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James Maguire's essay on Brautigan and Stegner
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Stegner vs. Brautigan; Recapitulation or Deconstruction?

by James H. Maguire?

"Modern literature and western literature are somehow irreconcilable, at least up to now. The kind of western writer who sticks to the western attitudes is likely to be considered a little backward by modernists" (Conversations 123). Wallace Stegner not only makes that general contention, but he also says of two specific writers, Ken Kesey and Richard Brautigan:

^I think they are Westerners trying to be something else—I'm not quite sure what. Kesey got blown by the San Francisco hip scene when he came down from Oregon. Brautigan, God knows what blew him, but I'd guess his vogue is past. He was always more clever than profound, I think. He had a certain acid, satiric wit and a way of doing things in compressed little semipoetic paragraphs which appealed very greatly to the young. Students followed him around like little dogs. A kind of odd man. He didn't have much conversation, he didn't have many ideas. He had an attitude, essentially a pose of the alienated and disoriented modern at odds with his society. (Conversations 138-139)^
Although many critics, scholars, and general readers share Stegner's opinion of Brautigan, many others not only disagree but also think the author of Trout Fishing in America has earned, as Edward Halsey Foster put it, "a very high place indeed in the estimation of those concerned with the development of American literature in our time" (124). Those who admire Brautigan do so for the same reason Stegner doesn't like him: because he's a modernist (at least some variety thereof). Stegner does approve of other modernists, his admiration for Faulkner being one such view he has recently expressed (Conversations 141, 194). Yet, Brautigan's writing also exhibits the three main modernist traits that Virginia V. Hlavsa identifies as characteristic of Faulkner's work: (1) "the practice of building on older works," organizing work "by external patterns or ordering structures"; (2) "fragmentation and distortion"; and (3) "the ironic mode" (23-26). Apparently, then, Stegner must object to Brautigan mainly because, although a Westerner, he was "trying to be something else."

Stegner's reputation as "a major figure in American letters and perhaps the leading western writer" seems assured (the assessment is Richard Etulain's 199, and I agree with it). So we are left with the question of whether to accept Stegner's view of modernists such as Brautigan—in other words, the question of whether western American literature can remain western if a writer like Brautigan is admitted to its canon. The answer is paradoxical: yes and no.

The second half of the paradox is true because the region's literature will not remain western, at least as Stegner defines the term. Stegner has repeatedly stressed the relative youth of western culture, and he has said that two or three more centuries may pass before that culture matures. He seems to assume, however, that the artists of a mature American West will not reject it, will not be "alienated and disoriented," although he allows for the possibility of such a change when he qualifies his statement by saying the irreconcilability of western and modernist sensibilities has prevailed "at least up to now."

Since Stegner has contributed to the building of a vital regional literature, and since he stresses repeatedly the need for continuity, no one should be surprised that he finds little value in the work of a younger Westerner seemingly alienated from all Stegner's generation has built. The response of Stegner and his contemporaries to the work of writers like Brautigan parallels some of earlier responses to Faulkner's work. As Hlavsa explains, "There is an elitist, rejecting side to the ironic mode, which even the cognoscenti may dislike" (36). To exclude ironists from a canon will not, however, consign them to oblivion (that is, if their work is good); it will only for a time lead criticism in the wrong direction (as American literary scholarship was sidetracked by Richard Chase's thesis; see Cady 53-69).

Obviously not a narrow-minded parochialist or an exclusionist, Stegner has, indeed, pushed for a broader definition of western American literature ("History, Myth, and the Western Writer"). But since he finds healthiest that fiction which serves as "a lens on life" (One Way 18-25), he most admires literature that accurately depicts what is actual, and he doesn't think that a writer like Bret Harte "matters much in the long run except that he was a skillful maker of stereotypes. . . . His descendents are all people like himself, who were not makers, not creators, but contrivers" (Conversations 133). Apparently, for Stegner the western writer, not being alienated, views his society clearly and is therefore capable of creating a fiction that allows readers to envision the West that he sees. Those whom Stegner sees as less than artists are writers (1) like Harte who merely contrive factitious melodrama with cardboard stereotypes and (2) alienated modernists whose work includes fragmentation and distortion and does not, therefore, convey an immediately clear view of a West that is.

Nevertheless, as Stegner admits, cultures change. Although their differences seem greater than their similarities, Norman Mailer and Cotton Mather share the pages of many anthologies as "American writers"; and Jane Austen and the author of Beowulf are both said to be "English." The contrasts between those authors may not create a gap as large as that between Stegner and Brautigan, but the West has always followed the grand scale. And the Grand Canyon separating the Stanford professor and the Zen skeptic may eventually yield first place to a Hells Canyon of a difference between them and a western writer yet to be born.

Allowing Brautigan into the canon of western American literature will destroy its current westernness, but paradoxically it will also remain western.

The epigraph to Trout Fishing in America states one of Brautigan's main themes, a western theme that also runs through Stegner's work: "There are seductions that should be in the Smithsonian Institute, right next to the Spirit of St. Louis." Both writers show the seductive power of the American Dream. In The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Bo Mason repeatedly uproots his family to follow the lure of the West; and the narrator of Trout Fishing in America tells stories of characters like Bo for whom America is "often only a place in the mind" (116). From Mark Twain to Willa Cather to Larry McMurtry, western writers have shown that the dream of a golden West is "often only a place in the mind."

To expose the folly of chasing the West's Big Rock Candy Mountain, both Stegner and Brautigan link their narratives to western history. Their views of history differ radically, however, Stegner tracing continuity, Brautigan highlighting discontinuity. Lyman Ward, the narrator of Stegner's Angle of Repose, says: "Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations" (519), a view Stegner seems to share. In Brautigan's work, discontinuity is so pervasive that one critic argues even "Duration is out of the question" (Chenetier 82).

In spite of such divergent views of history, both Stegner and Brautigan attack popular myths of the historical West. The main approach of both authors to western history is personal, and they expose the inadequacy of the myths by telling the stories of characters who are like actual people they have known. Commenting on "horse operas, whether John Wayne's, Owen Wister's or Zane Grey's that are built on a handful of episodes," Stegner says: "Those are legitimate; they're part of western history, but there's a whole lot of other history to which those things really were attached as a kind of lurid fringe." And he adds that "the lurid, the exciting, the romantic, the adventurous, the deadly, are always more interesting in fiction than the kinds of things that make a continuous society" (Conversations 149). But Stegner, like the earlier American Realists of whom he has written, makes interesting the everyday and commonplace, the domestic dramas of families that suffer but endure. Brautigan, too, describes the commonplace, but his characters not only suffer, they are often defeated. In Brautigan's fiction, families fall apart. All seems discontinuity. Winos and prostitutes, drifters and lunatics, lonely children and old people in western town and cities meet with dead ends, missed opportunities.

To distinguish between these two approaches, I have, of course, exaggerated, for Stegner sometimes shows us discontinuities, and Brautigan's irony ironically creates its own sort of continuum (a succession of defeats and disappointments). And despite their divergent philosophies of history, they both expose the weaknesses and neo-romantic glorifications of the Old West. Lyman Ward says (and again Stegner seems to agree): "Contrary to the myth, the West was not made entirely by pioneers who had thrown everything away but an axe and a gun" (41). Such an explicit attack on the popular myth cannot be found in Brautigan's work, but as Edward Foster notes, "The Hawkline Monster parodies westerns and gothics" and ridicules "certain stereotypes in popular culture" (106-107). For Brautigan, however, history of any sort is ultimately an illusion, the impression, as Foster puts it, of "a universe that appears to change but essentially does not change at all, being ultimately the great, ineffable void." (83).

Although Brautigan may see all worldly forms as ultimately making the "ineffable void," he nevertheless attacks—with a seeming conviction akin to Stegner's—the pollution and rape of the West. In Trout Fishing in America, the West's rivers and lakes and mountains are spoiled by sheep (Brautigan shares John Muir's view of them as "hooved locusts") and by tourists. In one chapter, a shopping center sells a beautiful mountain stream by the foot, as though it were a stovepipe, an analogy that conveys the truth of actual "development" practices in most mountain resorts. We have destroyed much of the West, Brautigan shows, by treating it as something other than what it is, a practice accelerated since Lewis and Clark viewed the West and a Garden of Eden. Most western writers also see—and protest against—the accelerating destruction of the natural environment, and Stegner is no exception. Regardless of whether Susan Tyburski is right in arguing that Stegner believes in the sacrality of the land, he has consistently advocated as much wilderness as possible, attacking shortsighted, greedy "developers" who ignore the warnings of scientists such as John Wesley Powell. Stegner seems as alienated as Brautigan from the society of developers.

For all their differences, both the Zen cynic and the professor defend landscape and wildlife and attack avarice. This common cause sets them (and most western writers) apart from the majority of Westerners. Like Stegner, Brautigan can see how destructive is the lure of El Dorado, because his mind is not parochial. The first chapter of TFIA, for example, alludes to Benjamin Franklin, Dante, and Kafka; and among many other allusions in Angle of Repose, Stegner's narrator mentions Heraclitus, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Reading works by Brautigan and Stegner, the reader is constantly reminded that the West, for all its isolation, is part of the world, that culture does not stop at national or regional boundaries. Such broad vision, of course, characterizes great artists everywhere, but Brautigan and Stegner use their knowledge not to glorify their regional culture but to show how inadequate, how immature, how nascent it still is.

Yet because a skeptic like Brautigan shows so little faith in the idea of America—indeed, hardly any faith in any idea—Stegner regards the literature of such modernists as toxic in its effects. Why? Because the modernists' pretentious desire to be what they are not encourages their readers to do likewise, and too many will be like the hippies in All the Little Live Things and Angle of Repose, rejecting bourgeois American values but having nothing with which to replace them. But Stegner has Brautigan pegged wrong. He was, as Foster and Chenetier assert, a Beat, not a hippy, and he was not trying to be anything—he was who he was. He was a Westerner who distrusted profoundly, as Chenetier describes it:

^an assualt on all fixed representational forms, from myths and codes to moral messages and idealogical assertions. In Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan contrasts his longing for an authentic (if problematic) pastoral vision with the multiple expressions of a corrupted, modern pseudo-tradition, thus denouncing the destruction of the country's soul and its recuperatiion by the hypocritical messages of a commercialized, falsified present. (32)^
It is Stegner who is trying to be somebody, trying to be that Westerner he has long struggled to create in his fiction: a person with the best of both masculine and femine powers, a harmonious blend of Susan and Oliver Ward, someone who knows the tricky nature of language but who also knows how to use it to get at truth.

Is Stegner right, though, in apparently believing that the toxic modernists will only delay or prevent the maturation of western American culture? Only a simple-minded embrace of Brautigan's work would cause such damage. A more likely effect of the West's acceptance of Brautigan will be an increasingly sophisticated readership. This conclusion follows from the belief that the mind can return to harmony with the world around it only through the struggle of art, and if a canon contains only one view of life, it may lack the tension necessary to stimulate that creative struggle. Indeed, some of Stegner's best work includes such tension: greedy developers versus students of western history and geography, hippies versus professors.

Will Brautigan's work prove toxic even when mixed with a reading of Stegner's? Both writers argue the inadequacy of a regional culture based primarily on popular glorifications of the Old West, and both attack greedy developers and exploiters. But the styles and philosophies of the two authors differ radically. Stegner believes in continuities, and he hopes that through centuries of hard work, the West may build a worthwhile culture. A will-o-the-wisp is all Brautigan sees in views like Stegner's. Brautigan's fiction may not be a lens on a sort of western life Stegner has experienced, but it is sometimes a lens on the truth of a certain type of western experience.

Is western American literature big enough, then, for both Brautigan and Stegner? The ancient Greeks somehow found room in their culture for both Diogenes and Aristotle, so surely the American West can learn from both Trout Fishing in America and Angle of Repose.


The Pacific Northwest Forum? 11(2)
Spring 1987: 23-28




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