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Because The World Was Hollow

by Robert Edward Bell

The writing in Watermelon Sugar represents an example of the traditional formalism that had dominated prose since the late eighteen hundreds. Even with the early modernistic writings of T.S. Elliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the rules of structure that had set the boundaries of stylistic approaches to prose had reamined intact since the Victorian era. The San Francisco Beat scene that permeated in North Beach during the l950's sought to break this internal strangle-hold on prose, and free the writer, giving prose a more sporadic and open style; while allowing themes into literature that had been hidden under a cloth of respectability by earlier generations. A revolution of the mind was beginning to take hold in North Beach, and it was spreading, but it was not without precident. A movement, especially one in literature, is not ill-planned. It is cultivated and grows in the early morning dawn, as a garden feeds off morning dew after the cool rains of spring.

Once the cautious reader opens the hard bound book of In Watermelon Sugar, he is met with the phrase "Writing 21." Writing 21 refers to a large variety of classes offered at Berkley in the l970's, where groups of writers would meet, sometimes to compose the best of experimental literature at that time. Harmless in appearance, this simple word followed by a seemingly insignificant number, must have struck a note of fear in the hearts of the adherents of formalism that had held reign over literature until the 1950's; for it carried the key to the overthrow of a stale prosaic style based on the hollow promises from a cold barren age.

Brautigan's form of writing was a simple stripped-down from of minimalism.

"......Richard Brautigan's poetry mimics the naivete' of Corso's but with a success born of literary sophistication. Brautigan's method is to maintain his stylistics at such an elementary level that his pared sentences seem logically incontrovertible, his bad analogies inexplicabley luminous." (p.134-135. Kiernan)

He would not only carry this into his poetry, but his prose as well, but even the minimalism of Brautigan could trace its roots to formalism, whose patterns were borrowed from the great thnker and writer Jack Spicer.

" As a student of linguistics, Jack Spicer troubled by the disjunction between language and its referents and came to believe that the poet's task was to minimize that disjunction by cultivating an extreme passivity in the creative process. Like Blake and Yeats before him, he believed "voices" dictated his poems, and his goal after the mid-1950's was apparently to collapse his own authorship into spirit-authorship. In pursuit of his goal, he eliminated such barriers to that collapse as rhyme and the first-person pronoun; ultimately, it would seem, he sought to eliminate purpose and cognitive sense altogether." (p.134-135. Kiernan)

Brautigan weaves a tapestry into a story proving his creative and artistic genius. The reader is taken on a journey to the land of Watermelon Sugar, where a feeling of fantasy mixes with a cloud of ominous dread that rains down on a white-wash of apparently vague sentences. It is not until the ending of the story that the reader comes to realize what the author has accomplished. The threads sepearately are woven together by the muse of time, and it is only after the reader has stepped away from the text, that he grasps the full beauty of a completed picture. Words in this story reign supreme as colors in a painting, and the reader is given a surreal portrait of the mind.

A system of bridges and planks make up this magical land that stretches over lakes and rivers. Each section is topped with a heading that encompasses the main theme of the chapeter. Each segment comes together to form an entity inside the whole. Brautigan has taken this form of minimalism to finite limitations; so that the story comes together in a small woven package, whose threads weave inside and out to form an on-going living texture, set inside the magical world of this unknown land, where sugary planks float downwards through currents, around streams along the boundaries of i-death.

Death along with a sense of a buried past hang in the atmosphere of the plot. With the introduction of The Place Of Forgotten Works, Brautigan creates a sense of buried dreams decaying in the rememberances of imaginary hopes, and a past that loses shape inside the lakes of murky fading waters, where creatures evoke pictures of the mind, that are best left forgotten in the recesses of the heart. Even in the beginnings of the novel, the narrator leaves the reader with a perspective of a dream-like state boardering on the surreal. Nothing seems to fit with-in the context of the story, and nothing appears to follow nothing, as characters enter and leave the stage. Folk tales are woven, spun by singing songsters, that do not appear to make sense, and thoughts and descriptions revolve around a center that does not seem to carry a feeling of foundation. The stones have been laid, but there is a need that they stand firm. Sands shift and as the poetry from a yeat's poem, the revolution cannot hold. Chaos reigns inside the novel, and it is not until the end that the reader realizes that reason has surfaced. He leaves the story as a driver leaves the interstate, after passing a series of billboards, that have been erected along roadsides long since left vanquished.

Imagery and description inside the story both melt, and seem to dissolve before the reader's hands. The reader walks into a world, where plants and buildings are composed of Watermelon Sugar. They come in a variety of colors, that seem to dissolve with the feigning night. Wooden wallkways cross over lakes, entering into a land that blends past and present in a future that remains uncertain, undefined, creating itself as the story evolves; carrying the reader along through a world dominated by sights and sounds, clamoring to be heard and seen, touched by unseen hands and ears. This is the power of Brautigan's minimalism: the ability to strip a story down to its' bear essentials and then evoke the conscousness, where complex symbols and images are broken down into the simplest of terms.

From the beginning of the story, Brautigan creates a story where past, present, and future turn around an uncertain center. Because of this, the scenery, plot, characters, even the narrator appear undefined, as if seen through the murky view from a broken refracted lens. The narrator seems transparent, as he views the trout from the bridges of i-death, and as these large fish swim in the swirling waters of lost time; fish sinking into the deepest depths of an abysial resonace, sounds bouncing off onto the achitecture of the primevial.

He watches as a trout swims lazily in the cool waters of the bridge, and tells the reader a story of past Utopia. We are told of a land where the forgotten works of the inhabitants of i-death have been stored. Why have they been stored there ? Strange characters are buried in steal tombs in blue crystal waters. Tigers emerge and eat the people of i-death, having conversations amongst themselves. Who are these tigers ? Why are they there ? The narrator, undefined in himself arouses the curiosity of the observer, tells the story of this forgotten place in pieces of past and present memories, in the same way that life progresses in uncertain patterns abounding inside the ordered realms of chaos.

PArt II

Scenes shift back and forth between past and present, adding to the total affect of the story. References are continuously made to The Place Of Forgotten Works. In the utopian community of i-death and watermelong sugar, life remains ordered. People work and live their lives in a structured world, where schedule holds permeance with tradition. There is a sense of reckoning as the townspeople discuss the place of forgotten works over the dinner table. Margaret and our transparent narrator are told not to venture there. It is a place of danger, a place to be avoided. There are constant warnings not to visit this place, but neither character is told the reason. Mysterious stories from the past surround this place and i-death, and there are sculptures and structures, whose purpose and meaning has been lost over time. It is a place where the forgotten live and are lost; a dangerous place where things are buried never to be discovered. This is the danger of in-boil and his gang. They break the rules, throw tradition away, refusing to conform, while forever running into the night mists of the mind.

Settlers living in this village will occasionally, cautiously travel there, into this land of the forgotten. They will then leave, telling their fellow neighbors of the hidden sights boardering along the dangerous realms of the expressionistic. When in-boil and his gang enter the land of forgotten works, the characters enter a world of fable and myth. They are wild and unruly, known for their heavy drinking, and are expelled from the community. They are forced to leave.

They soon take up residence in the land of the forgotten works, and the story once again begins to flow, as events seem to move towards an uncertain center. In-boil and his gang represent order gone astray, the basic animalistic needs of man let loose upon the world. They stand for the destroyer of civilization; chaos running rampent, the hand of time turning in the force of the wind; and as Odysseus in some ship's bow searching to find home again, these heroes remain lost in the abyss of the self, mourning for the dawn, drowning in the waters of an everlasting dawn. They enter some netherworld, reaching towards some undefined moment. It is this undefined moment that these characters represent; but the reader cannot help but think that there may be something more to Brautigan's development of in-boil and his band of merry men, and he is correct.

"Like most artists, Richard Brautigan had his obsessions. Death was one. Plumbing was another. Bathtubs, toilets, and outhouses appear throughout his work. A letter in Trout Fishing In America requests information about the protagonist's "evacuations" and says, "you're well aware of my unending fascination with camp-out crapping." For Brautigan it was more than a fascination with vulgarity or scatology, these age-old comic topics; rather these objects and activities symbolize larger questions. How do we wash ourselves both literally and metaphor- ically ? How do we dispose of our waste ? And that all encompassing philosophical query: Where does everything go ? Nothing disappears. Brautigan's work suggests that we are haunted both by people and by things, by what has actually taken place in the past and we think has taken place." (p.5-6., Mills.)

For these travelers, their voyage never ends for they sail on the ship of memory. Time fills these sails of fable and story, and they lose themselves on some unnamed quest, where reflection turns into labyrinths of soul singing odes to heart and mind. At the end of the story, the characters stand at the statue of mirrors contemplating Margaaret's death, and they realize the danger of burying forgotten things for too long.


Online Source: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/beat_boulevard/83971/1(external link)