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Michael Mason's review of 'Richard Brautigan' by Marc Chénetier and Edward Halsey Foster
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Review of 'Richard Brautigan' by Marc Chénetier and 'Richard Brautigan' Edward Halsey Foster

by Michael Mason?

Both these books seek to dislodge Richard Brautigan from what their authors take to be his usual pigeonhole in the public mind: as a novelist of sixties, hippy, People's-Park. flower-power, acid, etcetera whimsy. Edward Foster, partly by a simple appeal to biographical and bibliographical fact, wants to attach Brautigan to an earlier West Coast literary wave, the Beats (Trout Fishing in America was written around 1960 — though not published until 1967 — when Brautigan was living in San Francisco, sharing digs with Philip Whalen). Marc Chénetier tries to claim Brautigan for a sensibility that will prove very much more transient and peculiar than that of the Beats though it is not so perceived in his book. Chénetier offers a Brautigan who is the author of "metafictions." Or rather, that is one of several ways in which he states the matter, ways which cohere weakly in logic, but strongly as pieces of fashionable jargon.

This book is indeed a very pure specimen of eighties academic literary critical rhetoric. The well-known East Anglian Contemporary Writers series to which it belongs aims to put critical weight behind the work of writers of the last thirty years or so, and one must ask, what does a book like this do for its subject, that justifies a place for it on the bookshelves of students and teachers rather than in a time capsule? For it is by no means certain that Chénetier's whole premise, that Brautigan's books are somehow about themselves, is an interesting claim to make about a writer in the first place. It might be interesting — the deadly atmosphere that such propositions tend to carry with them may be dispersible — but the case must he made. There are two arguments to which such a case might appeal, and it is instructive to see how they work for the present study.

One might say that writing self-referring books was interesting because it was difficult. Contemporary criticism frequently implies, if it does not state, that activities like narrative and description are less strenuous and demanding than the bringing of these activities into question. This is not implausible as a general thought (even if rather condescending to orthodox novelists), but it invariably fails to apply to the particular evidence which critics of Professor Chénetier's stamp bring forward. In a representative passage such as the following there is a ludicrous disproportion between the vocabulary of effort and "struggle," and the stylistic activities which it is being used to denote:

Brautigan sees characters sucked dry of inner life by outward linguistic systems, and pits adversary systems against these. The result is sometimes a method of strategic parody, a mocking and subversion of genres. But this is part of a larger and more precise struggle, which seeks the partial deconstruction of the narrative fundamentals — plot, character, structure — through ellipse, discontinuity, redundancy, trompe-l'oeil, syntactic disruption.

In what sense is syntactic disruption effortful? In itself, grammatical rule-breaking is, almost literally, child's play. The attitude in this passage could only be intelligible if syntactic correctness — and all the other features of orthodox fictional prose — retain a huge degree of legitimacy, a legitimacy which the experimental novelist is investigating the limits of rather than exploding (which is what Brautigan, in his fiction of continuous approximation to orthodox narrative and description seems, roughly, to be doing). But for Chénetier, with his very simple, manichean literary aesthetics, conventional fictional discourse has no legitimacy. On his terms, indeed, Brautigan's "struggle" is an inexplicably feeble, halfway affair.

The other, more important, ground which might make a "metafictional" endeavour worthwhile (though it would still leave Brautigan very backward in the battlefield) has to do with philosophical truth. If orthodox fictional discourse perpetuates deep epistemological error, there is clearly an excellent case for blowing it out of the water, unstrenuous though the task would actually be on Chénetier's account. This book, like so much recent criticism, has a great deal of huffing and puffing about epistemological fallacies, but it is impossible to identify any precise view that all this righteous indignation is directed at. Sometimes the thought seems to be that reality is an unproblematic thing, which novels merely deliver a false account of. On other occasions "reality" is set in obscurely derisive quotation marks. There is also a thorough confusion about the mechanism of philosophical error: is it (in ascending order of breadth of incrimination) narrative, description, syntax, or all language? Intermittently, each of these different positions seems to be espoused by the author. A vein of philosophical scepticism has excited Professor Chénetier but he has not bothered (despite the genuine, enormous import of these questions) to pursue it beyond mere tags and turns of phrase. A distinguishing feature of the literary criticism of the eighties, in future eyes, will be that it was, in a philosophical component of considerable ambitiousness, reprehensibly and frivolously half-baked.

Professor Foster's book is much more modest, but it offers an account of Brautigan's idiosyncrasy which is more probable historically, more considerate of the material, and more interesting than anything Chénetier can produce. The main contention is that Brautigan, in his early fiction at least, is trying to bring Eastern mysticism to bear on American experience. This is perhaps asserted rather than argued for thoroughly: Foster's study inclines to the breezy, suggestive, and lecture-like. But the idea certainly caters for everything that Chénetier notices with his elaborate obliquities. Foster also gives the sense that he is excited and admires Brautigan. He reads him with his senses alerted by pleasure in the undertaking, and consequently he notices a good deal.

And he recognizes that epistemology — either of the confused Eng. Lit, sort or Buddhist-derived — is not the whole key to Brautigan. This has become especially clear in Brautigan's most recent novel, The Tokyo-Montana Express, which is a psychological meditation, or psycho-perceptual meditation. Its main theme is human purposiveness, in its gradations from complete obsessiveness to the bogus dedication of a furniture-salesman, and in its relativity to cultural and personal point of view. The nuances of these things require attention, and they are difficult to give a satisfying verbal form to. It is impressive when a writer can achieve something as entertaining, subtle, and provocative as the "The Menu/1965?' section of The Tokyo-Montana Express. This is the kind of work which justifies trying to write about Brautigan and which any worthwhile study should keep in the foreground.


Journal of American Studies?
April 1985: 124-125



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