by Arlen J. Hansen?
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
-- Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous
If I'm going to be a fictional character G declared to himself I want to be in a rousing good yarn as they say, not some piece of avant-garde preciousness. I want passion and bravura action in my plot, heroes I can admire, heroines I can love, memorable speeches, colorful accessory characters, poetical language.
-- John Barth, "Life-Story"
To describe the relationship between an individual and his environment, Perls and Goodman use the phrase "creative adjustment." Implicit in this oxymoron is a tension between the active, dynamic qualities of experience and the more passive, adaptive qualities. The word "creative" mitigates some of the determinism implied by "adjustment"; and "adjustment" holds in check the tendency toward delusion or escapist fantasy. This balance, it seems, is seldom observed in the fiction of the past hundred years. Indeed, this fiction seems characteristically dominated by deterministic preoccupations with traps and mazes, with victim-heroes and anti-heroes, and with overt and disguised polemics on behalf of empiricism and behavioralism. By and large, the dominant stance in American fiction during the past century has been that of the so-called "realist" who has urged his readers to distinguish between self-generated "illusion" and sturdy "reality." According to these realists, one is simply to face "reality" and to avoid "illusion."
Accordingly, in 1926 Lewis Mumford warned his readers that man's creative energies, which had illuminated so brightly the golden days of Emerson and Whitman, were now jeopardized by a nearly complete surrender to determinism: "In full lust of life man is not merely a poor creature, wryly adjusting himself to external circumstances: he is also a creator, an artist, making circumstances conform to the aims and necessities he himself freely imposes." Living, Mumford feared, was becoming primarily a matter of adjustment. Like both Mumford and Goodman, several recent writers see creativity to be more prominent in human experience than determinism would have it. Indeed, it might well be said that these young writers see determinism itself as simply another instance of creative adjustment. In this sense, the very determinism which tends to minimize man's ability to create may itself be a creation of the interpolating human mind. These writers, that is, shift radically the grounds of fiction to undermine the absolutism present in much determinist fiction. For the purposes of this essay, the beginning of the shift in emphasis from the environment's controlling power back to man's creative power is to be first seen in the transitional work of Kurt Vonnegut. The new vision is explored and developed in a rich variety of ways by such writers as Donald Barthelme, William Gass, and Robert Coover. It reaches its most extreme, though hardly most effective, form to date in the works of Richard Brautigan.
(...)
In a way, Richard Brautigan carries the new solipsism to an extreme found nowhere else. Whereas Vonnegut's novel uses a cat's cradle to suggest how man's imagination completes constructs, Brautigan's novels are the cat's cradles, and Brautigan's imagination has already provided the cats. His novels, that is, simply describe the cat that his playful imagination has created. By presenting his own particular use of the construct, Brautigan is not necessarily advocating that everyone employ the construct in the same manner; rather, he is merely demonstrating the ability of man to make whatever use of constructs he wishes. The tradition of trout fishing in America, for example, provides Brautigan terms and values by which to define and measure his own experience. By looking at existence in the context of trout-fishing-in-America, Brautigan (like most of us raised on Thoreau and Hemingway) focuses on the simplicity, honesty, fellowship, loneliness, and naturalness of his experience. When he changes the construct to watermelon sugar in his next novel, Brautigan sees experience through, as it were, watermelon sugar glasses: "In watermelon sugar," he begins, "the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar." It is as if Brautigan has transposed the "out there" from a base of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen to a base of watermelon sugar. The transposed life, needless to say, is far sweeter.
Interested primarily in describing his own solipsistic perceptions of experience, Brautigan is more a Bokonon than he is a Vonnegut or a Coover — both of whom are primarily interested in the nature and consequences of man's perception and who, thus, study Man-Perceiving. This, then, is what Brautigan's work risks: the value of his work depends upon the appeal of his perception and not so much upon the accuracy, meaning, or significance of his perception. Brautigan undertakes to argue on behalf of man's creative solipsism by presenting his own solipsistic transformations; he must, therefore, make his transformations attractive and enticing. Consequently, his work is most susceptible to preciousness. Another charge frequently brought against Brautigan is also attributable to his particular kind of experimentation with solipsism: the tendency of his work to be so highly personal as to be obscure. The world of watermelon sugar, that is, may seem not only precious, but also inaccessible and — since its only controlling agency is Brautigan's solipsism — apparently random, without ascertainable laws. Undoubtedly these charges too often obtain; but many readers who are quick to point out the moments of preciousness or obscurantism fail to acknowledge Brautigan's larger purpose — namely, to illustrate the transforming power of solipsism. It may well be, however, that in his reaction against the determinist's world Brautigan approaches the opposite extreme by minimizing the role of adjustment in experience and by over-emphasizing the powers of man's creative solipsism.
The challenge to the solipsists, then, is to find a perspective that articulates the value and inescapability of subjectivism and yet avoids its delusions. The viability of the new solipsism, as opposed to the old, is that it seeks creative adjustment to whatever the mind takes to be "out there." Although these writers seek to restore man's creative powers, the determinism implicit in "adjustment" is still a real and present force, never to be ignored or escaped as an older solipsism might maintain and as Brautigan, for one, occasionally seems to think. The narrator in John Barth's "Anonymiad" is thus a new solipsist. Reminiscent not only of Mumford and Goodman, but also of Vonnegut's Bokonon and Barthelme's Answerer, Barth's narrator says:
I found by pretending that things had happened which in fact had not, and that people existed who didn't, I could achieve a lovely truth which actuality obscures — especially when I learned to abandon myth and pattern my fabrications on actual people and events...
The narrator's refusal passively to accept "actuality" and his creative projections both betray his solipsism. Even more noteworthy, perhaps, is the concluding clause (underscored) which recalls Gass's comment on the need to balance "personal construction" and "actual fact." And, like many of Coover's characters, the narrator has come to the solipsistic act of making his own, new stories. Once again, experience provides the string networks, and the creative imagination provides the cats. This is not to deny, of course, the fallibility of such solipsism which to date is most apparent in the occasional preciousness of Brautigan. These writers began in reaction to the determinists' denial of the power or significance of man's creative imagination. In the end some may try to deny the adjustmental aspect of experience, and thus their vision may become too highly subjective and delusory. But the moments of delusion and preciousness might prove in the final analysis a small price to pay for a renewed attention to, and respect for, man's imagination.
Modern Fiction Studies 19
Spring 1973
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