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Mark Siegel's essay on 'Trout Fishing in America'
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Trout Fishing in America

by Mark Siegel

A young man describes his fantastic adventures fishing in the continental United States, as well as many other things he feels are thematically connected.

Principal characters:
THE NARRATOR, an unnamed trout fisherman
TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA, a friend of the narrator, a cultural concept, and a multifaceted activity
TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA SHORTY, a perversion of his namesake

While Richard Brautigan's popularity, especially among young people, is considerable, the intellectual quality of his work has been consistently under-rated. Most probably, it is the easy readability, wild imagination, and bizarre humor of Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), In Watermelon Sugar (1968), The Hawkline Monster (1974), and his many other novels and collections of poems that account for both his popularity and the assumption that he has nothing "serious" to say. Ironically, Brautigan is not merely one of the more serious chroniclers of contemporary American society, but may also be one of the more pessimistic. Often Brautigan's narrators seem perversely upbeat — because they rarely offer criticism or blunt commentary — until the sheer weight of the perversity crushes that perspective for the reader. In A Confederate General from Big Sur, for example, the Civil War is called "the last good time this country ever had." Eventually, however, the horror of the war, the emptiness of the values on both sides, and the fraud of the heroic Confederate General — really a cowardly recruit — leak like oil onto the pond of the narrative, discoloring the pastoral reflection and suggesting the failure of both contemporary middle-American culture and its countercultures.

Trout Fishing in America is a collage of excerpts and images bound together by the presence of an anonymous narrator, peculiar references to trout fishing, and a unique, hypnotic literary voice. The narrator begins his story with an ironic juxtaposition of a statue of Benjamin Franklin welcoming new Americans and starving people walking to a pathetic soup kitchen. He digresses about how, as a child, he once imagined that he saw a beautiful trout stream in the woods, only to discover that it was merely a flight of stairs leading up to a house. He returns to adulthood and describes his frustration at being unable to hitch a ride on a highway. He regresses to childhood to describe a friend, "The Kool-Aid Wino," who salvages a miserable life by creating a potent religious ritual around badly diluted Kool-Aid, who creates his own "Kool-Aid reality" and is able to "illuminate" himself with it, The narrator discusses recipes for walnut catsup?, apple compote, and pie crust. Mostly, however, he discusses various fishing trips and his generally unsuccessful attempts to catch trout. He annotates The Trout Fishing Diary of Alonso Hagen, a record of trout lost between 1891 and 1897 by a fisherman who never caught a single fish. Brautigan describes his own encounters with a character / thing / idea named Trout Fishing in America, who is his frequent companion, and with Trout Fishing in America Shorty, a nasty, distorted little wino. He recalls a recent visit to the Cleveland Wrecking Yard?, where used trout stream is sold by the foot — trees and birds cost extra, of course.

While this incomplete summary of events suggests that Brautigan is savagely demythifying the legend of pastoral America — the notion that Americans have been purified and revitalized by their contacts with an abundant nature — Brautigan's point is not really so simple. For example, when the narrator reports catching a peculiarly deformed hunchback trout?, he notes: "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." Throughout Trout Fishing in America, energy, and especially the energy of the imagination, seems to the saving grace in the usually clumsy lies by which people live. Structurally, the novel is more or less symmetrical, and the tale of the Kool-Aid wino at the start is balanced by homage to Leonardo da Vinci near the end. Da Vinci invents a fantastic fishing lure called "The Last Supper," which sells millions in America and does very well overseas in places such as the Vatican, where there are not any trout. Thirty-four ex-presidents of the United States claim they caught their limit on "The Last Supper." Moments like this, some readers conclude, show that Brautigan, while announcing the demise of real pastoral opportunities in America, is yet optimistic about the potential of American energy and imagination to revitalize its values and dreams. Again, however, this is an oversimplification. The Kool-Aid wino is an impoverished diabetic whose fantasies at best enable him only partially to escape his daily misery. Da Vinci's lure is "the sensation of the twentieth century, far outstripping such shallow accomplishments as Hiroshima or Mahatma Gandhi," Brautigan says, as usual without authorial clarification.

Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) and Ernest Hemingway's? "Big Two-Hearted River," the obvious literary antecedents of Trout Fishing in America — to which Brautigan makes overt references — suggest what his point may be. Moby Dick begins not with the famous phrase "Call me Ishmael," but with an etymology of whales. Brautigan ends Trout Fishing in America not with his homage to Leonardo da Vinci, but with a brief allusion to the human need to create words for things, and he says that his own need is to end his book with the word "mayonnaise." He does so in an apparently extraneous letter of condolence for the "passing of Mr. Good." "Gods [sic] will be done. He has lived a good long life and has gone to a better place." The author of the sympathy note adds a postscript: "Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise." Perhaps the literary mayonnaise is the novel's humor, the otherwise "irrelevant" ingredient that helps readers swallow the bad news about the world. In Moby Dick, lshmael goes to sea to rediscover his own humanity — and finally does so at the cost of the lives of all his friends. Perhaps Brautigan's narrator, pondering the death of a cultural tradition he has known and loved, finally achieves a rebirth; by confronting — and by forcing readers to confront — the possibility that the old gods may be dead, perhaps he will be ready to rejoin the important human struggle epitomized in the novel's opening scene of poverty in the land of promise. If Melville is seeking to define the ambiguous and ambivalent experience of his characters through the etymology of "whale," perhaps Brautigan is trying to tell his readers that, while he has not been able to define the American experience in so many words, he has tried to capture its ambiguities in his tale.

The simplicity of Brautigan's sentence structure, loaded with bizarre associations and startling juxtapositions, is virtually a parody of Hemingway's? prose style, and this novel seems in part to be a parody of his short story "Big Two-Hearted River." While Hemingway's hero Nick Adams found in his pastoral retreat and mind-soothing pursuit of trout some measure of psychological sanctuary, Brautigan's narrator implies that this pastoralism — if it was ever more than a myth — is dead. (In fact, the last time Trout Fishing in America sees the narrator is on the Big Wood River, ten miles from Ketchum, Idaho, soon after Hemingway had killed himself there.) Hemingway's evasion of particularly American problems can only end in suicide, but his dream — in many ways the dream of trout fishing, of peace, plenty, and pastoral simplicity — has made an indelible impression on the American mind, has made Americans to some extent what they are, and cannot merely be cut out of their cultural selves. Like Mr. Good, Trout Fishing in America lived a good long life, his death was to be expected, and "it was nice you could see him yesterday even if he did not know you." Insisting that he is still alive is self-delusion; the imagination that strives to catch him may yet create new weapons or new peace; but like "The Last Supper," it is a betrayal and a masquerade. The staircase that the narrator imagined was a trout stream remained a staircase, and, as Trout Fishing in America tells him, "there was nothing I could do." Perhaps from living too long on imagination alone, the Kool-Aid wino eventually became as bitter as the novel's other wino, Trout Fishing in America Shorty. America desperately needs to cope with its present, unsettled reality. Imagination is a potent force, but it must be used to construct rather than merely to escape.


Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature?
Salem Press, 1983: 1979-1981



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