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Kurt Albert Mayer's review of Annegreth Horataschek's book about Brautigan
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Review of Erkenntnis und Realitat: Sprachreflexion und Sprachexperiment in den Romanen von Richard Brautigan

by Kurt Albert Mayer?

Richard Brautigan, all but ignored by German Americanists before his death in 1984, suddenly enjoys a certain vogue in those quarters. Of three doctoral dissertations grown to book-length studies of his writings and published in the last five years, Ms. Horatschek's Erkenntnis and Realitit. Sprachreflexion and Sprachexperiment in den Romanen von Richard Brautigan is the most penetrating and ambitious. Regarding the author as influenced by postmodernism and French poststructuralism, it allocates a chapter each to ten of Brautigan's books and proposes to elucidate their epistemological dimension as well as the concept and use of language underlying his prose. The interpretations are intrinsic, yet in a pragmatic rather than a dogmatically formalist way, and profess to shed light on the vast array of intertextual references imported by Brautigan. When it is warranted by textual clues, the readings resort to ideas drawn from the depth psychology of Freud and Jung, to semiological and psychologic-philosophical postulates of poststructuralism (derived from Barthes and Lacan), to popular culture, essays on postmodernist critical theory like Susan Sontag's, or findings in the early history of Babylon, Egyptian mythology, Zen Buddhism, and Japanese literary history.

The explications offered are on the whole persuasive, although some contradictions inherent in Brautigan's career and writings are not resolved satisfactorily. It must be taken into consideration that there is an a-rational element in his art that defies articulation. His habit of self-advertisement, of having his portrait appear on the covers of his books, apparently was more enticing than his repeated endeavors at dissociating himself from his fictions; all too often, the study mistakes characters of his works for their author. Similarly, the sweeping inclusion of heterogeneous worlds of thought in the frame of reference invites a number of inconsistencies. As Braurigan refused to categorize his works according to traditional headings, calling them writings instead of poems or novels, the restriction imposed on the selection of primary texts is problematic, for his prose frequently exhibits lyrical rather than narrative qualities, and many of his poems can he classified as such only because of their formal appearance. Also, with respect to his anachronistic bent it may be well that postmodernist theories of the late 60's and early 70's are introduced in order to point our how firmly he is integrated in the prevalent literary currents of his time, but neglect of chronology tends to eclipse Brasasigan's role as a forerunner in the advancement of the new writing emerging at the time — Trout Fishing in America, for instance, was published prior to the essays it is said to comply with.

If generally true to fact, the readings suffer from occasional longeurs. As the 'great novels' of the 60's (Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General From Big Sur, and In Watermelon Sugar) are allotted no more space than the later, lesser novels, the discussions do not rise above surveys of the research devoted to the books; at best, glimpses are afforded which hardly explain the complex interplay of random, seemingly self-generating episodes and lighthanded verbal variegations turning off into unexpected meaning. In contrast, the books written in the 1970's (and commonly lumped together as genre parodies) receive more than a fair share of attention. Seeking to exonerate them, the drawn-out presentations of The Abortion, The Hawkline Monster, Willard and His Bowling Trophies, Sombrero Fallout, and Dreaming of Babylon inadvertently confirm allegations that these texts are labored fictional constructs lacking the wit and playfulness which accounted for the success of his earlier writings.

Erkenntnis und Realität is first of all a close analysis of Richard Brautigan's minor novels. An admirably perceptive study, it suffers the limitations of the works it sets out to examine, for it, too, is unable to bridge the dichotomies at the bottom of Brautigan's failure. That it is carelessly proofread and edited is another matter — some fifty slips and errors in the first half make one lose count — but that need not be held too strongly against the book.


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