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James M. Mellard's essay on Trout Fishing in America
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Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America

by James M. Mellard

...for all of the astonishment he expresses at the wilderness of their own contriving in which Americans dwell, Mr. Brautigan's principal concern, one feels, is, in the midst of hell, to play...

Nathan A. Scott, Jr.
"History, Hope, and Literature" (1973)

The pastoral/performative tradition to which Brautigan belongs has been extremely elastic, adaptable, and fluid: One can see in his work at some points strains of the lyrical novel, that sub-genre focusing upon the contents and shifting forms of consciousness and represented in works of Bellow, Coover?, Hawkes?, Heller, Exley, and others, and in Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar. At other points one can see the strain of authorially self-conscious metafictions — those fictions about the writing of fiction, represented currently in Nabokov's? Pale Fire, Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, and, again, in Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar. At yet other points one can see aspects of those fictions that convert the artistic process into a literary or metaphysical game of some sort, as in Ada and several other works of Nabokov, Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., Don DeLillo's? End Zone, Roth's The Great American Novel and Updike's The Centaur. Brautigan touches this strain in Trout Fishing in America and in all his works that have their primary impulse in the parody or mimicking of popular, formulaic types: The Abortion and its parody of a "romance" such as A Farewell to Arms; The Hawkline Monster, a parody of the gothic and the western; and Willard and His Bowling Trophies, which parodies both pornography and the gangster genre of films such as Bonnie and Clyde and Dillinger. A Confederate General from Big Sur fits here, too, for it seems a parody of such bohemian or Beat works as Henry Miller's Tropic novels and Kerouac's On the Road, this latter especially. Brautigan does seem located at the very center of late modernist fiction, and he seems so not despite but because of his roots in the tradition of American naive or pastoral fiction that runs back through Malamud, Kerouac, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway?, Fitzgerald, Anderson?, Stein?, Crane, Twain?, and, according to Tanner, even beyond. Like his older but temperamentally contemporary colleague Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Brautigan does what the best pastoral writers have always done: he treats topical themes (which, in the tradition, are always universal) in the language of simple people so that the extremes, the best and worst, of our culture become more clearly visible.

In Brautigan every study must begin with Trout Fishing in America (1967). All those naive quirks and pastoral preoccupations that make his work significant and reveal his indebtedness to the tradition appear here. Perhaps the first traditional aspect of Trout Fishing that strikes one is point of view, the pose of the author. Because, as Walt Whitman had before him, Brautigan actually includes a photograph of himself with his work, the term pose applies literally as well as figuratively; the old-fashioned openness, directness, and rusticity of the author in the photograph seem clearly embodied in the prose. When Brautigan's first chapter "explains" the cover, unless we notice that he makes no mention of himself and the woman who shares the picture's space, he would not seem to be anything but direct in his style:

The cover for Trout Fishing in America is a photograph taken late in the afternoon, a photograph of the Benjamin Franklin Statue in San Francisco's Washington Square.

Born 1706 — Died 1790, Benjamin Franklin stands on a pedestal that looks like a house containing stone furniture. He holds some papers in one hand and his hat in the other.

It seems a transparent prose, apparently interested only in the representation of the scene before us: at first glance here or in the next longish paragraph, wherein Brautigan explains the word "Welcome" appearing on the four sides of the statue and describes three almost leafless poplars and wet February grass, all the attention of the language appears to be directed toward the universe outside man, outside language, outside consciousness. All the interest seems horizontally directed toward depiction and narration.

But there is one disjunction in those two short paragraphs quoted above — the simile "like a house containing stone furniture." The simile here — and throughout Brautigan, as also in the whole tradition of colloquial/vernacular American literary style — introduces a movement away from the picture or the action and toward some vertex — a theme, idea, meaning. It raises all sorts of questions that we feel obliged to answer, but at this point there is virtually nothing upon which to base our answers, so we read on, having slowed down the pace and prepared to pause again if similar vertical disjunctions recur. They do. We must pause again at "a tall cypress tree, almost dark like a room," and again at the church's "vast door that looks like a huge mousehole, perhaps from a Tom and Jerry cartoon." If Brautigan's prose remained horizontal and continued to point at the universe outside the book or outside language and man's consciousness, Trout Fishing would be one of the fastest reads in the history of the novel (perhaps only The Old Man and the Sea might match it outside Brautigan's canon). The novel reads slow and long, however, and the reason lies in these vertical dispersals of style. They create disjunctive, reflexive, micro-rhythms that generate more interest than do the meta-rhythms of plot continuity and that development of character seen as "an unbroken series of successful gestures" — as Scott Fitzgerald defines personality in The Great Gatsby.

Trout Fishing in America is not naively naive, not a simple pastoral fiction; it is a subtle poetic novel by a lyrical poet, built upon the popular conventions of a widely shared tradition. As a lyrical novel,1 Trout Fishing will reveal its secrets to us not by analysis of "story" — what happens and what happens next — but, if at all, by meditative casts into the individual chapters, each a small deep pool whose meaning might perhaps rise to our best lures. Like those trout pools, however, each section seems to conceal more meaning than any of our linear casts can catch. But we continue to cast, hoping no doubt to land the big one, a Moby Trout, a "great fish," like Santiago's marlin, that will draw everything together for us. Thus, the question about such a work always seems to be, do the vertical dispersions have a common center or offer a holistic meaning? In other words, how do we read such a book? One way is to begin with the genre conventions that seem to fit best. Trout Fishing seems most easily read through the conventions of the pastoral element of the oral/colloquial tradition.

One of the pastoral themes in the tradition is the concern with man's fate, his telos, or end — his death. Death appears as a theme even in the opening chapter. That the theme appears is not surprising, but that it appears in such a disarming prose style may well be surprising to many readers. The clues are in those vertical dispersals. But we as readers are forced to put them all together, by meditative casts, lateral drifts. We don't have a lot to go on: objectively, only the Franklin statue, Washington Square, Adlai Stevenson, and Kafka; and, ambiguously subjective and objective, the house with stone furniture, the tree dark like a room, and the door like a huge mousehole. A common reference point for the men whose names are here identified might lie in their identification with historic conceptualizations of America, but the common point of reference for the sequence of similes lies in the concept of domicile, and, though the salutation "welcome" on the statue points to the four axes of earth, not one place described seems finally comfortable or secure.

What we have so far, then, is a series of items and figures of speech that subtly associate America with something less than ideal places; this negative point may be validated in the vertices drawn by other details: the words of the statue, "saying in marble," Presented By / H. D. Cogswell / To Our / Boys And Girls / Who Will Soon / Take Our Places / And Pass On, and the inscription over the church door "Per l'Universo." All these details suggest that this could be a sacred place, a world center, a universal navel. It could be that from which man emanates and to which he returns. But as it is presented to us here, every connotation is negative: here, at the beginning of Trout Fishing, the once-sacred place is a tomb, offering only a bare hint of renewal and sustenance — in the newspaper-wrapped sandwiches, filled on one occasion with spinach, Popeye's rejuvenating elixir — but little else. What we are left with, finally, is the traditional pastoral theme of et in Arcadia ego: even in Arcady or Eden — or America — there is death. Welcome to it, the statue says, "facing the directions of this world." Never has simplicity seemed so duplicitous.

Two sets of related themes that thread their way through the whole book are sex and violence, death and excrement. Or are they sex and death, violence and excrement, sex and excrement, violence and death? The question seems always, where do we put the emphasis? Ultimately, it doesn't really matter, for each of the book's forty-seven sections interweaves these motifs. The book is one of the most mortifying experiences one could imagine, and yet it manifests a remarkably subtle wit and humor, both so pervasive that only two chapters ("The Salt Creek Coyotes" and "The Surgeon") have almost nothing humorous. What Brautigan has recognized is the way that sex and violence energize the conventions of humor, turn scatology into eschatology. They appear together everywhere in the American naive tradition that he continues.

The combination of humor and grotesquerie that make the book so intensely ambiguous is well illustrated in the chapter "Worsewick." "Worsewick Hot Springs was nothing fancy," writes Brautigan. Persons unknown had put boards across the creek to dam it up at a point where hot springs fed into it. The narrator, his "woman," and the baby go there one day and bathe in the tub so created: "There was a green slime growing around the edges of the tub and there were dozens of dead fish floating in our bath. Their bodies had been turned white by death, like frost on iron doors. Their eyes were large and stiff" (TFA, p. 43). Playing there among the dead fish and shine, the narrator says he began "to get ideas," so his woman takes the baby back to the car for her nap: "It really was time," he insists, "for her to take a nap." He and his woman make love there in the water, but because she didn't have her diaphragm and he doesn't want to have more children, they decide upon coitus interruptus, so that when he ejaculates his "sperm came out into the water, unaccustomed to the light, and instantly it became a misty, stringy kind of thing and swirled out like a falling star, and," he says, "I saw a dead fish come forward and float into my sperm, bending it in the middle. His eyes were stiff like iron" (TFA, p. 44).

This is all incredibly grotesque and at least one critic, Neil Schmitz, has suggested that its demonic image of procreative sex is a complete "profanation." Such an unambiguously moral interpretation seems firmly based in a reading of other parts of this chapter. Focusing upon the image of the narrator having at his woman as the deerflies had had at her while getting from the car to the water and also upon the flat statement that he wanted no "more kids for a long time," Schmitz can turn the chapter into a bitter, Swiftian satire upon death-loving man. But Brautigan's tone just will not let it remain so, and if we turn to the crucial simile he employs to describe the "precipitous orgasm" (Schmitz's words) we can see how Brautigan's language gives another direction to argument: "Then I came, and just cleared her in a split second like an airplane in the movies, pulling out of a nosedive and sailing over the roof of a school" (TFA, p. 44). Agreeing not to bring children into an overcrowded world is not quite a profanation these days, and it is sex as recreation, not procreation, that Brautigan celebrates here (and in many of his poems, despite the apparently contrary theme of "The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster"), at the same time he shows graphically that much of the world has become a garbage dump or a toilet reaching "down like an accordion into the abyss" (TFA, p. 101). It is not a pretty world, but, Brautigan suggests, it's all we've got. So we must make do with it.2

Because Trout Fishing is a popular traditional/lyrical novel, we can drop a line into any of its pools and might come up with a clear sense of the book's total meaning, a dominant theme drawing all the vertices together. At any given point in the book its main theme will be visible either in the text itself or in the activity that, implicitly, always lies behind it. In other words, we can often take the text at face value, or we can retreat to the transforming, metamorphic, metaphoric process of imaginative creation that underlies it. Individual chapters will often be about the disjunction between "reality and the world," with specific images concretely manifesting the grotesqueness of the world and other images illustrating the impact of mind, imagination, and creativity upon it. In the "Worsewick" episode, for example, the "bathtub" pool with all the dead trout, slime, and deerflies "says" one thing about the world, but Brautigan's language and the narrative structure his art imposes on the experience transform it into something different and not entirely repellent. The sheer playfulness of language conveys a rather cheerful message ("the medium is the message"), and the whole structure of the episode leads us from the most repellent-seeming of mundane activities to an act (ironically, it is coitus interruptus that achieves climactic revelation) that takes on cosmological significance, as Brautigan's similes take us from the age of the dinosaurs ("I did this by going deeper and deeper in the water, like a dinosaur, and letting the green slime and dead fish cover me over" he says of hiding his "hard on"), to the age of aeronautical technology ("like an airplane"), to the cosmic reaches of intergalactic space ("like a falling star"). Consequently, one would suggest that the book is not about reality, or that manifestation of it called "America," but about our knowledge of it, how we can cope with it and finally must make do with it. The process is at best tragi-comic, as the most profound pastoral art always is in its formulae of elegy, ubi sunt, or et in Arcadia ego.

The meta-narrative component of Trout Fishing, in contrast to most works in the tradition, we must extrapolate for ourselves from the discontinuous sections, but in doing so we see clearly how tragi-comic becomes the whole structure. While the book has frequently been called a "quest," a search for the "real" America to replace all the sham dreams, all the corrupted visions, an America for Amerika, it seems less to provide a quest than images manifesting the development of the artist. In other words, it seems not the Bildungsroman, but the Künstlerroman. In a general way the book's meta-narrative (reconstructed) moves, like the simpler Bildungsroman, from childhood to youth to maturity. "The Cover of Trout Fishing in America," of course, is the invitational prologue to the book, so the fact of the narrator's mature presence there does not interfere with the development that actually begins in the next two chapters, "Knock on Wood (Part One?)" and "Knock on Wood (Part Two?)," both of which concern the narrator's childhood initiation to "trout fishing in America." Initiation is disillusioning in a particularly modernist way for him, since the first trout stream and the magnificent waterfalls he sees turn out to be nothing more than a perceptual error, a "flight of wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees." Modernist, too, is the way the ritual charm that he enacts — knocking on wood — has the effect not of confirming "reality" or protecting his fantasy or desire, but of revealing their unreality and impossibility. So the boy does the only thing that any modernist youth can do: he internalizes his dream and his reality: "I ended up by being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself" (TFA, p. 5). He becomes, in a word, the artist, and Bildungsroman metamorphoses into Künstlerroman, a portrait of the artist as a young (fisher) man.

"The Hunchback Trout?" climaxes the series of episodes that includes the "Knock on Wood" sections, as well as "Grider Creek" and "Tom Martin Creek." These episodes show the various typal frustrations the young angler goes through before the glorious success of landing the hunchback trout. His success, however, is as much imaginative as sporting. Indeed, Brautigan's style intimates that the success is mainly literary, for the episode, more than most, is indicative of the role of style and language in Trout Fishing. The entire episode is controlled by a single metaphor — of the creek "like 12,845 telephone booths in a row" and the "kid covered with fishing tackle," "just like a telephone repairman," "going in there and catching a few trout" and keeping "the telephones in service," "an asset to society" (TFA, p. 55). Narrating the day the "kid" "punched in" for work at the creek and landed the hunchback, he is able to match the incredible physical energy of the trout with the verbal, imaginative energy of the artist: "The fish ran deep again and I could feel its life energy screaming back up the line to my hand. The line felt like sound. It was like an ambulance siren coming straight at me, red light flashing, and then going away again and then taking to the air and becoming an air-raid siren" (TFA, p. 57). In the book, one has the impression that this episode marks not an end of innocence but a discovery of the one effective potency man has in an otherwise impermeable world. That potency, again sacramentally ingested, is the artist's: "There was a fine thing about that trout. I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy. I don't know if anyone would have understood his body. I put it in my creel. / Later in the afternoon when the telephone booths began to grow dark at the edges, I punched out of the creek and went home. I had the hunchback trout for dinner. Wrapped in cornmeal and fried in butter, its hump tasted sweet as the kisses of Esmeralda" (TFA, p. 57). Brautigan's Moby Trout, his great fish, turns out to be a hunchback in the Bell System.

In a lyrical novel such as this we might infer that "the kid's" actions contain all the message we — or the narrator — require, for eventually we do surmise that his sacraments are also incarnations. They are attainments of the dream in the only way possible, whether for artist or for man in general. Indeed, this is enough to go on in Trout Fishing, but we are impelled to read on, both because of the tremendous vitality of Brautigan's imagination and because we want to check our trout lines. Are there other manifestations of the theme, other avatars of the artist? There are. In "The Kool-Aid Wino" (a child who creates a "Kool-Aid reality"); the wine winos of "A Walden Pond for Winos"; the bookstore manager of "Sea, Sea Rider?" (who introduces an adolescent narrator not just to sex, but to sex-with imagination); old Charles Hayman, who lives his art, crotchety as he is (he's an aged, illiterate, child-loathing W. C. Fields of 1876), in "The Last Year the Trout Came Up Hayman Creek"; Lord Byron, memorialized in "The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America"; and, finally, in the narrator himself in "The Hunchback Trout?" (TFA, pp. 5-57).

There is a somewhat more extended "plot" structure than this suggests, however, for there appear to be three "transforms" of the basic narrative unit. The "Knock on Wood" and "The Hunchback Trout" chapters bracket the first of three overlapping narrative sequences. The earlier chapters portray the narrator as a real fisherman before they spiral into fantastic verbal displays. Some of these chapters are as socially critical as anything elsewhere in the book, and so serve as a foundation for the shift that comes in the second of the three narrative sequences. In a general way, the second sequence focuses upon "the kid's" mature life. It shows more fully than the first his relationship with "his woman" and his friends, who are usually young couples, a pattern of socialization often following the period of male bonding, intimated in the first section, for example, in "A Walden Pond for Winos." The sequence also focuses upon the imposition of mundane reality upon the kid's trout-fishing mythopoeic vision.

One sort of episode in this middle sequence continues the more specifically social themes treated in the first sequence in, for example, "Prologue to Grider Creek" (on John Dillinger's home town), "The Message" (a young Hitler shepherd whose message is "Stalingrad"), "The Mayor of the Twentieth Century" (Jack the Ripper), "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari" (on duplex realities), and "The Salt Creek Coyotes" (coyote poisoning associated with the execution of Caryl Chessman). In the middle section, these corruptions of the kid's trout-fishing vision are recreated in more humble figures. The obverse of the heroic criminals, these figures are avatars of the failed imagination, not the corrupted one. The terrified couple of "Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America?," fugitives from a murderous black pimp, are trapped in a bleak hotel room, drinking their lives away behind innumerable locks upon their door, and perpetually out in the world "on bail," The arch-conservative doctor of "The Surgeon?," willing to give up practicing in any meaningful way the profession for which he is trained because people won't or can't pay their doctor bills, loads up his wife and kids in a camper and goes in search of an America the narrator confesses is "often only a place in the mind" (TFA, p. 72). Everything about the trout fishing mythos has gone awry in "A Note on the Camping Craze That Is Currently Sweeping America?," an America aglow with the "unholy white light" of the Coleman lantern and so overcrowded with campers that one must wait for death among them in order to find a place to pitch a tent. And, finally, there are the narrator's friends in New York City — an unemployed burglar for whom he "fears the worst" and his cocktail-waitress wife — whose life he finds so depressing he feels he must strike out for Fairbanks, Alaska, as soon as possible: this in "A Return to the Cover of This Book."

What these episodes suggest, in contrast to the rather general themes of the earlier episodes, is the very personal dimensions of the failure of the imagination in the face of reality. These people are the narrator's friends or they are people whom he has actually met and talked to, and their lives make direct contact with his. Their problems — how to cope with the world — are his problems as well. These people have clung to the dream into their mature lives, too, but they have not made what Brautigan would consider adequate responses. Consequently, the narrator, with his woman and child, continues to seek streams beyond those where the uninitiated and the unaware have trekked.

Another sort of episode in this middle sequence describes some of these ventures; they involve the whole family now, and the roles of the woman and the child begin to take on increased thematic significance. In "The Teddy Roosevelt Chingader?'," Brautigan recounts the efforts of the three of them to find a decent, undesecrated camping spot in Challis National Forest, at Big Redfish Lake, which had become "the Forest Lawn of camping in Idaho" or a "skidrow hotel" with "too many trailers and campers parked in the halls" (p. 61), and, finally, at Little Redfish Lake, almost empty of campers, clean and uncluttered. This episode, occurring earlier, is on the theme of "Camping Craze," but here involves the narrator himself. "The Pudding Master of Stanley Basin?" introduces the woman and child as heroines. The woman finds a successful and humane way to catch minnows for the baby, and the baby, "too young" to kill, adapts her "furry" sound, which she makes for animals, to a "silver" sound and learns from the parents how to play with and take care of the minnows at the same time: "The children's game and the banker's game, she picked up those silver things one at a time, and put them back in the pan. There was still a little water in it. The fish like this. You could tell" (TFA, p. 65). In "The Lake Josephus Days" the narrator momentarily distracts himself with thoughts of the Andrews Sisters, the 'forties and zoot suits, but must admit that his main concern is the well-being of the baby, who, though ill from too much sun, soon recovers. The full significance of the baby becomes a bit clearer in "Sandbox Minus John Dillinger Equals What??" Though the narrator's own imagination may be corrupted to the extent that he can dream his daughter into the myth's violence as "the woman in red," the child herself is free, so the answer to the title's question, then, is a sandbox — or an imagination — without John Dillinger.

In the last sequence of sections, the child-as-hero appears — or reappears. In Trout Fishing, as in pastoral generally, the positive, beneficent potentialities of the unfettered, phenomenologically uncluttered imagination belong to the child (or rustic or naif elsewhere in the tradition). Her anti-type here appears to be Trout Fishing in America Shorty. Shorty seems to be the emblematic, imaginative construct in the book who symbolizes all those other cripples — emotional, creative, psychopathic — who populate the book: "He was a legless, screaming middle-aged wino. / He descended upon North Beach like a chapter from the Old Testament. He was the reason birds migrate in the autumn. They have to. He was the cold turning of the earth; the bad wind that blows off sugar" (TFA, p. 45). The embodiment of universal negation, Trout Fishing in America Shorty belongs to the unimaginative "naturalism" of writers such as Nelson Algren, so the narrator and a friend decide to ship him to Chicago to Algren, or, failing that, "if he comes back to San Francisco someday and dies," the narrator says, Shorty "should be buried right beside the Benjamin Franklin statue in Washington Square" (TFA, p. 47). In "Footnote Chapter to 'The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren?,'" Brautigan says that Shorty has been taken up by the French "New Wave" film makers, who may be starring him in "Trout Fishing in America Shorty, Mon Amour," letting him in a dubbed voice denounce man's inhumanity to man (TFA, p. 63). "They'll milk it for all it's worth," he says, "and make cream and butter from a pair of empty pants legs and a low budget. But I may be all wrong. What was being shot may have been just a scene from a new science-fiction movie 'Trout Fishing in America Shorty from Outer Space.' One of those cheap thrillers with the theme: Scientists, mad or otherwise, should never play God, that ends with the castle on fire and a lot of people walking home through the dark woods" (TFA, p. 63).

The impotency of Shorty and the strength of the child in the book are both shown in the interesting episode in which they appear together. "The Last Mention of Trout Fishing in America Shorty" suggests that hope does exist for Brautigan's creatures, for the chapter shows the baby escaping Shorty's clutches, not by hiding behind garbage cans (as in the "first mention" chapter), but by scampering off to the very symbol of imaginative creation - -a sandbox, one at the other end of the self-same park in which the book begins. When the Franklin statue "turned green like a traffic light, and the baby noticed the sandbox," she decided it "suddenly looked better to her than Trout Fishing in America Shorty" and the sausages he would give to her to eat: "Trout Fishing in America Shorty stared after her as if the space between them were a river growing larger and larger" (TFA, p. 97).

The child brings a fresh imagination to the world of Trout Fishing in America. That world is about as worn out as it can possibly be, but not merely because the landscapes are so depleted or trampled down or garbage-filled. It is worn out because the frame the angling Horatio Algering mythos has provided is now so inadequate. In its broadest configuration showing how the mythos can be replaced, the novel shows the narrator's becoming the creative, artistic imagination, not by denying the nugatory in our American existence but by transforming it. The always present and insistent dark vision accounts for much of the novel's length, for if the accounts of death and the epitaphs of one sort or another are eliminated, not much is left in Trout Fishing. The narrator here, as in any other pastoral work, especially one dealing with the theme of et in Arcadia ego, must simply adapt to the fact of decay and death even in Arcady, Eden, America — life itself.

Much of this adaptation appears in the plenitude of epitaphs, but much of it, too, appears in those "monuments" to man's physical being, scatology becoming eschatology in "Red Lip?," "On Paradise," and "Footnote Chapter to 'Red Lip'?." Only a wryly mature imagination could present the abandoned outhouse of "Red Lip as "a monument... to a good ass gone under," one announcing, "The old guy who built me crapped in here 9,745 times and he's dead now and I don't want anyone else to touch me. He was a good guy" (TFA, p. 7). Only an adjusted, comic imagination could create the statue in "On Paradise" that attests to man's physical transience; "It was a twelve-foot high marble statue of a young man walking out on a cold morning to a crapper that had the classic half-moon cut above the door. / The 1930's will never come again, but his shoes were wet with dew. They'll stay that way in marble" (TFA, p. 49).

It is a literary imagination, as well as a healthy one, for there seems little doubt that the image of dew echoes the lines from Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," ones that associate dew upon the feet with man's autochthonous origin and earthly telos. That origin — in earth — is powerfully, sadly attested to once again in "Footnote Chapter to 'Red Lip,'" for there the narrator, having, like Fitzgerald's Carraway, come home from searching for the dream America, retreats to the California bush and then sees it, too, become a refuse dump. They left the California bush, he says, when the toilet into which they had been dropping their garbage had become so full that it almost "became necessary to stand on the toilet seat and step into that hole, crushing the garbage down like an accordion into the abyss" (TFA, p. 101).

Everything in Trout Fishing in America deserves its memorial, even when it has passed its usefulness (as in the Byronic and the Hemingway heroes) or was never of any use to begin with (Trout Fishing in America Shorty) or was genuinely antithetical to use (Jack the Ripper, John Dillinger, etc.). Trout Fishing in America — the old pastoral, Walden, Algerian, Gatsbean, Nick Adams dream — deserves its memorial, too, and receives it in what most critics have acknowledged as the purest, most extravagant expression of imagination in the book: "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard?" (TFA, pp. 102-7). This chapter brings us full circle back to the opening chapters, for the two parts of "Knock on Wood" have foreshadowed the transformation of trout fishing in America into the artifacts of industrial, technological America. The boy's waterfall staircase now shows up in the "used plumbing department, surrounded by hundreds of toilets" (TFA, p. 106). One can no longer market the myth as a fresh new product, but as an artist — a writer — Brautigan suggests that one can still find a way to use it: it can become the writer's medium and refresh his art: "I thought to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper" (TFA, p. 110). It may be gone now, but it was good in its time. Requiescat in pace. Rest in Peace, Trout Fishing in America Peace. Trout Fishing is a book filled with memorials and epitaphs, and their insistent presences suggest just how thoroughly it is permeated with the spirit of the elegy, the ubi sunt, and the et in Arcadia ego themes of pastoral art. The big question seems constantly to be how to cope — with the fact of death, with the passing of a cherished dream, with the ambiguities that surround one always. The myth upon which trout fishing rests as a real activity begins to seem inadequate in a social structure shot through with violence, fear, cruelty, overpopulation, and ecological disaster.

Brautigan seems very much to be working a stream of American literature represented by many novelists, but in some ways his themes seem best represented by the poetry and philosophy of Wallace Stevens. Stevens worked in the world — in that most mundane of professions, the insurance industry; still, he wrote poetry that illustrated the potency of the imagination in transforming the world, not by denying it but by using it. In The Comedian as the Letter C, Stevens begins with a pale, unimaginative hero voyaging into a new world, "a world without imagination." The tension in Stevens and Brautigan is always between the external reality and the faculty of imagination, but the result in both writers is that the best art comes from the combination of a phenomenological reality and an idealistic imagination: "Nota: Man is the intelligence of his soil" becomes "Nota: his soil is man's intelligence." Both must interact if human beings are to bring order to chaos. Brautigan feels just as strongly as Stevens that reality must constantly be reinterpreted, the old myths replaced, revitalized, or stripped of their husks in order to lay bare the live core. But the job takes an artist's imagination, and we must all be artists. What Trout Fishing in America does, then, is to represent both the need and the expression of imagination, and Brautigan's portrait of a young trout fisherman thus becomes a portrait of the artist as well.


The Exploded Form: The Modernist Novel in America
University of Illinois Press, 1980



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