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Gordon E. Slethaug's essay on 'The Hawkline Monster'
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The Hawkline Monster: Brautigan's "Buffoon Mutation"

by Gordon E. Slethaug

The book, itself a mutation about mutations, ultimately spoofs the romance forms it uses and suggests that humanity's attempts at escape, whether in fiction or in life, are in good part doomed to disaster, for we cannot escape the problems we create.

Despite the affirmative critical reception of previous books such as Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan's Hawkline Monster has come in for some severe drubbing. Its peculiar blend of the western and gothic and its galloping sequence of events lead to Phoebe Adams' complaint in the Atlantic Monthly of the lack of direction: "The author calls his novel 'A Gothic Western,' and perhaps one should leave it at that... for it looks as though Mr. Brautigan himself never quite decided where he was headed." Roderick Nordell of the Christian Science Monitor is similarly negative about the structure of the book, finding the parody of the gothic western too contrived and precious. Even John Yohalem of The New York Times Book Review, although defending the wit and entertainment value of the book, suggested that it is a slight thing of little consequence. Essentially, this book by Brautigan is drummed out on the basis of its superficiality and its parodic use of popular literature techniques. Yet I contend that both the contrived atmosphere and techniques drawn from escapist literature of the romance genre exactly suit Brautigan's serious concerns about the relationship between escapism and reality. Following the venerable tradition of the burlesque, by exploiting accepted conventions of literature and life, he asked that we rethink our way of perceiving things.

The title of the book itself functions to alert readers to the centrality of the relationship between content and form, in short, the point of the parody. By calling his book The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, Brautigan pointed the readers' attention in two directions: to the fictional center of the tale — the monster itself — and to the formal structure of the narration. Although the two elements may seem too discrepant to be so twinned, both monster and form relate integrally to each other. The typically evil-hearted Hawkline Monster, inadvertently created by Professor Hawkline from a batch of chemicals through which he has passed electricity, also has a shadow, "a buffoon mutation," bumbling, inept, angry to have to follow his master, but essentially good-hearted. "Gothic western" refers to two of the prototypal romance forms upon which the book draws; as with the monster's shadow, the form of the book becomes a shadow of the original forms, in effect, also a buffoon mutation. The book, itself a mutation and about mutations, ultimately spoofs the romance forms it uses and suggests that humanity's attempts at escape, whether in fiction or in life, are in good part doomed to disaster, for we cannot escape the problems we create.

The title character of the book, the prey for and antagonist of the heroic gunslinger/monster killers, has been created from an elixir of chemical compounds and magical substances gathered from all corners of the globe: ancient Egypt, South America, the Himalayas, even Atlantis (HM, p.111). When combined, these substances form a volatile mixture with wholly new characteristics and properties; they are transformed into "The Chemicals" out of which a monster and its shadow are born. This transformation is the first, chronologically, of many within The Hawkline Monster.

The monster created from The Chemicals develops a malevolent will as formidable as those of other literary monsters in the works of John Gardner?, J.R.R. Tolkien?, Mary Shelley, and John Milton? and in Beowulf?. This development is a gradual process, however. At the beginning of its career it "was benevolent, almost giddy with the excitement of having just been created. There was a future with the possibility of help and joy for all mankind" (HM, p.155). But as with the archetypal Satan, it does not long remain innocent and helpful. Discovering its own peculiar abilities, it asserts itself, pulling pranks on the professor and wandering out of its womblike crystal jar in search of new territory and experiences. It first contrives only silly pranks, such as covering things with green feathers or suspending a piece of pie in the air. But the pranks become more harmful and the results more devastating. It turns the Professor into an elephant-foot umbrella stand and "kills" the seven-foot, three-hundred-pound butler, shrinking him to a thirty-one-inch, fifty-pound dwarf. It changes one of the Professor's daughters into an Indian maiden, Magic Child, and turns both the daughters' thoughts to lovemaking at wholly inappropriate times. It has the capacity to alter both the victims' shapes and thought processes. Ironically, resembling a pool of light (perhaps like the Luciferous side of Satan but generally out of keeping with typically dark and foul monsters), this monster is described as an "ungodly waterfall," "the true amalgamation of mischief and evil" who conceives of "a diabolical fate" for its human victims, hoping to alter their forms so they will become mere shadows of himself (HM, p.165).

The monster has still another dimension, a shadow, a "buffoon mutation," and a "reluctant complement of darkness" (HM, p.158), that is forced to follow along, but that refuses finally to be type cast in the same role as the monster, even wishing "the Hawkline Monster were dead" (HM, p.155). Until the heroic battle between the monster-killers and the monster, the shadow is forced to bumble along in its auxiliary capacity. Fate (The Chemicals) has decreed that it will, with its limited powers, be an unwilling "participant observer" of the monster's evil deeds, even though its nature is essentially good and its will uncorrupted.

The shadow, then, holds many features in common with the monster. It has been created from the same batch of chemicals, has had the same electrical current passed through it, and has a form resembling the monster's; but it is still a comic parody (buffoon mutation) of its master, with the shared characteristics functioning to different ends; that is, it wills to do good and finally helps defeat the evil purposes of its monster twin. In effect, this most recent buffoon follows a long tradition of comic buffoons dating back to Attic comedy in which the buffoon pretends to clownish foolery to save the hero from the threats of a self-aggrandizing imposter. It is the buffoon who significantly helps to restore a proper social order.

The structure of The Hawkline Monster reinforces the role of the buffoon mutation with its comic parody and burlesque masking its thematically serious function, in effect also following the buffoon tradition by functioning as a social corrective. The book is divided into three major comic portions of unequal length. Book 1 (59 pages) depends upon a western format, book 2 (18 pages) upon the gothic, and book 3 (113 pages) upon a combination of fantasy, science fiction, and the detective story, concluding with a turn to realism. In each of these instances Brautigan used elements typical of that form or genre and then distorted or transformed them, resulting in a buffoon parody of the form itself.

In the first portion Brautigan introduced the main characters, setting and tone — all clearly unrealistic and depending upon romance elements typical of the western. With its bleak, parched landscape, rattlesnakes, and abandoned grave, the Dead Hills strikes a chord, resonant of other classic westerns. Moreover, the town of Billy has its own share of stereotypical frontier characters, including Ma Smith, the Cafe owner who cooks a stout meal of fried potatoes, steak, biscuits with gravy, and blackberry pie for the local men; Jack Williams, the six-foot, two-hundred-pound marshal-saloon owner, known for being "tough but fair" and for having an ungovernable tongue; and Pills, the owner of the local corral and its wretched horses.

Other aspects of the book are a slight turn of the screw away from the normal conventions of the western. For example, although the two heroes, Cameron and Greer, are prototypically hard-headed on certain occasions and sentimentally soft on others, rather than being the expected lawmen or gunslingers who have been driven to vigilante justice by personal tragedy or lack of proper justice, they are hired killers with little motive other than doing a job well for pay.

Ironically, although they are manly enough for almost any bizarre killing, they find seasickness completely unnerving: "even more terrible than the time they shot a deputy sheriff in Idaho ten times and he wouldn't die" (HM, p.10). If the characterization is just a bit off, so is the setting, especially at the book's inception, where the action begins in a pineapple field in Hawaii, then moves to Chinatown in San Francisco, and next goes to a whorehouse in Portland, Oregon, before finally settling into the prairies of eastern Oregon. Even the location of eastern Oregon does not ring true when compared with the typical cowboy setting of the Dakotas, Montana, Nevada, Texas, and Wyoming. The date, too, is off. Most cowboy fiction is set about the time of the Civil War, just when the western territories were opening. But 1902 is about two or three generations late — perhaps an accurate enough time for the settling of eastern Oregon but not appropriately conventional for a western. Then, too, the confrontation of the heroes with one of the heroines, Magic Child, in a Portland whorehouse is truly exceptional for the typically asexual western. The second of the two heroines, Miss Hawkline, is introduced as sitting naked on the floor of her mansion in "a room filled with musical instruments and kerosene lamps that were burning low" (HM, p.13). Indeed, book 1 might well be considered a "liberated western," for the heroes and heroines relish sexuality; ironically, in this topsy-turvy western it is mainly the women who do the seducing, suggesting an inversion of the conventional roles of men and women.

In addition to the stereotypical roles of hero and heroine in a western, one of the most sacrosanct roles is that of the horse. The horse ought to be strong and powerful, capable of carrying a rider into and out of nearly insurmountable difficulties. But not so with the nags of Billy. One horse "was so swaybacked that it looked like an October quarter moon" (HM, p.37). One "didn't have any ears. A drunken cowboy had bitten them off for a fifty-cent bet" (HM, p.38). A third actually drank whiskey, and a fourth had a wooden foot shaped like a duck's foot.

The nature of these inversions and irregularities moves us away from the conventions of the western, causing us to laugh both at the conventions and the irregularities. The transformation of expected conventions causes the burlesque to cut simultaneously in two directions: although we cannot take the western conventions as normative, neither can we accept the liberated elements as superior. In effect, prototype and parody are both reduced to the absurd — as absurd as the grave beside the road leading into the Dead Hills: "It was simply a pile of bleak rocks covered with vulture shit" (HM, p.54).

In book 2 the element of structural transformation works in roughly the same way as in the western. Here in the realm of the gothic we are hardly into the section at all before the stereotypical elements give way to parody. We enter this section when the road through the Dead Hills deadends at the Hawkline Manor — a huge, yellow, gloomy Victorian mansion with stained glass windows, balconies, turrets, and red brick fireplaces — looking "like a fugitive from a dream" (HM, p.59). The snow piled around it in the midst of ninety-degree summer prairie weather gives it an air of the bizarre, slightly sinister, macabre, unreal and also humorous. The household furnishings — elephant-foot umbrella stand, fine china, crystal chandeliers, and pictures provide an image of elegance, associated with the mystery inherent in gothic tradition. The main sense of mystery in the house is conveyed by the presence of something extraordinary, spooky, and even supernatural. First observed by Cameron and Greer in an upstairs window, this phenomenon sets the stage for knowledge of the experiments and resulting monstrosities of Professor Hawkline, the misguided scientist. Blackness and the dark, so often associated with evil in gothic romances, are here reduced to the humorous association between Miss Hawkline's "long black hair," "high top shoes," and coal: "The shoes were made of patent leather and sparkled like pieces of coal" (HM, p.63). The traditional gothic elements of the story do add to the story's suspense, its main story line, and impact, but the incongruity and disproportion suggested by the use of blackness helps to undercut and transform the intense gothic atmosphere into one of comedy.

This sense of mystery, the macabre, and monstrosity coupled with the comic continues in book 3 as we hear more about the Professor's misdirected experiments, one of which "got out of the laboratory and ate... [the] family dog in the back yard... [while] the next door neighbors [in Boston] were having a wedding reception in their garden" (HM, p.83). Clearly, the latest experiment, the prankish monster, has done away with the Professor himself. With this information the readers understand that the fiction has moved away from the western and gothic to fantasy, science fiction, and, eventually, the detective story.

Appropriate to the hunting of such a monster of science and magic, the western gunslingers virtually change character before us. They desert their cowboy stances and become part of a different order, taking tea in the parlor, drinking sherry from decanters, and ultimately stalking their monstrous quarry. They have their appointed task or quest; no matter how perilous, this new questing beast must be pursued. The two men have been specially chosen to accomplish a heroic task that no one else is equipped in any fashion to undertake. They have been sought out in a Portland whorehouse, because they have the right look: the finger of fate (or is it the Hawkline Monster?) is upon them. Magic Child outlines their specific duties with regard to the petrifying monster: "We're afraid someday he'll break the doors down and get upstairs into the house. We don't want the monster running around the house" (HM, pp.75-76). But this monster is no simple ungainly and unmasterful hulking beast. It can bend the mind so that the questers cannot keep their minds on their appointed tasks. With a monster so preternaturally tricky and mind bending, the questers must be certain of the nature and tactics of their quarry. Consequently, they adopt the methods of sleuths or private eyes to get to the heart of the matter (a device Brautigan exploited fully in Dreaming of Babylon: A Detective Story). Cameron mentally counts everything, including the appearances of the brilliantly hued light and its inept shadow that appear in different locations of the house, but that initially appear to be something other than the fabled monster of the ice caves. Greer conducts an official inquiry of the Hawkline sisters regarding their nonexistent knowledge of Magic Child, the form that the puckish monster has previously given one of the Hawkline sisters. Both of the men grill the girls about their knowledge of the monster in the caves, so much so that one of them says; "Why all these questions? We've already told you everything that we know and now we're telling it to you again" (HM, p.135).

In keeping with the parody of fantasy, science fiction, and detective-story forms, the latter scenes of the book present a blend of the conventional and the ludicrous. When the questers-sleuths have gathered information about the monster, they suspect it does not live in the ice caves but resides in the Professor's laboratory. They then go in search of it immediately after midnight, an appropriate time for the final battle of any such quest. Although traditional tools of the quest — whether from fantasy, science fiction, or the detective story — might at first seem useful, the two heroes — Cameron and Greer — find that since they are coping with such an unusual monster, normal weapons are useless. In effect they must lay down their guns; accordingly, contrary to convention, they carry neither munitions nor amulets, only a glass of whiskey. The battle is hardly a battle at all, for the monster's shadow blocks the monster's vision at just the time that the heroes throw whiskey into The Chemicals. Consequently, even the final showdown between the protagonist and antagonist of fantasy and science fiction is parodied here.

The "happily ever after" conclusion similarly receives a serious challenge. Following the explosion resulting from the whiskey mixed with The Chemicals, the Hawkline manor burns to the ground and the ice caves are melted, turning the area into a lake, later designated a park, although it is poorly maintained and seldom visited. The two Hawkline sisters, out from under the naming curse of the monster, each go separate ways. One marries Greer, runs a whorehouse, and gets killed in an auto accident. The other goes to Paris, marries a Russian count, and is killed during the Russian Revolution. Greer is arrested for auto theft and is put into prison. Only Cameron survives in the "real world." He becomes a successful movie producer in Hollywood, probably with his own stock-in-trade of illusion and romance.

The Chemicals, the monster and his shadow, the romance prototypes and their parodies (in addition to the final transition from romance to the real world) — these are the main mutations or transformations within the book. There are secondary ones as well, which tend to reinforce the primary ones. We have the change of one Hawkline sister into Magic Child, the alteration of the huge, living butler into a dead dwarf, the metamorphosis of Professor Hawkline into an elephant foot umbrella stand, the change of the ice caves into a lake, and ultimately the evolution of the monster and his shadow into a handful of diamonds and their shadows. Even Brautigan's use of certain symbols seems somehow transformed; for instance, light tends to symbolize evil and darkness good.

One appropriate view of the book's mutations is that Brautigan was having an immense amount of fun playing with the conventions of the romance, mixing them together in a delightful literary potpourri. Looked at this way, the buffoon mutation may exist solely to illustrate how conventions can be wrenched, twisted rendered ribald and ludicrous, in a meaningless and zany way.

Brautigan, however, clearly used these mutations for larger and more universal concerns and criticisms. The chapter "Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey, Won't You Come Home??" stands out from the others in suggesting Brautigan's concerns, those concerns depicted in Professor Hawkline's experiment that was begun out of utopian expectations for a better world: "Only a man of Professor Hawkline's talent and dedication could have joined these chemicals together in friendship and made them good neighbors" (HM, p.112). The book conclusively shows that the Professor's hopes were dead wrong, with chaos and destruction resulting from his experiment. A perfect blend of materials, especially in any kind of attempt to achieve a blend of the past and present, is wholly impossible to attain. The narrator's comment about the twentieth century makes it clear that modern humans are reaping the folly of just such a failed vision as Professor Hawkline's: "The death of the Hawkline Monster and the end of a scientific dream" (HM, p.182). Brautigan hinted that chaos and destruction are part of a legacy of the past and will in all probability be part of our legacy to the future. Essentially, Brautigan's was an apocalyptic vision, suggesting that humankind's lot is not one of betterment but perhaps one of self-destruction. Nothing, including science, is really able to alter this view: when science tries it only creates monsters and destroys the landscape. So apocalyptic and despairing is his surrealistic vision of disaster that "It was almost like something out of Hieronymus Bosch?, if he had been into Western landscapes" (HM, p.183).

But if Brautigan raised questions about the value of science and utopian schemes in directing human affairs and solving humankind's problems, he certainly did not take the opposing view that humans ought to escape from reality. He made this position clear in two ways — by the use of formalistic elements of the romance and by the use of The Chemicals. The romance forms and their parodies ultimately function in the book to spoof forms of escapism. As we have seen, Brautigan used just enough conventions to make the work convincing within the traditional romance frame of reference and then added the parodic elements. In effect, he made us conscious of these forms not just for their own sake but so that we become aware of a larger question, the question of the proper relationship and balance between romance and reality. He presented the elements so that we do not accept them as realistic in any sense: we know we are in a fabricated fictional world, as indicated for instance by the singularly flat and undeveloped characters with no significant individuality who people this book. The only difference between Cameron and Greer is that one counts and one is taller than the other, although we are told that the observer is never sure which man is taller after he has taken his eyes away, and it really doesn't matter. Similarly, the Hawkline sisters are totally interchangeable within the fiction. The book points to such doubling and conventional character depiction within the romance fiction and spoofs it, so that we become aware that this book is in no way realistic and, furthermore, that we are aware of the limitations of escapistic romance fiction.

In another way also Brautigan underlined his views on reality and escapism: through his depiction of The Chemicals. Although within the book The Chemicals are simply a collection of magical and scientific ingredients through which electricity has been passed, the very name "Chemicals" suggests hard drugs. As modern readers well know, chemicals (hard drugs) and whiskey mix only with fundamentally harmful and lethal effects. Escape through The Chemicals may be fun and nonthreatening for awhile — as the Professor discovers — causing the world to look benevolent and hopeful, but finally it shows its dark side, the monstrous effects. This is certainly Brautigan's statement on the use and abuse of escape through drugs. The drug trip may start out beautifully with pleasing and unexpected things happening, but with increased usage and dosage the trips become nightmarish, with addicts becoming prisoners of their own dreams. The drugs become mind bending and mind destroying.

Ultimately, Brautigan suggested that humankind cannot depend upon utopian hopes, drugs, wish fulfillment dreams, or escapistic fiction; humans will have to exist primarily in their own world of reality, inadequate and threatening though that world may be. But Brautigan did give us an indication of the way we human beings can find some degree of meaning and fulfillment in this world. He showed this by means of the characterization of Cameron, the only one of the heroes and heroines to survive in the "real world." He is the one who counts and keeps track of things. In effect, we assume that he is the most rational of the four, but he also has a totally spontaneous side and is clearly ready for a joyful sexual romp. He has both the rational and emotional sides, a balance that is perhaps behind his success as a movie producer in Hollywood. As an artist, one with imagination in addition to reason and emotion, he can create illusions for others but as a manipulator of the media, he is almost certainly not taken in by those illusions himself. As with the young Ambrose in Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, "he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed." Brautigan indicated that we need moments of escape (after all, that is the role of the imagination), but those moments must never overwhelm us and upset the ever delicate balance between romance and reality.

Escape through romance, drugs, and utopian schemes will help humans but little to cope with their real problems, although such escape may seem temporarily satisfying. By using the romance form Brautigan successfully debunked an overly romantic view of life. His "buffoon mutation" has a distinctly social and philosophical function with a sure message, even while it is sheer delight to read.


The Scope of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the First International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film
Robert A. Collins & Howard D. Pearce eds.
Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985: 137-145



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