Ludwig Wittgenstein once noted that “Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through.”¹ However, as Keirkegaurd and others have forcefully argued, the prospect of death is life's central fact and the repression of this fact life's primary task. For Ernest Becker, moreover, man's heroism lies in his impossible efforts to transcend creatureliness, to deny death by means of “life-enhancing illusion.”² Among such illusions might be placed statements such as Wittgenstein's and the fiction of Richard Brautigan.

As Becker writes early in The Denial of Death, “The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive” (p. 66). For Becker, this dilemma is inherent to consciousness, a consequence of human nature more than nurture. His views thus oppose those of Marcuse or Norman O. Brown, whose works speak to the desire for unrepressed living while pointing an accusing finger at society as the cause of repression. Yet throughout the Sixties, Brautigan created characters seeking not greater freedom but greater control over their lives: over their creatureliness, their thoughts and emotions. But further, although shrinking from life should not be seen exclusively as a result of social antagonism toward freedom and self-expansiveness, society can exacerbate this existential timidity. And in Trout Fishing in America (completed 1961, published 1967), A Confederate General from Big Sur (completed 1963, published 1964), In Watermelon Sugar (completed 1964, published 1968), and The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971) the global village falls to ataractic communes and isolated dreamers seeking escapes from history, time, and change.

I

The American 1960s was often violent and deadly. The decade brought the country Vietnam and nightly body counts, the Cuban missile crisis and renewed atmospheric nuclear testing, Birmingham Sunday and the Days of Rage, Watts and Newark, Charles Whitman and Richard Speck, assassinations and alarms of overpopulation and eco-death. Strange, unnatural death and explicitly detailed acts of irrational, unexpected violence clearly obsessed the decade's fiction. Brautigan suggested the inseparability of death from his vision of the Sixties in the title of his fourth novel, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, thereby underscoring the death-obsession which his critics have frequently noticed percolating through his work.³ This obsession underlies the now-famous vignettes of blighted landscapes and polluted streams, perverted myths, frustrated hopes, corrupted values, corporeal and spiritual death in Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan's disappointment with our times underlies as well the sense of degeneration informing A Confederate General, evoked through the novel's contrast of present-day America with the Civil War years and of the heroic images that war typically conjures up with both the imagined behavior of Lee Mellon's ancestor Augustus and the observed behavior of that border psychopath Lee. In Watermelon Sugar reveals its author's critique of society in its images of an alternative community and of the Forgotten Works: those remains of a self-destructive civilization so far fallen into ruin that its survivors, 171 years later, can no longer identify many of its simplest artifacts.

Additionally, Brautigan's idée fixe habitually works itself out in stories of dropouts or of those living along the mainstream's more ragged tributaries, for his characters customarily sound retreats: to Big Sur, to what remains of the wilderness, to the emotionless science-fiction commune of iDEATH, to the cloistered utopia Vida and the narrator share in The Abortion.⁴ Such a conjunction of death, destruction, and disaffiliation suggests that Lee, Vida, and the rest share a countercultural view of the dominant culture as dealing and desiring death; in which case, disengagement from society might understandably follow. But further, to the extent that fear of death may be considered the primary motivational factor in men's lives, disengagement may result not only because death is ubiquitous within the confines of the establishment but because, even when most admirable, most heroic, the dominant culture offers promises of transcending death that no longer convince. When such promises fail to inspire belief, the individual is forced back upon himself to create his own illusions of control, his own means of defusing death fears. In short, our world makes closet neurotics of us all when we must forego, in some measure giving allegiance to the dominant culture as savior and attempt instead to erect private stays against dissolution.⁵

To free themselves from the anxiety of death, Brautigan's heroes seek to control the life that awakens it, seek the know-how of dominating life through self-imposed restraints upon life and self. Lee Mellon, for instance, may possess a certain amount of barely serviceable survival know-how, but, as importantly, he also has the know-how to shape his life into a denial of death. In that connection, Hugh Kenner has recently observed how-to literature's venerable tradition in America. Infiltrating the work of our best writers (Kenner points to Walden, Moby-Dick, Life on the Mississippi, and Death in the Afternoon), how-to literature has over the years metamorphosed into “a genre sui generis, the indigenous American literature of escape.”⁶ Similarly, Brautigan's Sixties seekers put a premium on self-reliance, on know-how, as a way of creating the illusion that one is master of one's life, hence of one's destiny. In this respect, The Abortion is in a sense only a terribly au courant how to manual (how to resolve a problematic pregnancy easily, safely, and relatively emotionlessly); In Watermelon Sugar, a mock blueprint for structuring utopia; and Lee Mellon, that “Confederate general in ruins,”⁷ a half-assed, latter-day Thoreau.

Brautigan's is, however, a curious brand of how-to self-reliance. Two comments reprinted on the back cover of the Dell edition of Trout Fishing clarify the nature of these novels as how-to literature. A reader at the Viking Press noted that “Mr. Brautigan submitted a book to us in 1962 called Trout Fishing in America. I gather from reports that it was not about trout fishing.” Fly Fisherman magazine, on the other hand, told its readers that “reading Trout Fishing in America won't help you catch more fish, but it does have something to do with trout fishing.”⁸ The point is that Brautigan, foregoing even a facade of practical instruction, foregrounds instead the escapism underlying America's indigenous genre no less than it underlies the musings of armchair and weekend anglers. He focuses on the how-to of escape: not only from a particularly deadly society but from too much life generally, and from the fear of being overwhelmed by this life, the life awakening fears of death.

Such concerns may be described as religious insofar as they manifest a preoccupation with death and its transcendence and insofar as the desire to transcend death lies at the heart of religious belief. Brautigan's fiction as how-to, then, involves creating a private religion that promises a triumph over death. This combination of self-reliance and spiritual necessity—requiring the reshaping of a received but no longer viable tradition or, more drastically, the constructing of a private alternative to fit personal needs—characterizes as well a large part of religious thought in America. America's history of do-it-yourself religion might be seen to begin with the Puritans' covenant theology and their vision of the New World as the New Israel. This tradition informs the Enlightenment appropriation of Puritanism, the Transcendentalist and Romantic revisions of Puritanism and Unitarianism, the merger of civil and millennial expectations that became so centrally a part of nineteenth-century thought, the Campbellites and Millerites (indeed, America's history of utopian communities in general), the work of Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy, Emerson's plea for religious self-reliance and James's Varieties of Religious Experience, Henry Adams and the Beats. In short, whenever spiritual dissatisfaction has flowered, Americans have been quick to “make it new,” to clear some imaginative ground upon which to raise their personal solutions.

II

As man's capacity for killing increased in scale, as incomprehensible death seemed increasingly omnipresent, as conventional religious belief as a means of resolving death fears continued to collapse, literary theorists began speaking more and more of literature's function in terms of its ability to give endings meaning.⁹ It is art's ability to control its ends, its power to resee and to reorder reality, that Brautigan foregrounds in his first completed novel, Trout Fishing in America. “Rembrandt Creek,” one of the novel's two “lost chapters” (published in Esquire three years after the book's appearance), seems to offer a heuristic for interpreting Trout Fishing's intention: “Often I think about Rembrandt Creek and how much it looked like a painting hanging in the world's largest museum with a roof that went to the stars and galleries that knew the whisk of comets.”¹⁰ Like the name arbitrarily assigned to the creek, this passage reminds the reader of the possibility of transforming life into art. More explicitly still, Brautigan emphasizes fiction's ability to legislate endings by the conclusion he here offers. The penultimate chapter of the novel ends with the narrator expressing his desire to “write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise” (p. 181). Then, on the next and final page, postfixed to the letter concluding Trout Fishing but having nothing to do with this letter, the following appears: “Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonaise” (p. 182). (Not to strain, but the fact that “mayonnaise” is here misspelled—in all editions of the novel, as far as I can tell—may suggest that the narrator's wish to control his story's ending has been at best imperfectly realized.) Finally, the book's overall style and structure highlight art as symbolic transcendence: through its collage construction and lack of narrative line, the novel seems intent on converting time into space and thereby halting America's progressive decay, while this tactic of atemporality likewise creates a sense of timeless presence that erases mortality as a function of time-boundedness.¹¹

On the other hand, like the Biblical prophet, who assumes a countercultural stance to speak against his culture's numbness to death, Brautigan as controlling author has constructed a witty, dispassionate jeremiad to criticize his country's passionless capitulation to death, America's degeneration and forgetfulness concerning its hopes and dreams: which he does by ironically mirroring in his book's construction the sense of that eternal now that Walter Brueggemann labels “the lewd promise of immortality” and argues is always an illusion the establishment finds necessary to maintain to deny the possibility of newness, of alternative beginnings. By voicing through its series of koan-like sketches the despair over death and dissolution America has provoked, is blind to, and cannot countermand, Trout Fishing expresses the grief that must precede dismantling and energizing toward a new beginning. That is, through its language of grief, through its dark humor, through its awareness of death fears suppressed so long they have been forgotten in numbness, Brautigan's first novel opens the possibility of controlling death insofar as the novel now allows the future to be imagined alternatively.¹²

However, Brautigan's fiction attempts to solve the problem of death not only by finding an energizing language of grief and hope, not only by imposing “coherent patterns” providing ends consonant with beginnings and middles,¹³ but also by intercalating within these patterns accounts of characters who themselves seek controls over death, controls they would like to think proffer freedom, dignity, and hope—characteristics of the “best” illusions, according to Becker (p. 202). Toward this end, the characters of A Confederate General, In Watermelon Sugar, and The Abortion resort, variously, to fantasy, simplification of perception and response, ritualized and routinized behavior, and an effort at shutting down the self by maintaining a cool aloofness from emotion, from too much introspection, and from anything else that might cause a loss of self-control. Self-reliance for these characters is achieved not by expanding the sphere of their competence but by reducing life's scope and possibility (the less-is-more approach) or by wrapping themselves in private myths that imaginatively render life harmless. The problem with such ploys lies in the fact that rather than penetrating a numbness to death and so engaging in that “embrace of deathliness [that] permits newness to come,”¹⁴ these characters typically spin illusions enhancing numbness by camouflaging its underlying anxiety: those fears of death with which they refuse to wrestle.

III

A Confederate General, with its hard-drinking, dope-smoking, gun-toting, womanizing dropouts Lee and Jesse, might seem to illustrate not the characterization of Brautigan's heroes just drawn but that craziness that may easily result from the need to contrive private rituals. Yet neurosis and psychosis are ways of seeking to control life and to neutralize the terror of eventual annihilation—though such strategies cost too much, which is part of the reason why Lee and Jesse seem finally to be leading unenviable lives.

In an early discussion of A Confederate General Terence Malley objected that Jesse's replacement of Lee as the novel's center of attention works to the book's detriment. Malley found Jesse's slide into psychological instability too radical a change from his earlier role as humorous sidekick, and the melancholic temperament he comes to exhibit, too perplexing.¹⁵ Yet from first to last the book is Jesse's, not only because he is its narrator and central consciousness but because what A Confederate General in fact chronicles is Lee's effect on Jesse: the gradual undermining of this shy loner's precarious psychological balance through his acquaintance with Lee, that “end product of American spirit, pride and the old know-how” (p. 93).

The reader learns little about Jesse's life prior to his meeting Lee, but one suspects it was quietly desperate. Well read, given to paying visits on the elderly woman living below him, conscientious he leaves a newfound lover's bed, for example, to recover a drunken Lee before the police find him), Jesse finds his days nonetheless clouded by depression. The most unlikely experiences emerge from his mind in metaphoric shrouds: “a rush of wind came by the cabin. The wind made me think about the Battle of Agincourt for it moved like arrows about us …” (p. 111). Against this habitual disposition, Jesse favors small life-enhancing illusions, such as humor—which attempts to distance despair and to deflate its seriousness—or the book about the soul he reads shortly after joining Lee at Big Sur: “The book said everything was all right if you didn't die while you were reading the book, if your fingers maintained life while turning the pages” (p. 66). Similarly, after obsessively reading and rereading Ecclesiastes, Jesse finds a way of bringing its gloomy world view under control by reducing the text to its punctuation marks, which he then carefully tabulates night by night, Qoheleth's vision mastered by being reduced to a “kind of study in engineering” (p. 74).

Yet at the time Jesse is practicing such pathetic rituals, he has already fallen into the manic world of Lee Mellon. Lee's exuberance doubtless attracts the withdrawn Jesse, who finds fascinating material for his death-suffused outlook in Lee's martial fantasy and violent behavior. Throughout the novel, Jesse has occasion to relate instances of Lee's sadism, as when Lee threatens to shoot two teenagers caught trying to siphon gas from his truck (pp. 76-80). If heroism is, at root, the courage to face death, and sadism, like mental illness generally, “a way of talking about people who have lost courage” (Becker, p. 209),¹⁶ Lee's sadistic behavior is a logical consequence of his lifestyle, as is the fantasy role he assigns himself: the outlaw descendent of the fictitious Confederate general Augustus Mellon.

Lee leads a life of petty violence, squalor, and penury; as a self-reliant outlaw, he is inept: his hold-ups net him petty cash; he cannot shoot straight because he is “excitable” (p. 65); and although while holed up in an abandoned house in Oakland he successfully taps a gas main, he cannot control the resulting flame and is consequently seen for a time minus eyebrows. To give such a life meaning and the heroic dimension that would justify it, Lee must resort to sadism and fantasy: as the Confederate General of Big Sur, he gains self-worth by proxy and a precedent for abandoning the conventions by which lesser men must live.

The martial imagery draping Lee and the book is, however, primarily Jesse's doing, for he has masochistically bought into Lee's fantasy life to add vicarious grandeur to his own failed heroics. As Jesse observes while the two teenagers grovel at gunpoint and he stands by, ax in hand, “Do you see how perfect our names were, how the names lent themselves to this kind of business? Our names were made for us in another century” (p. 78). But eventually, these fantasies become themselves too overwhelming, no longer a means of controlling life but now a threat to self-control. Johnston Wade may be the final straw here, for, unlike the fantasies of the others (even Lee, threatening the teenagers, knows his gun is not loaded), Wade's are so out of control and dangerous that Lee finally resorts to chaining Wade to a log to keep everyone safe. Further, Wade, as a deranged insurance magnate on the lam because convinced his family is out to get him, offers an unsettling reminder not only of society's power to destroy but also of both the trapped individual's recourse to fantasy-control and the destructive potential of fantasy itself.

After a few hours of Wade, Jesse confesses, “I wanted reality to be there. What we had wasn't worth it. Reality would be better” (p. 126). But life at Big Sur will continue to tip Jesse's delicate balance: “I was really gone. My mind was beginning to take a vacation from my senses. I felt it continuing to go while Lee Mellon got the dope” (p. 152). By the final chapter, Jesse has fallen into sexual impotence and, looking back, concludes, “The last week's activities had been a little too much for me, I think. A little too much of life had been thrown at me …” (p. 154).

Jesse fails to find the illusions he needs, leaning instead on the crutch of others' fantasies, which offer him small hope, smaller dignity, and at best a loser's kind of freedom. Unable to discover a way of ordering his life into a meaningful, heroic whole, Jesse, not surprisingly, finds no satisfying end for his story but rather five alternative conclusions followed by “more and more endings: the sixth, the 53rd, the 131st, the 9,435th ending, endings going faster and faster, more and more endings, faster and faster until this book is having 186,000 endings per second” (p. 159).

IV

According to Nietzsche, most men employ either “guilty” or “innocent” means in their struggles against life's “deadening dull, paralyzing, protracted pain,” which only the courageous have the capacity to experience without a soporific. Guilty means always involve “some kind of an orgy of feeling,” whereas innocent means include a “general muting of the feeling of life, mechanical activity, the petty pleasure, above all ‘love of one's neighbor’ … the communal feeling of power through which the individual's discontent with himself is drowned in his pleasure in the prosperity of the community.”¹⁷ In A Confederate General Lee and Wade represent the employment of guilty expedients, which submerge Jesse and his more innocent stratagems. Well aware of the dangers of excess, and more fortunate than Jesse in avoiding these dangers, the characters of In Watermelon Sugar and The Abortion likewise favor innocent maneuvers. In both books, characters find asylums wherein carefully regulated and ritualized fantasies—do-it-yourself religions—achieve a drastic shutting down of self that masks a failure of heroism and voids death anxiety more successfully than anachronistic secession and more predictably than dope.

In the world of Watermelon Sugar, simple, quietly routine days pass without disturbing emotions, thoughts, or desires. Whatever happens is seen to have happened for the best and as it must, and whatever displeases tends to disappear from view, like Margaret's note: “I read the note and it did not please me and I threw it away, so not even time could find it.”¹⁸ Personality has been so repressed that most of the community's art, to choose one telling example, stands as the work of anonymous artists who typically favor harmless subjects, electing to produce statues of vegetables and books on innocuous topics like pine needles and owls. In iDEATH, the community's spiritual center, as in Watermelon Sugar generally, “a delicate balance” obtains, as the narrator acknowledges (p. 1). To safeguard this life's emotional and intellectual deep sleep, virtues conducive to placidity must be cultivated; consideration and politeness are fetishized, and small, unsophisticated pleasures prevail. To experience such innocent joys, emotion must be carefully monitored, and even sexual desire must be satisfied with passion well under control (p. 34).

Further, all actual or potential threats to the community's well-being must be neutralized. Books, for example, are unvalued. Written by those who can find no satisfaction in more communally useful employment, books are seen as odd, solitary pursuits. If they do not, as in Farhenheit 451, represent such subversive dangers as curiosity and originality of thought, this is because no one pays them any mind. Although only twenty-three books have appeared in 171 years, even these go largely unread (pp. 11, 135), the possibility of life's growing too large averted by simple disregard, which also serves to defuse the nearby evil of the Forgotten Works:

Nobody has been very far into the Forgotten Works, except that guy Charley said who wrote a book about them, and I wonder what his trouble was, to spend weeks in there.

The Forgotten Works just go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. You get the picture. It's a big place, much bigger than we are.

(p. 82)

Other sources of unrest fade from view as readily. The tigers, the once-great threat to Watermelon Sugar, required the most active opposition. Exterminated and subsequently mythologized, the tigers, symbols of human aggressiveness and instinctual need, have taken the theological problem of Blake's tyger with them, leaving only their remembered virtues—their math prowess and beautiful singing voices—for souvenirs. On the other hand, inBOIL and his gang, like Margaret, obligingly remove themselves through suicide, the end of their restless dissatisfaction with iDEATH. However, their deaths, although violent, trouble utopia only momentarily because Watermelon Sugar is a world with the knowhow to repress death anxiety by masking death's reality behind numbing familiarity, spurious immortality, and soporific funereal wisdom. InBOIL may kill himself to reveal iDEATH's true meaning, what the death of the self really entails: that it means more than the death of the ego (Ideath), of the id (IDeath), of thought (IDEAth); that Charley and the rest have made a mockery of iDEATH, have, in fact, failed to confront it. Yet nestled firmly in their numbed, death-in-life existence, iDEATH's inhabitants cannot be flushed by literal death so easily. In the midst of the mass suicide of inBOIL and his gang, the narrator's girlfriend responds only by fetching a pail and mop to clean up the “mess” their bleeding to death has made. And although other deaths may elicit more sympathetic responses, they do not provoke much more emotion. Watching in the Statue of Mirrors (in which “everything is reflected”) as his former girlfriend Margaret hangs herself, the narrator remarks, “I stopped looking into the Statue of Mirrors. I'd seen enough for that day. I sat down on a couch by the river and stared into the water of the deep pool that's there. Margaret was dead” (p. 136; see the similar reaction of Margaret's brother, p. 142).

Naming its center iDEATH, a place as changeable as death is various (pp. 18, 144-45), the community can pretend to be living with and in “death,” which is further familiarized through elaborate burial rituals that leave the dead “in glass coffins at the bottoms of rivers” with “foxfire in the tombs, so they glow at night and we can appreciate what comes next” (p. 60). However, the community must pay a great price for this anxiety-free life. The shutting down of self practiced in Watermelon Sugar has reduced tremendously the scope of human response-ability. Moreover, the elaborate defensive armor forged here is not without chinks: unpacified dissidents like inBOIL; unhappy, ostracized souls like Margaret; and the restless, nameless narrator as well. Not only does the narrator see behind the shared illusions of iDEATH (“We call everything a river here. We're that kind of people,” p. 2); he has written a book (“I wonder what his trouble was”): a book very different from the others written in Watermelon Sugar; a book that builds toward the suicide of iDEATH's latest dropout and ends on the day of the black sun; a book that implicitly gives the lie to the utopian triumph over death this world seems to represent by showing Watermelon Sugar as the restricted, dehumanizing, hopeless, and deadly place it finally is.

V

The Abortion continues Brautigan's interest in characters attempting to retreat from life. The narrator, again nameless, appears in the novel's first two books as a recluse operating a library to which San Francisco's lonely, frustrated residents can bring manuscripts to be recorded in the Library Contents Ledger, shelved (but never borrowed or read), and eventually moved to caves for permanent storage (where “cave seepage” will insure their destruction). Life, the narrator confesses, “was all pretty complicated before I started working here,”¹⁹ but now, safe within the library—tellingly described as a prison, a church, a funeral parlor, an asylum, a time machine, a monastery (pp. 71, 77, 84, 85, 105, 178)—the ritualized, isolated life he leads in this building he has not left once in three years insulates him from history, time, and change. As he remarks upon finally emerging, “Gee, it had been a long time. I hadn't realized that being in that library for so many years was almost like being in some kind of timeless thing. Maybe an eternity” (p. 70).

The cause behind the narrator's re-entry into life is Vida, a relentlessly beautiful girl who arrives one evening with a book for the stacks. She also is in retreat from life; as she tells the narrator, “I can see at a glance … that you are something like me. You're not at home in the world” (p. 51). Vida's unease centers upon her body, not despite but because of its beauty: “My book is about my body, about how horrible it is to have people creeping, crawling, sucking at something I am not,” she explains (p. 45).

If the library represents a refuge from life, Vida (Spanish for life) enters as a threat to the narrator's innocent defenses: mechanical activity, petty pleasures, muted feeling. “‘Yes,’ I said, feeling the door close behind me, knowing that somehow this at first-appearing shy unhappy girl was turning, turning into something strong that I did not know how to deal with” (p. 49). The narrator rightly feels such qualms, for Vida's beauty—the terrible beauty of life—is a perilous thing capable of wrecking havoc wherever it reveals itself. A middle-aged man, for instance, spotting Vida in the airport, “stood there staring on like a fool, not taking his eyes off Vida, even though her beauty had caused him to lose control of the world” (p. 117). And Vida's beauty can conjure death anxieties even more directly: “The driver continued staring at Vida. He paid very little attention to his driving. … I made a mental note of it for the future, not to have Vida's beauty risk our lives” (p. 177).

Yet Vida's beauty does risk their lives. The narrator finds himself far from the library riding in a taxi because Vida's appearance has caused life to enter his world in one particularly troublesome fashion: she has become pregnant, and the two must seek a Tijuana abortion, endangering Vida in obvious ways (and through the very source of her existential dis-ease), endangering the narrator insofar as this fall into physicality constitutes the immediate cause for his forced return to the world. “It looks like our bodies got us,” Vida concludes, to which the narrator replies, “It happens sometimes” (p. 67), seeking comfort, like Jesse, in the assumption of a lighthearted attitude.

Indeed, although the narrator's good-natured stoicism falters momentarily as he waits in the doctor's office for the abortion to begin, for the most part he and Vida respond splendidly to life's sudden eruption in their midst. Just as Vida drags the narrator from his womblike existence to “live like a normal human being” (p. 189), so he more than reconciles her to her body. By novel's end, Vida is in fact supporting him by working in a North Beach topless bar (p. 191).²⁰ Similarly, the narrator's outlook changes during the course of his adventure. Flying to San Diego en route to Tijuana had left him green with nausea and desirous of a return to timelessness (p. 120). However, by the time of his return flight, mere hours later, he can remark cavalierly, “From time to time the airplane was bucked by an invisible horse in the sky but it didn't bother me because I was falling in love with the 727 jet, my sky home, my air love” (p. 183). And even earlier, only minutes after leaving the abortionist's, he finds it hard to keep a straight face when the hotel desk clerk reveals his belief that “People should never change. … They are happier that way” (p. 173). Returning to find he has lost his library position, the narrator adjusts quickly, moving into an apartment with Vida, Foster (his only other friend and a former library employee), and Foster's girlfriend and raising money for the library at a table across from Sproul Hall at Berkeley, where he becomes the hero Vida had assured him he would be (pp. 113, 192).

But in what sense is the narrator a hero? And how have he and Vida made their rapid transition from passive withdrawal to active participation in the world? The answer to the first question usually involves the narrator's personality. Beatle-like in appearance, gentle, caring, tranquilized, the narrator embodies, ostensibly, the virtues of heroism as redefined by the counterculture. Thus Malley describes him as a “strange, passive, low-keyed hero of our time” desiring an escape from the American experience, and Charles Hackenberry, plugging into the story's allegorical possibilities, sees in Brautigan's romance a “portrait of the peace movement's heroism and efficacy, its solution to the unwanted pregnancy of American intervention in Asia.”²¹ But I would suggest that the narrator considers himself heroic because he has triumphed over death. This feat accounts as well for his and Vida's altered attitudes toward the world, attitudes that in fact begin to change when they decide to seek an abortion, for this decision seems to place control over death (choosing its time and means) and so over life in their hands.

Although Hackenberry illustrates that The Abortion enacts the archetypal heroic quest, he carefully notes that the book is as much a parody of the romance as it is a romance-proper. It is parodic for the same reasons the narrator's control over death fails as a liberating, dignifying, and hopeful life-enhancing illusion. Like Lee and inBOIL, The Abortion's narrator has attempted to control life and death by becoming the agent of death (in this case, the indirect agent). But his triumph is ephemeral. He has not seized control of his life; he has not even severed his connection with the library. But more to the point, his triumph lacks heroism, involving as it does a Foster-financed, antagonist-free trip to Tijuana for a relatively guiltless, untroubling termination of his girlfriend's pregnancy. The hotel clerk's wish may cause the narrator to smile, but the object of his quest is the fulfillment of this wish: to remain the same, to deny life and change: “Vida's stomach was flat and perfect and it was going to remain that way” (p. 133). The abortion was inexpensive and painless, and one gets what one pays for: in this case, a cheap, temporary illusion that will be obsolete in a few years.

VI

A Confederate General, In Watermelon Sugar, and The Abortion present searches for illusions capable of allaying death anxiety and of controlling the life that awakens this anxiety by overwhelming us self-conscious animals with the knowledge of our inherent finitude and biological enslavement. These searches end no more successfully than the search in Trout Fishing for pristine trout streams or for the continuance of traditional American myths and ideals, and one might conclude that Brautigan holds no hope of discovering a saving illusion that does not necessitate shutting down the self, smothering emotion, limiting human possibility. Yet stepping back, so to speak, beyond these stories and their narrators to the level on which both become components of Brautigan's imaginative acts, one returns to the sphere of art as life-enhancing illusion. In “Tire Chain Bridge,” a brief, three-page stop along the route of The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980), Brautigan presents in small compass a paradigmatic exploration of the possibilities and limits of art as death-defying illusion.

“Tire Chain Bridge” takes the form of a parable about the Sixties. It begins:

The 1960s:

A lot of people remember hating President Lyndon Baines Johnson and loving Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, depending on the point of view. God rest their souls.

I remember an old Indian woman looking for a tire chain in the snow.²²

The story, set in 1969, is quickly told. Its narrator and his girlfriend are driving across New Mexico after a snowfall, looking for “some old Indian ruins.” They find them, after a fashion, in the persons of an old Indian man and his sister. The man is encountered first, “standing patiently beside a blue Age-of-Aquarius pickup truck parked on the side of the road.” He is not in any trouble; in fact, “Everything's just fine”: he only waits for his sister, who is a mile or so down the road looking for a lost tire chain valued at three dollars. The narrator is pleased to learn that road conditions improve ahead but has trouble believing someone is really “out there,” searching in such wintry weather beneath the indifferent mesas for a used tire chain. But driving on, he soon finds her and asks foolishly if she has found the chain yet. Glancing “at the nearby 121,000 square miles, which is the area of New Mexico,” she answers simply, “It's here someplace.”

“Good luck,” I said, ten years ago in the Sixties that have become legend now like the days of King Arthur sitting at the Round Table with the Beatles, and John singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

We drove down the road toward the Seventies, leaving her slowly behind, looking for a tire chain in the snow with her brother waiting patiently beside a blue pickup truck with its Age-of-Aquarius paint job starting to flake.

So the story ends. Although brief, seemingly artless, and lightly told in a style matching the content's superficial slightness, “Tire Chain Bridge” means more than meets the casual eye, but what? Surely one must push beyond Edward Halsey Foster's opinion that the story illustrates an ability to laugh good-naturedly at the world's left over hippies.²³ True, the narrator's retrospective glance back does appear to offer a biting (though hardly acerb) assessment of the decade's foibles and delusions. Its heroes and villains, once as large and seemingly eternal as the New Mexican mesas, barely survived the decade, and—like the narrator's road, which disappeared into “a premature horizon”—they have already vanished into legend. Yet what sort of legends have they left us? Is the Age of Aquarius a fit substitute for Camelot? Are the Beatles the best the period could serve up in the way of heroes worthy to sit beside Arthur and his knights? Is “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” what we have in lieu of Morte d'Arthur?

If a parable, the lesson of “Tire Chain Bridge” would seem to be that the Sixties was a time of hopeless searching and of passive complacency: both inadequate responses to a cold world in which life exists, like this story, between death and dissolution. Further, these quests, however solemn and sincere, were worse than hopeless: they were so absurd as to be unbelievable (“‘What?’ I said, not quite hearing or maybe just not believing …”). The boon sought was trivial, the seekers caricatures of knights errant capable of mistaking a used tire chain for the Holy Grail. But if the searches were ludicrous, the alternative response was an exercise in misguided smugness: to wait beatifically in the assurance that “everything's just fine” while another conducts one's search, seeks one's solutions. Hoping to salvage a three-dollar investment but oblivious to his truck's slow corruption, the brother would seem to be the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Similarly, the Age of Aquarius itself—self-satisfied, commercialized, soon bogged down in trivialities and (like the Beatles) in internal feuding—was already beginning to chip and fade even as it was being proclaimed a fait accompli.

Such a reading follows Brautigan's recent critics in their efforts to free his work from a too-narrow and perhaps spurious identification with the counterculture.²⁴ But I think the reading just offered does not tell the entire story. In the first place, metamorphosis into legend is not necessarily a shameful fate; to seat the Beatles beside Arthur may be a means not of undercutting their stature but of enhancing it. And with its acid-induced celebration of wonder, of emancipation from an overly repressive and joyless sense of reality, “Lucy in the Sky,” the lay of Woodstock Nation, may be in its way a fitting successor to the songs of the troubadours, an appropriate anthem for the Children's Crusade of the Sixties.

But in terms of a close reading of Brautigan's story, it is perhaps more important to note that the Indian couple is heading not out of but into bad weather, and so the tire chain is well worth looking for: it could save their lives. To see the chain only in terms of its meager monetary worth discloses not only a faulty but a dangerous value system, just as it is wrong to fault the brother for worrying more about the chain than about his pickup: for want of the chain, the truck may be lost. Moreover, direction of motion is problematic here. Although the Indians seem to be dawdling “in the middle of nowhere” and the narrator ostensibly heading toward better weather, the road he travels is, like the year in which the story is set, a bridge into the Seventies, a decade equated in the opening and closing paragraphs with death—Joplin in 1970, Morrison in '71, Johnson in '73—and with disintegration: the flaking paint, the Beatles' death as a group in 1970, the evaporating sensibility of the Sixties. This dissolution hits closer to home for the narrator in that he and his “long since gone girlfriend” broke up after their travels together; and it is emphasized structurally by the girlfriend's disappearance into an infrequent “we” after paragraph six, the only paragraph in which she is spoken of.

Yet looking back to tell his tale, the narrator recalls as his talismanic figure not his girlfriend, not the mesas, not the Indian ruins he was looking for and presumably found, not the decade's dead or disbanded culture heroes, but a woman “looking for a tire chain in the snow.” It is she who orients his perspective on the past. The narrator, apparently, cannot recall this woman without the accompanying thoughts of death and deterioration framing her story, yet in recollection her eyes “[echo] timelessness,” placing her symbolically among those mesas that “had been witnesses to the beginning of time.” Just as she stands alone in the snowy landscape—her patient searching akin to neither her brother's inertia nor the narrator's heedless forward progress into the Seventies and the end of the road—so she stands apart from the decade's famous dead and their failed heroics.

Tire chains are, of course, a means of controlling one's movement along dangerous routes. The woman's search becomes, then, a defiance of death, a search for control in a deadly environment. There is no reason to suppose she enjoys her cold, lonely task, undertaken possibly only to please her brother, who lingers metaphorically closer to the Seventies, content to let whatever will be, be. Yet unlike him, she acts, purposefully if hopelessly, her actions sounding a small triumph of life over death, her conviction that the chain is “here someplace” becoming, however unconvincingly or absurdly, a denial of death: a denial echoed by the story's surface tone, which implies that nothing terribly fearful or serious is here at issue.

However, a sorrow underlies the story's placid surface. This sadness derives not so much from the narrator's necrology or wistful recounting of things past as from his recognition of the futility of the woman's paltry stay against destruction (and, by extension, of the limits of his own death-defying art). Her seeking may bridge the loss surrounding her, but the narrator has located these structurally peripheral memento mori at the story's thematic center. He has anchored his story-proper—of the salvific bridge the woman's action erects—in death at both ends: in the physical deaths with which “Tire Chain Bridge” begins and in the symbolic, spiritual death with which it ends. This latter anchorage involves the extinction of a way of seeing, of imagining the world: possibilities flatten out and dead-end, like the mess-topped horizon behind the narrator's forward-fleeing Jeep. Structurally, then, “Tire Chain Bridge” gives in to death. And so it is no wonder that the narrator's style has been affected by his acknowledgment of death's centrality, of the limits of control, of the losing battle recollection as an artistic method wages against entropy. And consequently, it is no wonder that the story should sound so flat and artless, that beneath its surface calm should be heard a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”

The story, in fact, would seem to deflate its own implicit pretensions as a stay against decay, just as and because it undermines the promise of the woman's seeking. Yet if seeming to succumb to the death it argues is inescapable, “Tire Chain Bridge” acts upon us as it does only by virtue of its remaining an accomplished fact even while proclaiming itself a fading, futile, gesture. The story's telling establishes a small, coherent world of order, and, through its direct engagement of death, “Tire Chain Bridge” permits the “fruitful yearning” that alone allows newness and hope to come.²⁵ Perhaps Becker is correct when he writes that, in the face of death's inevitability, “The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force” (p. 285). The woman has fashioned herself; the narrator, his story. It would seem that, like his creator, he cannot do otherwise.

VII

Several years ago John Clayton complained that Brautigan's “politics of imagination,” with its implied hope of “salvation through perception,” was not only insufficient but dangerous because its vision might seduce readers into abandoning the struggle to make this world a better place.²⁶ One can understand Clayton's objection, yet he is wrong to dismiss Brautigan's work as unrebelliously or merely escapist, as lacking a social consciousness. Clayton's error lay in missing the centrality in Brautigan's fiction of death and the anxiety an awareness of death engenders. This awareness is ineradicable; as the narrator of one short story observes, “you cannot camouflage death with words. Always at the end of the words somebody is dead.”²⁷ Death-obsessed, Brautigan's characters find they must dissociate themselves from a culture that both throws death constantly in their paths and fails to give it meaning. These characters typically retreat into private life-enhancing religions, but habitually this ploy does not, as in Trout Fishing or “Tire Chain Bridge,” engage life-and-death fears head-on and fruitfully; rather, it intensifies that hopelessness and numbness that make death so fearsome within the establishment. A year ago, Richard Brautigan committed suicide; why, I would not presume to say. His work, however, continues to forward an especially severe critique of American society, one that moves beyond politics into prophecy, implicitly sounding a call for repentance, for a turning from death toward life.

Notes

1. Notebooks 1914-1916, 2nd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 75e.

2. The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973). Further references are to the paperback edition (New York: Free Press, 1975) and are included parenthetically within the text.

3. See, for example, Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Ihab Hassan, Contemporary American Literature: 1945-1972 (New York: Ungar, 1973); and Jack Hicks, In the Singer's Temple: Prose Fictions of Barthelme, Gaines, Brautigan, Piercy, Kesey, and Kosinski (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1981).

4. Brautigan's characters as dropouts have been the subject of much commentary. See one example, John Clayton, “Richard Brautigan: The Politics of Woodstock,” New American Review, 11 (1971), 56-68; Terence Malley, Richard Brautigan, Writers for the Seventies (New York: Warner, 1972); W. T. Lhamon, Jr., “Break and Enter to Breakaway: Scotching Modernism in the Social Novel of the American Sixties,” boundary 2, 3 (1975), 289-306 and Manfred Pütz, The Story of Identity: American Fiction of the Sixties (Stuttgart J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1979).

5. My discussion here is much indebted to Becker; see pp. 198-99 particularly.

6. “The Wherefores of How-To: Pascal, BASIC, Call Up a Literary Tradition,” Harper's, March 1984, p. 92

7. A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964; rpt. New York: Delta / Seymour Lawrence, 1979), p. 18. Further references are included parenthetically within the text.

8. Trout Fishing in America (New York: Dell, 1967). Further references are included parenthetically within the text.

9. See, for example, Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967) and Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984).

10. “Rembrandt Creek,” in Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), p. 42.

11. According to Frederick Hoffman, fictions positing no hopes for an afterlife often, in attempting to articulate their “mortal no,” work to convert time into space. See The Mortal No: Death and the Modern Imagination (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964).

12. Brueggemann develops the notion of prophecy sketched here in his book The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978).

13. See Kermode, p. 17.

14. Brueggemann, p. 113.

15. Malley, pp. 104-09.

16. In this quotation, Becker is summarizing Alfred Adler. See Adler's The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (London: Kegan Paul, 1942), chap. 21.

17. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), p. 136.

18. In Watermelon Sugar (1968; rpt. New York: Dell, 1973), p. 65. Further references are included parenthetically within the text.

19. The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971; rpt. New York: Pocket Books, 1972). p. 53. Further references are included parenthetically within the text.

20. Even earlier, Vida had mellowed to the point where Foster (keeper of the caves and arranger of the abortion) could make her laugh by swearing, “My God, ma'am, you're so pretty I'd walk ten miles barefooted on a freezing morning to stand in your shit” (p. 78). That Vida can laugh at such a remark is particularly revealing, for as Becker explains, “excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams” (p. 33).

21. Malley, p. 75, and Charles Hackenberry, “Romance and Parody in Brautigan's The Abortion,” Critique, 23, ii (1981-1982), 34.

22. In The Tokyo-Montana Express (New York: Delacorte / Seymour Lawrence, 1980), p. 94. Because the story is so short (running from p. 94 to p. 97), I will not include page references in the text.

23. Richard Brautigan (Boston: Twayne, 1983), pp. 120-21.

24. The two most recent book-length studies of Brautigan, for example, assert among their principal intentions the desire to free the novelist from the critical error of reading him primarily in terms of Sixties concerns. Foster in his Preface claims that “Brautigan's best works were in fact never quite what they were alleged to be. Although they certainly do reflect a special time in American history, the time they reflect has little to do with America in the late 1960s and early 1970s.” Marc Chénetier, Richard Brautigan (New York: Methuen, 1983), offers the thesis that Brautigan “has always been much more akin to the metafictionists of the seventies than to the naive flower-children of what I should like to call the pre-Nixapsarian sixties” (p. 16).

25. The phrase is Brueggemann's, p. 113.

26. Clayton, pp. 56, 59.

27. “The World War I Los Angeles Airplane,” in Revenge of the Lawn, p. 169.