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Grethen Legler's essay on Brautigan
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Brautigan's Waters

by Gretchen Legler?

Richard Brautigan's rowdy, nonconformist book Trout Fishing in America is an excellent and illuminating "other voice" in nature writing courses, particularly courses where the aim may be to critique and analyze constructions of nature.

Brautigan's work is particularly useful when paired with or set against more traditional texts such as the work of the Transcendental naturalists Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, or the work of the early "scientific" naturalists Ernest Thompson Seaton and John Burroughs, all traditionally acknowledged "fathers" of the American nature essay. Brautigan also is useful when set against "fishing stories," including Hemingway's short story "Big Two-Hearted River," Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, or Sigurd Olson's accounts of trout fishing in northern Minnesota in The Singing Wilderness and other works.

Thoreau, Muir, Seton, Burroughs, and others have, in part, inherited the language and attitudes with which they write about nature from the discourse of modern science, in many ways objectifying the natural world, turning nature into an "other" to be feared, fought with, controlled, and transcended. Brautigan, on the other hand, is not pastoral, romantic, or nostalgic, as his predecessors and some of his peers are. Brautigan boldly challenges the traditional concept of nature as "natural," nature as "other." He challenges the elitist idea that only a select few can appreciate "her" and the notion that nature can properly be experienced only alone, or in loneliness.

Brautigan's dissonant voice is partly evident in the way he writes about water. Consider Brautigan's description of Worsewick Hot Springs in "Worsewick":

^Worsewick Hot Springs was nothing fancy . . . We parked our car on the dirt road and went down and took off our clothes . . . There was a green slime growing around the edges of the tub and there were dozens of dead fish floating in our bath. (43)^
Later, after Brautigan and his wife make love in the hot springs, he writes, "I saw a dead fish come forward and float into my sperm, bending it in the middle. His eyes were still like iron" (44).

Consider, in comparison, Thoreau's description of Walden and White pond sic in chapter nine of Walden:

^White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light . . . They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck . . . How much fairer than the pool before the farmer's door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. (137-38)^
Brautigan's account of the hot springs, in contrast to Thoreau's of the pond, deromanticizes the water as pure and untouchable and also celebrates the sexual, or what Thoreau, elsewhere in Walden, calls the "reptile" within us.

Brautigan's description of the dead fish as "stiff like iron" is one example of the industrial metaphors he uses throughout the book to confuse and revise our concept of what is "natural." In "The Hunchback Trout," this use of industrial metaphors is most evident. Brautigan writes that the trout stream he fishes on is like a row of telephone booths, and the fish he catches is no silver-bellied beauty but a grotesque mutant.

Sigurd Olson's account of trout fishing in America in "Pools of The Isabella," in which he watches his son Glen catch a fish, is startlingly romantic in comparison to Brautigan. As the father and son stand by the stream, "looking at that trout, listening to the whitethroats and the music of the rapids," Olson suggests that this conquest finally proves that his son "measured up at last" to manhood (94).

While Olson's and Thoreau's creeks and ponds are pristine and pure—the measure of beauty being cleanliness and coldness—Brautigan's waters are another matter. Fishing on Owl Snuff Creek in "Trout Death by Port Wine," Brautigan's friend remarks that the creek reminds him of . . . what? Of "Evangeline's vagina" (31). Brautigan's strength, and the element that makes his text a crucial one in any discussion of American nature writing, is that he represents nature differently. He begins to unravel the nature/culture dualism, rather than weave it tighter. He'd "like to get it right" (3), he says in "Knock on Wood (Part One)." The result of this wanting to represent nature more completely and honestly is a struggle to hit upon appropriate metaphors. Brautigan's waters are full of slime, silt, and sewage. There is little glory in the polluted landscape he writes of. His trout are not strong-jawed, sleek or jeweled. Silver is not a good adjective to describe a trout, he writes in "Knock On Wood"—"Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat" (3).

College English Association Critic? 54(1)
Fall 1991: 67-69.



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.