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by Kent Bales?
Reading Richard Brautigan often gives me the sensation of gazing in a mirror. He and I are nearly the same age, grew up in similar circumstances in small Western towns and cities, and moved to the Bay Area at about the same time. There is, then, a narcissist pleasure in seeing what feels like my own experience given a clarity of expression I have rarely been able to give it. But beyond this shared experience I sense a larger similarity. With a shift in focus I see, "behind" me in the mirror, my society, the social "nature" and its natural setting as they are now, including the social myths that at once unite and divide the society as they mediate its sense (and senses) of reality. Doubtless I assent to the "truth" of this reflection in part because I recognize myself in the foreground, but it is not merely self-love that validates Brautigan's image of society for me. Rather it is the truth of the self-image, the accurate picture it gives of my ambivalence toward the experience that is "mine" and helped make me "me." We have learned to recognize ambivalence in ourselves; Brautigan's mirror to society shows it at work there as well — and on a scale transcending individual ambivalences, and not merely their sum. Trout Fishing in America shows especially well the boundaries and common ground of these two related ambivalences. (p.29)
Brautigan shows us people balancing, people falling, people long ago fallen. He doesn't lose balance, though, even when he temporarily sends his narrator sprawling. Throughout he makes us feel that balancc is an aesthetic virtue as well as a key to survival. It can also be celebratory: Brautigan deftly weighs beginnings against conclusions, chapters against chapters, motifs against motifs, not so much to shore fragments against ruins in order to survive as to remind us that, while the play is in earnest, it is still play. If we can follow the line walked among report, reminiscence, and fantasy in "Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity?," say, catching the nuances of feeling that accompany these turns, we can learn to keep our balance elsewhere in the book and perhaps outside it too. The narrator, by putting himself always before us as the narrator, shows himself master of the contradictions as well as their embodiment, yet always behind him is the final fabricator, Brautigan himself, even more the master. He reminds us of this role by the artful juggling of chapters and motifs I mentioned just now, but at the close — like a good juggler — he twice calls attention to his role and person. ... As the simple and obvious modulation of voice in "Trout Fishing in America Nib" reminds us, the narrator's nib can produce many different effects, express a variety of contradictory myths and facts. He is at home in contradiction, clear-eyed and firm of hand as he creates a fictional world that mirrors oddly but clearly the myth-mediated world of cross purposes that we inhabit waking and sleeping, the world that we inherit and the world that, "growing up," we have shaped in part for ourselves. As Brautigan has shaped him. (pp. 39-40)
[Comprehension], seeing and feeling things and persons as they are along with the myths by which they order and disorder their lives, means most to Brautigan. It permits him and us to recapture the simple while remaining aware of the complex, to fish for trout while aware of all that trout fishing ignores. Most of all, it evades pessimism by offering an escape into other ways of ordering reality into new myth. The method requires cunning as well as skill, and so too does trout fishing. (p. 41)
Neil Schmitz's "Richard Brautigan and the Modern Pastoral," in Modern Fiction Studies, 19 (Spring 1973), almost decided me against writing this, for besides being excellent, it covers A Confederate General front Big Sur, The Abortion, and In Watermelon Sugar as well as Trout Fishing. But while Schmitz calls attention to the power of myth in Brautigan, he seems to me mistaken about how to take it all — or how Brautigan takes it. Schmitz's Brautigan is moved by an "ironic pessimism" to deflate the "posturing rhetoric" of myth. "What exists in history, things as they are" possess for him the greatest power. Like Roland Barthes, whose definition of myth he adopts, Schmitz sees myth as essentially lies to be seen as such and overcome. In this view myth alienates signs or words from the reality they name. Since I don't think Brautigan shares this rationalism and know I do not, I have written this essay in qualified praise of myth's inevitable but limited power. (pp.41-2)
Western Humanities Review?
Winter 1975
This excerpt was taken from Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 5
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.
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