Loading...
 
Print
Faces of Fiction

by Peter Lewis?

It is easier to understand why Richard Brautigan became a cult figure than why he has remained one. The novelty, charm and wit of his early work were refreshing, especially in the context of American fiction, since here was an innovative writer with a distinctive offbeat imagination who was not trying to compete with Bellow, Barth, Heller or Pynchon, not trying to write the Great Serious Comic Epic in Prose of some other typically American leviathan. In art, small is often much more beautiful than big. Yet very enjoyable as some of Brautigan's novels are, can he bear the strain of the heavy scholarship being erected on his slight oeuvre? Butterflies are best left to fly around in the open air instead of being fixed and formulated on pins in museum cases. Like most cult figures, Brautigan has been the victim of his admirers, with the result that even his feeblest books have received rave reviews. Only totally misplaced devotion could have led to the critical praise for his "Gothic Western," The Hawklline Monster, a trite fable on the Frankenstein theme couched in a mainly unfunny Gothic burlesque and replete with cheap, instant surrealism. His three novels since then, organized in his familiar mini-chapter way, consist of two interwoven narratives, although in Dreaming of Babylon the second one is decidedly intermittent. All three deal with the sine qua nons of contemporary literature, sex, and violence, but it is Willard and his Bowling Trophies that comes closest to being a parody of sexploitation commercial fiction, with Bob and Constance desperately and not very successfully trying to enliven their restricted sex life by playing "the Story of O game," complete with bondage, gagging and flagellation. The other strand of the novel concerns the Logan brothers' attempt to recover their stolen bowling trophies and to revenge themselves bloodily on the thieves. Brautigan is presumably trying to make serious points about American society — one of the epigraphs is Senator Church's "This land is cursed with violence" — but his amoral flippancy and detachment trivialise the themes.

In Sombrero Fallout, sex is present in the framing narrative in which a humorous writer sadly recollects his affair with a Japanese girl who has left him, while the fantastic story that writes itself in his waste-paper basket after he has abandoned it is about the ease with which violence can escalate from a minor incident to communal madness and slaughter. This fable is the best thing Brautigan has done for some time, but by presenting it as an extended sick joke he again trivialises his subject, virtually turning it into fun. Fantasy can be used to heighten the horror and menace of violence, but Brautigan's fantasy, while bringing out the logic of lunacy, is essentially anodyne. The farce fails to be savage. Farce, decidedly non-savage, is never far away in Dreaming of Babylon, a "Private Eye Novel 1942," in which Brautigan has one eye on Hammett and Chandler and is obviously playing games with the conventions of their types of fiction. Sternian? subversion of novelistic realism has been an important feature of modernist and post-modernist fiction, but it has now degenerated into facile modishness. Brautigan's transformation of the private-eye novel into burlesque terms is, perhaps, as much nostalgic as subversive, but it does have the effect of belittling the social comment of more serious writers of the genre like Chandler, and puts nothing in its place but easy laughs. Violence seems something almost unreal that happens in books or on the screen. As for Brautigan's penniless and unsuccessful investigator, C. Card, he is a parody of figures like Philip Marlowe who tries to escape the misery of his existence in a most non-Marlovian way by creating a utopian dream world, Babylon, to which he can retreat. A comic refurbishing of Chandlerian fiction could have considerable satirical potential, but Brautigan settles for an entertaining romp. To describe him as an entertainer or lightweight is, of course, heretical, considering his prestige in academe, but he now seems to be writing his own kind of pop-art pot-boiler, nihilistic at heart. His popular success seems to have stunted the development of his not inconsiderable talent.

Stand? 19(4)
1978: 66-71



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.