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Michael Skau's essay on Trout Fishing in America
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American Ethos: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America

by Michael Skau?
University of Nebraska at Omaha

The epigraph to Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America asserts, "There are seductions that should be in the Smithsonian Institute, right next to the Spirit of St. Louis." The particular seductions with which Brautigan concerns himself are the escapist use of imagination and determined non-involvement. While recognizing and demonstrating the attractiveness of these seductions, Brautigan assumes an ironic stance and criticizes his narrator's refusal to actively participate in the development of social change. The narrator recounts his search for an ideal America, encountering frustration throughout his quest; he perceives that contemporary America differs from his ideals, but evades the problems besetting America. Several critics have noted the weaknesses of the narrator but suggest that he embodies Brautigan's own values. However, the novel demonstrates that Brautigan disapproves of his narrator's behavior and that the author indicates both the need for constructive action and the danger in failing to act.

Trout Fishing in America portrays the adventures of a young man (who is never named and achieves conventional Everyman status) pursuing the America that got away. His quest for the vital American experience begins in childhood, and the idealistic naiveté of youth is characteristic of his attitude throughout much of the novel. The vast expanse of the United States is treated imaginatively as an immense playground, the contours of which have been undergoing discovery for several centuries. Francois Truffaut has observed that "Americans always seem to be ready to start their lives anew." Brautigan's narrator goes further: he is ready to begin the life of America anew. Thus, the novel and its characters are trans-historical, ranging from Lewis and Clark and the pioneers in their three-cornered hats to the contemporary phenomena of movie stars and Ban-the-Bomb demonstrators. The use of temporal expanse is not simply a surrealistic time-leveling device: instead, the narrator is desperately attempting to capture a quality which he sees as characteristically American throughout the history of this country. That quality is best represented by the hunchback trout which the narrator catches: "There was a fine thing about that trout. I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy." The narrator finds himself in an America whose "body" has changed dramatically since the early years of its exploration. The contemporary America of Trout Fishing in America parallels the diluted beverage prepared by the Kool-Aid wino, "a mere shadow of its desired potency." This America is weakened by poverty, violence, and the manipulations of crass commercial interests and fraudulent politicians.

The first chapter of the novel introduces the theme of poverty in the form of destitute people who receive sandwiches in the park. In addition, Brautigan provides a sketch of the Kool-Aid wino's family, picking beans for two-and-one half cents a pound, and an episode where the narrator goes fishing between a graveyard for the rich and a graveyard for the poor: the narrator has graphic evidence of economic inequity in America. He also recognizes the essential violence of American life, from the man in Mooresville, Indiana, murdering "child-eyed rats," through the brutally sadistic Mayor of the Twentieth Century, to the state's use of capital punishment. The narrator finds violence in America so commonplace that he is astonished to come across a campground stovepipe which has not been riddled with bullet holes. Commercial interests and politicians are also blamed for the impoverished American spirit. The celebration of trout in the second chapter of Trout Fishing in America projects the fish in industrial terms:

Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout.
The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.
Imagine Pittsburgh.
A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains and tunnels.
The Andrew Carnegie of Trout!

Subsequent examples of the commercialization of America, including the John Dillinger Museum in Mooresvilie, Indiana, and the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, with its stacks of used trout streams, serve to comment on an amoebic tendency of American commercialism toward co-optation. The narrator suggests that the products of civilization have violated the natural world which he craves: "As much as anything else, the Coleman lantern is the symbol of the camping craze that is currently sweeping America, with its unholy white light burning in the forests of America." (TFA, p.117). Mr. Norris embodies the estrangement of modern man from the natural world, when he decides to go camping and charges an arsenal of equipment at a sporting goods store (TFA, p.119), thus, in effect, bringing the encumbrances of civilization with him. Faced with his modernized America, the narrator desires to establish a more elemental relationship with his environment. For example, in "Another Method of Making Walnut Catsup?" (TFA, pp.16-18), he offers a number of recipes which provide an alternative to commercially prepared foods. His recipes are natural: they do not contain artificial coloring, sweeteners, preservatives, cyclamates etc. However, even the narrator himself is a victim of the forces of material progress. A child of the twentieth century, he naturally thinks of rivers and streams in terms of telephone booths, department stores, and movies: "I'd had a childhood fancy that I would walk down to the Missouri River and it would look just like a Deanna Durbin movie — a chorus girl who wanted to go to college or she was a rich girl or they needed money for something or she did something" (TFA, p.146). The character named Trout Fishing in America corroborates the fact that the modern perception of the "body" of America differs from that of the past: "No, I don't think [Meriwether] Lewis would have understood it if the Missouri River had suddenly begun to look like a Deanna Durbin movie, like a chorus girl who wanted to go to college" (TFA, p.148). Finally, the narrator also recognizes the malevolent deceptions of American politics. In "The Ballet for Trout Fishing in America," the narrator describes a dead Cobra Lily plant mounted by an "I'm for Nixon" button (evidently from Nixon's campaign for the 1960 presidential election). His explanation of the habits of the Cobra Lily has obvious political parallels: "Nature has endowed the Cobra Lily with the means of catching its own food. The forked tongue is covered with honey glands which attract the insects upon which it feeds. Once inside the hood, downward pointing hairs prevent the insect from crawling out" (TFA, p.23). The suggestion that politicians attract voters with honeyed promises, only to feed upon the people.

The narrator is clearly aware of the problems of contemporary American society, but his usual approach to these, as to everything else, is willful misperception. At one point in the novel, he comments, "Like astigmatism, I made myself at home" (TFA, p.99). Throughout the novel he makes himself at home in America by indulging a faulty vision of reality. His evasion essentially involves imaginative escapism which finally leads him to surrender and passive acceptance. He frequently employs digression to shift the focus of his attention away from anything which threatens his equanimity. Thus, he recalls a cat he saw when he was young:

The cat had fallen or been thrown off a high wooden sidewalk that went along the side of a hill in Tacoma, Washington. The cat was lying in a parking lot below.

The fall had not appreciably helped the thickness of the cat, and then a few people had parked their cars on the cat. Of course, that was a long time ago and the cars looked different from the way they look now.

You hardly see those cars any more. They are the old cars. They have to get off the highway because they can't keep up.
(TFA, p.89)

Unpleasantness is not disarmed here; it is simply evaded. The narrator uses a comparable diversionary tactic when he recounts his infant daughter's illness:

I gave her a small drink of water, not too much, and rinsed the vomit taste out of her mouth. Then I wiped the puke off my clothes and for some strange reason suddenly it was a perfect time, there at Mushroom Springs, to wonder whatever happened to the Zoot suit.

Along with World War II and the Andrews Sisters, the Zoot suit had been very popular in the early 40s. I guess they were all just passing fads. (TFA, p.126)

Similarly the narrator evades social problems: instead of deploring the situation of the poor who receive sandwiches in the park, he tells an amusing anecdote about a friend whose sandwich contained only a leaf of spinach; instead of lamenting the poverty of the Kool-Aid wino's family, he focuses on the wino's antic ritual. He uses imagination as a means of distorting reality into a problem to be smiled at rather than corrected.

Trout Fishing in America provides an examination of the imaginative capacity as a means of confronting what the narrator sees as an impoverished modern American reality. He frequently creates images which are preposterous according to conventional logical standards, but which possess or establish an appropriateness peculiar to the internal logic of the novel. Time after time an image is suggested and then adopted as though it were literal, thus enabling the narrator to participate in the creation of an imaginary world. In "Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America?," Brautigan demonstrates the complexity of this process of imagination supplanting reality through willful misperception. The narrator visits several acquaintances, finds himself confused about their cat named "208," and tries to invent an explanation for its name: "I pretended that the cat, 208, was named after their room number, though I knew that their number was in the three hundreds" (TFA, p.111). He explains that "it was easier for me to establish order in my mind by pretending that the cat was named after their room number. It seemed like a good idea and the logical reason for a cat to have the name 208" (TFA, p.111). However, logic is seldom comfortable in Brautigan's novels. Never very satisfied with his pretended explanation, the narrator later finds what he calls "the true significance of 208's name" (TFA, p.112). In effect, coincidence provides him with an explanation which is much more plausible than ridiculously pretending the cat was named after an inaccurate hotel room number: bailing a friend out of jail, he discovers that the bail office is room 208 in the Hall of Justice. At this point, his prose waxes poetic to reflect his enthusiasm over his discovery: "I paid ten dollars for my friend's life and found the original meaning of 208, how it runs like melting snow all the way down the mountainside to a small cat living and playing in Hotel Trout Fishing in America, believing itself to be the last cat in the world, not having seen another cat in such a long time, totally unafraid, newspaper spread out all over the bathroom floor, and something good cooking on the hot plate" (TFA, p.112). However, his explanation is only barely more satisfying to the reader than the earlier one: it stems simply from coincidence. The novel offers no specific connection between the cat or its owners and the bail office of the San Francisco Hall of Justice. The narrator has found an explanation which is more convenient than believing that the room of the couple on the third floor has the number 208. The earlier fiction has been replaced by one which does not require that he overlook the reality obviating his explanation. He has employed imagination to establish a rather tenuous and circumstantial order in his mind. In another episode the narrator responds similarly: he finds himself disturbed by economic inequities and creates an imaginary solution for the impoverished who are now dead: "Once, while cleaning the trout before I went home in the almost night, I had a vision of going over to the poor graveyard and gathering up grass and fruit jars and tin cans and markers and wilted flowers and bugs and weeds and clods and going home and putting a hook in the vise and tying a fly with all that stuff and then going outside and casting it up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening star" (TFA, p.31). Once again, extended prose structure signals fanciful invention, this time producing a pretty sentiment, to be sure, but one which remains absurd as a constructive social measure. The novel repeatedly demonstrates the human tendency to replace reality with the creations of the imagination. In "Sea, Sea Rider?," the controlling force of this propensity depends upon the saturation of the modern mind with the literature of popular American culture, ranging from Hemingway novels to macho pulp westerns. The chapter's title arises from the final image of episode: the pages of the book began to speed up and turn faster and faster until they were spinning like wheels in the sea" (TFA, p.39). The narrator finds himself riding the sea of his own reading experiences (which the bookstore owner conveniently articulates for him), adapting reality into terms commensurate with those experiences. As a result, the narrator's search for America becomes a quest for an imagined America, the virginal America of popular fiction and elementary school history classes: America, he assures us, is "often only a place in the mind" (TFA, p.116). Brautigan's narrator finds it easier to indulge in fantasy and non-involvement than to dare to challenge the social order: at one point, he admits, "I was going to say that a sick person should never under any conditions be a bad debt, but I decided to forget it" (TFA p.114). The enervating apathy of his escapist visions finally deprives him of the impetus for the quest: "I've come home from Trout Fishing in America (TFA, p.149). At this stage, his surrender of the potential fruition of his quest is so thorough that he engages in bitter, reactionary ridicule of nonviolent peace marchers.

In a sensitive and engaged examination of Trout Fishing in America, John Clayton has complained that in the midst of a commercialized and unwholesome America, Brautigan offers only "the politics of imagination." Clayton continues, "And the politics of imagination is finally not enough for me. It's not enough for us." However, while it may be enough for the narrator of Trout Fishing in America, it is not enough for Brautigan himself. Neil Schmitz has perceptively observed that "because his fiction is told in the first person by an I whose discourse has remained relatively consistent in manner, Brautigan is often read as though he were this speaker, this voice idling in lyrical reverie." Yet Schmitz is reluctant to apply this insight to the narrator of Trout Fishing in America: "Unlike the writers who narrate The Abortion and In Watermelon Sugar, this writer is very close to Brautigan's voice." However, unlike his narrator, Brautigan sees the ultimate failure of imagination and escapism as programs for life. He is critical of his narrator's evasion of the economic and social inequities of America and his inaction in the face of the violence, commercialism, and political greed of the country. Throughout the novel. Brautigan portrays as defective vision the narrator's use of imagination as a mode of perception. The narrator takes no corrective measures to improve his world, despite his recognition of its deficiencies. In the light of another Brautigan novel, In Watermelon Sugar, this passivity varies from the attitude of the author: the tigers must be slain before the Edenic world can be entertained.

Brautigan recognizes the attractiveness of the imaginative retreat, but portrays the culpability of this approach. The poverty of the unfortunates who receive sandwiches in the park or who pick beans for two-and-one-half cents a pound cannot be laughed or wished away. Like the flight of stairs which the narrator mistakes for a creek, the seductions by imagination are self-imposed and should not long survive the piercing glare of reality. While the narrator purposefully evades that glare, Brautigan demonstrates the impossibility of even achieving self-satisfaction by that stratagem. In "Red Lip," the narrator is trying to get a ride to Steelhead, but with no success. While waiting, he invents a game to pass the time: "I had nothing else to do, so I caught salmon flies in my landing net. I made up my own game. It went like this: I couldn't chase after them. I had to let them fly to me. It was something to do with my mind. I caught six" (TFA, p.10). While his passive method provides him with flies here, he does not gain a ride. Brautigan seems to offer no hope that Americans can easily return to an idealized state: his narrator finds himself repeatedly thwarted in his simple quest. Encountering continuous frustration, he doesn't even succeed in actually fishing until the eleventh chapter, and even then he is in a creek that "turned out to be a real son-of-a-bitch (TFA, p.28). Subsequently, he goes fishing literally in the midst of death, with a graveyard on either side, in "a slow-moving, funeral-procession-on-a-hot-day creek" (TFA, p.29). This is soon followed by an account of the fish which die in Hayman Creek (TFA, p.42). the trout killed by port wine (TFA, pp.43-49), and "The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America" (TFA, pp.50-51). The elegiac atmosphere generated by these episodes epitomizes the frustration which the narrator experiences throughout his search. Brautigan also uses "The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America" to reflect his criticism of the narrator by focusing on Lord Byron, the romantic rebel who died while working for Greek independence. Byron is equated with Trout Fishing in America, the ideal, and provides an effective foil to Brautigan's noncommittal narrator. Conclusive evidence of the narrator's failure appears at the end of Trout Fishing in America. The penultimate chapter of the novel provides three quotations concerning the nature of language, the medium being employed for the creation of imaginative reality. After citing these passages, the narrator comments, "expressing a human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise" (TFA, p.181). At first glance, it would, appear that he is successful in this desire. However, the concluding word of the novel is "mayonaise," a misspelling of the word "mayonnaise." It is Brautigan, not the narrator, who has the last word: the frustration of the narrator's "human need" on an elemental level of language is the capstone of Brautigan's criticism of his attempt to divorce himself, through imagination and evasion, from the problems he finds prevalent in America.

Imagination is not, of course, wholly to be despised: Brautigan indicates that it can serve fruitfully by providing a goal and a sense of direction, but it must be accompanied by creative action. Thus, the narrator fantasizes Leonardo da Vinci: "I saw him inventing a new spinning lure for trout fishing in America. I saw him first of all working with his imagination, then with metal and color and hooks, trying a little of this and a little of that, and then adding motion and then taking it away and then coming back again with a different motion, and in the end the lure was invented" (TFA, pp.175-176). However, the narrator does not recognize any need for implementation in his own situation. He fails to realize that the correction of social problems is the only guarantee of personal freedom and justice. The preservation of these values, like the pair of socks he buys, is jeopardized by his passive, evasive role: "I wish I hadn't lost that guarantee. That was a shame. I've had to face the fact that new socks are not going to be a family heirloom. Losing the guarantee took care of that. All future generations are on their own" (TFA, p.95). Unless one actively participates in the refurbishment of American society, all future generations are truly on their own. The historical ideals upon which America was founded become like the photographs which the narrator has taken, but which he cannot afford to have developed: "They are in suspension now like seeds in a package" (TFA, p.125). Brautigan suggests that only firm commitment and persistence, even in the face of failure as repeated as that of Alonso Hagen, can provide the hope of fulfillment.

Imagination by itself cannot guarantee the clarity of perception required for the development of social change. The values which the narrator idealizes as Trout Fishing in America, if misperceived, can also be seductions. In fact, on the title page of the novel, the words, "Trout Fishing in America" graphically take the shape of a hook. The danger Brautigan discovers in his narrator's approach is that it reduces the Trout Fishing in America ideals from social goals to private goals. Brautigan shows that, like astigmatism, imagination can distort what it sees. Even when imagination offers something of value, it must be accompanied by action; the evasive comfort it provides is too often both illusory and incapacitating.


Portland Review
Fall/Winter 1981



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