at supper.
Anyone who reads these novels as un-ironized examples of their genres will be repelled by the freeze-frame effect. As Keith Abbott puts it, "Violence, irrational hate, grief, and loss of innocence via the modern sexual diseases - [...] [these] themes demanded either psychological characterization or bold dramatic action, neither of which [Brautigan] could use effectively, given his style" (123). If we accept irony and absurdity, then we can enjoy the slippery play of our responses to the disparity between genre-fiction cliches and what actually happens. Some of the momentum of a monster-killing plot normally derives from the monster: we understand the pull exerted by dragons on knights, or murderers on detectives. We are balked of such known narrative tensions by a monster consisting of conscious light followed by a stumblebum shadow, both of which arise from a mixture of chemicals. Even if we accept Gordon E. Slethaug's theory that the chemicals represent recreational drugs (144), we cannot anticipate the for m that a fight with conscious chemicals might take, yet the urgency of genre fiction derives from our having such expectations. The gothic and western elements are also rendered absurd by the kaleidoscopic description of the main characters' later lives.
By making his focal figures hit men, whose profession demands lack of feeling, Brautigan has simplified the narrative challenge facing him in this first attempt to change his style and win back his audience. He could work on the action plot, so different from the pacing in his previous novels, without having to find narrative forms for representing feelings as well. Having found the ironized perspective on action that felt right to him, he was ready in future works to add roiling, violent emotions and play them off against action. In each of the next three novels, he sets up interlace structures consisting of the same three elements: an unhappy plot, a happy plot, and an action plot. Brautigan draws on his Zen focus for short, vibrant scenes, and in these novels he explores the links between unhappy plots and action plots, and he tries to see where the happy option might fit in. Must happiness be forever beyond one s reach? Or can it become narratively as well as psychologically and philosophically assimilated?
Brautigan applies his own powers of unjudgemental observation to capture the experiences of his characters, but they, themselves, are no longer presented as detached. They seethe with volatile emotions. In Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery, the action strand is a vendetta. Robbed of their bowling trophies, the Logan brothers vow vengeance and become criminals to support their search. The unhappy narrative concerns Bob and Constance as their marriage collapses under guilt and venereal warts. The happy story describes the cheerful, sexy marriage of John and Patricia, who have found the bowling trophies in an abandoned car and have installed them as ornaments in their little fiat. Narrative tensions rise in both the unhappy and the action plot, and Brautigan releases these by having the Logan brothers mistakenly murder the unhappy couple.
Can actions blot out unhappiness? In a sense, yes. Narrative tensions are released, but characters' emotions are not. Stolen bowling trophies are a poor excuse for murder, let alone murder of anyone but the original thieves, and part of what Brautigan does is render the vendetta action absurd. If one compares this novel to the next two, one sees where it has failed to solve a narrative problem to Brautigan's satisfaction. He does not manage to create significant connection among the three plot lines. Nothing relates the unhappy couple to the Logan brothers. Nor does the brothers' anguish invoke any larger issue - the failure of the American Dream, for instance. Since Brautigan goes on to link his subplots more closely, one deduces that rendering everything absurd was not an aim that satisfied him.
Since E. Foster despises Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel as the worst of Brautigan's novels (103), and since almost no one else has written on it, I may seem perverse in calling it arguably his best and most polished performance. True, it is less experimental than Trout Fishing in America and less poetic than The Tokyo-Montana Express. For humour, effective resonance between the plots, and devastating satire, however, this novel seems to me uniquely successful in solving Brautigan's problems of linking action and emotion. A writer of humor suffers agonies from the breakup with his Japanese lover. One hour in an evening of woe is his contribution to the novel, his every rippling change of emotion carefully observed without judgement by the implied author — this is the unhappy plot. The action narrative derives from his tearing up the start of a story and tossing it in the wastebasket. The characters described on that paper, like the characters of Flann O'Brien? and Gilbert Sorrentino, take control of their own lives and go on without the author. Their wastebasket activities turn into an absurd and explosive riot that kills thousands in an American town. The contrasting happy strand of action consists of the former girlfriend, Yukiko, and her serene dreams during that same hour. The dreams are suffused with the spirit of her dead father, who had committed suicide in anger over his wife's infidelity but who offers a benign presence here. Not only is Yukiko relaxed and at peace, but also we see atonement with a parental figure, a highly significant motif coming from Brautigan's pen.
In contrast to Willard and His Bowling Trophies, Sombrero Fallout manages to make the three strands resonate meaningfully together. When the writer in one plot cries copiously, two men in the wastebasket world start crying uncontrollably, and their unmanly behaviour arouses such uneasiness in bystanders that it triggers a cascade of violent events that embody the writer's repressed anger. The psychological and political construction of the Orient by America, present in the writer's love for a Japanese woman who caters to his sexual and emotional needs, has its echoes in an invocation of Vietnam in the wastebasket action plot. The guns that fall into townspeople's hands are the "finest collection of hardware outside of Indo-China during the great Vietnam War days" (132). The writer's agonies abate when he turns his experience into a country-and-western lyric. The banality of the lyric's wording is paralleled in the wastebasket President's speech, whose thundering cliches provide rhetorical quietus to the insa ne massacre. In contrast to this intertwining of emotion and violence, Yukiko sleeps, enjoying oneiric rapprochement with her father. Like her cat, she is efficient and serene, and her cat's purr is the motor that runs her dreams. Her serenity makes us understand both why the writer wants her back so badly and also why his behaviour drives her to break off the relationship. All three strands thus achieve an emotionally logical lessening of tensions both in the action and in the characters' minds.
Another improvement over Willard and His Bowling Trophies is the reemergence of America as a significant issue. The Logan brothers' loss is idiosyncratic, whereas the wastebasket town, inflamed by riot, resonates with American inner-city violence - as the fictional foreign newspaper headlines make clear. The Americanness of the wastebasket mop-up is brilliant satire. The insane mayor who chants his license plate number is transformed by suicide into a hero, that being easier for the public to assimilate than absurdity. The sombrero that falls from the skies and starts the riot (violence "at the drop of a hat") turns from black to white, a bad-guy to good-guy shift in television western codes. By the time the media are through, everyone and everything has been recast as tragically heroic and typically American, and watchers can congratulate themselves on America's greatness. Norman Mailer, ideologue for macho violence, makes an amusing cameo appearance as a war correspondent to tell the great American public w hat it should think. Brautigan never renders America with more satiric gusto than in this novel, and he puts similar enthusiasm and skill into portraying the emotions of the writer. Untouched by all the explosive tensions are Yukiko's harmonious slumbers and her cat's elegant sufficiency. As readers, we can enjoy and approve the fashion in which the writer laments her departure, but the novel's creator allows us to see that she was right to reclaim her independence. The book manages both hysterics and even-handed fairness.
Having succeeded in representing emotions and action, and having managed to connect the two, why launch another three-strand novel? What aesthetic problems remained unsolved in Sombrero Fallout? I suggest that the synthesis that Brautigan worked out at an artistic level did not entirely satisfy him emotionally because of Yukiko's being female, oriental, and asleep and therefore withdrawn from the other actions. Her serenity and her gender make her unsatisfactory as a narrative conduit for the tensions over America and parents that so clearly obsess Brautigan as writer. Her atonement with her father is promising, but only as a first approximation toward releasing oedipal tensions between son and father. Hence, the next book faces a male protagonist with parental problems and life in America.
In Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel, 1942, we again find the three narrative strands. The unhappy strand is the miserable, guilt-filled parental relationship in which Card as a child has accidentally caused his father's death and is still nagged about it by his mother. The violence-filled action plot involves Card as a private eye stealing a corpse. The happy material consists of Walter Mitty-like daydreams in which Card imagines himself the best baseball player or general or private eye in Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon. The parental plot is obviously responsible for the life-destroying power of the daydreams; as Mark Hedborn puts it in Lacanian terms, "We can postulate that Card forecloses the Name-of-the-Father when his father dies. From that point on whenever he tries to enter fully into the Symbolic realm he cannot, because the Imaginary (Babylon) intrudes to ruin his opportunity" (108). Significantly, Card's action story ends with his hiding the stolen body of a dead whore in his refrigerator. Brautigan has physicalized metaphors since Trout Fishing in America, and this one reifying frozen passion reminds us of the importance of ice caves of the Hawkline house, the iciness of the sombrero that started the wastebasket riot, and the chilly calm of trout in their streams.
What distinguishes Dreaming of Babylon from Sombrero Fallout is the failure of the plot lines to integrate emotion with action. The gumshoe story is just parody (analyzed by Grimaud and Grimes). It takes on a literary form, but no grander issue, such as America. The unhappy childhood and happy daydreams are technically all part of the one mans life, but they disintegrate rather than integrate his mentality. Both operate to render him accident prone in the real world, and he achieves no Zen-like ability to contemplate them with detachment. At this point in his narrative development, Brautigan is coming to realize that trying to make his characters act rather than be passive has not helped them achieve freedom from their emotional baggage. Action does not cancel out unhappiness. The Zen observations that he as author brings to describing them and their emotions does not trickle down to the protagonists and help them gain perspective. Only in Sombrero Fallout does he manage to make action and emotion correlate effectively, and obviously what he is doing is sufficiently unusual that it does not communicate to many readers.
Having failed to integrate action with the emotions that matter most to him, Brautigan shifts his narrative strategies yet again. His final two lifetime novels do not resemble each other on the surface, but both hark back to the early experiments in passive Zen observation, both are structured about contrasts, and both conjoin his original affectlessness with the emotional extravagance that grace the action plots. Pure neutrality and undiluted emotionality - the modes of the first four and next four novels respectively - have not worked separately, so Brautigan the narrative experimenter tries combining them.
The reliance upon Zen is easier to document for The Tokyo-Montana Express than for any of his other books. In trying to describe Zen values to me, colleague John Whalen-Bridge remarked that the observer experiences the death of Princess Diana as a ripple in the mind, and that ripple is of no more importance than the ripple caused by the naked lunch on the end of one's fork. This value judgement does not apply to the personage and food but to the perceptions of each in the meditator's mind. Brautigan makes just such a comparison when the emotions caused by the death of President Kennedy are equated with those that the narrator feels about pancakes at a restaurant. Another echo of Eastern thought is Brautigan's reducing barriers between ego and the rest of the world when he says the "I" of the book is the voice of the stops on the Tokyo-Montana Express; he diffuses his narrator into the dual landscape. The novel is emotionally warmer than any of the earlier texts. While the narrator himself expresses little fe eling directly, other characters with whom he interacts do display their emotions. The narrator also offers readers something other than emotional void at every scene. He presents opportunities to feel obviously acceptable emotions, such as sympathy for the woman whose life's savings have disappeared with her unsuccessful Chinese restaurant, for the discarded Christmas trees cluttering the cityscape, for the caged wolf. Occasionally his meditations are pleasant: his experience with the shrine-of-carp cab and the fantasy on orange trees in Osaka, for instance. The dominant trope, though, is the "alien being." The classical musician Francl, who came to the American west in 1851 and died in the snow in 1875, is one such alien. So are the live eels imprisoned in a kitchen bucket, the domestic pets abandoned by the road, the various suicides, the makers of pizza in Japan, the centuries-old intelligence serving time in Ancona, the woman searching the snow for a tire chain, and the mid-winter crows trying to eat bit s of rubber tire in the road. All these creatures are isolated. They operate as if they had been plucked from their home world and dropped into one that is indifferent or hostile. The narrator feels just as alien in Montana as he does in Japan.
Episode by episode, the sense of not belonging to this world remains bearable, although the cumulative effect is fairly oppressive for emotional readers. Zen perspective does encourage dispassionate detachment, though, so the narrator neither invites us to get greatly roused, nor does he do so himself. As in the earlier novels, he mostly avoids telling us what to think, making us view our own emotions and understand them. In the chapter devoted to the death-row menu, for instance, he tells us that he and friends are upset by the menu but never explains why. We are left to mull over possibilities. Is he bothered because this high-calorie complex menu is served to murderers while poor children go hungry? Is it the contrast between the state's hypocritical solicitude and its intention to execute the men? Is it gourmet revulsion at what an institutional cafeteria considers fancy food? Is it the irony that the prisoners have been eating this last-meal food for years because they inhabit death row? Are we meant to liken the prisoners to the penned chickens who get fed exotic leftovers, Italian and Chinese? We must grope our own way to appropriate emotions. The feelings in The Tokyo-Montana Express are not resolved, but they do not get out of hand as they did in Dreaming of Babylon.
Having achieved a much greater degree of literary calm in The Tokyo-Montana Express than in Dreaming of Babylon, Brautigan once again takes up explosive feelings, in So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away. He sets up three tranquil, passive portraits and contrasts them with Whitey growing up and coping with frenzied guilt over shooting a friend. The narrator, Whitey as an adult, says he is describing the calm people as if understanding them could help him understand himself; if he could reach their state of mind, he could come to terms with his past.
The three have indeed achieved notable serenity in their lives. The alcoholic watchman seems placidly if cynically at peace with the world. The old man with the elaborately carved dock and boat has achieved monk-like serenity. He is a gas-injured veteran of World War I, living on a tiny pension. His minuscule shack is tidy, and he makes no unnecessary movements. He grows most of his own food. Despite the years of work that have gone into the ornamental carving on his dock and boat, he accepts that some day a sheriff will run him off the land because he is a squatter. His ability to face the probability that an ungrateful society will deprive him of his modest squat and his extraordinary handiwork indicates an admirable measure of detachment. The eccentrics portrayed in most detail are the bovine couple who set up their entire living room (down to National Geographics and doilies) on the bank of a pond every evening where they fish. The Depression has uprooted this couple, but they have created a compensatory world for themselves.
The three portraits all echo earlier Brautigan creations from his first, passive, affectless phase. The watchman, with his trick postcard of a catfish, has some of the serenity of various trout fishermen. The dock carver resembles Old Charley from iDEATH. The couple's ritual act of world creation links them to the "Kool-Aid Wino" in Trout Fishing in America who similarly makes his reality by an act of will. Brautigan thus draws on the calm creations of the early books to balance or contain Whitey's frenzies, similar in their roiling intensity to the emotions of Brautigan's second, action, phase of writing.
Whitey does not achieve complete serenity, although some atonement between himself and his mother takes place. His early comments on her are very negative. She "just barely tolerated my existence. She could take me or leave me" (44). She is responsible for his being exposed to a number of unsatisfactory stepfathers. Her panic over being lodged in a flat with a gas stove reduces family life to shambles. Nevertheless, when Whitey has spent months obsessing over the hamburger he nearly bought instead of the fatal bullets that he did purchase, she enters his obsession and agrees that maybe he should have bought a hamburger. Almost magically, as sometimes happens when an outsider enters a fantasy, it loses its hold on Whitey, and he is able to burn his compulsive writings. He observes a caged coyote and bear in a neighbourhood zoo. They appear outwardly tranquil, if not precisely happy. Their endurance seems a more liveable state of mind to him than his orgies of guilt. With his emotional temperature thus lowered, Whitey ponders the couple by the pond and imagines their commenting on his having disappeared. He becomes invisible in the dusk, and they remain, placid amid their furnishings. Brautigan almost seems to be trying a cinematic fade-out from Whitey to them, from his unhappiness to their acceptance of what is. In terms of the technical portrayal of Whitey's emotions, this is a highly successful novel, in part because emotions and action are so tightly conjoined. The happy and miserable elements mingle enough to lessen the misery, though not yet enough to reach complete equilibrium.
Brautigan's daughter has issued a posthumous novel by her father, entitled An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey. In this, Brautigan largely eschews action and avoids giving his characters dramatic emotions. The narrator (who is either Brautigan himself or a very Brautigan-like writer) admits to being depressed (57-58, 86-90). To counter that anomie, he focusses on the minutiae of lives and emotions around him. He notes out-of-place creatures and objects such as a brand-new woman's shoe in a Hawaiian intersection and a spider in the hairs on his arm. His thoughts repeatedly return to the death from cancer of a thirty-eight-year-old female friend and the suicide of a woman whose house he rented. The narrator opines that in describing weather and thunderstorms he is describing himself (99). This narrator, the two dead women, and the alienated objects all seem projections of Brautigan's own melancholy. The narrator's plan to record daily experience (1-2, 107) resembles that of Scheherazade: he puts forth words to avoid being engulfed by death. In this novel, Brautigan's observations are as sharp as always, but he finds no actions that can block awareness or create a distance between himself and the temptation of nothingness.
Brautigan has lapsed into critical oblivion. Why attempt resurrection? Does he have a place in the canon of American literature? His early books once seemed to chime with 1960s flower power, but most critics realize that the 1960s ethos is not very central to his endeavour. As experimenter, he is interesting, but many more radical writers have succeeded him. His angers, directed at parental figures and America, put him right in the mainstream. A man's search for his father is the Maxwell Perkins ticket to writing the great American novel, and it hardly matters whether one wishes to find or kill the father.
Brautigan's whole novelistic output is an ongoing experiment in which intense emotion is channelled into plots whose surface concerns only glancingly reflect the causes of the emotion. The characters are not allegorical as they were in the medieval psychomachia, but the emotions well up at a distance from those characters and flow through them as their actions or their Zen observations attempt to contain the psychic energies. To this inner dynamic Brautigan adds his own aesthetic, a certain wry charm, acutely observed detail, an occasionally dazzling sense of vision, a spare efficiency of means, and a vein of high fantasy. He also invites an unusual reader response; the unjudgemental narrative stances or characters play foil to readers' reactions and invite self-analysis.
How should readers respond to Brautigan outside the 1960s' context? We find strong feelings swirling about recurrent issues, expressed in economically sketched vignettes. Like soap bubbles, their form is simple, their tension, immense. In novels, we perhaps expect powerful emotions to be the province of sprawling books. Norman Mailer novels reverberate with vivid feelings. However, Mailer is producing a fictional equivalent to Gericault's famous painting "The Raft of the Medusa," while Brautigan gives us the Chinese master's perfect frog in one continuous brush stroke. The one works on heroic scale with heroic bodies in torment, while the other is postcard sized, with very subtle variation in the shades of gray and black on the background paper. It looks simple. Simplicity rarely is, though. Formally, Brautigan's novels strive for the compressed simplicity of haiku. They are sparely poetic and small scaled, if not actually miniature. In the land where bigger is better, he has tried looking at life from a different angle and has reflected that perspective in his art.
Author's note: I owe thanks to John Whalen-Bridge, University of Singapore, for introducing me to Zen and for reading more than one draft of my argument.
Mosaic
March 2001
![[toggle]](javascript:icntoggle('mod-Brautigan_Resourcesl2','module.png'); "[toggle]"){kind=small}