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by David L. Vanderwerken
Texas Christian University
For all its seeming formal disparities and discontinuities, Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America explores a very traditional theme, the gap between ideal America and real America, between Trout Fishing in America and Trout Fishing in America Shorty. Continually, Brautigan contrasts temporal and geographic America with a timeless America that is "often only a place in the mind." When the narrator's daughter, who embodies the innocent and hopeful state of mind that is, in part, Trout Fishing in America, flees Shorty, he "stared after her as if the space between them were a river growing larger and larger" (TFA, p.158). In another version of this central contrast, Brautigan pits Franklin's Philadelphia, the birthplace of the promise of America, against Carnegie's Pittsburgh, today's industrial horror. The spiritual distance between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh seems insurmountable, even as the divergence between America's mythical past and the American present seems irreconcilable. Despite the disillusionment, the sense of failure and loss pervading the novel, Brautigan attempts to bridge the gap through the artist's power of imagining America otherwise. In so doing, Brautigan becomes a legatee of an uncompromisingly idealistic strain of American writing that wills to redeem America through formal achievement. As Tony Tanner has noted, Trout Fishing in America, or ideal America, is "flourishing in the writer's imagination." Trout Fishing in America, then, is traditional in theme and form. Formal experimentation is no stranger to a literature that contains Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury, U.S.A., Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five.
The example of Moby Dick is instructive in dealing with the structure and style of Trout Fishing in America, since Melvillean echoes, resound throughout the novel. Indeed, Brautigan's admiration for Melville is already on record. The sheer quantity of short chapters, their apparently random arrangement, their digressive nature, with a number of chapters seemingly unrelated to the narrative — all reflect the "careful disorderliness" of Moby Dick. The characters whom the narrator crosses in his meanderings are the equivalents of Moby Dick's various gams, which illuminate central thematic concerns. Stylistically, Brautigan's verbal inventiveness approaches Melville's. Trout Fishing in America is loaded with put-ons, parodies. throwaway comments, whimsical irony, pseudo-logic, mock scholarship — for example, the list of fishing books that includes no accounts of "Trout Death by Port Wine" (TFA, pp.44-5), hyperbole, incongruous juxtapositions, and red herrings too numerous to document. For the careful reader, surprises lurk on even page. Both Moby Dick and Trout Fishing in America convey a sense of the imagination run wild in their stylistic wit and ingenuity. At times, the tones and rhythms of Brautigan's sentences shrewdly approximate Melville's, as the following passages from "The Lee Shore" and "The Towel" illustrate:
Take heart. take heart, 0 Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing — straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!
0 it's far away now in the mountains that a photograph guards the memory of a man. The photograph is all alone out there. The snow is falling eighteen years after his death. It covers up the door. It covers up the towel. (TFA, p.139)
Both writers delight in the unlimited freedom of the imagination, and both exhibit boundless pleasure in exploring the resources and possibilities of language. Brautigan's homage to Melville's experimental structure and style is omnipresent in Trout Fishing in America.
Furthermore, just as Melville slips hints to the reader on how to read Moby Dick, Brautigan keys the reader as well. Melville's cry, "God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught — nay, but the draught of a draught, Oh, Time, Strength. Cash, and Patience!" (142), suggests that Moby Dick is an organic process, continually creative, never complete. Other significant hints which reinforce the idea of organic form are; "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method" (358), and "Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters" (287). In the same way, Brautigan, at one point calls a bookstore "a parking lot for used graveyards" (TFA, p.32), where most books go unread and are out of print. Yet in the same passage, Brautigan cryptically mentions that "through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again" (TFA, p.32-3), In his novel, like Melville, Brautigan seeks an "organic process," a unique form that will revitalize well-worn materials. An explicit representation of the nature of the process can be found in the narrator's fantasy that Leonardo da Vinci is inventing a "new spinning lure for trout fishing in America": "I saw him first of all working with his imagination, then with metal and color and hooks, trying a little of this and a little of that, and then adding motion and then taking it away and then coming back again with a different motion, and in the end the lure was invented" (TFA, pp.175-6). Hopefully, a book that darts and rolls with the illusory life-like action of a lure, "spinning like wheels in the sea" (TFA, p.39), will result. Trying a little of this and a little of that, changing pace and rhythm, endlessly experimenting and inventing — all aimed at keeping the reader disoriented, off balance and wary — perfectly describe Brautigan's method.
Besides the structural and stylistic similarities between the two writers, Brautigan and Melville converge in their use of controlling symbols. Both Moby Dick and Trout Fishing in America are fluid symbols, metamorphic, and chameleon-like. Melville tells us directly that "Moby Dick was ubiquitous" (177); Brautigan's Trout Fishing, as well, undergoes a variety of transformations. Both entities remain mysterious, unknowable, capable of accruing projected associations and values, yet never revealing their essential meanings. In attempting to arrive at some understanding of such phantoms, Melville and Brautigan circle their subjects again and again, hoping that obliquity will succeed where directness fails. Ultimately, Moby Dick and Trout Fishing in America elude fixed meanings, exist inviolate and indefinable, and retain their freedom in the province of the human imagination. As they should, whale and trout finally resist human grasps and swim free. For both Melville and Brautigan, only the pursuit itself, the continuing quest for the ineffable, holds lasting value. As Brautigan's frustrated, but resigned, Alonso Hagen says: "Somebody else will have to go out there" (TFA, p.137) to search for Trout Fishing in America.
The protean form of the novel allows Brautigan great range in exploring his main theme of ideal America versus real America. Trout fishing as a symbol is metamorphic, surely, but at the same time constant in representing an ideal — the continuing historical appeal that America has for the human imagination as a place where all good things are possible. As Kenneth Seib says: "Trout Fishing in America suggests the myth of America itself, a land of vast open spaces, of unlimited resources and opportunities, and of streams into which one only has to toss a bent pin in order to pull out fish of astonishing sizes." Essentially, Trout Fishing in America is like an ungraduated yardstick, by which Brautigan measures contemporary America — and the kinds of measurements made vary amazingly.
In the opening chapters, Brautigan introduces his theme and his perspective of his materials, as well as positing his major assumption that a mythical Golden Age, from which we have fallen, once indeed existed in America. Brautigan draws a stark contrast in the opening "Cover" chapter between the statue of Benjamin Franklin, significantly located in Washington Square Park?, and the poor who gather for free sandwiches every afternoon. The statue, holding out a seemingly generous fourfold "WELCOME" to the poor, parodies the Statue of Liberty and its command to "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses." As we immediately learn, America promises much but delivers little. The paltry spinach-leaf sandwich given to the narrator's friend hollowly echoes the philanthropic tradition associated with Franklin. When the narrator mentions Kafka's knowledge of Franklin's autobiography at the end of the chapter, Brautigan casts a perspective on the foregoing scene that holds for the entire novel. The weird sandwich and the strange little scene prepare us for later bizarre, grotesque, and incongruous items and incidents — trout steel, a wooden staircase that appears to be a waterfall — all detailing the Kafkaesque metamorphosis of Trout Fishing in America into Trout Fishing in America Shorty.
When Trout Fishing fondly recalls in the second chapter "people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn" (TFA, p.5), he obviously alludes to America's Founding Fathers and to the nexus of ideals, values, and beliefs associated with them or projected upon them. As so many American writers have done, Brautigan views our mythical past with the inward eye of the imagination, assuming that an age of innocence, hopefulness, and harmony existed during the nation's dawning, with everything downhill since then. Instead of fishing for a new promise for man, later Americans fish for natural resources to exploit — "Maybe trout steel" (TFA, p.4). Franklin becomes Carnegie; the way to wealth becomes the gospel of wealth. The narrator returns to the statue of Franklin, that Colonial giant and archetypal American, at least six times in the novel, as if seeking to recover somehow the lost paradise through some communion with the statue. Indeed, the vast number of statues, monuments, gravestones, and inscriptions dwelt upon in the novel suggests that Brautigan's passion is to coerce these relics of Trout Fishing in America back to life. Yet Franklin remains mute, and the narrator encounters only winos, the defeated, the hopeless, the criminal, and, of course, Shorty. In rage, the narrator once says that Shorty should be buried next to the Franklin statue and a monument erected to him — a most explicit juxtaposition of ideal America with real American which measures the distance between them.
As Brautigan traces our downward historical journey through the contrasts and ironies of the various episodes, he reinforces his theme by carefully placing most episodes in specific time contexts: times of day, seasons of the year, ages of the narrator and characters. A consistent cyclical pattern emerges, the parts of which gather very traditional emotional and psychological associations. The framework, in turn, suggests a broader parallel, as times, seasons, and ages are linked to a spiritual record of America. Richard Brautigan, as well as his Alonso Hagen, keeps a diary of Trout Fishing in America.
For example, most of the moments of profound disillusionment in the novel occur on spring mornings during the narrator's childhood. The innocence and expectancy of childhood, the renewal of spring and the possibility and creativity of morning deepen the felt sense of loss. On one childhood morning in spring, the narrator discovers that an apparent waterfall is in reality a flight of wooden stairs, and his response conveys his pain: "I stood there for a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing" (TFA, p.8). On an April morning the narrator and his friends are inspired to chalk "Trout fishing in America" on the backs of the first graders. When the principal checks their spontaneous and exuberant prank, the joy of spring becomes the melancholy of autumn: "But after a few more days trout fishing in America disappeared altogether as it was destined to from its very beginning, and a kind of autumn fell over the first grade" (TFA, p.62). Clearly, the narrator's comment here refers to more than what happened to the first grade; the episode is nothing less than a parable of America. Yet again, it is "one spring day" (TFA, p.133) when, as "just a kid" (TFA, p.129), the narrator happens across The Trout Fishing Diary of Alonso Hagen, with its tedious and depressing chronicle of frustration and failure: "I have never even gotten my hands on a trout" (TFA, p.137). With disastrous springs such as these, what can summer bring? Essentially, summer confirms the suspicions of spring.
The narrator's peripatetic search for trout over a long, moribund summer composes the bulk of the novel. Brautigan stresses summer's heat with its overtones of desert and hell. Every stream has some flaw: Grider Creek is inaccessible (TFA, p.21); Tom Martin Creek "turned out to be a real son-of-a-bitch" (TFA, p.28); Graveyard Creek suggests its own limitations (TFA, p.31); Hayman Creek seems cursed (TFA, p.40); Salt Creek has cyanide capsules along its banks (TFA, p.83). Even the good fishing at Lake Josephus sours when the baby gets sick (TFA, p.126). Much like the streams, the people encountered prove equally obstinant: the shepherd who resembles a "young, skinny Adolf Hitler" (TFA, p.52); "the original silent old farmer" (TFA, p.88); the bitter surgeon fuming about "bad debts" (TFA, p.114). When a hostile store clerk calls the narrator a "Commie bastard" (TFA, p.96), he ruefully comments: "I didn't learn anything about fishing in that store" (TFA, p.96). Nor, indeed, from any of these residents of the inferno. Finally, on a hot July day, the narrator learns of the death of a fellow angler, Hemingway, and sees Trout Fishing in America for the last time. Directly after this, the narrator ends his journey "I've come home from Trout Fishing in America" (TFA, p.149).
With the waning of the year comes autumn, the season belonging to Trout Fishing in America Shorty: "He was the cold turning of the earth; the bad wind that blows off sugar" (TFA, p.69). The autumn that "fell over the first grade" in the spring is made flesh in Shorty, the pathetic middle-aged drunkard and cripple with his garish "chrome-plated steel wheelchair" (TFA, p.69). Although Shorty personifies contemporary American reality, he continually appeals to children as if wistfully yearning to recover vicariously a second chance. The children wisely avoid him: "After a while the children would run and hide when they saw Trout Fishing in America Shorty coming" (TFA, p.70). Shorty's true children are the sordid occupants of "Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America?." In "The Last Mention of Trout Fishing in America Shorty," the narrator's baby daughter must decide between real America and ideal America:
"Come here, kid," he said. "Come over and see old Trout Fishing in America Shorty."
Just then the Benjamin Franklin statue turned green like a traffic light, and the baby noticed the sandbox at the other end of the park.
The sandbox suddenly looked better to her than Trout Fishing in America Shorty. She didn't care about his sausages any more either.
She decided to take advantage of the green light, and she crossed over to the sandbox. (TFA, pp.157-8)
The child instinctively chooses Franklin's green light over Shorty's brown sausage, not so hopeful a choice as it appears. She is, after all, a child and will eventually experience the same disillusionment as her father; she is lured only by a sandbox — a miniature wasteland. Given the mood and tone of the novel, one cannot help thinking that autumn will ultimately fall over her, too.
The novel, which begins in February, ends with four chapters set in winter's atmosphere of depression, twilight gloom, and death. When Ishmael's soul is a "damp, drizzly November," he heads for the sea. When the "wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line," Nick Carraway goes back to the Midwest. What does Brautigan do when it is a "funky winter day in rainy San Francisco" (TFA, p.175), after abandoning his quest for Trout Fishing in America? How can he bridge the widening river between real and ideal America? What response will be adequate? Brautigan, like Melville and Fitzgerald, responds in the only way possible for the artist — through a transformative and inventive act of his imagination, which will be an act of redemption and transcendence. The narrator's vision of da Vinci "inventing a new spinning lure for trout fishing in America" (TFA, p.175), thereby regenerating and revitalizing America, is a transparent expression of his own aim in the novel. Just as Leonardo's lure, "The Last Supper," redeems America — "thirty-four ex-presidents catch their limit" (TFA, p.176) — Brautigan envisions an equivalent achievement for his book. Earlier, in the crucial chapter, "Trout Fishing on the Bevel," the narrator fishes Graveyard Creek, but he finds himself disturbed by the "poverty of the dead" (TFA, p.31) in the poor cemetery. At this point, he has a similar vision, in which he himself transforms the poverty through the richness of his imagination:
Once, while cleaning the trout before I went home in the almost night, I had a vision of going over to the poor graveyard and gathering up grass and fruit jars and tin cans and markers and wilted flowers and bugs and weeds and clods and going home and putting a hook in the vise and tying a fly with all that stuff and then going outside and casting it up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening star. (TFA, p.31)
Here, the narrator is a redeemer who orders disparate materials and who turns trash into transcendence. Yet, as a writer, Brautigan ties his flies with words. In receiving his legacy of a pen with a gold nib that "takes on the personality of the artist" (TFA, p.179), the narrator expresses his hope of finding a unique style and voice for rendering his imaginative ideal — Trout Fishing in America — and of making an individual contribution to one great tradition of American fiction.
In choosing to write the kind of fiction that he does — symbolic, parabolic, fantastic — Brautigan clearly aligns himself with the tradition of American romancers, as opposed to that of the realists. The "actual and the imaginary" collide on every page of Trout Fishing in America. In his conviction that an imaginative ideal America is the only true America, Brautigan joins the tradition of Thoreau, who says: "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains." Hints of the same kind of distant perspective appear in Brautigan's novel with references to time, death, and eternity — particularly in "Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity?" (TFA, p.128). As with Thoreau, all ultimates are absorbed into and transcended by the imagination in an effort to create a universe that "answers to our conceptions." Although Brautigan would happily send that emissary from the actual — Shorty — to realistic writers, he intends to keep Trout Fishing in America for himself.
Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction? 16,1 (1974)
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