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Excerpt from 'The American Counterculture'
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Excerpt from The American Counterculture

by Christopher Gair?

While Kesey resurrects Christian mythology to escape the confines of military-industrial America, Richard Brautigan goes even further in launching what Marc Chénetier? describes as 'an assault on fixed representational forms, from myths and codes to moral messages and ideological assertations'. For Chénetier, one of the very few critics to engage seriously with Brautigan's fiction, novels such as Trout Fishing in America (1967) echo Kesey in contrasting 'longing for an authentic (if problematic) pastoral vision with the multiple expressions of a corrupted, modern pseudo-tradition, thus denouncing the destruction of the country's soul and its recuperation by the hypocritical messages of a commercialized, falsified present.

The point can be illustrated by a brief look at one of the stories collected in Revenge of the Lawn (1972) and at episodes from Trout Fishing in America, although the themes I discuss emerge in Brautigan's first novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964) and are at the heart of most of his fiction written in the 1960s. In 'The Wild Birds of Heaven?' Mr Henly's children coerce Henly, a 'simple American man', into purchasing a new television by warning him that if he refuses they will 'become juvenile delinquents'. Having been shown a picture of 'five juvenile delinquents raping an old woman', Henly agrees, and — in a moment characteristic of Brautigan's surrealist ability to combine objects with their social purposes — finds a 'video pacifier that had a 42-inch screen with built-in umbilical ducts'. In a world where having a large debt is an index of being a good creditor, and where a 'beautiful girl' is measured by the fact that 'she looked like a composite of all the beautiful girls you see in all the cigarette advertisements and on television', it comes only as a minor surprise when a blacksmith removes Henly's shadow and replaces it with the shadow of a bird that will remain until he has paid for the television. When, as he leaves, the 'beautiful girl' speaks to him, Henly thinks of sex, reaches for his cigarettes and, to his embarrassment, finds that he has 'smoked them all up'. The story concludes with her staring 'at him as if he were a small child that had done something wrong'.

To summarize "The Wild Birds of Heaven" in this way illustrates both Brautigan's view of an America distorted by consumer capitalism and the linguistic strategies he deploys in order to reveal the hidden mechanisms of control. For Brautigan, relationships with things have replaced those with other people, so that children will become juvenile delinquents not because of absent parents but because of a broken television. Purchasing a new set that is more maternal than a biological mother can (at least for the 'simple American man') avert crisis. Beauty is no longer what Herbert Marcuse? calls the 'untranslatable universals': instead, it is stripped to its commodity form, what Marcuse calls 'the music of salesmanship'. Sex is no longer a pleasure to be enjoyed in itself or a means of reproduction; rather, it is a tool of the corporation, its meaning reduced to standardized images prompted by internalized associations with advertisements and movies. When the blacksmith nails the bird's shadow to Henly's feet, the process suggests a two-dimensional crucifixion, in which the body and color of the natural world have been entirely removed without Henly even realizing what he has lost. It is only because he cannot perform the function of the 'simple American man' — because he is out of cigarettes — that Henly is embarrassed into feeling like a child. Until that point, he is convinced of his own power and freedom.

Brautigan's use of the surreal echoes William Burroughs's novelistic cut-ups or Bob Dylan's? mid-60s lyrics in its ability to highlight the absurdities of 'everyday' American life. By describing a familiar object in an unusual way — a 'video pacifier that had a 42-inch screen with built-in umbilical ducts' — or. as with the bird's shadow, representing the common (and seemingly even desirable) condition of good credit rating and large debt with singular symbolism, Brautigan exposes the ideological patterns that dictate individual and collective behavior. Reading his fiction, it is apparent that Brautigan detects narratives and monuments that limit human freedom everywhere he looks, and that he believes escaping the control they wield requires constant vigilance and imagination.

The point is made most directly in Trout Fishing in America. The novel's cover depicts Brautigan and a woman in front of a statue of Benjamin Franklin in San Francisco's Washington Square. Franklin, of course, serves as the epitome of the disciplined American subject, rising from obscurity to wealth and power through strictly managed ambitions and efforts. His articulation of the American Dream has been used as the model for the success myth at the core of national identity. For Brautigan, such control represents nothing but danger. As a recollection near the start of the book makes clear, he understands that the displacement of the natural by the cultural begins in early childhood:

One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland, I ... saw a row of old houses, huddled together like seals on a rock ... At a distance I saw a waterfall come pouring down off the hill. It was long and white and I could almost feel its cold spray.

There must be a creek there, I thought, and it probably has trout in it.

Trout.

... But as I got closer to the creek I could see that something was wrong. The creek did not act right. There was a strangeness to it. There was a thing about its motion that was wrong. Finally I got close enough to see what the trouble was.

The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees.

In order to discover the 'real' American of the boy's imagination — achieved through rare cherished moments of union with nature — Brautigan recognizes the need to dismantle the scaffolding that supports national mythologies. In Trout Fishing, the process involves an (deliberately) unsystematic deconstruction of Franklin's Autobiography (1793), probably the most famous representation of hegemonic Americanism. Instead of a chronological account of an individual's gradual development, tracing a path from obscurity to success, Brautigan's protagonist, 'Trout Fishing in America', is a fragmented assemblage of many 'characters' whose story illustrates an inversion of the usual markers of progression and results in a withdrawal from conventional American life. Where Franklin constructs charts and lists to discipline himself into a particular shape, Brautigan leaps from one anecdote to another, often seemingly at random, celebrating particular moments for themselves rather than seeing them as points on a path that will only reach its deferred fulfillment at the end of the book. The closing word of Trout Fishing in America offers an ironic and witty undermining of such narratives: instead of a grand statement of social success, the novel ends with the understated 'mayonaise', a misspelled gratification of 'the human need ... to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise'. Where Franklin, the trained typesetter, uses his trade as a metaphor for the need to correct the 'errata' in his life, Brautigan finishes with a typographical error that symbolizes a freedom from American discipline that embodies the countercultural ideal.

Brautigan is probably the most 'writerly' of the novelists I have discussed in this chapter. His defamiliarizing language and constant sign-posting of inter-textual allusions to other writers provide a self-consciously systematic literary investigation of the textual strategies that underpin forms of social control.


Edinburgh University Press, 2007: 154-157



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