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Social Criticism and the Deformation of Man: Satire, the Grotesque and Comic Nihilism in the Modern and Postmodern American Novel

by Gerhard Hoffmann

With Brautigan satire utilizes the idea of utopia, and by making it entropic drains it of all vitality so that it comes to be an anti-utopia. We have already mentioned that the Sixties youth movement went forth from a new utopian ideal of a "saved" world of love and peace that young people held up against the performance pressure of the competition society they were retreating from.1 But the positions of youth protest were absorbed by society, became modish trappings of the intellectual scene and the marketplace. The redeemed world of alternative living in solidarity, without aggression and conflict, became available for satire when it froze into a usable cliché, into an easily assumed pose and detached itself more and more from reality. With that, satire in the postmodern experimental novel had three target areas at as disposal, each of which had to be tackled with changing standpoints: official society with its institutions and media, which, however, was becoming more liberal in its cultural outlook and hardly offered any resistance to alternative tendencies; the popularized, modish schemata of the wasteland ideology and of existentialism; and finally the beautiful new world of the hippies and flower children.

First in Trout Fishing in America (1967), the satiric perspective turns against the idea of nature as an alternative to civilization, but still retains the imagination as counter- value. The very title of Trout Fishing in America provides the verbal playing-ground for an intellectual creativity that is at once subversive and liberating by activating two old familiar, tradition-freighted clichés: the purity and organic wholeness of nature and the image of America as a New Eden. Two things happen to these clichés. First, they are shattered in the narrative situation; a satiric perspective is established which measures the present by the past, civilizational reality by the ideal of an unspoiled primitivity. In the end, the differences between the categories nature and civilization, organic wholeness and mechanical fragmentation, are, however, leveled when, for example, in the chapter "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard?," a used trout stream is sold by the foot, "the waterfalls separatcly of course, and the trees and birds, flowers, grass and ferns we're also selling extra." But in order to avoid tire didactic perspective of social criticism and a simplistic sort of dialectical opposition, Brautigan, second, turns the semantic content of the title towards the fantastic and the situational and thus underlines the fact that language is the medium of freedom, that imagination holds sway over language and its clichés and can generate any number of new, fresh situations out of the one formulation by arbitrarily changing its meaning. "Trout Fishing in America" thus stands not only for what "normality" means and connotes, but also for a person, a place, a hotel, a cripple, a costume, a fountain pen, a book.

In In Watermelon Sugar (1968), Brautigan further develops this method of lingual arbitrariness in the direction of a more unobstructed and interconnected representation of a utopian situation, an idyll called iDEATH, where people live in apparent harmony. Although death has not been abolished, it is aestheticized and made "beautiful." The book makes use of utopia as a cliché, adds, however, anti-utopian incongruences which unmask the utopia as mere illusion. The title wording is used to multiply meaning, but, unlike Trout Fishing in America, not with the intention of dissolving meaning; instead the tendency is to "ideologically" integrate everything in iDEATH. In iDEATH - the word itself is a satiric denunciation - "Our lives we have carefully constructed from watermelon sugar," and practically everything in the place is made of "watermelon sugar": houses, books, graves, statues, food, fuel. This "unity" and "wholeness" embodies the social harmony of iDEATH; it is, however, merely material and mechanistic and exists at the price of the loss of individuality and variability. There is only the one exemplary and elementary situation of "gentle life" without the intensity of love or pain, a life in harmonious stasis which is multiplied in the narrative situations and displayed in its various aspects, but always in a diagrammatic, distancing, and unemotional style which levels differences. There is no plot, not even action, with the exception of Margaret's and the inBOIL group's suicide, which, however, triggers no emotions, much less conflicts. Nor are there characters or psychological explanations for what happens beyond the reference to a "broken heart" and a longing for the true iDEATH, which in inBOlL's view would include the dynamics of violence. It is a utopian society turned entropic, dominated by the complete stasis of rationality contrasted only with the old eruptive emotional dynamism of love, suffering, violence etc., which, however, can appear only in deformation. The opposition between utopia and entropy here establishes, to be sure, the dialectic structure of satire, but does not provide a valid counterconcept, so that the value pole of satire is left vacant. This again points to the general value deficit in postmodern fiction, which Pynchon makes use of to combine various meaning structures into a convincing multi-perspective.


Amerikastudien?, 28(2), 1983