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Richard Brautigan (30 janvier 1935 - 14 septembre 1984) est un écrivain et poète américain.

Issu d'un milieu social défavorisé de la côté Ouest, Brautigan trouve sa raison d'être dans l'écriture et rejoint le mouvement littéraire de San Francisco en 1956. Il y fréquente les artistes de la Beat Generation et participe a de nombreux évènements de la Contre-culture. En 1967, durant le Summer of Love, il est révélé au monde par son best-seller La pêche à la truite en Amérique et est surnommé le « dernier des Beats ». Ses écrits suivants auront moins de succès et dès les années 1970, il tombe progressivement dans l'anonymat et l'alcoolisme. Il met fin à ses jours en septembre 1984. Son dernier roman Cahier d'un retour de Troie sera publié 10 ans plus tard en France. (déjà en ligne)

M-C Agosto mail
M CHENETIER marc.chenetier@orange.fr

Analyse de l'œuvre

Influences reçues

Parmi les influences notables de Brautigan comptent les poètes Emily Dickinson et William Carlos Williams. Découverts durant ses études secondaires, « Dickinson le marque par sa personnalité de poète en tant qu'excentrique étranger écrivant des télégrammes depuis une réalité parallèle et Williams par son insistence à rejeter les formes poétiques dépassées pour écrire dans un langage vulgaire sur des sujets qui ont un impact immédiat sur le lecteur. » (déjà en ligne)

Japon

Evolution de l'œuvre

"trois grandes étapes" (agosto p8) Grandes périodes d'écrits.

Etat des lieux de l'Amérique

écologique, pastorale américaine, fantaisie, bohème, démontage historique, culturel et textuel.
termine sur "vengeance de la pelouse".

Parodies de romans

années 70

Bilan personnel, art de dire le quotidien

autofiction, intime, ton plus grave.

le cas particulier du cahier

pathétique, cassure, fin du reve, mort sans masque, pas fiction mais témoignage, plus d'imaginaire,

Éléments postmodernes chez Brautigan

utilisation de la Parodie

Brautigan emprunte à tous les genres de la littérature américaine (le western, le polar, le récit de souvenirs) pour mieux les faire imploser, les divertir de leur cours. Son écriture, celle d'un grand styliste et ré-inventeur de la langue américaine, procède par images et digressions perpétuelles, pareille au détective de Un privé à Babylone (traduit en France par l'universitaire Marc Chénetier, qui contribua à le faire découvrir chez l'éditeur Christian Bourgois) toujours distrait de son enquête par son rêve de Babylone.

"Dynamitage de l'écriture et des formes du langage" p7, Agosto, belin.-
"l'image qui décrit le mieus l'écriture de b est celle du kaléidoscope ou du puzzle." p37

Discontinuité et inachevé

chénetier chap 5

Nouvelle Fiction?

post modernisme expérimental p 10, agosto

fusion, combinaison auteur, narrateur, personnage, agosto

invraissanblable, accepter pv immaginaire, vrai fiction, rapport enfant p90 agosto, images incongrues, jeu perception (+p 105agosto), pt de vue

l'eau chez brautigan, vie dérive, labilité

plaisir sensualité (p 95 agosto)

Ecriture de la négation "p 111 agosto faculté de production par et sur le vide"

Place de Brautigan Beat?Hippie?Contre-culture

Dans les années 1960, Brautigan s'engage dans les activités de la contre-culture à San Francisco, participant fréquemment à des "performances" en tant que poète. La publication de Trout Fishing in America (La Pêche à la truite en Amérique) en 1967, il est catapulté vers une notoriété internationale et désigné par les critiques comme le meilleur représentant de cette contre-culture émergente.

Accueil et critique

truite pastèque

Un nouveau regard sur son œuvre

1)Toutefois son œuvre reste appréciée en Europe et au Japon. (SOURCE???)

2) Tokyo et Blow : retour à d'anciennes techniques salué par des critiques mais toujours pas de grand retour des lecteurs.

3) Intérêt pour la métafiction ++
« Longtemps, la critique littéraire n'a vu dans l'oeuvre de Brautigan que le charme et la douceur, la fraîcheur et la drôlerie. C'était faire peu de cas de la profonde tristesse qu hante ces écrites et devait mener leur auteur à l'épuisement et à sa perte. »

Stirling, Grant. "Mourning and Metafiction: Carole Maso's The Art Lover." Contemporary Literature 39(4) Winter 1998: 586-613. Reviews The Art Lover by Carole Maso (San Francisco: North Point, 1990). Says it "explores issues of mourning and loss, sexuality and identification" while Maso utilizes elements of self-reflexivity to explore "ways in language to express the extreme" (586). Says the "patent" use of self-reflexivity to "relentlessly foreground" the "discursive rendering that shapes our worlds" is known as "metafiction." Notes that other authors have used this technique. When Richard Brautigan employs fanciful figural language that stretches a reader's imagination by the incongruity of the image—"The trouts would wait there like airplane tickets for us to come"; "I waded about seventy-three telephone booths in"—he implicitly foregrounds the artifice that inhabits language while still using that language throughout Trout Fishing in America. (587-588)

Thompson, Craig. "Brautigan, Richard (1935-1984)." Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide. Ed. Larry McCaffery. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. 286-289. Provides a critical review of Brautigan's works. Concludes saying, Although Brautigan's themes may never again be as appealing to readers as they were in the 1960s, his attempts to move beyond traditional genres and narrative styles still deserve attention from critics and readers interested in metafictional texts. Also in this book, Ron Silliman ("New Prose, New Prose Poem," 165) says, Brautigan represents "the laidback side of the San Francisco Renaissance" when one considers the "gamut of possibilities" within New American poetry and Lynn McKean ("Klinkowitz, Jerome," 430) says that Klinkowitz collaborated with "such newly mainstream fictionists as Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and Donald Barthelme."
détails: In the 1960s Richard Brautigan became one of America's most widely read experimental authors. Following the publication of Trout Fishing in America (1967), his importance to the counterculture, particularly in San Francisco rivaled that of Carlos Castañeda and Alvin Toffler. "The greening of America" provided fertile ground for an author with a cynical view of American values and an antipathy for literary traditions. As that era passed, however, Brautigan's popularity faded, and many critics who admired his early works began to dismiss him as a relic of the "hippie" generation. At the same time, some critics have come to look past the apparent thematic thinness ajn have found deeper motives and complexities in his work. The metafictional aspects of his books are more than a whimsical trick; they are the products of Brautigan's aesthetic concern for the spontaneous and immediate, and his reiection of fixed forms.

Brautigan's final books, The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980) and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (1982), seem to return to earlier techniques and themes. Many critics applauded this move, particularly in the case of The Tokyo-Montana Express. The structure is reminiscent of Trout Fishing in America, with each chapter an apparently autonomous vignette. He again presented images of two very different cultures, this time East and West.

Even though these last books received a more favorable critical response, Brautigan was still widely viewed as a writer whom time and events had passed by. In The Tokyo Montana Express, he fueled this sentiment with melancholy themes of nostalgia and aging: "What makes you older is when your bones, muscles and blood wear out, when the heart sinks into oblivion and all the houses you ever lived in are gone and people are not really certain that your civilization ever existed" (p. 162). Although Brautigan's themes may never again be as appealing to readers as they were in the 1960s, his attempts to move beyond traditional genres and narrative styles still deserve attention from critics and readers interested in metafictional texts.

divers

2

"Genre in the Mainstream: Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar" Ryan Britt Tor.Com. 14 June 2011.

NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material. Every Tuesday on Tor.com we take a look at books and authors from mainstream literary fiction that contain aspects of science fiction, fantasy, horror and other genre elements. We're not necessarily claiming these books or authors for the genre camps, but asserting if you like science fiction, fantasy et al., you'll likely find these books appealing too!

Overall, Genre in the Mainstream hopes to be part of the ongoing discussion about serious literature and how it interacts with artistically sound genre fiction.

Today Richard Brautigan, famously known as the "last of the beats" gives us a completely realized fantasy world in his one-of-a-kind novel; In Watermelon Sugar.

Arguably, Brautigan's OTHER famous novel is Trout Fishing in America, a book that is most certainly not about trout fishing. In that book, Brautigan appropriates language with surrealist license insofar as sometimes a person can be known as "trout fishing in America" while other times it is a mode of behavior and sometimes whatever metaphor the reader is imaginative enough to insert within the phrase. Superficially, Brautigan is an author who likes playing word games by demonstrating to us that language itself can be fictionalized.

However, while In Watermelon Sugar does contain similar language appropriation and an exploration to discover the meanings of words and our desires behind them, there is a quite literal, even if ethereal, fantasy world depicted here. The book exists out of time, and possibly even out of space. In an unnamed town, sunlight is a different color every day, sometimes red, sometimes grey, sometimes yellow. Nearly everything is manufactured in this town from a substance called watermelon sugar, which is harvested from multi-colored watermelons. (Watermelons are colored differently depending on which day they were harvested.) Most who live in the town congregate near a lodge-type structure called iDeath, which serves as a kind of community meeting place and neutral territory. The narrator of the novel is also unnamed but claims to be writing a book about his experiences at iDeath and with the people who live there.

Beyond having stars that shine different colors and sometimes coalesce into one, the world of In Watermelon Sugar also has a bizarre history. It is revealed fairly quickly that the inhabitants of the town once lived in harmony with talking, mentally evolved tigers. Throughout the town there are statues and lanterns erected in honor of the tigers, even though they are now all extinct. At one point, the narrator recounts the time when the tigers began eating the people, specifically the narrator's parents.

The reverence all the characters have for the tigers is in direct contrast to the novel's main antagonist, a character called inBoil. Why Brautigan gives characters and places such bizarre names is never really explained, but there is a slight suggestion that In Watermelon Sugar may take place in some distant, post-everything future, or perhaps even in an alternate dimension. In any case, inBoil and his "gang" live in a place called The Forgotten Works, which contains a variety of old machinery and objects which are mysterious to all the characters who live near iDeath. Here again we're given hints at some kind of far future world where people have forgotten what certain technology even looks like, and as such are in no position to make it recognizable to the reader. Because In Watermelon Sugar is a very short novel, I'll not describe what inBoil and his gang are plotting, nor what happens to the narrator. You'll have to find out.

What makes In Watermelon Sugar such a wonderful and otherworldly read? Like many of Brautigan's works, he asserts his absurd premises with almost aggressive casualness. Sounds like a paradox, but it's completely true. If one were to flip through the pages of In Watermelon Sugar each "chapter" appears to be one page, and you might think you'd picked up a collection of poetry, rather than a short novel. But Brautigan has a singular ability to tell a complete and compelling story through a series of small passages, which all on their own are extremely beautiful. If Bradbury had the surrealistic sensibilities of a poet, the towns in Dandelion Wine and In Watermelon Sugar could very well be neighbors. The casual part is that the individual passages of the book look simple and almost child-like. The aggressive part is that these passages contain a weighty story about death, betrayal and love. Talking tigers too.

But if one ignores talking tigers, different-colored light, and a character named inBoil, there may not seem to be anything fantastical about In Watermelon Sugar. But the simple truth is the act of reading the book does transport the sensibilities of the reader elsewhere. Brautigan doesn't spend a whole lot of time trying to convince you the world of In Watermelon Sugar is real. But the characters and emotions certainly are. Whenever I read this book, I always imagine I've been given an account of a specific incident from an alternate universe. If one could send messages in bottles from alternate universe, I imagine we would often stumble upon ones like this. Where watermelons might not mean watermelon, and tigers might be a different creature all together. All fiction should give us a glimpse into the way an author views his or her own version of the world. It's a special treat when the world being described is so perfectly odd as this one.

A voir ce que je peux en faire

"Jack Spicer's Best Seller, Trout Fishing in America" Lawrence La Riviere White The Valve 3 September 2006.

NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material. Another day, another example of my ignorance. On the recommendation of a student, I picked up Trout Fishing in America. That someone eighteen years old would even know about the book was my first surprise. Even though I'd never read any of his stuff, Richard Brautigan was a low-level iconic figure for me, one of those symbols floating around from my pre-adolescence, like macramé or communes. To put it bluntly, I thought he was a hippy.

The bigger surprise came when I read the dedication page: "To Jack Spicer and Ron Loewinsohn." Loewinsohn wasn't the surprise. I'd known of him at Berkeley, that he'd been a teenaged San Francisco scene poet, but had gone on to get a Ph.D. (what must it be like to have your collected poems published while in graduate school?) and get a grown-up job, joined the tweed jacket and silk tie crew. Though I'd only read his novel Magnetic Field(s), which compared favorably to the Kundera that was so popular when I was in college, I had no idea about his poetry. I just assumed he was a Beatnik. And I'm a sloppy enough thinker to accommodate hippies and Beatniks within the same prejudice.

But Spicer? Why was he there, the anti-Beatnik, anti-Ferlinghetti? How could the acidic Spicer be associated with any noodly, wet hippy stuff?

If I had been paying better attention, none of this would have been a surpise.

If I had known of John F. Barber's worthy web site, I would have already known that Brautigan, despite the long hair, walrus moustache, and funny hats, resisted being identified as a hippy.

If I had read Poet Be Like God more carefully, I would have already known about this relation to Brautigan. He makes many references in the biography, and there is a good account of Spicer's importance for the book: Spicer admired Brautigan's poetry and had published it in J [the mimeographed poetry journal Spicer edited] . . . Brautigan was wrestling through the writing of his first "novel," which became Trout Fishing in America. He brought it to Spicer page by page, and the two men revised it as though it were a long serial poem . . . Loewinsohn speculated on the reasons for the double dedication. "Me, I think it was just friendship; and Jack, editing, help, whatever he did. Jack was absolutely fascinated with Trout Fishing, and spent a lot of time with Richard talking about it . . . Anytime you get [could] get Richard to accept criticism [was] an unbelievable accomplishment. He [was] so defensive, and so guarded; and Jack was able to get him to make changes. Whatever he did he deserved some sort of Henry Kissinger award." Trout Fishing, with its disjointed episodes (short chapters of one to six pages that change location and time sequence haphazardly), fits well with Spicer's project of the serial poem. And calling it a poem helps get around the oddness of calling it a novel. And it is poetic. For example, the chapter "Sea, Sea Rider" (the brazen pun would have appealed to Spicer's broad humor) begins, The man who owned the bookstore was not magic. He was not a three-legged crow on the dandelion side of the mountain.

He was, of course, a Jew, a retired merchant seaman who had been torpedoed in the North Atlantic and floated there day after day until death did not want him. He had a young wife, a heart attack, a Volkswagen and a home in Marin County. He liked the works of George Orwell, Richard Aldington and Edmund Wilson.

He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans.

The bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. Most of the books were out of print, and no one wanted to read them any more and the people who had read the books had died or forgotten about them, but through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again. They wore their ancient copyrights like new maidenheads.

I went to the bookstore in the afternoons after I got off work, during that terrible year of 1959. In addition to the free use of metaphor and the wild fancies, there is a lyric fluidity to the best sentences in Trout Fishing, but in contrast to the surrealist flourishes, the lyricism is sober, restrained ("They wore their ancient copyrights like new maidenheads"), in the way Spicer's diction and syntax is restrained, matter-of-fact, even severe.

The combination of the fanciful and the actual (most of the material in the book is directly autobiographical, drawing on Brautigan's childhood in Tacoma, Eugene, and Great Falls, his travels in the back country of Idaho, and his boulevardiering around San Francisco, and especially Washington Square Park) is an appealing feature of Trout Fishing, especially when compared a more abstract, simpler work like In Watermelon Sugar.

In a similar way, Spicer's poetry often brings concrete narrative details into his highly imaginative constructs, such as how the "Fake Novel of Arthur Rimbaud" (from Heads of the Town Down to the Aether) yokes bits of Rimbaud's life to metaphoric constructions such as the "dead letter office" that collects all poems never written.

Now the backcountry topos of Trout Fishing would be alien to Spicer. Car camping and fishing are some of the last things one could imagine Jack doing. He was through and through a city boy. But it's possible that Brautigan's tales of life in the poverty of the Pacific Northwest would have topical appeal to Spicer. There could be a connection to what could be called the culture of the Anthology of American Folk Music, a nostalgia for the pre-technological past, but a nostalgia thoroughly mediated by technology and mass culture. Some examples of the latter in Trout Fishing would be Kool-Aid, Deanna Durbin (at one point a young Brautigan mistakes the partially frozen Missouri River for her) and of course the cars that he is either hitch-hiking in or driving up logging roads to get to the creeks.

Spicer had a show on Berkeley's KPFA for a spell in 1949-1950. He played what they called old-timey music, ad-libbing alternative lyrics (whose colorfulness eventually got him fired). One of his recurrent guests was Harry Smith, who would go on to compile the Anthology.

In contrast to the seeming authenticity of poverty and bait fishing, there is also a sophisticated, playful self-consciousness to the book, a post-modern meta-level, as it were. Trout Fishing in America appears as a character within its own chapters, for example, writing and receiving correspondence that is transcribed in the novel. The cover of the book, a photograph of the Ben Franklin statue in North Beach's Washington Square Park, is topic within the book. The book cover and the park become interchangeable within the story, so that Brautigan can take his daughter to play in the book cover's sandbox, where she meets Trout Fishing in America Shorty, an avatar from Nelson Algren's Walk on the Wild Side.

This kind of self-consciousness, the working through the project of the poem as a theme of the poem, is a hallmark of Spicer's later writing. (And a post-modern cliché as well? It's only a cliché if it's done lamely.) One imagines that part of the book would have had a great appeal to Jack, that he would have, as its editor, encouraged Brautigan in that direction.

But the biggest shock I felt, upon reading Spicer's name on the dedication page, came from thinking how many other people had read it there as well. Trout Fishing has sold lots and lots and has been translated often and sold around the world. How many tens of thousands of people, people how have no idea who Spicer is, have no idea of his poetry, have read his name, if only once. To little avail, as far as Spicer's popularity is concerned.

P.S. Do not allow my maladroit rhetorical gestures to leave you with the impression that I am not very much pro-hippy. I revere much of the wet, noodly stuff.

A lire

"Trout Fishing in America" Thomas Reed Whissen Classic Cult Fiction: A Companion to Popular Cult Literature. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. 274-279.

NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material. Richard Brautigan wrote Trout Fishing in America in 1961, but it was not published until 1967, the year of the "summer of love," and by then it was seized upon by an audience that brought to it all the political, cultural, and emotional baggage that we associate with the term "hippie." In fact, to some it is the cult book of the sixties, possibly because it seems to require an "altered state of consciousness" to understand what it is all about. Reading it today gives meaning to the joke, "If you remember the sixties, you weren't there." Trout Fishing in America comes closer to being a literary high than any other book of its time with the possible exception of the novels of William S. Burroughs.

Written as early in the decade as it was, it also has much in common with the novels of the beat generation in its emotional and intellectual detachment, an attitude closer to the existential aloofness of the hipsters than to the idealistic involvement of the hippies. "Hippie" has an inescapably quaint sound to it now, like "dandy" or "flapper," but it meant something specific in the sixties; and it was as a "hippie writer" that Brautigan was received.

When we refer to the sixties, we usually mean the last half of the decade, not the first, for the two halves are as different as day and night. The first five years were the years of beehive hairdos and rhinestone glasses, button-down shirts and narrow ties, Audrey Hepburn movies and Henry Mancini music. Then came the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the start of the Vietnam War, and from 1964 on everything got turned upside down. It is from the latter half of the decade, then, that we get the image of the sixties as an era of long hair and granny glasses, headbands and serapes, bellbottoms and muumuus; of strung-out flower children clustered in communes, strumming dulcimers against a psychedelic backdrop of dope, sex, and hard rock. And it was into this milieu that Richard Brautigan was wildly received.

The secret of the book's success is quite simple. Trout Fishing in America was the literary equivalent of the Grateful Dead—something instantly gratifying when one was high, something requiring no context, no frame of reference other than what one supplied at the moment. Trout Fishing was unlike anything these cult readers had ever seen before, totally unlike the structured, boring novels they had been forced to study and analyze in high school or college. Here was a novel that seemed to be—and for the most part was—totally without plot or narrative or sustained characterization. It was, rather, a series of psychedelic moments—like the succession of frissons so dear to Oscar Wilde and the decadents—that could only be indulged in fleetingly but that yielded an elusive kind of thrill that depended on nothing but the confluence of language, music, and dope.

Thus, Trout Fishing was blissfully immune to the claptrap of literary criticism. There was no analytical apparatus available to deliver this unique creation into the hands of pompous critics or patronizing professors. The book might seem disorganized and meaningless to them, but to the stoned it was an added high just to be able to open the book to any page and find something "mind blowing," something "far out," something silly you could get a kick out of without getting "heavy" about it. The only other book that even came close to it was William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, about which it was rumored that the chapters had been shuffled like a deck of cards and then published in whatever order resulted. The fact that these two books looked utterly chaotic was quite to the taste of a generation that condemned authority, reason, and order as enemies of all that was good.

But there was a curious contradiction in this high handed condemnation of authority, for it was precisely authority, albeit of a different nature, that the counterculturists worshiped. One has only to think of the pantheon of counterculture gods and gurus, now mostly gone—Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Benjamin Spock, Daniel Berrigan, Mark Rudd—to realize how hungry the hippies were for someone to order them around, to tell them how to dress, what to listen to, what to smoke, when to make love and, of course, what to think. Books like Do It and Steal This Book do not begin to indicate how eager these so-called rebels were to follow some charismatic leader. (The word "charisma" came into common usage in 1960 with John F. Kennedy.) Both Hunter S. Thompson and Christopher Lasch have drawn attention to this clear and curious desire for authority that they claim reached into every corner of life and left little room for individual initiative.

Thus, Brautigan's first readers tended to let the immediacy of their reading experience blind them to his essential individualism. Here again one can see how much closer Brautigan was to the hipsters and the beats of the fifties, who cultivated a fierce individuality, than to the hippies, who cultivated communes. And in a commune there is little room for individual conviction when the good of all comes first.

One reason Brautigan went undetected for so long is that he did not assert his personality into this book the way [Jack] Kerouac did. In Brautigan's prose, American people and things are seen as they are, observed and documented, as it were. Brautigan acts as witness, not judge. And like the "true witnesses" of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, he makes neither more nor less of whatever he sees. He uses no conventional techniques to achieve a comic or a dramatic effect. He sees everything with cool, neutral detachment.

Because Brautigan does not intrude upon his story or impose on it any particular slang, the book lacks any sense of the didactic, any intimation that, regardless of how satiric and political it seems, it is supposed to instruct its readers in how to think or behave. Brautigan allows the satire to emerge from his unadorned reporting of America's own internal contradictions rather than from an implied criticism of its ability to measure up to the standards of some arbitrary ideological presumption. With Trout Fishing in America, the reader brings politics to the book. For cult readers, this was no problem. Finding what they wanted to find in the book made reading it all the more enjoyable, in the same way a mystic might find religious reinforcement in working out the numerological references in the Bible to prove some arcane hypothesis.

Brautigan's disengaged, thoroughly nonpolitical narrative voice is the subtle hook by which this book takes hold of its readers, for nothing is more convincing than the report of the disinterested journalist who just happens to uncover something about some governmental cover-up. Another hook, this one much more subtle and much more insidious, is the use of the disinterested voice that indiscriminately accepts evil as well as good. By documenting without judging, Brautigan sends the message that it is pointless to try to change anything, that decisive change is impossible, because the evil inevitably returns.

The acceptance of the immutability of a world divided between good and evil carries with it the tainted thrill of heresy. Emil Sinclair arrives at the same point in Hermann Hesse's Demian, and there is a longing for it that runs through Albert Camus's The Stranger. It is ultimately a deeply cynical attitude that only adds to the moral confusion in which good and evil are merely interchangeable options, menu items, equal choices. Evil is accepted, even condoned, as being as valuable a part of experience as good, and perhaps even preferable to it. This dispassionate, disembodied, impersonal narrator invites belief precisely because he seems so objective. A man with no score to settle has no reason not to tell the truth. Because Brautigan apparently has nothing to gain by portraying America one way and not another, we trust him implicitly.

Several things contributed to the phenomenal success of this extraordinary book. For one thing. the book is not at all about what it says it is about: trout fishing. Any angler who picked it up would be in for a shock. This kind of zaniness appealed to the age. Another attraction was the apparent absence of a traditional hero. Instead, in his place there is the absurd substitution of "trout fishing in America" used in every conceivable metaphorical sense. So ultimately, it becomes the center of attention, both message and messenger combined, and Brautigan can make the title mean anything or anyone he wants it to mean—or the reader wants it to mean.

Another explanation for the phenomenal popularity of Trout Fishing in America is that it is so unapologetically self-indulgent. By claiming no right to exist, it seems to earn that right. This is an impregnable, unimpeachable, nonassailable book. It seems to belong by itself and to itself, to have nothing to do with anything but itself. And within itself, all is delightful disorganization. It provides a fine escape from a world where everything is perceived as being altogether too regimented and logical.

Brautigan had no ax to grind. No ramparts are breached or causes advanced in this slim volume. Brautigan, like Meursault in The Stranger, is simply too passive to get involved—not because he agrees with the world as he finds it, but because he does not seem to feel that there are social revolutions worth fighting. It is no surprise, then, that this book has been called The Great Gatsby of its time. All wars fought. All Gods dead.

Naturally, the book had its detractors. Those who were mixed up in movements, involved in crusades, concerned about solving the problem instead of being part of the problem, tended to think that books without some obvious agenda were like people who stood on the sidelines and minded their own business: just taking up space. They found the book carelessly gross and its author/narrator preoccupied with a phony detached self, playing the role of this droll, poker-faced, seemingly disinterested third party, detachedly observing something that he never makes quite clear. How can you describe what you are observing, they asked, without having a basic opinion? If you talk about observing the follies or the inanities or even the peculiarities of Americans, aren't you already making a judgment?

What is probably closer to the truth—and closer to the book's central appeal—is the presence of a situation in which the observer is observing himself observing. This interpretation is congruent with the extreme self-consciousness of the age, the passion for keeping one's finger forever on one's own pulse, the obsessive preoccupation with how one was perceived and what image one projected. Brautigan, then, is looking in the mirror, watching himself showing off, pulling his tricks and performing his stunts with a "Who, me?" look on his face. But there was no way that a sixties cult figure could remain neutral, certainly not in the eyes of those who put the spin on what they read, regardless of what the author might have intended. Nobody straddled the fence, least of all Richard Brautigan—certainly not as far as his followers were concerned. And where cult books are concerned, it is the readers who have the last word.

One thing they glimpsed in Brautigan's vision was the bleakly pessimistic view that America, sooner or later, transforms even its finest things into salable commodities. This was the America of mindless restrictions and prohibitions, of broken promises and shattered dreams, the America the beats had rebelled against in the fifties. However true or false this image of America was historically, it fueled the disenchantment, anger, restlessness, and rebellion that found its way into all counterculture writing in the sixties, including Brautigan.

Brautigan's deceptive passivity is pure beat. Unlike the Marxists of the thirties or the New Left of the sixties, the beats did not set out to change the world but to change themselves, to reach beyond the limits and repressions of America and find a heightened personal awareness through whatever means promised fulfillment—mysticism, drugs, sex, "relentless motion." They were continually reaching out for something beyond America's metaphysical boundaries. It mattered little how vocal you were or how dedicated to changing the world, the truth was that the only person you could ultimately reform was yourself.

There is something sweet about such a gentle philosophy, and some of its acceptance had to do with the respect with which the flower children of the sixties welcomed their forerunners, the beats, into their midst. Brautigan came to be known as the "honorary kid" and "the last hippie in America." He was a little older than the rest, and so it was easy to look upon his books as charming but dated, as old-fashioned reminders of the way things were, the way the students of the fifties read F. Scott Fitzgerald, less as literature than as an excuse to wax nostalgic about a time they never knew. It is, in fact, the way today's students read Kurt Vonnegut and Burroughs and even Brautigan.

Brautigan's picture of America as oppressive and morally weak was commonplace among the beats, but unlike most beats, he displayed neither rage nor horror but almost a kind of contentment, neither smug nor approving, with America as it was. Anger and rational solutions were both irrelevant at this point, for America, as understood by the narrator, was dying. The book is filled with references to death, and the report on Trout Fishing in America's autopsy is not entirely a joke. There was nothing to do now but sit back and watch.

Brautigan's deepest appeal, then, is to an almost Oriental passivity that some consider the ultimate wisdom: the true ability to "let go and let God." It is possible that he was the most deeply spiritual of all the writers of that period, for at the core of Trout Fishing in America is the legendary serenity of the fisherman at rest in the middle of the glassy-surfaced lake, a fine mist rising about him, the frost of his own breath before him, and a palpable peace surrounding and protecting him.

Tom Robbins once said that no matter how fervently a romantic might support a political movement, he must eventually withdraw from active participation in the movement because it means the supremacy of the organization over the individual and is, as such, an affront to intimacy, the principal ingredient with which this life is sweetened. Romantics do not want to limit themselves, to surrender their freedom to anyone or any group.

It is possible that if the generation of the sixties had read this book (the one they claimed to love so much) a lot more carefully, they would have realized that dreams such as theirs never have a chance. Brautigan's real message to them, one that has only later emerged with striking clarity, is that the man who does not go along with the dominant culture must, if he wants to survive, stand alone.

Or it may be that Brautigan is asking the ultimate question of the age, the one Hunter S. Thompson put this way: "Is there anyone tending the light at the end of the tunnel?"

Analyse Watermelon

"Narrative Technique in Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar" Carolyn Blakely CLA Journal 35 (2) December 1991:150-158.

NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material. Richard Brautigan, one among many writers who have been either ignored or brushed aside by numerous critics as passing fads or as transitory appeals to the fancies of the young generation, should not be dismissed so lightly. One may not assume from a cursory reading of his work that he is shallow or that he has no message to convey. On the contrary, it seems that his message is just as profound and valid as that of more established writers, in spite of the fact that his prose style is revolutionary and that his ideas are couched in a language which is frequently implied rather than overt in its statements. It is sometimes necessary to go beyond what is said in In Watermelon Sugar and concentrate on what is not said, for that is where the statement seems to lie. Some critics ignore this possibility, however, casually dismissing Brautigan as possessing no literary worth but seeing him instead as the response to the Beat Generation's need for a vehicle through which to vocalize its cynical outlook on life.

Michael Feld explains Brautigan as being a writer who is "namedropped in most places where there's lots of sensitivity and modernity and drugs and no common sense going on, where cool languid personalities slump about passing joints like sweaty kisses, speaking of power to the people and freedom and the plight of gypsies [and who] displays above anything else . . . a distaste for work." Jonathan Yardley's estimation of Brautigan is no higher than Feld's because he says that sooner or later . . . Brautigan is going to go the way of many minor literary figures, and even some bigger ones . . . who appeal to the peculiar needs of later adolescence." Apparently these critics see Brautigan as only a response to the younger generation's radical cry for a return to nature in order to get it all together. They think that his style is casual and offhand, but in vogue, creating a certain charm for these youthful readers. In the opposite camp is Neil Schmitz, who labels In Watermelon Sugar a pastoral myth with all its objectives in fiction: the denial of history, its passion for loveliness (all those exquisite suns), its desire to represent the normative life, the "natural" way. And yet it is wrong, this perfected world. The balance that suits them, also stylizes them and the result is a disfiguring of their humanity."

Indeed, the perfected world of this novel does not work. Brautigan's silence speaks loudly as he presents what seems to be a parody of the pastoral. This society may represent what modern man might wish it to be—an answer to or a substitute for the mechanistic, profit-seeking, inhumane world of social and moral decadence in which he finds himself, but the distortion in the new society is also obvious and just as unattractive. Viewing this book, then, as a parody of the pastoral, one might consider the ideas that are implied by the silence and attempt to determine what Brautigan's attitude is toward this "perfect" society.

Admittedly the novel does present some of the images of the pastoral tradition when one observes its characters engaged in happy labor, in solitary walks along the river, and in contented existence in little shacks in the hills. Pauline, for example, is the healthy happy maiden who is delighted to whip up hearty stews for the communal workers; and the schoolmaster who leads his pupils into a meadow to study nature is reminiscent of Goldsmith's portrait of the school-master in the pastoral setting of The Deserted Village.

These images, however, seem, to camouflage the weaknesses in a society which is a fantasy or a postholocaustal world set in some idyllic future tense. Initially, this appears to be a nostalgic yearning for a pastoral America which has disappeared or has been destroyed by such elements as crime and violence until we realize that the reality of the past America has been replaced by a dream that is inadequate. Tony Tanner says that it is "a pastoral dream in which the dominance of fantasy and imagination over the Forgotten Works and the wrecking yard is perhaps too effortlessly achieved." A summary of the novel reveals the pastoral dream: The narrator lives in a happy commune in an unlocated realm called, mysteriously, iDeath. The prevailing material there is watermelon sugar . . . which may be food, furniture, or fuel. More generally it is the sweet secretion of the imagination. There is still death in iDeath, but it has been made into something mysterious and almost beautiful: the dead are buried in glass coffins which are laid on the riverbed. Foxfire is put inside . . . There was once a more violent time—the time of the tigers—but they have been killed off. More recently there has been a defection from iDeath by a drunken foul-mouthed figure called inBoil. . . . He and his gang have gone back to live in a place called the Forgotten Works . . . an endless panorama of all the machines and things which made up a vanished way of life. . . . But inBoil returns to the commune insisting that the tigers were the real meaning of iDeath. . . . He and his followers say that they will bring back the real iDeath. They do this by gradually cutting themselves to pieces in front of the disgusted members of the community. Afterwards their bodies are taken down to the Forgotten Works, burned up, and forgotten. Everyone is relieved. Except for . . . Margaret who had started to show an inquisitive interest in the things heaped up in the Forgotten Works. . . . She commits suicide. But after the funeral the community gathers together for a dance, and the musicians are poised with their instruments. (Tanner p.413) And so the book ends, but the problem remains; this perfect society is void of emotions and as such Brautigan implies that there is much to be desired in this fantasy also. In the delineation of this less-than-perfect society, he uses the techniques of fragmentation, repetition, and juxtaposition in order to establish the prevailing sense of loss. Although it is utopian in atmosphere, it offers no notations of progress, neither materialistically nor emotionally.

In discussing the structure of In Watermelon Sugar, Patricia Hernlund argues that the book has a fragmented time scheme which focuses on three deaths and that this organization permits the revelation of the narrator's (and his society's) responses to negative elements. The first of these time sequences is the distant past where the Forgotten Works began. The second time sequence concerns the major portion of the narrator's life. The third occurs during the narrator's present years but before the present time and is presented in a flashback to the first sign of trouble indicated by the rumor that inBoil is plotting some scheme, which is almost simultaneous with the beginning of trouble between the narrator and Margaret. Finally, the fourth sequence is the present time of the novel which covers about three days.

Obviously the book does not adhere to a linear, chronological plot, but if it is put to the test, this fragmented time scheme seems to work. In the first sequence the narrator says, "Nobody knows how old the Forgotten Works are reaching as they do into distances that we cannot travel nor want to." But one can speculate, however, that they mark the beginning of this new society that replaces a rejected past society which was plagued by the tigers and which was also the time of the birth of Charley, inBoil, and Old Chuck—a time before the narrator.

The second sequence is a time of the narrator's, Margaret's, and Pauline's childhood and young adulthood, when inBoil told them stories and when the tigers killed his parents and were eventually killed themselves. It is also a time when inBoil drew away from iDeath and turned to the Forgotten Works, when Margaret and the narrator became lovers, and when he began making statues.

It is during the third period that inBoil dies and that the narrator implied some connection between inBoil and Margaret which is suggested to him by her inquisitive delving into the Forgotten Works. He says, "Sometimes Margaret went down into the Forgotten Works by herself. It worried me. She was so pretty and inBoil and that gang of his were so ugly. They might get ideas. Why did she want to go down there all the time?" (p. 90). Later, specifically questioning Margaret about inBoil's scheme, Charley asks, "What do you know about this, Margaret? You've spent a lot of time down there lately" (p. 95). Although this implied connection is denied by some of the characters, the narrator allows his suspicions to overwhelm him, severs his ties with Margaret, and starts his relationship with Pauline.

In the fourth and final sequence we see Old Chuck recounting a dream about the tigers and the narrator remembering their killing his parents. It is here, too, that Margaret commits suicide, and the citizens prepare for her funeral and a dance immediately after sunset.

The instances of repetition in the novel promote the suggested lack of emotion, sense of boredom, and feeling of loss. The only real sign of emotion of any major kind occurs in the chapter that describes the suicide of inBoil and his followers. The narrator's description of Pauline's rage at their messing up the hatchery with their blood places her in a peculiar light: "Pauline did not act like a woman should under these circumstances. She was not afraid or made ill by this at all. She just kept getting madder and madder. Her face was red with anger" (p. 118). There is a total absence of human sympathy or of any type of positive feelings, and this impression is emphasized by Pauline's methodical mopping up blood and wringing it out into a bucket.

In the two-page chapter entitled "My Name," the narrator repeats the sentence "That is my name" twelve times, establishing a hollowness and a situation that allows him to become whatever the reader wishes him to be. Harvey Leavitt suggests that the narrator is a part of a society in which the individual self is unimportant (I Death), in which the psychological is suppressed by the physiological (Id Death), in which knowledge is no longer desirable (Idea Death), and in which "the first person pronoun is dead in a social order that makes itself conscious of the interdependency of its parts . . ."

The almost total absence of emotion is even more obvious in the chapter entitled "Arithmetic," where the narrator describes, with alarming and disquieting calmness, his lack of response to the killing of his parents by the tigers. This startling attitude is strongly emphasized as the youth repeats and stresses the importance of learning his arithmetic rather than the tragic death of his parents. In the middle of the disaster he says to the tigers, "You could help me with my arithmetic" (p. 39) and continues to reiterate in the rest of the chapter how helpful the tigers were with his arithmetic. To cite a further example of this emotional void and atmosphere of boredom created through the device of repetition, one might note the conversation in the "Meat Loaf?" chapter: "Today's special is meat loaf, isn't it?" Doc Edwards said. "Yes, 'Meat Loaf for a gray day is the best way,' that's our motto," she said. "I'll have some meat loaf," Fred said. "What about you?" the waitress said. "Meat loaf?" "Yeah, meat loaf," I said. "Three meat loaves" the waitress said. (p. 129) Here the boring routine is established: on every "gray day" the special is meat loaf.

The sense of loss is also apparent in other instances. In the chapter "Statue of Mirrors" the narrator describes the visions that he has in the mirrors and the emptiness that he feels as he stands for hours allowing his mind to drain. When the visions begin to occur, he describes them in a repetitive pattern. Half of the sentences in that chapter begin with the same sentence structure, establishing the loss and emptiness that lead up to the climactic ending of the chapter: "I saw Old Chuck on the front porch . . . I saw some kids playing baseball . . . I saw Fred directing his crew . . . [and] I saw Margaret climbing an apple tree beside her shack. She was crying and had a scarf knotted around her neck. She took the loose end of the scarf and tied it to a branch covered with young apples. She stepped off the branch and then she was standing by herself on the air" (p. 135). Even then the narrator displays no emotion, in the very next chapter he says simply, "I stopped looking into the statue of Mirrors. I'd seen enough for that day" (p. 136).

In what she sees as another of Brautigan's negative statements about his society, Hernlund says that "pleasure is negated by sudden introduction of an opposing emotion." One may point to many instances in which the pleasant is juxtaposed with the unpleasant. In one of those instances the narrator speaks of how beautiful the tigers were in the same sentence in which he mentions the fact that they ate his parents; in another, Fred praises Pauline's good stew and the pleasure he derives from eating it in the same breath that he quietly hints at the displeasure of eating carrots; and in the middle of the whole idyllic scene describing Pauline's prettiness and pleasant watermelon sugar aroma one is suddenly and unexpectedly told how most of the citizens did not like Margaret anymore because they thought that she might be involved in a conspiracy with inBoil and his gang.

In a society where the narrator insists that its citizens take pride in their communal life style, it seems that this style is peculiarly static. It refuses whatever is different from itself, as evidenced by the failure to name the "beautiful" things that Margaret finds in the Forgotten Works. Schmitz thinks that "Margaret's curiosity is the first step toward wisdom . . . but wisdom that is destructive of the innocence the writer strives to sustain."

Leavitt, in a very extensive analogy, labels iDeath as "an Eden without the built-in supremacy order that was established for Adam I [He sees the narrator as Adam II] and Eve. Classification begets power, and power begets pride, and pride is an emotion." Since emotion is considerably absent from iDeath, inaction is created through the mundane tasks of existence. Life in iDeath is void of such emotions as pity and joy, the absence of which could be presumed to be worse than anything that could be imagined in the old society. On this same issue, Hernlund concludes that "the delicate balance in iDeath is the delusion that they can maintain a neutral position disjunct from violence and death without also cutting themselves off from life's fullness. The basic error results in boredom, ritual, and sterility devoid not only of pleasure but of all feeling and thus all real curiosity, vitality, or a reason for existence."

Life in the new utopian society is a farce and does not represent a satisfactory escape for man from his tainted, modern world. At the extreme, however, one might view life here as being equal with death. Certainly the one birth recorded in the novel does not offset the twenty-two suicides. At any rate, Brautigan must be reckoned with, not dismissed lightly. He recognizes the problem inherent in society, and this may be his shock therapy to awaken society itself to that problem, much the same way that Jonathan Swift? did in "A Modest Proposal."

Notes et références

Références

Catégorie:Naissance en 1935 Catégorie:Naissance à Tacoma Catégorie:Décès en 1984 Catégorie:Écrivain américain du XXe siècle Catégorie:Écrivain de langue anglaise Catégorie:Diggers (San Francisco) Catégorie:Suicide par balle

cs:Richard Brautigan de:Richard Brautigan en:Richard Brautigan fa:ریچارد براتیگان fi:Richard Brautigan he:ריצ'רד בראוטיגן hu:Richard Brautigan it:Richard Brautigan ja:リチャード・ブローティガン nl:Richard Brautigan no:Richard Brautigan pl:Richard Brautigan ru:Бротиган, Ричард sh:Richard Brautigan sk:Richard Brautigan sv:Richard Brautigan tr:Richard Brautigan