Flash player not available.
by Craig Thompson?
In the 1960s Richard Brautigan became one of America's most widely read experimental authors. Following the publication of Trout Fishing in America (1967), his importance to the counterculture, particularly in San Francisco rivaled that of Carlos Castañeda? and Alvin Toffler?. "The greening of America" provided fertile ground for an author with a cynical view of American values and an antipathy for literary traditions. As that era passed, however, Brautigan's popularity faded, and many critics who admired his early works began to dismiss him as a relic of the "hippie" generation. At the same time, some critics have come to look past the apparent thematic thinness andn have found deeper motives and complexities in his work. The metafictional aspects of his books are more than a whimsical trick; they are the products of Brautigan's aesthetic concern for the spontaneous and immediate, and his rejection of fixed forms.
Born in Tacoma, Washington, on January 30, 1935, Richard Gary Brautigan was the oldest child of Bernard and Lula Mary Keho Brautigan. In 1954 he moved to San Francisco where, at one time, he shared an apartment with Philip Whalen. He married Virginia Dionne Adler in 1957, and their daughter Ianthe was born in 1960. The Brautigans were divorced in 1970. He maintained homes in both Montana and Bolinas, California, while often traveling to Japan. It was at his cabin in Bolinas that Brautigan committed suicide in October 1984.
In 1954 San Francisco was about to become the literary center of the Beat Generation. Besides Whalen, Brautigan became friends and was influenced by Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure?. It was in San Francisco that Brautigan was first exposed to Zen Buddhism. His first three books, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), Trout Fishing in America, and In Watermelon Sugar (1968), all echo the Zen aversion to fixity and intellectual reflection. It was with these books that Brautigan, for the most part, earned his critical reputation.
A Confederate General from Big Sur, although written after Trout Fishing in America, was Brautigan's first published book of fiction. The general is Lee Mellon. a friend of the narrator (Jesse) who establishes his own "country" in Big Sur. It is a community that, like the Confederacy, is antithetical to mainstream America. Although the book proceeds in a fairly straightforward narrative, a military tale of the Civil War is inserted into the text more and more obtrusively. In the final three chapters the primary discourse seems to be moving toward a conventional resolution, but this possibility is exploded with an ending that produces an infinite number of futures: "endings going faster and faster, more and more endings, faster and faster until this book is having 186,000 endings per second"(p. 159). This conclusion - endings occurring at the speed of light - denies the book's ability to create a closed reality and is linked to Jesse's pondering of nature, a contemplation that has left him "distracted" and impotent.
The book that brought nationwide popularity to Brautigan was Trout Fishing in America. Eschewing intellectual reflection, the text moves along the surface of reality, from image to image, usually offering scenes from two very different Americas. "The Cover for Trout Fishing in America" contrasts the America of Benjamin Franklin (a statue of whom is on the cover) and Adlai Stevenson to an America where "people gather in the park across the street from the church and they are hungry" (p.2). It is through the accumulation of images that the text resonates, not through referential discourse. Brautigan's rejection of fixity is reflected through his use of a verbal phrase as the book's title and central metaphor. In addition, it is never determined just what Trout Fishing in America is. At different times it is a person, place, hotel, adjective, author, sport, and the book itself.
Brautigan's reluctance to employ stable signifiers is also an important part of In Watermelon Sugar: "my name? depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind" (p.4). The narrator's anonymity, along with a nearby community called iDEATH, suggests the death of the individual ego. As in his two previous books, Brautigan uses statues to suggest permanence. Of his experience as a sculptor, the narrator can only say, "the statue did not go well and pretty soon I was only going down to iDEATH and staring at the statue... I had never had much luck at statues" (p.75). Nearly everything in iDEATH is made of watermelon sugar, suggesting fluidity and change.
In each of these books, Brautigan rejected the notion that traditional texts can truly reflect reality. Jesse attempts to find enlightenment in Ecclesiastes and ends up concentrating entirely on the punctuation marks. In Trout Fishing in America the reader is told that "the bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars" (p.32). All the books in In Watermelon Sugar have either been burned or relegated to Forgotten Works, the land of fixed ideas.
With The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971) Brautigan began a series of books in which, by mixing genres, be attempted to break down traditional literary definitions. The Abortion begins in a bizarre library where authors go and place their books wherever they want, thus denying categorization. When the librarian's girlfriend Vida (life) becomes pregnant, they travel to Mexico for an abortion and the book becomes a realistic love story. Brautigan also employs multiple genres in The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974), Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (1975), Sombrero Fallout. A Japanese Novel (1976), and Dreaming of Babylon. A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1977). By mocking and subverting genre categories, Brautigan was trying to free literature from its own world of predetermined definitions — fixed definitions that he felt are both a distortion and a limit to creativity.
Brautigan's final books. The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (1982), seem to return to earlier techniques and themes. Many critics applauded this move, particularly in the case of The Tokyo-Montana Express. The structure is reminiscent of Trout Fishing in America, with each chapter an apparently autonomous vignette. He again presented images of two very different cultures, this time East and West.
Even though these last books received a more favorable critical response, Brautigan was still widely viewed as a writer whom time and events had passed by. In The Tokyo-Montana Express, he fueled this sentiment with melancholy themes of nostalgia and aging: "What makes you older is when your bones, muscles and blood wear out, when the heart sinks into oblivion and all the houses you ever lived in are gone and people are not really certain that your civilization ever existed" (p.162). Although Brautigan's themes may never again be as appearing to readers as they were in the 1960s, his attempts to move beyond traditional genres and narrative styles still deserve attention from critics and readers interested in metafictional texts.
Post-Modern Fiction: A Bio-Biographical Guide
New York: Greenwood Press, 1986
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.
![[toggle]](javascript:icntoggle('mod-Brautigan_Resourcesl2','module.png'); "[toggle]"){kind=small}