Anonymous,1970

"Polluted Eden"
Anonymous
The Times Literary Supplement, 14 Aug. 1970, p. 893.
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.

Trout Fishing in America is playful and serious, hilarious and melancholy, profound and absurd. Its "characters" are scarcely less elusive and amorphous than its plot, which in traditional terms is nonexistent; and its emotional tone varies inconclusively from the poignant to the inconsequential. To describe it as a book written in a protesting spirit would give no sense of the light-hearted ripple of its pervasive humour; just as to label it some kind of quasi-surrealist comedy would be to miss the quite specific causes of its underlying sadness and anger. Such preliminary remarks perhaps suggest how idiosyncratic, how delightfully unique a prose-writer Richard Brautigan is.

Implicitly assuming a lost American Eden, Brautigan builds his book around a number of contrasts: between a hopeful past and a distressed present; between rural beauty and urban squalor, between natural paradise and social purgatory; between lilting imagination and lumpish reality. "The cover for Trout Fishing in America is a photograph . . . of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco's Washington Square . . . Was it Kafka who learned about America by reading the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin . . . Kafka who said, 'I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic'?" In place of that earlier, self-assertive confidence, Brautigan's world is permeated by a plain, cussed will-to-survive or by a merely haphazard continuousness. (Any "systematic" pessimism, such as was flaunted by a Californian predecessor like Jeffers, would be almost as ponderously inappropriate here as optimism.) As for health, in the cities there are cripples and winos; in the country hepatitis and the graves of the derelict-dead. A century ago Thoreau had Walden Pond for idyllic retreat; now, "a Walden Pond for Winos" turns out to be an insane asylum.

"Trout fishing in America", the entity which gives its name to the book is many things—a person, a state of mind, places, objects. One time it is a pen-nib: "I thought to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper." Such bright-eyed freshness characterizes Brautigan's writing about the natural world. It can have all the wondrous clarity of the best American writing in that mode. It appears, however, intermittently, for nature is on the way out, is no match for commerce, the wilderness is changing its dress from the natural to the industrial. Opening the book, we glance at Pittsburgh, where trout are made into steel, "used to make buildings, trains and tunnels"; we end up in the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, where wild animals, waterfalls, and stretches of a Colorado trout stream, stacked in piles outside the plumbing department, are being sold off at bargain prices.

Although a surgeon, a school principal, and even Maria Callas make fleeting appearances here, success and respectability are for the most part alien presences. This is a world of the failed and the disreputable; of shack-dwellers and dirt-farmers; of pimps. whores, and drunks; of the run-down, the left-over, the broken-up; of America's poor, tired, and hungry. It is a shabby world illuminated by rays of a marvellous compassion which would transform this reality of the poor and cast it "up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening Star." It is a violent world, too, haunted by the ghosts of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Billy the Kid. The "Supreme Executioner" poisons trout to a twitching death with port wine. A shepherd, looking like "Adolf Hitler, but friendly," leads his flock "lulled into senseless sleep" towards Stalingrad. And Jack-the-Ripper, disguised as the all-American pastoral dream, is reborn as "the Mayor of the Twentieth Century." Violence passes into political paranoia, as the surgeon inveighs against Socialized Medicine, and "the Red shadow of the Ghandian nonviolence Trojan Horse" falls across America. "You're better off dead, you Commie bastard," replies the storekeeper to a question about fishing in Cuba. "If you fish in this creek, we'll hit you in the head," says the sign. Two FBI agents keep permanent watch over a trout stream. The last chapter is "The Mayonnaise Chapter," sauce for a dead trout/

Brautigan tells his stories, his parables, his jokes, in a style of fine simplicity and economy. His sentences, whether soberly informative or wildly hallucinating, are seldom troubled by dependent clauses. He has a fondness for similes, both strikingly apt and superbly irrelevant. His heritage, in homage or parody, is completely American: there are echoes of Twain, Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, even of Erskine Caldwell and the Steinbeck of Cannery Row. And his flashing incongruities and rambling non sequiturs probably owe less to European surrealism than to Hollywood silent comedies and the general ethos of "psychedelic California." An American manner for American matter: a slender American classic.

In Watermelon Sugar adheres more closely to a narrative line than does Trout Fishing in America: it's easier to describe what happens in it, though perhaps no less easy to say quite what it's about. The narrator lives in the community of iDEATH, a "beautiful, gentle" place. It is an egoless world of vision and imagination, in which "our lives we have carefully constructed out of watermelon sugar and then travelled to the length of our dreams." The last of the tigers, who had methodically eaten the narrator's parents before his eyes, have been destroyed. All is watermelon-sugar-sweet: "we work it into the shape of this thing that we have: our lives." The sun shines a different colour every day: the favourite day is black and soundless. The narrator is writing a book, "one word after another". His girlfriend is Margaret: he falls in love with Pauline.

The sweetness is soured only by inBOIL and his gang of drunks, foul and fierce and dirty. They live in the Forgotten Works and rummage around amongst the debris of forgotten times, making whiskey out of forgotten things, like books. Margaret, jealous of Pauline, and no longer peaceful-sweet and tranquil-high, feels some kind of affinity with inBOIL and spends more and more time in the Forgotten Works; everybody else in iDEATH is repelled by him. inBOIL's uncomprehending hatred of the iDEATH community wells up within him, until one day he and his gang march on iDEATH, insisting "this isn't iDEATH at all. This is a just a figment of your imagination . . . You're all at a masquerade party . . . The tigers were the true meaninig of iDEATH".

So saying, these anachronisms from the Forgotten Works proceed systematically to mutilate themselves to death. "We've proved iDEATH," says the dying inBOIL - which is to say, presumably, that there is no iDEATH but death, that the only way to lose one's ego is to lose one's bodily life. Pauline mops up the mess, the inhabitants of iDEATH cart off the bodies in wheelbarrows and burn them along with all the Forgotten Works. Margaret hangs herself from an apple tree. Her funeral takes place on "the black and soundless day". As the fable ends, everyone is waiting for sunset at the close of the soundless day, so that sound and music and dance can begin again. Whether the dancing starts and everyone lives happily ever after, we will never know for sure.

In Watermelon Sugarhas the charm of the fairy story it almost is. But it has neither the emotional complexity, nor the imaginative ingenuity, nor the implicit historical and cultural awareness, not the acute and tough critical-mindedness of Trout Fishing in America. In important respects it really is more sentimental, less radical. In fact, many of the insights of the one book undercut the sugary values of the other; for until the poor and the broken inherit trout-fishing-in-America, the community of iDEATH will be "a masquerade party". In Trout Fishing in America Brautigan writes of a hippie playing poor in the California bush: "This is all very funny to her. Her parents have money". That is the dimension that is absent from In Watermelon Sugar.

It is good that two works of so gifted a writer, with so unpredictably inventive an imagination, are now readily available in this country. Brautigan is thirty-five years old and has written over the past decade several other books of poetry and prose. Let us hope that more of them will soon appear here, especially A Confederate General from Big Sur, with its splendidly outrageous hero, Lee Mellon, and its multiplicity of endings, eventually "186,000 ending, per second."

Belinski,1971

"Belinski on Brautigan"
P. X. Belinski
Georgia Straight, vol. 5, no. 211, 19-22 Oct. 1971, p.19.
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.

What is this book about? Well, on page 8 Richard Brautigan gives a list of 24 things of what it is about. "1. iDEATH (A good place). . . . 3. The tigers and how they lived and how beautiful they were and how they talked to me while they ate my parents and how I talked back to them and how they stopped eating my parents though it did not help my parents any, nothing could help them by then, and we talked for a long time and one of the tigers helped me with my arithmetic, then they told me to go away. I returned later to burn the shack down. That's what we did in those days. 4. The Statue of Mirrors. 5. Old Chuck. 12. The beautiful trout hatchery at iDEATH and how it was built and the things that happen there. (It's a swell place for dancing.). . . . 14. A waitress. 15. Al, Bill, others. 17. The sun and how it changes (very interesting). 18. inBOIL and that gang of his and the place where they used to dig, the FORGOTTEN WORKS, and all the terrible things they did and what happened to them, and how quiet and nice things are around now that they are dead. . . . 20. Margaret and that other girl who carried the lantern at night and never came close. . . . 22. My life lived in watermelon sugar. (There must be worse lives). 23. Pauline (She is my favorite. You'll see.) 24. And this is the twenty-fourth book written in 171 years. Last month Charley said to me, 'You don't seem to like making statues or doing anything else. Why don't you write a book? The last one was written thirty-five years ago. It's about time somebody wrote another book.'"

IN WATERMELON SUGAR is not about Fingers Scheinberg, kangaroos that speak French, Ed Sullivan playing Snoopy on Flip Wilson's first show of the '71 fall season, bananas (existential, symbolic or otherwise), or vaginal deodorant. Neither does Brautigan write about the plan of the sadistic army clique that runs Brazil and calls itself a government to tear down the entire Amazon rain forest. Ecologists are worried about that one. It's a project financed by the Amerikans. But enough of this humour, back to Brautigan I say.

The hero whose name is—"If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer. That is my name. . . . Perhaps it is raining very hard. That is my name." etc. etc.—The hero with many names lives in a shack near iDEATH. He has "a bed, a chair, a table, and a large chest that I keep my things in. I have a lantern that burns watermelon trout oil at night." In and out of the "piney woods" around iDEATH flow cold and clear rivers. "Some of the rivers are only a few inches wide. I know a river that is only [an] half-inch wide. I know because I measured it and sat beside it for a whole day. . . . We call everything a river here. We're that kind of people."

Near the shack is a bridge with a board that makes noise when you step on it. There are two kinds of people. Those who step on this particular board and those who don't. Margaret steps on the board everytime she crosses the bridge.

Around iDEATH (pop. 375) "are twenty or thirty statues of vegetables scattered here and there" including "the statue of an artichoke near the shingle factory and a ten-foot carrot near the trout hatchery." Organic foot freaks must have run wild in IN WATERMELON SUGAR speculates px belinski.

It is inBOIL (one word) who provides the DRAMATIC TENSION of the story. inBOIL and his gang, about twenty, "lived in a little bunch of lousy shacks with leaky roots near the FORGOTTEN WORKS. . . . They were no good." The kind of people who joined inBOIL's gang "would always be unhappy and nervous and shifty or have 'light fingers' and talk a lot about things that good people did not understand or wanted to. They would grow more and more nervous and no account and then finally you would hear them having joined inBOIL's gang and now they were working with him in the Forgotten Works, and being paid in whiskey that inBOIL made from forgotten things."

inBOIL used to live in iDEATH and Charley and Pauline knew him but then he went bad and moved down to the FORGOTTEN WORKS and many years passed and people joined him and every once in a while one of them would sober up and come to town to sell "forgotten things that were particularly beautiful or curious or books which we used for fuel then because there were millions of them lying around in the Forgotten Works . . ."

"Nobody knows how old the Forgotten Works are, reaching as they do into distances that we cannot travel nor want to." At the entrance "is the statue of a forgotten thing" and "a sign above the gate that says:
THIS IS THE ENTRANCE TO THE FORGOTTEN WORKS
BE CAREFUL
YOU MIGHT GET LOST

Margaret spends a lot of time in the Forgotten Works—'nuff said. The CLIMAX of the "PLOT?" occurs at the trout hatchery when inBOIL and his gang show up to commit a very messy Van Goghian mass suicide ritual. "The trout hatchery at iDEATH was built years ago when the last tiger was killed and burned on the spot. . . . There is a statue of the last tiger in the hatchery. The tiger is on fire in the statue." inBOIL and his buddies show up when Charley, Pauline, and others are standing around watching the tiger burn. "OK" says inBOIL, "this is what it's all about. You don't know what's really going on with iDEATH. The tigers know more about iDEATH than you know. You killed all the tigers and burned the last one in here. . . . That was all wrong." inBOIL proceeds to cut off his thumb with his own jack knife and drop "it into a tray filled with trout just barely hatched."

All his men cut off their thumbs.

"You all look silly," said Charley, "without your thumbs."

"It's only a beginning," inBOIL said. "All right, men. Le'ts cut off our noses."

They went on hacking off their fingers and ears. While they were all bleeding to death Pauline went to get a mop and pail to clean up the mess.

"Pauline started mopping up the blood and wringing it out into the bucket. When the bucket was almost full of blood, inBOIL died.

"I am iDEATH," he said.

"You're an asshole," Pauline said.

The DENOUEMENT of the story now happens. The story teller gets a preview of Margaret's suicide (she hangs herself from an apple tree with a blue scarf) by seeing the event in the Statue of Mirrors where "everything is reflected. . . . if you stand there long enough and empty your mind of everything else but the mirrors, and you must be careful not to want anything from the mirrors. They just have to happen."

PX Belinski cannot empty his mind enough to find out what it's all about. Please read the book and send in your ideas. All ears, thumbs, and fingers will be quick frozen and sent to Pakistan. No blue scarves or apple twigs need be sent. VENCEREMOS.

Blakely,1991

"Narrative Technique in Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar"
Carolyn Blakely
CLA Journal, vol. 35, no. 2, Dec. 1991, pp.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."

Britt,2011

"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.

Coleman,1970

"Finny Peculiar"
John Coleman
The Observer [London], 26 July 1970, p. 25.
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.

New readers start here. Mr. Brautigan is a 35-year-old American, living in San Francisco, and author of such mind-snapping titles as Lay the Marble Tea, A Confederate General from Big Sur, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace and Please Plant This Book. The photographs on the binding of the two works under review show him to be whimsical, given to quaint clothes, richly moustached: a gentle, over-age hippie of sorts.

It is with some trepidation that one broaches the slim volumes. The blurbs have already warned us that his "revolutionary prose style . . . a cult among the young, has begun to win the awed admiration of Establishment critics." Evidently, all this is to be taken with pinch of salt or, at least, watermelon sugar.

Trout Fishing is a pleasant surprise, though probably not so for aspiring anglers. It's a little as if Hemingway had stopped worrying about his masculinity, being a simple anecdotal ramble around memories and rural America. I suppose the thing it most reminds one of is a kind of vividly coloured quilt or counterpane, the squares of different stuff confidently stitched together to an end that is entirely personal but more than random. You trust the teller, not the tale, as he sews in a recipe for Walnut Catsup or the story of a man overrun by cynical rats of the splendid Trout Fishing Dairy of Alonso Jagen, running from 1897-1897: Alonso never caught a trout, but recorded his annual losses religiously. Fantasy peeps unsettlingly in and out. There is a very persuasive account of the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, which sells used trout streams and old waterfalls. This is an excellent and pretty original comic compilation by the relaxed standards of our time, streets ahead of Burroughs or Kerouac: the man is seen to be doing his own thing without fuss or stress.

In Watermelon Sugar apparently preserves a similar cool, but is much more nervous and ambitious beneath its repetitive surface. Words like "fine," "nice," "good," "great" are made to do an unconscionable amount of work. Here we are out in the sort of visionary territory the French surrealist Henri Michaux delighted in: Mr. Brautigan must surely have stumbled across something like that melancholy little piece, "Je vous éris d'un pays lointaut". At any rate, there is an extraordinary affinity. A tender community live peacefully in a place called iDEATH (sic); once there were tigers who ate the narrator's parents and helped him with his sums. Now there is Margaret, who hangs herself, and Pauline, who makes great pancakes. Buddies, led by inBOIL, inhabit the Forgotten Works; they cut off their thumbs, ears and noses and bleed to death—iDEATH, for all I know.

There may be an idea lurking, and Mr. Brautigan has a genuine gift for imposing the unexpected, a loner's vision. But this myth, slackly sustained, dismisseth me.

Foster,1992

"Richard Brautigan's Utopia of Detachment"
Jeffrey M. Foster
Connecticut Review, vol. 14, no. 1, Spring 1992, pp. 85-91.
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.

For as long as there has been the quest for social order, there has been the quest for the perfect social order, or utopia. While this search for and development of the ideal community is not, of course, an exclusively American venture, the American contribution has been substantial and, at times, profound. From the settlements of the Shakers, Dunkards, and Amana Society of the Huterian brethren to the utopian social experiments of the nineteenth century, such as Brook Farm and New Harmony, to the communal living popular during the 1960s and 70s, America has produced some impressive examples of the model community. Equally impressive are the studies into the aspects of utopia by such American writers and social reformers as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, Robert Owen, Albert Brisbane, and B.F. Skinner. Notwithstanding the scope and fervor of the utopian experience in America and abroad, however, the search continues as it always will. Therefore, we must remain open to all theories concerning the establishment of the ideal society. And some of the more important and creative ideas can be found in an often overlooked work of American literature: Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar.

In Watermelon Sugar, a novel that sprung directly from the counter-culture of the 1960s, depicts a commune, iDEATH, which is based on the philosophy that man must lead a passive existence, remaining detached from strong emotional bonds to people and all worldly things. With this philosophy as its foundation, iDEATH proves to be a truly functional utopia. Some critics, though, insist that In Watermelon Sugar portrays a faulty and misguided utopia. But, in fact, iDEATH is a highly successful community in that each of its members, in acknowledgement and acceptance of man's intrinsic inability to understand or control the world, looks to nature for guidance; each member becomes what Harvey Leavitt calls "an instrument of nature" (20). It is this understanding and acknowledgement and transformation which is the mission of iDEATH. So, when Patricia Hernlund states that "the delicate balance in iDEATH . . . is the delusion that they [the communal members] can maintain a neutral position disjunct from violence and death without also cutting themselves off from life's fullness" (16), she is missing the entire point of the novel. Life, for the men and women of iDEATH, cannot revolve around a person's thoughts, emotions, and desires because these can only lead to deception, betrayal, and disappointment. Therefore, the denizens of the commune turn away from the temporal, illusory, and transitory world, looking instead to nature as the higher authority that will lead them into the perfect order and peace found only within the natural process.1

The narrator of In Watermelon Sugar is the quintessential member of the commune. In his character we see contentment, gentleness, honesty, and the detachment from extreme emotion that is the foundation of the iDEATH philosophy. All these traits are possible because of the deliberate killing of the "I," the self, as suggested by the name "iDEATH." With this destruction of the self, the individual can "enter a finer existence" (Foster 86). This existence is a collective one, which includes not only all the other members of iDEATH, but everything carried by the flow of nature. A significant point of this philosophy is that individual death is not an issue because nature's cycle of birth and death guarantees the regeneration of the species.2 This regeneration of life is illustrated in the novel by the construction of the trout hatchery on the exact spot where the tigers had been burned to death: The walls of the hatchery "went up around the ashes" (109). So, the annihilation of the self is not an act of destruction because at iDEATH, life springs from death. The narrator demonstrates his allegiance to this philosophy by surrendering his name in the chapter titled, "My Name," in which he says, "My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is on your mind" (4). He then continues this show of trust in the reader:

"If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.
"That is my name.
"Perhaps it was raining very hard.
"That is my name." (4)

The narrator's desire for anonymity suggests the objectivity with which he can recount the events of iDEATH. Because he remains emotionally detached from the world, and because he, like the others at iDEATH, does "not understand envy and hate" (Foster 81), he can be trusted as an honest and reliable narrator. Says Foster:

"Thoroughly disinterested and detached from the confusion and expectations of our conventional world, he [the narrator] is able to see and record experience with an honesty few of us could match. And he has his reward, for if he experiences no great emotion and does not know the "meaning" of the events he reports, he is a genuinely contented man." (87)

Therefore, if we take him to be an honest narrator with nothing to gain by lying, we can believe all that he says about iDEATH, his life, and the lives of others. When he tells us that iDEATH "is beautiful" (1) and that the "delicate balance" there "suits" them (1), and that he has a "gentle life"(2), we must trust him. In believing that he and the other inhabitants of iDEATH are content with their "gentle" lives, we can only believe that they are both products and crucial elements of a utopia that "really works." (Foster 80)

This gentleness, which is a reflection of man's placid and peaceful acceptance of his place in the natural order, comes up often in In Watermelon Sugar: "The Gentle Cricket" (14), "sweet and gentle" (57), "a gentle fragrance" (33), "arms gently resting" (22), "a gentle life" (2), a very gentle statue" (14), and "cold and gently at rest" (145). And we see this gentleness when Margaret, after hanging herself from the apple tree, is "gently" lowered by Margaret's brother and the narrator (144). When Patricia Hernlund continues to criticize the commune by accusing the people there of being "devoid not only of pleasure but of all feeling" (16), she is ignoring the fact that this gentleness is an expression of love toward all existence. Gentleness arises naturally from man's acceptance of his relationship to the universe, of his place in the cosmological order. If man had no feelings for the world, he would not have the desire to treat his fellow humans and the world itself with gentleness; he would ignore them or even, if we take an existential viewpoint here, kill himself. As further discussion of the role of gentleness, we have this observation by Edward Halsey Foster:

"The people here are so gentle that we would assume that they would be highly vulnerable; paradoxically, they are not vulnerable at all. As the narrator says of one of the commune's members, she 'had a lot of strength gained through the process of gentleness.'" (82)

Gentleness. being a process, grows and evolves; it is not a trait of neutral, apathetic and static people.

While gentleness represents a peaceful acceptance of the state of things, it does not necessarily mean that there is a profound emotional tie to the people or community. The citizens of iDEATH, while always tending toward gentleness, are still detached from the individual components of nature and the universe; their love is for the whole of existence, not for its parts. Their lives don't revolve around emotions. Instead, they center on "the most commonplace and trivial things" (Foster 86), one of the most ubiquitious of which is food. The prominence held by food at iDEATH is suggested by the numerous food-oriented titles: "Vegetables," "Dinner That Night," "Strawberries," "Until Lunch," "Bacon," "Good Ham," "Apple Pie," and "Meat Loaf." We glimpse in this "Meat Loaf" chapter the lack of strong emotion that characterizes the people of iDeath:

"The waitress came over and asked what we were having for lunch.
'What are you boys having for lunch?' she said. She had been the waitress there for years. She had been a young girl there and now she was not young anymore.
'Today's special is meat loaf, isn't it?' Doc Edwards said.
'Yes, 'Meat Loaf for a gray day's the best way,' that's our motto,' she said.
Everybody laughed. It was a good joke.
'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." (129)

The repetition of "meat loaf" and "said" relays the feeling that the people of iDEATH are either passive or bored. But considering the peacefulness and security that the people enjoy, boredom can't be much of a problem (Leavitt 24). We may be mistaken in using the term "boredom," though, because it can be difficult to distinguish between ennui and passivity, especially for those of us who have never experienced true peace.

The danger of not keeping this distance from the world becomes obvious when we look at the lives and suicides of inBOIL and Margaret. Both of them reject the philosophical foundation of iDEATH by allowing themselves to become attached to the past, a past they wish they could resurrect. inBOIL wishes he could "bring back iDEATH" (111), the true iDEATH when the tigers were alive, and Margaret, who cannot forget her love for the narrator, has a "broken heart" (130). Such strong bonds to the past can lead only to disappointment and, in these two cases, to suicide.

Margaret and inBOIL's attachment to the past is made clear by these two character's interest in the symbolic Forgotten Works. It is here, where inBOIL lives and Margaret spends "a lot of time" (77), that the dead past lay, a past which includes all of man's errors, all of his unkept promises to himself, all of his delusions of power and knowledge, and all of that wisdom that brought him nowhere. Harvey Leavitt puts all of this into biblical terms:

"The original tree of knowledge led to a civilization remote from nature, but Adam II puts temptation outside his gates; the contamination cannot come from within, for a conscious act must be made to pass through the gates with the warning to the Forgotten Works." (24)

Leavitt adds that the Forgotten Works stand for "knowledge and curiosity," which can only lead to the destruction of iDEATH, just as they led to the fall of Eden (23). Man cannot profit from the junk in the Forgotten Works, and most of the people of iDEATH don't care to try: "Nobody knows how old the Forgotten Works are, reaching as they do into distances that we cannot travel nor want to" (82). Although inBOIL and Margaret often venture into the Forgotten Works, they always return empty-handed.

InBOIL believes that his suicide will bring back iDEATH—the true iDEATH. But his belief is based on a perverted sense of the philosophy of the commune. To inBOIL, the death of the self is physical, but to those who understand what iDEATH is really about, this death is psychological. When inBOIL kills himself by cutting off all his sensory organs except his tongue, he is saying, according to Patricia Hernlund, that "the people of iDEATH have cut themselves off from reality of the senses, except taste, to avoid being bothered by life" (12). This certainly is part of inBOIL's message, but it springs from a faulty interpretation of what iDEATH is about. The people of the commune, as we've discussed, are not trying to avoid life; they are merely attempting to avoid the extreme sensory stimulation that can lead to an attraction and addiction, as it were, to the temporal world. Emotion should not come from the excitement of the senses and the brain. Instead, it should flow from what Harry Leavitt calls "natural determinism" (23). That is, any emotion that rises from man's illusory abstraction of the world is forbidden. This includes man's foolish love of a past he believes he can somehow relive.

In contrast to the tragic implications of being hopelessly entwined in the deceptive world, we see the benefits of remaining detached when the commune's members witness inBOIL's suicide. Pauline "was not afraid or made ill by this at all"; she only got "madder and madder and madder" (113). And all Charley has to say is that he doesn't think that inBOIL has "proved anything" (113). Other people of iDEATH, upon hearing the news of inBOIL's death "were relieved," and the air was filled with a "festive Spirit" (118). Everyone realizes that inBOIL was a threat to the security and peace of iDEATH. But Patricia Hernlund has a complaint concerning the community's lack of concern:

"That Brautigan intended the reader to feel disgust as inBOIL and his followers mutilate themselves is obvious—the scene is memorable, particularly when juxtaposed to the inhuman lack of pity shown by the people of iDEATH . . . What we do not expect are onlookers with no response except anger." (12)

First of all, Brautigan has set up inBOIL as the antagonist of the novel. As Marc Chenetier puts it, "inBOIL preserves codified knowledge, violence, [and] perpetual reference" (38). Just what should our feelings be, then, no matter how bloody the end, when the enemy of a peaceful community gets what's coming to him, especially when it is at his own hand? Secon, why should we expect no response but anger? The entire novel deals with the advantages of distancing oneself from those emotions which cause dangerous feelings of attachment to worldly things and events. It should be no surprise that the denizens of iDEATH react the way they do.

So, too, should we not be surprised when the narrator displays no emotion as he watches, via the Statue of Mirrors, Margaret's suicide. The narrator's unwavering ability to separate himself from the events of the world is witnessed not only in the matter-of-fact tone of his narration of Margaret's hanging, but also in the fact that the suicide comes to us as just another event in a series of "normal" events at iDEATH:

"One of the kids pitching had a good fast ball and a lot of control. He threw five strikes in a row. I saw Fred directing his crew in the making of a golden plank of watermelon sugar. He was telling somebody to be careful with his end.

"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 her 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." (135)

The narrator's lack of emotion should not anger us, and it should definitely not surprise us. Extreme human emotions only lead, as Margaret's suicide tragically demonstrates, to disappointment and depression. And these may well push one to suicide. But the detachment of the narrator and the other members of iDEATH protects them; it allows them to turn away from the deceptive and ephemeral world. They are then free and open to receive the guidance of nature. And, again, it is this passive subordination to the natural process that is the basis of the iDEATH philosophy.

This philosophy is not just iDEATH's; it is also Brautigan's. His friend, Keith Abbott, tells us about Brautigan's view of life:

"Richard saw the world as populated with dead things, and the past a marble replica of breathing life. What sincerely perplexed him was how other people could worship these. He poked fun at such delusions, with a playful, Buddhist vision of the transitoriness of things." (132)

Indeed, this "transitoriness of things" is a main concern of In Watermelon Sugar. Brautigan has created characters who believe as he believes: the world is not for man; man is for the world. That is, man must subordinate his emotions, his desires, and his intellectual curiosity to the will of nature if he is to live harmoniously within the cosmological order, and if he is to face death with dignity and without struggle against the natural process.

Another important issue of In Watermelon Sugar, says Abbott, is the Buddhist "sense of the world's endless capacity for misleading us" (172). Really, we mislead ourselves. Through our intellects, we foolishly believe we can understand and shape the world around us. But our minds are fallible; we are fallible. To demonstrate this intellectual impotence, Brautigan gives us the tigers. Harvey Leavitt explains their significance:

"The tigers incorporate the human qualities of rational discourse and instinctive survival. The tigers symbolize the destructive ambiguity of man, his instinct for survival and the rational nature that allows him to explain his acts of violence in terms of survival." (19-20)

One of man's problems, then, is feeling the need to create and destroy simultaneously. And he attempts to rationalize this but falls short because his mind cannot handle contradiction. So, man should not try to explain anything because his mind is faulty. The tigers, in explaining to the narrator that they had to kill his parents in order to survive (39), reflect man's need to explain away his violence in terms of self-preservation. Also, Brautigan uses the tigers to illustrate how man's brain can be in error, even concerning simple matters. When the narrator, as a child, asks, "What's eight times eight?" a tiger answers, "Fifty-six" (40). The only way to avoid making mistakes is to give up the self to determinism, to the flow of nature. This is one of Brautigan's main concerns in the novel. Man must accept his subordinate, passive role in the workings of nature; he does not have the power to create anything on his own but illusion.

This passive role will lead to a gentle and contented life. But some critics, as we've seen, see things differently. Brooke Horvath, for example, calls In Watermelon Sugar

"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." (446)

And once again we have Patricia Hernlund who says, "Brautigan reminds us that a worse thing than violence and death could be a life without pity or joy" (16). And Neil Schmitz believes that this "balance that suits them also stylizes them and the result is a disfiguring of their humanity" (120). These critics have apparently failed to acknowledge the benefits to distancing oneself from the world, the dangers of becoming too attached to the past, and the philosophical views of Brautigan himself. And though Brautigan's views have been called Buddhist in nature, his vision may also be called Christian:

"The road to Christian salvation, we are told, begins when we turn our backs on the world about us, and that is exactly what the good people in Brautigan's novel have done. They have taken all the violence, evil, and cruelty of civilization and shut it and its history away, forever, in the Forgotten Works." (Foster 88)

Whether or not iDEATH presents a religious statement or not, we can see that the members of the commune have willfully forfeited some part of what makes them human, and they have given up their individuality, in keeping with the tenets of iDEATH, in order live a collective life with all people and with all things of nature. By detaching themselves from strong emotional ties to the world, they are avoiding illusory enticements and accepting their place in the natural process. Because they are not struggling to alter the facts of life and death, they are at peace. Because they accept both life and death equally, the people of iDEATH lead gentle, placid, and contented lives unburdened by fear and denial.

Such is Richard Brautigan's utopian vision. Although In Watermelon Sugar may never have the impact of Thoreau's Walden, and although Brautigan may not be considered a Thomas More or an Emerson, the value of Brautigan's novel should not be minimized. Indeed, as long as the pursuit of the perfect social order continues, and as long as man wishes to live in pure harmony with himself and the cosmos, no contribution is without significance.

Notes
1. Interestingly, if we substitute God for nature as the "higher authority" here, we have a central theme of Dante's Divine Comedy.
2. Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.
3. From this title, we could begin a discussion of the novel as a biblical allegory. For one such discussion, see Harvey Leavitt's article cited in t his paper.
4. As far as I can tell, besides one instance of "volunteered" and one of "asked," "said" is the only verb of dialogue used in the entire novel. This repetition of "said" creates the atmosphere of ennui, which is a crucial ingredient in In Watermelon Sugar and other Brautigan works.

Works Cited
Abbott, Keith. Downstream from Trout Fishing in America: A Memoir of Richard Brautigan. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1989.
Brautigan, Richard. In Watermelon Sugar. 1968. New York: Dell-Laurel, 1973.
Chenetier, Marc. Richard Brautigan. London: Methuen, 1983.
Foster, Edward Halsey. Richard Brautigan. Boston: Twayne, 1983.
Hernlund, Patricia. "Author's Intent: In Watermelon Sugar." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction. 16 (1974): 5-17.
Horvath, Brooke. "Richard Brautigan's Search for Control over Death." American Literature 57 (1988): 434-55.
Leavitt, Harvey. "The Regained Paradise of Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 16 (1974): 18-24.
Schmitz, Neil. "Richard Brautigan and the Modern Pastoral." Modern Fiction Studies 19 (1973): 109-125.

Furbank,1970

"Pacific Nursery"
P. N. Furbank
The Listener [London], vol. 84, no. 2158, 6 Aug. 1970, pp. 186-187.
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.

In New York City they have nightmares: on the West Coast they dream day-dreams. They also cultivate visions there, of course; but the extent to which West Coast culture has turned its back on Old Word values shows most in its childish and woolly-lamb side—its fancy lights and dressing-up, its cult of Tolkein and Pooh.

It is to this side that Richard Brautigan's two novels, now reaching us a few years late, belong: it is best to think of them as children's books. In Watermelon Sugar, at least is avowedly a tale for good children. It is about a race of good people who live in shacks made of watermelon sugar, in a place where the light changes colour every day. All round their dwellings there are rivers, some of them only a few inches wide. Theirs is a water-culture: they stand their statues in the rivers and bury their dead in luminous coffins on the river-bottom, and when the last talking tiger was killed, they built a trout-hatchery on the spot. Every day they meet for enourmous breakfasts in a place called iDEATH, which is both a house and a river-landscape; then they go off to gentle labour, carving statues and working in the Watermelon Works. The only threat to their contentment is inBOIL and his terrible gang, who drink whisky and lurk about, in a beastly manner, near the Forgotten Works (a vast ruinous complex, symbolising the Old World, piled mountain-high with things like books, whose use has been forgotten).

With Trout Fishing in America we return to the real United States, exploring its creeks and assorted matters by the way. The narrator's first experience with trout-fishing is abortive, what he has taken for a waterfall turning out, on closer inspection, to be a flight of white wooden steps. Still, he perseveres, on foot and in metaphor. There is much playing dumb with the reader:

"I bought a pair of tennis shoes and three pairs of socks at a store in McCall. The socks had a written guarantee. I was supposed to launder the old socks and send then in with the guarantee. Right off the bat, new socks would be on their way, traveling across America with my name on the package. Then all I would have to do would be to open the package, take those new socks out and put them on."

Also digressions, like the story of Trout Fishing in America Shorty, a legless wino whom the narrator and his friends plan to pack off to Nelson Algren in a shipping crate, with a couple of cases of sweet wine: the stickers would read: 'Handle this wino like he was an angel.' By the category-joke beloved of collage and the Goon Show, Trout Fishing in America becomes a character and joins the act. He writes letters addressed to 'Dear Ardent Admirer' and gives his reminiscences of Lewis and Clark discovering the great Missouri Falls. When a friend shows the narrator his new 30-dollar pen—the only pen to have, for its nib takes on the writer's personality—the latter reflects what an even better nib trout fishing in America would make, 'with a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper.'

It should not be nice, but is—I think because Richard Brautigan, odd progeny of Isaak Walton and Paterson, is really fond of his toys, and the virgin America they commemorate, and not just of himself. His is a most entrancing kind of pop writing, the prettiest of wallpapers for that great nursery by the Pacific.

Gillespie,1974

"Rats Reviews"
Bruce R. Gillespie
SF Commentary: The Independent Magazine about Science Fiction, 40 May 1974, pp. 52-54.
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.

Trout fishing in America is an activity. Trout fishing in America is a place. And somehow Richard Brautigan makes us believe that this magical phrase represents all the activities, people, and places that he discovers during his travels around America.

TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA is a group of forty-seven short episodes, none of them longer than eight pages. The publishers say that this is a novel. It isn't, but is more than a collection of short stories. The book describes some events and observations that occurred to the narrator while he and his woman and child and friends wandered around rural America. The publishers say that Richard Brautigan become "a cult among the young." Well, he's over thirty (born in 1935), and he's not a cult with me, but like many of America's young people he and his friends are interested in living a free, non-urban, non-technological life close to nature.

The narrator of TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA says that when he was a child his grandfather told him about trout fishing. "He had a way of describing trout as if they were precious and intelligent metal." When the narrator sets out on his travels, he spends much of his time looking for good trout streams. He investigates many other long-forgotten delights of rural America—although most of these bits of paradise are never quite what they seem.

"One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland," he writes, "at a distance I saw a waterfall come pouring down off the hill. It was long and white I could almost feel its cold spray." Even as a child he was always looking for the perfect spot to go trout fishing. At that age he thought he had found it. Next morning he got up early, took slices of white bread to make into doughballs for bait and set off. As he approached the creek he saw that it did not look right. When he came close enough, he found that it wasn't the trout stream he had been looking for. It wasn't even a stream. "The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees. . . . I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood."

In TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA most of the ideal trout streams seem to turn into pieces of wood. Brautigan writes about Cleveland Wrecking Yard, where, he says, anybody can buy cheaply a used trout stream—all divided into bits. "We're selling it by the foot length," says the salesman at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard. "You can buy as little as you want or you can buy all we've got left. A man came in here this morning and bought 563 feet." The waterfalls sell for $19 a foot. The birds, fish, flowers, and insects come in separate lots.

Like many people today, the narrator tries to live a truly free life. Out to live off the land, he must fish for trout. But to eat the trout, he must kill them. So what's the difference between industrial polluters killing trout and fishermen killing trout?

Brautigan shows that he realises this paradox. The narrator and his friend catch trout and lay it on a rock. Instead of breaking its neck, the narrator's friend pours port wine down the trout's throat. "The trout went into a spasm. Its body shook very rapidly like a telescope during an earthquake. . . . Some of the wine trickled out of its mouth and made a stain on the rock. The trout was laying very still now. 'It died happy,' he said." The narrator says that it is all right for a trout to have its neck broken by a fisherman but "It is against the natural order of death for a trout to die by having a drink of port wine." Why?

One of the best episodes in TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA makes a hero out of a man who had gone fishing for seven years and hadn't caught a single trout. The narrator admires this man just as much as he admires people with the ability to catch trout.

One of the most likable characters in the book is an old man whose name is Trout Fishing in America. But before the novel ends, he dies.

This book has page after page of brilliantly epigrammatic prose, witty observations, funny stories, and meanings that might or might not be wise or terrifying. Somehow, all the pieces do form an entire jigsaw puzzle. Americans seem to love trout fishing—"this land is your land," and all that. But soon they'll destroy all their trout streams, all their sources of life. Even the people who celebrate nature, like the hippies who live in independent rural communities, help to destroy life. In Brautigan's song to freedom, there are many sour, funny notes of disappointment and death. But he sings so well that the tune comes out right anyhow.

The tune of IN WATERMELON SUGAR, however, does not come out right. It just comes out—sugary.

IN WATERMELON SUGAR is the story of an ideal counter-culture community, somehow existing in peace and contentment after the rest of industrial society has disappeared. (Presumably it wiped itself out.) "No one ever wrote a true novel about happiness," wrote Joseph Hone, and Richard Brautigan does his best to prove this right. This little heaven, iDEATH, is a dull place where most of the people we meet don't do much, and where even the most complicated conversations read like this: "'That was a wonderful dinner,' Bill said. 'Yeah, that was really fine,' Charlie said. 'Good stew.' 'Thank you.' 'See you tomorrow,' I said." And so on.

IN WATERMELON SUGAR becomes slightly more interesting when a group of rebels tries to ruin the community. However, the rebels must have been wrong all along, for eventually they end their rebellion by committing suicide without anybody doing very much to oppose them.

This is a fable that is written very simply, but it's duller than a sermon. How could the man who wrote this also have written TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA? Will the real Richard Brautigan please stand up?

Hernlund,1974

"Author's Intent: In Watermelon Sugar"
Patricia Hernlund
Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, vol. 16, no. 1, 1974, pp. 5-17.
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's In Watermelon Sugar has become a fad book, popular in college classes because students have heard that it describes "their" way of lie, and because their teachers have heard that Brautigan has achieved a desirable success in making no judgement—good or bad—about the way of life he presents, or achieved a lyric description of a successful counterculture, or written a book that succeeds on several grounds but has a "curious lack of emotion."

These viewpoints are unsatisfactory. Possibly the brevity and fast pace of the novel make it too easy to read superficially, but even at a fast pace the book has an unpleasant, negative effect. To propose that Brautigan intended to produce a negative statement of some significance warrants a thorough examination. However, proving negative intent is not a matter of a few references. The book, though brief, describes an entire society and its way of life, the life of the nameless narrator, and what the book jacket describes as "a story of love and betrayal." Brautigan presents his material in a fragmented time scheme that must be put into sequence before the details about the narrator and his society are established. Brautigan's division of the novel into three books is understandable; focusing on the time scheme on threee deaths reveals the reactions of the narrator and his society toward negative events and leads to a further revelation of the reactions toward positive events, completing the search for Brautigan's intention as it is revealed in the novel's effect.

There are four time sequences: the distant past, the narrator's life of twenty-eight years, the recent past of the narrator's twenty-ninth year, and the three days that constitute the present time of the novel. In the distant past, we find the beginning of the Forgotten Works—"nobody knows how old they are" (69)—then the cut-off date, 171 years ago, and after that several landmarks before the birth of the narrator. The cut-off date is a similiar device of science fiction and fantasy, in which the causative event can be a nuclear explosion or a simple rejection of the old ways for a new and presumed better way. Brautigan's new society has undergone some trauma and has rejected a past society. The Forgotten Works are all that remain of the society before the cut-off date. After that time came the tigers (12, 19, 58), the making of the vegetable statues (26, 58), and a progression of twenty-three books—the latest "thirty-five years ago" (9, 10). Significantly, three characters of the novel were born in this period, before the narrator. Brautigan gives us enough information to know that the narrator is twenty-nine (33, 35) and that Charley, inBOIL, and Old Chuck are much older.

The second sequence is the first twenty-eight years of the narrator's life. He lived with his parents in a shack by the river (33). "As a child" he sat on inBOIL's knee to hear stories "and Margaret was there" (62), presumably a child of the same age. When he was nine, the tigers came and killed his parents (33-5). He went to live in iDEATH at the invitation of Charley who, though he liked the tigers, felt that "we're going to have to get rid of them. Soon" (35). Hunting the tigers took about two years. When the last one was killed, brought to iDEATH and`burned, the narrator was approximately twelve, and Pauline—the youngest character in the book—was six (31-2, 82, 92). The next event definitely took two years: inBOIL went "bad." At the beginning, he went "off by himself to the trout hatchery." At the end he fought with Charley and moved to the Forgotten Works (61-3). As the years passed twenty men joined him (61). Pauline was still a child, but "Margaret grew up to be a very pretty young woman and [she and the narrator] went steady together" (21, 64). Since "going steady does mean "sleeping together" (128), the narrator and Margaret have, apparently, been lovers for at least one-third of thelr lives—nine years or more. During the latest five year of these years (or more) the narrator has been making statues (12).

The third sequence, during his twenty-ninth year but before the present time, is presented almost entirely in a flashback dream (68-102). The sequence begins on a Saturday about four months "ago" with signs of trouble between the narrator and Margaret (68-74). A month passes, with rumors that inBOIL is about to start something (75-77). The climatic events begin on Sunday when Charley asked inBOIL what he is up to (79). On the next day, Monday, the narrator decided Margaret was disgusting, refused to sleep with her, and later praised Pauline's painting; unable to sleep, he walked to the aqueduct and saw the girl with the lantern—not knowing she was Pauline (76-85). On Tuesday, when Margeret had gone to the Forgotten Works before dawn, inBOIL and his gang arrived at iDEATH during breakfast and killed themselves. At Pauline's suggestion, their bodies were burned in their shacks. As she watched, Pauline hugged the narrator, who noticed her body. Then Margaret, emerging from the Works, was told the happenings (86-102). The significance of the narrator's turning away from Margaret and inBOIL's death will be discussed later, but two points must be made here. The narrator and Margaret broke up, then inBOIL committed suicide, then the narrator started "going steady" with Pauline, in that order and with no overlap. Further, no necessary or implied connection exists between Margaret and inBOIL in the actual sequence of events, and three characters indicate that we were not to see a connection: Margaret herself, Fred, and Pauline. The narrator, however, tries to convince the reader that a connection exists. We are not told when Pauline started sleeping with the narrator, but we do know they were sleeping together two months and three weeks after inBOIL's death (37).

Pauline and Fred have been concerned about Margaret's broken heart for some time (27, 100), but they report their concern to the narrator and urge him to help Margaret during the fourth and last sequence, the three days that are the "present time" of the novel. The narrator spends Tuesday writing. After dinner, Old Chuck recounts a dream of the tigers. Later, the narrator makes love to Pauline, and she, apparently reminded by Old Chuck's dream, also talks about the tigers. After Pauline is asleep, the narrator cures his recurrent insomnia by walking. Reminded by Pauline's talk, he remembers how the tigers killed his parents (1-37). Wednesday is divided in two parts (38-61 and 105-129), interrupted by the narrator's dream about the past four months. After breakfast on this day, the narrator goes to the watermelon works with Fred, then goes home by way of the river where a new tomb—soon to be Margaret's—collapses during construction. Back at his shack, the narrator destroys a note from Margaret, plants seeds, muses, and then takes a nap leading to his recurrent dream (the third time sequence). He then goes to lunch and to the statue of mirrors, where he sees the image of Margaret's suicide. That evening after dinner, Margaret's room is bricked up and her body placed in the trout hatchery to await burial. The narrator and Pauline again make love, and the narrator is again insomniac. Thursday, the black and soundless day the narrator likes best, is spent on Margaret's funeral and preparation for the dance that will follow after sunset, when sound returns (130-138).

The four time sequences, through the point of view of the nameless narrator, are fragmented into a multiplicity of detail. The fragmentation is also true of setting; but once the details of both are put in order, we can see a fully realized world. The society is composed of 375 people distributed between a town, where most live, a group of outlying "shacks," and a place named iDEATH, which has characteristics of both a house and an outdoor landscape. The society is "in watermelon sugar," at a low-lying point between hills and the Forgotten Works. The climate is temperate, and the vegetation is abundant, watered by a great many rivulets, creeks, and rivers. The main crop is watermelon. In our world, watermelons are singular as a food product with no by-products except pickles made from the rind instead of the pulp. At iDEATH, however, the pulp is processed at the watermelon works to produce watermelon sugar, which is then used to make and build almost everything in the community. Though lighting in the tombs is provided by foxfire (51), the street lights and the many lanterns burn a mixture of wateremelon sugar and trout oil (25, 28, 83). Since we are not told of any special process, we must assume the trout are killed to obtain the oil for the mixture. Some natural, unprocessed materials are also used, such as pine and rocks or stones, but the community depends heavily on its local industry, the watermelon factory, to satisfy its needs. Barter is used instead of money (65); horses, not automobiles are used—for work rather than carrying people, for no one travels out of the environs of the community; they travel "to the length of our dreams" because they "have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar" (1).

The setting mixes familiar with strange in another use of fantasy or science fiction technique, but only the initial break with "this world" is difficult; the details of "that world" are tangible and consistent. Every Tuesday is gold—a calendar effect. Everyone uses the same building materials—no one experiments. The inhabitants have not returned to nature so much as they have developed an efficient, closed community. The community is arranged around a well-defined set of principles and procedures. Charley who "knows about everything there is" (7), has been leader or spokesman for a long time. Some seventeen years ago he lit the match to burn the last tiger (31), and "a few short months ago" he lit the match to burn inBOIL and his gang (60, 100). He also decides who performs what work. At the end, he decides what kind of funeral Margaret will have and presides when her room is bricked up. Presumably, everyone contributes to the community. The twelve men at the watermelon works, including Fred, contribute a great deal and are fine craftsmen if not artists. The workers at the shingle factory, the tomb crew, the doctor and schoolteacher, the waitress, all contribute. Old Chuck lights lanterns. The young girl brings strawberries; Pauline and Al cook; Charley leads. But the narrator's life as a contributor to the community is not particularly successful. He is the only living artist and bad at his work: "I had never had much luck at statues. I was thinking about getting a job down at the Watermelon Works" (75). But he does not. Finally, a month before the "present time," Charley tells him: "You don't seem to like making statues of doing anything else. Why don't you write a book?" (9). The narrator does not decide to write a book; he lacks the volition. Who writes the book is unimportant; whether it is good or not does not really matter—Al is a poor cook, too. People may be curious about the book, but the principle of the society is that people stay busy to stay out of mischief (13), a Puritan and Victorian work ethic. The need is for contribution, not excellence, and yet the only people who offer less to the community than the narrator are Margaret, whose art form is collection, and inBOIL, who breaks the only taboo—he speaks against the community.

Although inBOIL moves to the Forgotten Works, he has not left the community or been punished. The Works may be viewed with some restraint, as reminder of the past trauma, but they are also viewed as a useful scrap heap and a curiosity. The millions of old books become fuel after inBOIL uses them to barter for food, and a forgotten thing is used as a bridge in the living room of iDEATH—again at inBOIL's initiative (22, 65). The curiosity is seen in Charley's and Pauline's reading the "old" books (10, 21), in the "new book written about the Works (9-10), and in the forgotten things collected by Fred (6-7, 22-23, 45), the narrator (57), and Margaret, who finds them "beautiful" (73) or "cute" (78). In contrast, the narrator thinks the forgotten things are "kind of ugly, if you want the truth" (73). Only he finds an unpleasant one (71). Only he communicates a sense of revulsion, at variance with the rest of the society and his own actions. The revulsion is not so much against the Works as it is against inBOIL and his gang who live there and "drink the stuff" (78). They brood against the community; that is repulsive to the narrator.

The impression of scope or coverage of a society with a long hisory and a narrator with a complex llfe is a valuable effect, but it is not necessarily a result of Brautigan's intention for the novel as a whole, unless other clues lead us to an understanding that the author has consciously handled his material toward a given end. One such clue is the use of the narrator's viewpoint as the filter through which the reader learns the time sequences and knowledge of the society. We have seen several instances, so far, of the narrator's negative character and his unreliability as an informant: he argues a connection between inBOIL and Margaret which is not borne out by the time sequence of the words of other characters; he alone sees the Forgotten Works as repulsive; within the society, he lacks contribution, lacks volition, and lacks satisfaction. These negative characteristics do not make him totally unreliable so much as they make him a typical member of his society with exaggeration of certain traits.

The division of the novel into three books, each having death as its central episode, is the device that focuses our attention on the flaws in the narrator and his society. The pattern of death is intentional, for the novel is written in these three units that cross time sequences to fix our attention on the theme. Although paradoxical, the division into three units of death does perform the function of gathering and explaining the fragmented time sequences and details, the contradictory aspects of the narrator's viewpoint, and the variety of attitudes the society takes to ward off certain emotions.

The first book, "In Watermelon Sugar," establishes the setting, introduces characters, and gives exposition—all in fragmented time—but it has its strongest effect on the reader in the one scene where the tigers kill and eat the narrator's parents. Brautigan is quite explicit about the distrubing aspects of the deaths:

"My parents didn't even have time to say anything before they were dead. . . . One of the tigers started eating my mother. He bit her arm off and started chewing on it. (33)

". . . He took a bite out of my father. (34)

"'We're awfully sorry we had to kill your parents and eat them.' . . . 'All right,' I said. 'And thanks for helping me with my arithmetic.'" (35)

Brautigan's selection achieves the effect of disgust in most readers—disgust at the eating more than at the killing itself. The juxtaposition of the reader's reaction with the lack of reaction in the tigers and the narrator serves to intensify the scene by making it more memorable and more disturbing.

Book Two, "inBOIL," develops the character of Margaret in preparation for the final book, but the build-up to inBOIL's immolation in the trout hatchery is the focus of the book. InBOIL claims that his suicide will demonstrate the meaning of iDEATH, that he is sacrificing himself and his gang for the understanding of the inhabitants. That Brautigan intended the reader to feel disgust as inBOIL and his followers multilate themselves is obvious—the scene is memorable, particularly when juxtaposed to the inhuiman lack of pity shown by the people of iDEATH. Their lack of response is like the narrator's when his parents are being chewed. As with the tigers, so with inBOIL; we expect their violence. What we do not expect are onlookers with no response except anger. Though the society does not like to interfere with anyone doing his own thing, it goes out of its way to prevent people from hurting each other. Yet the group that does not want to let Al know he cooks carrots badly is perfectly willing to let a group of men commit ritual suicide. Pauline "just kept getting madder and madder and madder." The narrator, however, has the proper "male" reaction, lacking anger, nausea, fear, or emotion. Charley, speaking to his dying brother, says only: "I hope you think you've proved something. . . . I don't think you've proved anything" (94-95). The society has gone too far into its traumatized state to be reached by inBOIL's immolation. The reader, however, still has a response and sees the symbolism as inBOIL and his men systematically mulitate their senses. They cut off the opposing thumb that allows humans to grasp; then the nose, the sense of smell. In the process, one man puts out an eye, part of sight. Hearing is next, followed by the rest of the fingers. Only the sense of taste is unmentioned. inBOIL's message is clear: the people of iDEATH have cut themselves off from every reality of the senses except taste, to avoid being bothered by life.

The third book, "Margaret," amply demonstrates the communal deprivation. We have judged her contribution to the society as she pursued her hobby, until it became a hobby horse; but the narrator judges it as mysterious, then suspect, then dangerous. He also uses it as a reason for leaving Margaret. The two other people whose actions and speech we know, Fred and Pauline, do not see her actions as dangerous; they are concerned and do not think the narrator has behaved correctly. If we are to believe the narrator, the last straw in his relations with Margaret was her "performance at dinner," which "really disgusted" him, and is the basis for his saying that everyone has turned against her. The scene is too simple to contain so much meaning for the narrator. She explains, "I don't know anything. I just get forgotten things down there. They don't tell me anything. They're always very nice to me." Then "Margaret went right back to eating her carrots as if nothing had happened" (80). Nothing had happened, even if part of the community thinks Margaret is connected with inBOIL. The narrator, who should know her better than anyone else, can see her as virulent, worthy of nothing.

But is it that? Or is he simply a moral coward who could not face Margaret with an accusation because he had no reason at all except ennui for getting rid of her? He told her nothing except that he was involved with Pauline (27). Could the note he received from her on Wednesday morning have been a suicide note? He says "it did not please me and I threw it away, so not even time could find it" (57). Later in the morning, while thinking of Margaret, he naps and has a dream he has had before (60), in which we learn of the events leading to Margaret's suicide—a counterpoint, a microcosmic parallel, to inBOIL's suicide. We see Margaret's position as a woman in this society: she does not contribute food, the narrator rejects her body, and she dies. Her hobby intensifies as the narrator's difficulties with his statues increase. What were her choices if Charley had not assigned her to cooking and she had no children after nine years or more? She uses her loneliness in the only creative way she has—collecting. In our society she would at least have had a few rights as a common-law wife. Even in a simple tribe some mechanism would have allowed for "putting away" a spouse, but she is denied such an emotional confrontation in iDEATH. Everyone knew of her rejection, even Pete at the Watermelon Works (46-47). Yet the narrator did not know or understand Margaret's desperation, since he refused to receive it and deal with it. His lack of reaction is a displacement technique: he hates inBOIL; therefore, he associates Margaret with inBOIL; therefore, he can abandon, ignore, and forget her. Seen this way, Margaret's actual death is anticlimatic, for the narrator has considered her "dead" for months. By watching her suicide in the Statue of Mirrors and not even bothering to confirm it, he is removing himself from the former pattern of his life, from responsiblity, and from death. With Margaret's suicide we finally understand that the narrator and his society do not respond with pity to the deaths of human beings because they do not have that emotion. Anger and rage are the only strong emotions in the whole novel, excepting the three scenes in which people cry for the tigers (31), Margeret cries while she is killing herself (113), and Pauline cries after Margaret is dead (121). The narrator's non-reaction to Margaret's hanging is to report it to Fred, to go with Fred to Margaret's brother, and to wait with the brother while Fred—not the narrator or her brother—cuts Margaret down.

If the unravelling of the time sequences reveals the workings of the society, the unpleasant life of the narrator, and his typifying flaws of the society, then the three deaths reveal the society's defense against negative emotions. To stop here would be unfair. Surely, if Brautigan is presenting an entire world, he must deal with the positive emotions of pleasure or joy. Three avenues are open for such positive pleasures: sex, eating, and the intellectual pleasure found in faith that the life at iDEATH is suitable and good.

If the narrator cannot find satisfaction with Margaret, did he find sexual pleasure with Pauline? Pauline is willing. Though she denies that she ever thought he would be more than a friend (41), she physically encouraged the narrator at inBOIL's funeral (99). Yet when they make love, neither Pauline nor the narrator expresses much pleasure or satisfaction. Even though the narrator speaks of her body in lyric expressions, they are not particulary good lyric expressions. For example, while Pauline is dreaming of a lamb, the narrator describes her body as a bed of flowers. The description goes sour when he continues speaking of her body by saying "perhaps that is where the lamb sat down" (37). No loves exists between them, just the fulfilling of bodily needs. The sense of touch is used but yields no emotion in their first love-scene: "I liked Pauline's body and she said that she liked mine, too, and we couldn't think of anything to say. . . . After making love we talked about the tigers" (30-31). The next love scene is even colder. On the night after Margaret's suicide, the narrator wants to make love with the lantern lit so that he can use the sense of sight. But if we remove that from the scene, it sounds more like masculinity problems than love. "Her eyes were red from crying. She looked very tired." Later, "she put her head back on the pillow and smiled ever so faintly. . . . After while [sic] I let Pauline go to sleep." Then the narrator looks down at her and boasts: "Strange, how well Pauline has slept since we have been going together" (127-128). Yet his insomnia remains and takes him to Margaret's body. He is, as usual, completely unmoved:

"I went to the trout hatchery and stood there staring at the cold undelightful body now of Margaret . . . There were some fingerlings darting around in a tray that had a lantern by the edge of it, illuminating Margaret's face. I stared at the fingerlings." (129)

If sex does not produce joy, perhaps the sense of taste may give pleasure. A full catalogue of eating and drinking is not necessary to show that these actions do not yield gratification or pleasure but are instead given negative connotations. Brautigan obtains the effect in two ways, using repetition to create an air of boredom:

"'Today's special is meat loaf, isn't it?' Doc Edward said.
'Yes, 'Meat loaf for the gray day is the best way,' that's our motto,' she said.
Everybody laughed. It was a good joke.
'I'll have some meat loaf,' Fred said.
'What about you?' the waitress said. 'Meat loaf?'
'Yes, meat loaf,' I said.
'Three meat loaves,' the waitress said." (107)

In addition to repetition, Brautigan uses juxtaposition. Food is again the vehicle most frequently used for contrast. Pleasant eating is juxtaposed with something unpleasant so that pleasure is negated by a sudden introduction of an opposing emotion:

"'This stew really tastes good,' Fred said. He put a big spoonful of stew in his mouth, almost spilling some on his overalls. 'Ummm—good,' he repeated, and then said under his breath, 'lot better than carrots.' (17)

"I was still holding the spoon from the mush I was eating. . . . One of the tigers started eating my mother." (33)

All of Brautigan's techniques—repetition, juxtaposition, fragmentation of time and setting, use of strange lyricism and elements from fantasy and science fiction—come to us through the point of view of the nameless narrator and gradually accumulate toward characterization for negative effect. We obtain the final clue to Brautigan's intention for the novel as a whole when we come to the society's one claim to pure pleasure: communal pride. The narrator repeatedly tells us that he and the others like living in watermelon sugar, that it does suit them; or, in a more defiant vein, "there must be worse lives." Indeed not. 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 watermelon sugar may be literally the same as dying, since we are told of only one birth to "balance" twenty-two suicides.

Seen in this way, In Watermelon Sugar is more than a fad book. It is not a description of "the students' way of life" or a lyric description of a successful counterculture. Brautigan judges his utopian commune and finds it wanting, and the "curious lack of emotion" is the very reason for the negative judgment. Brautigan reminds us that a worse thing than violence and death could be a life without pity or joy.

Kusnír,unkowkn

"Diversity of Postmodern Fantasy: Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar and Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father"
Jaroslav Kušnír
***?***.
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.

In her study on fantastic literature entitled Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (Routledge, 1981), Rosemary Jackson understands fantasy as a "mode" and as literature of both subversion (of the established order, of the dominant discourse as well as the dominant power structure) and desire (a desire to undermine this order, dominant discourse and power structure). According to her, "The fantastic is a literature which attempts to create a space for a discourse other than a conscious one and it is this which leads to its problematization of language, of the word, in its utterance of desire. The formal and thematic features of fantastic literature are similarly determined by this impossible attempt to find a language for desire" (Jackson 1981: 62).

She further observes that in connection with Freud's theory ". . . it is possible to see the modern fantastic as a literature preoccupied with unconscious desire and to relate this desire to cultural order. . . " (Jackson 1981:62). Similarly, according to Irwin "A fantasy is a story based on and controlled by an overt violation of what is generally accepted as possibility; it is the narrative result of transforming the condition contrary to fact into 'fact' itself" (Irwin 1976: x).

Jackson understands "the mode" as a device of identification ". . . structural features underlying various works in different periods of time" (Jackson 1981: 7), as ". . . a range of possibilities out of which various combinations produce different kinds of fiction in different historical situations" (Jackson 1981: 7). She further explains that "There is no abstract entity called 'fantasy'; there is only a range of different works which have similar structural characteristics and which seem to be generated by similar unconscious desires" (Jackson 1981:8).

Drawing on Freudian psychological theories of desire and fantasy, Todorov's, Irvine's, Rabkin's, Brooke-Rose's and other theorists' views, Jackson gives an analysis of different kinds of fantasies (from the Gothic tales through Victorian fantasies, to fantastic realism up to contemporary postmodern fantasies). She understands it as literature of both subversion (of the dominant discourse, culture, vision of reality) and desire (fantasy through subversion being the expression of desire). At the same time, she suggests a different kind of fantasy represented by contemporary postmodern and especially metafictional writing. In her view, such a literature is ". . . manifestly unreal . . . fabrication . . . lie" (Jackson 1981: 164). In her view, these ". . . metafictions are set apart, taking pleasure in their manifest unreality by presenting only a series of reversible representations" (Jackson 1981:164).

Despite such fantasy is different, in its nature, from traditional fantastic literature or literature with clearly identifiable and separable fantastic elements, in my view, it can also be understood as literature of both subversion and desire. On the one hand, it subverts both traditional representational discourse within the history of literary representations, the forms of literary representations which, speaking in John Barth's terms, have been exhausted (Barth 1967), and, at the same time, it subverts the dominant cultural order and morality. It is, on the other hand, being however playful and linguistically experimental, a literature of desire, a desire to offer an alternative vision of reality to one which seems to be corrupted and manipulated by modern culture, media as well as modes of behavior. It is different from previous fantasies because it subverts the very nature of the referential function of the language and offers, in an experimentally playful way, an alternative vision of reality both from the formal (linguistic, thematic) and social (behavior) point of view. Many postmodernist and metafictional authors writing in this way use different forms of fantasy in order to, on the one hand, subvert traditional "myths", and, on the other hand, to relativize the unitary, pseudo-objective vision of reality as well as to emphasize plurality of its perception.

In my paper, I will analyze textual strategies that form a fantastic nature of both authors' texts, and, at the same time, I will discuss the subversive function of these fantastic elements. Based on the analysis of these novels, I will try to point out different kinds of postmodern fantasy as manifested in these works.

Both postmodern novels use fantasy in different ways. Richard Brautigan's novel In Watermelon Sugar depicts seemingly real characters, although the setting is purely imaginary, fantastic or even supernatural and behavior of people psychologically unconvincing, harmonious, and even idealized. Creating a picture of idealized life in the natural environment within the idealized life in iDeath community and contrasting it to the world of the inBoil Gang (representing the world of violence and physical reality), Brautigan thus creates an idealized romantic vision of reality. This reality seems to be an alternative to the brutal presence of physical reality (and realism as a writing method). The fantastic nature of Brautigan's world in which tigers eat parents, but, at the same time, talk and teach children arithmetic, in which the brook runs through the house and the material things (bridge, clocks, books), are constructed of watermelon sugar is further supported by Brautigan's use of linguistic play. They are especially metafictional elements which problematise the referential function of language itself, and, in this way, construct what could be labeled, using Rosemary Jackson's terminology, a linguistic fantasy. Patricia Waugh understands metafiction as ". . . a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality"(Waugh 1984:2). These metafictional elements and especially an apparent fictitious and ambiguous status of a narrator undermine not only a make to believe approach to reality, but also the whole process of signification. In this way Brautigan creates a fantastic world par excellence within which his use of symbolism and allegory creates a multilayered semantic connotations I will deal with later. The narrator in Brautigan's novel In Watermelon Sugar comments on his own status in a following way:

"I guess you are kind of curious as to who I am, but I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.
If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago; Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was raining very hard.
That was my name. . .
Perhaps it was around midnight and the fire tolled like a bell inside the stove.
That is my name."
(Brautigan 1968: 4-5)

Undermining its own status as a physical entity, Brautigan' s narrator refers to himself as to purely imaginative, fictional being or even an abstract phenomenon (in addition to the above, being also an inability to answer the question; being writing a short story etc.). At the same time, this narrator emphasizes reading as a creative process in which the meaning is never given, but constructed in the reader' s mind in the process of reading and perception of constructed reality. Such an approach evoking doubts about real physical reality is further supported by another metafictional element present in the composition of the book and is connected with the narrator again. Not only the narrator, but also the reality he is speaking about is manifestly unreal, fictitious, a fictional story which he admits at the very end of the novel: "They were ready to go. It would only be a few seconds now, I wrote" (Brautigan 1968: 166).

In addition to this, the narrator himself is a writer writing an indefinite book which he never finishes but which seems to be, quite paradoxically, the book the reader has just read. Brautigan's fantasy thus becomes multilayered—from the perspective of the narrator and his writing with the use of metafictional elements it is evident that a reader does not read a real life, but a fictional story about it. This is a postmodernist construction of reality. At the same time, within this fictional story his use of fantasy does not only support its fictitious status, but also creates an alternative vision of reality and point out at man's withdrawal from the nature. At the same time, it celebrates the power of imagination and contrasts it to the contemporary materialistic and emotionally, spiritually and economically corrupted world.

For such a construction of fantasy and meaning Brautigan uses a dominant image which is a watermelon sugar representing an imaginary fantastic world (watermelon sugar is a diversity of both abstract and material things); the community of iDeath representing an idealized life and a peaceful harmony with nature. These images are juxtaposed to the inBoil gang representing brutality, violence and the physical material world as contrasted to idealized and peaceful one represented by the iDeath community. The inBoil gang "lived in a little bunch of lousy shacks with leaky roofs," "drank whiskey brewed from the things they found" (Brautigan 1968:76).

InBoil himself ". . . looked like a mess" (Brautigan 1968: 84) and "He became very removed from people and then his speech would be strange, slurred and his movements became jerky" (Brautigan 1968:71). These characteristics are in direct contradiction with the peaceful and harmonious life in the iDeath community that finally leads to its self-destruction. The physical unmotivated self-destruction means a symbolic destruction of evil, physicality and materialistic corrupted world. Brautigan thus, in this way, symbolically points out a power of imagination and fantasy as a contrast to the materialistic corrupted world. The Forgotten Works, a strange place where the garbage, waste, and by-products of commercial production are stored, represents such a world. At the same time, the image of the Forgotten Works along with inBoil gang, as I have mentioned, represent a physical world and create a contrast to imaginative and fantastic world of watermelon sugar and iDeath community. This world of iDeath does not represent an aggressive, or violent protest and critique of the dominant social order and contemporary society, but offers a peaceful, non violent alternative and both vision and way of life of almost a Tolstoyan nature.

Thus, this Brautigan's postmodern fantasy suggesting an alternative way and vision of life undermines the established understanding and perception of reality (and, at the same time, dominant social institutional model). At the same time, it is an expression of desire to establish a different understanding of reality, moral and social values. This new "sensibility" transgresses the boundaries of social institutional pattern and suggests freedom, freedom of the body and the mind that is understood as a freedom of the liberated spirit in Brautigan's novel. Some critics associate the transgressive imagery associated with the fantastic world of watermelon sugar used in this novel with the liberating spirit of the hippie and Beatnik community of the 1960's (Boyer 1987). On the structural level, all the characters in this novel have no doubt about the fantastic world they live in. That is why, using Todorov's terminology, this fantasy in its very nature could be labelled as marvellous in which ". . . supernatural factors do not arouse any distinctive reaction either in the characters or in the implicit reader" (Todorov 1970: 87).

Leavitt,1974

"The Regained Paradise of Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar"
Harvey Leavitt
Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, vol. 16, no. 1, 1974, pp. 18-24.
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.

On first reading Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar, one senses that something extraordinary has happened to the form of the novel, to the intellectual and aesthetic conventions to which we have become accustomed. Brautigan's work is jigsaw puzzle art that demands more than close reading; it demands an active participation by the reader, a reconstruction of a vision that has been fragmented but warmed by a private poetic sensibility. Three avenues of accessibility, the novel as a utopian instrument, the analogues to the Garden of Eden, and natural determinism converge and create a frame for Brautigan's novel.

Brautigan has created the utopian dream for the post-industrial age of affluence, beyond IBM, and finally beyond curiosity. His longings, unlike other utopian ideals, have no claim on progress, no uplifting of the material condition of man, no holy wars to redistribute the physical wealth, no new metaphors for survival based on the securing of human necessities, and no emotional nirvanas. Other utopian dreamers have responded directly to the events of their age, but Brautigan is responding to the cumulative ages of man, and no response can be significant for him that does not place the entire past on the junk heap (the forgotten works). Nothing will do but a fresh start, with a fresh set of assumptions; In Watermelon Sugar takes us back to the beginning, for this is Eden, with its syllabic and accented soul mate iDEATH, reconstructed.

The phrase from which the book draws its title is the initial indicator of Brautigan's reconstructed garden, for "In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again." We enter the novel during the "again" stage, man's second great attempt to obtain an earthly paradise; the unnamed narrator implies the failure of the past and indicates the social purpose of his creation when he states on the first page. "I hope this works out." Although we shall not attempt here to discover all of the Biblical analogues, we should point out that the narrator of the novel gives us a list of things he will tell us about (IWS, pp. 8-9) and that the list encompasses twenty-four items, the same number as books in the Hebraic version of the Old Testament. In addition, the novel is divided into three books, again paralleling the current division of the Old Testament into three sections. In themselves, these similarities are not important, but when coupled with the physical descriptions of the rivers (IWS, p.2), an analogue to the four rivers traversing Eden, and with the natural setting of piney woods, watermelon fields, and golden sun, the natural beauty and simplicity of an Eden seem apparent. The narrator also describes his simple shack made from natural materials and tells us, "I have a gentle life" (IWS, p. 1).

All leads to the obvious, that the narrator is Adam II, that he originated not from the dust, but is rather a creation of rational man-eating tigers who have eaten his parents and left him an orphan. The new Adam emerges, not out of the dust of a universe in chaos, but out of the debris of a systematic and highly developed social order. His navel is intact, but the past is becoming less and less intelligible to him; the forgotten works are a British Museum of discards, the books and wisdom in disarray and intellectually inaccessible, and the physical world a shambles of objects without meaning. The new Adam finds his past as bewildering as the land outside Eden was to the old Adam. Adam II is created, not by the hand of God, but out of a disintegrating social order whose meaning is lost. It is not a world in which God is dead, for God has never existed. Its creative force is scientific, rational, and competitive, in which emotions run high over rights of ownership for materials of survival, and the creation is its antithesis. The tigers incorporate the human qualities of rational discourse and instinctive survival (they eat Adam II's parents not out of malice, but out of hunger). The tigers symbolize the destructive ambiguity of man, his instinct for survival and his rational nature that allows him to explain his acts of violence in terms of survival. As civilization becomes more and more sophisticated, the connections between violent acts and survival become less direct, until finally man loses the ability to connect his deeds with his goals. Such perverted nature is one that needs to be eradicated in Brautigan's cosmos.

If one sees civilization as an elaborate rationalization process, as Brautigan apparently does, then the return to the good life must allow for the destruction of the accoutrements of the rationalistic society. The forgotten works are the destroyed society; as the new society builds it must discover its own realities. The dimensions of iDEATH are circumscribed in new ways from the vanished structure. If man faces up to his biological nature, if he realizes that sophisticated civilized acts grow out of biological instincts and drives, then he must connect his acts directly to his goals in order to return to the essential of existence. Better yet, he must allow himself to become an instrument of nature. From Brautigan's vision, then, glows a natural determinism that is exhibited throughout the novel.

In Watermelon Sugar, like the Old Testament, is a work of teaching and guidance. It sets up the law and creates the myths of the future. In place of a tree of knowledge, we now have the forgotten works, both of which test man's obedience and his curiosity. Instead of the fruits of Eden, we now have statues of beans, of carrots, of rutabagas, of grass. In Brautigan's Eden man does not merely accept what nature has given; his artistry is commanded to build monuments to nature. Margaret is a combination of the apocryphal first wife of Adam, Lilith, a demon who flies away from him, and Eve, who tempts him with knowledge. We clearly see Brautigan's vision when Adam II turns down a piece of apple pie (IWS, p. 109) and moments later Margaret hangs herself from an apple tree (IWS, p. 113). Adam II has resisted knowledge and curiosity. Completely free from the dead Margaret, he has Pauline, the new Eve who is totally integrated into nature. To carry the character analogue a bit further, inBOIL and Charley, the brothers, become the Cain and Abel figures of iDEATH. InBOIL cuts himself off from the communal family, immerses himself in the remnants of the forgotten works, loses himself in the numbness of alcohol, and loses touch with nature; he and his gang end up by mutilating their sense organs (IWS, p. 94), cutting off thumbs, noses, ears, eyes, in an act of defiance that is willed self-destruction, the only outcome for those who are not commanded by nature.

Brautigan's teleological system, like the Old Testament's, creates a systematic social and ethical order. The most literal plot device, the Adam II, Margaret, and Pauline triangle, hints at jealousy, and a kind of joyous celebration of life pervades the novel. Aside from the direct jealousy and the implied joy, emotion seems to have little place in iDEATH. Although Margaret and inBOIL feel boredom, jealousy, and hatred, their emotions are the stuff that myths are made of, the straying sheep, the peoples of Sodom and Gomorrah, the original sinners fallen from grace. The commune, however, remains untouched by their falls, and iDEATH as a philosophical system remains intact with Adam II and his Eve unsullied by Margaret and inBOIL. Whatever passes for emotion in the novel, then, is evolved out of natural determinism. After Margaret's death, nature imposes a mood and a state consistent with funereal dignity. It is black, soundless Thursday, and while preparations for a dance go forward, nature imposes a dignity on the death scene. No strong emotion occurs in love making either. A short chapter (IWS, p. 37) demonstrates the sensory nature of experience rather than abstract romanticizing about it. Pauline says in her sleep, "The lamb sat down in the flowers . . . The lamb was all right." Again, safety when one is integrated with nature, but always through the use of metaphors from nature and not filtered through the self. Adam II in the same scene talks of his touch upon her and her smell—direct sensory experiences—natural, growing out of his biological nature and not charged with abstract emotion. Adam II foreshadows the absence of emotion in the new society when he relates the story of his parents' death at the hands of the tigers and reveals his preoccupation with arithmetic (IWS, pp. 33-5).

The physical world of iDEATH and the countryside reveals the teleology further. Watermelon sugar, the building material of the society, is not only physical, but a state of mind. It is the material out of which planks and windows are made, but it is also the product out of which a life style is made. Its natural source, its sweetness, its infinite capacities make it a metaphor for the good nature, the nature with which one may become fully integrated. Watermelon sugar is also an extension of the fluid space and time of the novel. One is never certain of his location in space, whether inside or outside of buildings since the flow of events in the novel and the differences between a natural setting and housing made of natural materials is never clearly delineated. Here again, the setting is totally integrated with natural determinism.

Rivers, bridges, trout, and foxfire tombs all speak to us of iDEATH. The land is laced with rivers, operating as a multiple symbolic structure. They are fertile and life giving, but they are also the burial places for the dead. Like the trout hatchery that is built on the ashes of the immolated tigers, we have death and instant rebirth. The pattern continues after Margaret's death, for soon after a new baby is born in the town. Again the connection with the dead past is made, and hope emerges only when the new world is built on top of the ashes of the past. Burial in the river is the new immortality, for in the glass shrines the dead are a part of the world of iDEATH and their memory is never lost. The new Eden, without a God, produces a pantheistic integration. Like the trout, the dead become part of the river, totally incorporated into their environment, and witnesses to the new Eden. The trout, like watermelon sugar, are Brautigan's idealized nature, and they furnish the reader with a normative standard. The bridges, too, help to establish iDEATH's connection with Eden (IWS, pp. 13-15). The abandoned bridge on which the tigers were killed was set afire and partially destroyed, but the two ends remain intact. Symbolically, Eden is one end and iDEATH the other. What is between needed to be destroyed. The real pine bridge is contrasted with what has been abandoned: on it are lanterns shaped like the faces of children and trout, innocence and idealized nature, while on the abandoned bridge are tiger lanterns, rationalistic carnivores.

Like Eden's, iDEATH's enemy is knowledge and curiosity. Perhaps implied in the assumptions of every utopian work, activity must cease when one succeeds in creating his perfection. The status quo must be maintained for all utopias; only the point at which existence is frozen makes them different. In Watermelon Sugar creates a non-authoritarian rule, an intensely self-disciplined society which limits its parameters consciously, while Eden is circumscribed by an outside authority. Brautigan's goals are substantially the same as those of the Old Testament, but he uses a humanistic rather than a deistic device to maintain iDEATH.

Natural determinism, like religion, demands giving up the self to an outside force. Control is shifted and incorporated into a trilogy of symbols emerging from the name of the commune, iDEATH: I death, id death, and idea death.

"I death" is an outgrowth of the literal communal setting, but it transcends that level and also demands that self be submerged in order to achieve an integration with nature. The first person pronoun is dead in a social order that makes itself conscious of the interdependency of its parts, in a world that knows no dominion of superior animals. Thus iDEATH is an Eden without the built-in supremacy order that was established for Adam I and Eve. Classification begets power, and power begets pride, and pride is an emotion. Emotion is mostly absent from iDEATH, and thus the built-in failure for the original Adam and Eve, which finally made them challengers for power, is eliminated in iDEATH.

"Id death" is a natural outgrowth of the previous ideas. In a supercharged world of identity crises, no one is in iDEATH, for only the sensory self is significant, not the psychological self, which is diminished in iDEATH. The libido is transmuted into the purely physiological, the superego derives from the past, which does not exist. Finally, the ego is an extension of I, which has been essentially banished from iDEATH. Again, Adam II has reshaped Eden and eliminated another source for the Fall.

"Idea death" shares its source with Eden from which knowledge is banished. The original tree of knowledge led to a civilization remote from nature, but Adam II puts temptation outside his gates; the contamination cannot come from within, for a conscious act must be made to pass through the gate with its warning to the forgotten works. Thus Adam II has learned from Eden again, although, as with everything else in iDEATH, sin and knowledge take a physical form rather than the abstract condition of knowing.

In many ways the new Eden is the Bible for the contemporary college generation, a generation that rejects man's mastery over nature, rejects intellectual rationalism, rejects authoritarianism, and emphasizes the natural elements in existence, embraces the environment, and lives collectively rather than individually. The novel finally becomes the new Genesis, the Bible for a new world, with new assumptions, that is carried in the hearts of the young. Such moral stricture according to Brautigan is naturally rather than divinely inspired. Like other utopias, iDEATH creates a sense of boredom, of inaction, and the mundane tasks of existence seem to pale before the activities of an inBOIL who acts out, who literally rebels at the world of pure sensation by his acts of sensory mutilation. Adam II as the passive chronicler is not made of the stuff that we have come to know in traditional prophets, but in a world of new assumptions, he is perhaps the archetype for the future. By any standard, most utopian novels are not exciting reading, and yet an emotional appeal that demands every man to speculate on a future good exerts a pulling force on the reader. Brautigan takes us a step beyond because he bends the language, he shapes a universe of half-inch rivers and grand old trout, statues of grass and a waste land that even the birds avoid. The poet is inseparable from the novelist, so utopia gains a new dimension.

Rohrberger,1986

"In Watermelon Sugar"
Mary Rohrberger
Masterplots II. American Fiction Series. 4 vols. Edited by Frank N. Magill. Salem Press, 1986. Vol. 2, 787-791.
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.

Author: Richard Brautigan (1935-1984)
Type of plot: Surrealistic
Time of plot: Simultaneously no time and all times
Locale: Simultaneously no place and every place
First published: 1968

Principal characters:
THE NARRATOR, an unnamed protagonist who is writing the first book to be written in thirty-one years in the community known as iDEATH
MARGARET, the narrator's previous girlfriend
PAULINE, the narrator's present girlfriend
CHARLEY, the leader of the community
inBOIL, Charley's brother

The Novel
In Watermelon Sugar is difficult to discuss in the language of ordinary rational discourse. For example, one cannot speak of time and space separately. If the novel is set in the present or in the distant past, then it must be operating in some remote civilization, perhaps someplace else in the galaxy or on some world of spun sugar and dreams. If the novel is set in the distant future, then it is possible that it takes place on earth, perhaps after a holocaust of such terrible dimensions that the historical past has become an alien memory. More likely, time and place are to be accepted as a combination of all possibilities, forming a montage in the mind such that boundaries between present, past, and future, the concrete and the abstract, and the denotative and connotative remain malleable, in constant and fluid motion, transitory and ephemeral. The name of the community where the action is set is a case in point. It is unclear whether one should pronounce iDEATH emphasizing "death" or emphasizing "idea." Only the mind can create the montage that enables a reader to hear both sounds at the same time.

In iDEATH, the historical memory extends back only one hundred and seventy-one years. The remnants of a civilization, apparently very similar to the real world, are relegated to "The Forgotten Works" which "go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on." The people of the community have no idea how old "The Forgotten Works" are, but they reach into distances that the people will not travel. A sign above the gate to "The Forgotten Works" warns the curious: "Be careful. You might get lost."

The narrator heeds the warning, but Margaret does not. As spokesman for the village, the narrator is not only the chronicler of a society that proceeds day by day as words follow one after another, not necessarily related in terms of cause and effect of fixed meaning, but also a poet-seer through whose eyes "reality" is reflected and through whose subconscious meaning is provoked. For, despite the fact that the narrator insists that he lives a gentle and satisfying life, he is restless, troubled, and insecure. Margaret's forays into "The Forgotten Works" serve to pique her continuing curiosity but, for the narrator, are the stuff of which nightmares are made. Chapter titles, rather than the narrator, make the point: "Margaret," "Margaret Again," six times repeated until finally "Margaret Again, Again, Again, Again, Again."

The action that takes place concerning the narrator and Margaret and that leads to her suicide is the most conventional of the levels of narration in the novel. At this level, a reader can discern a movement from exposition to complication to climax and denouement, with Margaret's funeral being the last piece of action. On another level, the story of inBOIL takes on greater importance. The narrator dreams the history of inBOIL and his gang and the "terrible things that happened just a few short months ago." If the entire action of the novel is considered to be a dream vision, then inBOIL's story is a dream within a dream, a kind of parenthetical expression, but one having central significance.

Other structural patterns can be discerned: a rising movement, for example, that never comes to climax or denouement. At the end of the novel, one must remember that the musicians are poised to begin, and all is ready to be done (and done again as life is done) In Watermelon Sugar. On the other hand, a deeper structure, revealed to the reader but unknown to the narrator, moves with continual falling action, so that anticipation merges with despair, and the sense of continuing renewal becomes a conviction of ultimate end.

Through a process of deduction, a reader can determine three time sequences operating in the novel: a distant past of which "The Forgotten Works" are emblematic (the narrator's twenty-eight-year life when he lived with his parents in a shack by the river, listened with Margaret to inBOIL's stories, watched the tigers kill and eat his parents, participated in the tiger hunt, joined the commune of iDEATH, and established an intimate relationship with Margaret); the recent past (the breaking up of the liaison between Margaret and the narrator and what happened to inBOIL); and the three days that make up the present time of the novel, during which period the narrator and Pauline establish their relationship and Margaret kills herself. Margaret's funeral takes place on Thursday, the black and soundless day. The action begins on Tuesday, the gold day, and proceeds through Wednesday, the gray day.

Part of the magical effect of the novel derives from the descriptions of iDEATH. As is suggested above, the sun on different days is different in color. The watermelons, too, are different in color, depending on the day. Seeds gathered from a blue watermelon, for example, picked on a blue day (Saturday), and then planted on a blue day make blue watermelons. (The stars, however, are always one color-red.)

The watermelons are processed to make watermelon sugar, which in turn is spun out to make everything in the community. The weather is always temperate. There are many waterways, creeks and rivers, some only inches wide. The houses are a delightful combination of indoors and outdoors. Statues of vegetables adorn the community. Lighted bridges decorate the night. The dead are buried in glass coffins placed at the bottoms of rivers, and the coffins glow at night because fox fire is put in the tombs. Such is the world of In Watermelon Sugar, passing strange and full of quirky charm.

The Characters
Much of the sense of disparity in the novel results from the incongruity inherent in the person of the narrator, who insists that everything in iDEATH is exactly as it should be—the people gentle, pleasant, and tolerant. Despite the narrator's insistence that iDEATH is a stable Utopia, however, many of the things that happen are fraught with pain and violence. Balancing the easygoing and vegetarian people with their light chores and flower-filled parades are the man-eating tigers, the burning of the mutilated corpses of inBOIL and his gang, Margaret's suicide, and the emptiness felt by the narrator but never named.

Indeed, the narrator never really names anything, even himself. In chapter 3, the narrator invites the reader to do the naming: "My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind." Though the narrator clearly plays the role of poet-seer, he came upon his vocation by accident. He was not good at anything else, though he had tried several occupations. It is Charley who suggests that the narrator write a book. Margaret's excursions into "The Forgotten Works" disturb the narrator so greatly that he cannot cope with his feelings for her. Nor is the narrator's restlessness assuaged by his liaison with Pauline. He remains an insomniac and nightwalker throughout the novel. Thor's day is his favorite—black, silent, and long.

Margaret is the only character in the novel who exhibits what one would normally call the signs of an active and curious mind. Her visits to "The Fotgotten Works" and her continuing conversations with inBOIL, however, cause the community to isolate her and the narrator to shun her. Only Pauline seems to wonder how Margaret is responding to the loss of a long-standing relationship with the narrator and her alienation from the community. The narrator expresses no interest and refuses to discuss the matter beyond saying that everything will be alright. Yet Margaret's desolation and hurt are apparent. She returns to the narrator's shack, knocking at his door with a persistence that bothers him; she walks past Pauline without responding to her greeting. Only Margaret seems shocked and pained by the death of inBOIL and his gang, and only she seems to understand its significance. Her suicide, which she accomplishes by hanging herself from an apple tree, clearly results from a sense of profound despair over the community's inability to recognize what inBOIL was trying to say by means of his immolation and over the community's and the narrator's total rejection of her.

InBOIL and Charley, the community's acknowledged leader, are Janus-like counterparts, Charley having accepted the bland and docile as the only acceptable reality, and inBOIL insisting on the reality of pain and loss. When inBOIL and his men come to confront Charley and the iDEATH community, inBOIL insists that he is going to show Charley what is really going on. Without the tigers, inBOIL says, there can be no iDEATH. InBOIL accuses Charley and his group of living "like a bunch of clucks." Then inBOIL and his men slowly and deliberately cut off their thumbs, their noses, and their ears, systematically removing their sense organs and thus illustrating the deprivation of the iDEATH community.

Other characters in In Watermelon Sugar, particularly Pauline, play significant roles. Pauline seemingly accepts without question her role in the community, especially after her liaison with the narrator: Apparently, she stops her nightwalking and sleeps well, and she appears content taking her turn in the kitchen. Charley, who knows "about everthing there is' has been the unquestioned leader of the community for a long time. All the members of the commune, including Fred, who is a fine craftsman, Al, who takes turns in the kitchen with Pauline, old Chuck, who lights the lanterns, and the young girl who picks strawberries play a contributing role, each according to his or her own special interests and needs.

Themes and Meanings
Critics have argued both sides of the question as to whether iDEATH is Heaven or Hell. Only a few have recognized the paradoxical nature of Brautigan's statement. Rational discourse in the Western world establishes absolutes, insists on a categorical difference between Heaven and Hell, up and down, fiction and fact, love and hate. Yet Brautigan appears to be trying to mesh the opposites, suggesting that rather than being antithetical, opposites are identical. The world is Janus-like. iDEATH is both idea (creation) and death. Life is not simply passive or violent; life and death are not contraries. Each partakes of the other. It is the separation of the two that is unnatural. In terms of the novel, watermelon sugar is also polyurethane foam.

Apparent polarities thus form the base of In Watermelon Sugar; in this respect, the novel recalls the Surrealists' point sublime, where contraries are identified, where the "yes" and the "no" merge. It is not necessary to limit time and space as people are accustomed to doing. Time and space are one. Past and future yield to the simultaneous. In dreams, one understands that which one's culture and language have in the past made difficult to apprehend. Thus, Brautigan's effort to get above or beyond the language of rational discourse and to eschew ordinary novelistic techniques, where time and linear plots carry the story line, is closely tied to the meaning of In Watermelon Sugar. Form and content are also one.

Critical Context
In Watermelon Sugar was one of three early works—the others were A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964) and Trout Fishing in America (1967)—which established Brautigan as one of the most popular writers of the 1960's. His books were particularly popular on college campuses; photographs of the author showed a rangy figure with shoulder-length hair, granny glasses, and a walrus mustache—the quintessential San Francisco writer. At the same time, he was recognized by some critics as a writer whose works could stand on their own merit; Guy Davenport, reviewing Brautigan's early novels in The Hudson Review, described him as "one of the most gifted innovators in our literature."

In the decade and a half between the appearance of In Watermelon Sugar and his death by suicide in 1984, Brautigan published many more books, but none of them enjoyed the success of his early works. His identification with the counterculture worked against him; from the beginning, many hostile critics had rejected his work as cute and ephemeral, and it became fashionable to dismiss him as a phenomenon of the 1960's, no longer of interest.

In time, Richard Brautigan will find a permanent place in American literature. Whatever the vicissitudes of critical opinion (his later works are only beginning to receive an objective critical reading), it is certain that In Watermelon Sugar will be numbered among the lasting works of the 1960's—a book which captures as few others do the spirit of that extraordinary moment in American history.

Rohrberger1982

"Multicolored Loin Cloths, Glass, Trinkets of Words: Surrealism in In Watermelon Sugar"
Mary Rohrberger and Peggy C. Gardner
Ball State University Forum, vol. 23, no. 1, Winter 1982, pp. 61-67.
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.

In the Manifestoes of Surrealism, André Breton writes: "Each of us has within himself the potential of an orator: Multicolored loin cloths, glass trinkets of words." Breton here gives instructions to the poet-seer, the alchemist, the frequenter of the hall of mirrors, in how to compose, or, rather, how to allow composition to take place. The activity is marvelous as is its product. "Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful. in fact only the marvelous is beautiful." He comments later, "What is fantastic about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real." Breton's Manifestoes define the philosophic base for a post World War I movement which continues to function as a dominant mode in contemporary literature. The dislocation of time, the refusal to accept the experiential, and the insistence on the antirational provide a vision of the marvelous characteristic of much of contemporary fiction. Breton anticipates the contemporary mode when he writes: "The fabric of adorable improbabilities must be made a trifle more subtle the older we grow, and we are still at the stage of waiting for this kind of spider . . ."

Breton's statement finds its counterpart in the woof and warp of pastoral fantasy and despotic reality which is the world of Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar. Although this literary pastiche, like Brautigan's other works, has stimulated little scholarly comment, recent criticism by Harvey Leavitt ["The Regained Paradise of Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar"] and Patricia Hernlund ["Author's Intent: In Watermelon Sugar"] suggests a complexity to the novel which is belied by its deceptively simple surface. Leavitt believes that the novel presents a vision of a rustic good life, marked by an acceptance of and integration into nature and by a rejection of the materialistic and technological. He notes the Adam and Eve imagery and the use of Cain and Abel prototypes and speculates that in In Watermelon Sugar Brautigan has created a new world arising out of the chaos of the past. Taking an opposing view as to meaning, Hernlund notes the four time schemes that are intertwined and fragmented which, when unraveled, reveal a utopian society. But, Hernlund believes that life in iDEATH is unsatisfying, despite the narrator's claim that it is suitable and good.

Both claims are right, but in order to see how the apparently contradictory is not contradictory at all, it is necessary to understand how surrealism operates to determine structure and reveal meaning. Ihab Hassan's thesis that "beneath the surface of happy love and naive humor, the reader feels the lurking presence of loss, madness, death . . ." is tangential to Breton's comparison of the surrealist state to one "which can only be fairly compared to that of madness."

This recreation of the state of madness which is achieved through the dérèglement du sens by the fixed and systematic disordering of the elements of space and time that Breton advocates as the "order of the day" by the Surrealists is not an evasion of reality but an expansion of it. Only when the mind is open to all possibilities, however strange, unconditioned, and unlimited, can man grasp his true relationship to the universe. When man is freed from the limitations of time and space, from the prison of rational categories, from the tyranny of imposed authority, art for the Surrealist will find its apogee not in the creation of a personal myth but rather in the creation of the collective myth. It is through the creation of such a myth in his creation of a world, lucid as a vision, rich as a dream overflowing into real life, yet troubled by the phantoms of the subconscious that Brautigan juxtaposes the preconscious and conscious states of modern man. It is in the surrealist refraction of reality through the poet-narrator's point of view, the incandescent force of imagery, and, finally, the dream vision structure that the contradictions of the novel are illumined and resolved.

The poet-narrator of In Watermelon Sugar initiates a deceptive intimacy with the reader because "I am here and you are distant" and rearranges chronological time to indicate either past, present, or future on this planet, on some world of spun sugar and dreams, or entirely in the mind. More likely, he sets functions simultaneously on all planes. The narrator gives the reader enough clues to formulate a series of theses on the origin (and probable demise) of the Forgotten Works and of iDEATH.

The Forgotten Works are evidence of a civilization either in the distant past or perhaps in the immediate future which has collapsed and from which the seeds of similar development have evolved into a culture similar to ours. If the story is set in time present, we need to imagine a civilization different from ours but recognizable and in existence perhaps somewhere else in the galaxy. If in the future, the Forgotten Works may be remnants of our civilization after a holocaust of such traumatic import that the historical past is an alien memory that the inhabitants of the utopian iDEATH "cannot travel nor want to" (IWS, p. 69). If the Forgotten Works are a manifestation of the subconscious, the "things" found there can be an allusion to Breton's "trouvailles" or "found things," his images of inspiration.

Though each of these explanations has some validity, none alone is entirely satisfactory. The novel seems, rather, a combination of all possibilities, with aspects of each coinciding in some ways but skewed in others, forming a montage in the mind. iDEATH, then, is idea, a dream or marvelous vision, whose landscapes are similar to those of the extensional world but altered in such a way as to create a strange effect, disorienting and absurd. It is through the narrator's mode of reflecting reality in this tripartite fashion that the boundaries between past and present and between the concrete and the abstract remain fluid and malleable for the reader.

In iDEATH the past is counted only to one hundred and seventy-one years, the sun on different days is different in color, rivers can be only a few inches wide, rooms and houses seem a delightful combination of indoors and outdoors, above and below the ground, and the placing of stones "gathered from a great distance" has become a fetish for order. Theirs is a world of carrot communion, bland and harmless social noises and flower-filled parades. Light chores fill their days, and the restless build vegetable statues, light the lamps at the bridges to keep "out of mischief." or, as in the narrator's case, sublimate reality through the listing of banalities. Lovemaking is like a breath of wind and seems to be a transport from that "delicate balance" that is iDEATH. The subject of the tigers is the aftermath of lovemaking between Pauline and the narrator, and their conversation leads to "one of those long walks" that the narrator takes at night.

The poet-narrator appraises his world from the fetal security of polite truisms and over-cooked carrots of iDEATH by insisting that he has "a gentle life." His catalogue, the book, that is sanctioned by Charley, the status quo of the public spirit and the Mustapha Mond of iDEATH, is a careful construct of innocence and stability built to sustain that "delicate balance" of the superego which is iDEATH. Indeed, much of the sense of incongruity in the novel comes from the disparity between the tone used by the narrator in his recounting of events and his insistence that life is pleasant and satisfying in iDEATH and that the events themselves—phenomena which, at least on one level, are fraught with pain and violence—are but uncomfortable moments, easily negated by fire (as in the burning of the mutilated corpses of inBOIL and his gang) or Pauline's warm body.

It is not necessary, however, that the poet comprehend. The poet is miracle worker, seer, priest, who, as Wallace Fowlie [Age of Surrealism Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1966. 24] says, "causes the miracle by a magical use of words, by an incantation which he does not fully understand." The poet cannot intervene consciously. Rather, he must learn to follow his inner life, to go down into his dreams, to submerge his ego and make himself "into an echo, the method of echolalia." In addition, the poet can be everyman, for "all men are potential poets in their dreaming".

The third chapter of In Watermelon Sugar firmly establishes the nameless narrator in this role. "My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind." He continues with thirteen examples specifically relating reader and writer, examples which evoke the nostalgia of memory and those inchoate times when the critical, the reflective faculties are suspended in the passive and receptive moment. The fifth example is: "Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around. That is my name." The seventh example is: "Or you heard someone calling from a great distance. Their voice was almost an echo. That is my name." The thirteen examples contain both pleasant and unpleasant experiences and call for both happy and sad responses. At the end of the chapter, a single sentence stands without the echoing refrain: "And I wish Margaret would leave me alone." But by now the reader can supply the repetitive phrase; for that, too, is his name.

Although the narrator's book is sanctioned by Charley ("Charley's Idea") and constructed "from where you're at," its substructure violates the narrator's apparent intention. The terror of curiosity that Margaret represents, the violence of introspection that is inBOIL, and the creative force of art that was repressed with the burning of the last tigers establishes the paranoia of the poet and, by analogy, of iDEATH.

Chapter Two introduces Margaret as an insistent presence in the novel. Chapter titles make the point: "Margaret", "Margaret Again", "Margaret Again, Again" and finally, "Margaret Again, Again, Again, Again, Again". Margaret, nurtured, like the narrator, on inBOIL's stories, has been unable to fit "into the very changing of iDEATH" that the narrator finds so satisfying, so suitable. Her implacable desire to collect things from the Forgotten Works troubles the narrator; her open and friendly manner with inBOIL is an affront to his sensibilities. ("That really disgusted me: a decent woman smiling at inBOIL. I could not help but wonder, what next?" IWS, p. 73), and her refusal to be properly indignant with the rest of iDEATH about inBOIL and his gang alienates her from the narrator. He then shifts his affection to another night-walker—Pauline, who, like the narrator, is eager to preserve the delicate balance of iDEATH.

Although discomfited by the withdrawal of inBOIL from the commune of iDEATH (and related only after a dream has regenerated the memories of those "terrible things"), the narrator appears resigned to the fact that certain character types are not a part of that facade of politeness that is iDEATH. inBOIL and his gang are distinguishable from those who readily identify themselves with iDEATH by being unhappy, nervous, and shifty and by talking about "things that good people did not understand nor wanted to" (IWS, p. 61). The narrator is able to sublimate his restlessness with long walks at night and relate his own guileless sense of guilt by intuiting that the eyes of the Grand Old Trout were watching him after he had left the river. "He was still staring at me when I was gone from sight, I thought" (IWS, p. 53).

The trout as replacement for the tigers is one of the most significant symbolic levels of In Watermelon Sugar and one which Brautigan insists upon maintaining as an enigma by the linking of the violent and the beautiful. Despite their perplexity over inBOIL's inability to live within the placid world of iDEATH, the citizens of iDEATH are nostalgic about the tigers in their past and even recognize the necessity of the tigers' behavior. Old Chuck dreams of their beautiful voices, their songs "like lanterns, burning oil." The narrator-author is innocent as to the significance of the tigers' consumption of his parents as something they were "absolutely forced to . . . the only way we can keep alive" (IWS p. 34). Brautigan may be suggesting that the consuming power of art, the linking of art-id-tigers, or the death of "I" and its associated aesthetic drive is essential to the preservation of a changeless utopia with his tiger symbols. In fact, Charley reinforces this theory when he speculates that perhaps people were also tigers a long time ago, but the people changed and the tigers did not. The tiger says, "We're just like you . . . We speak the same language you do. We think the same thoughts . . . (IWS, p.34). But Charley, the controller of iDEATH, exercises the pervasive logic that explains the status of iDEATH. "They're very nice and have a good way of stating things, but we're going to have to get rid of them. Soon" (IWS, p. 35). And they do. When the last tiger is killed, the hunters bring it to iDEATH and the people subject it to a ritual burning. Then they immediately build the trout hatchery over the spot where the tiger had been burned. "The walls went up around the ashes" (IWS, p. 92). Flower-strewn and burned, the tigers and inBOIL and his gang join the Forgotten Works as distances not to be "traveled into" except by dreams.

Because of the intense resistance of the narrator against recognizing the disparate elements of his world, the task belongs to the reader as he is made increasingly aware of the narrator's hostility and repression. The reader, then, is the mediator of the organic design of the novel; the relationships, the coincidences, the logic of events are never subjects of introspection for the narrator who simply writes "one word after another." The melding of exterior objects with the interior world of the subconscious must be done by the reader who becomes the "conductor" (a favorite term of Breton's) between the separate worlds.

Dreams which are the passport to the surrealist state of receptivity and the entry to the subconscious are the liberating force in iDEATH; dreams are the only part of living which do not fall into the comfortable patterns of iDEATH. It is in the dream state that the images which people the narrator's unconscious world assert themselves. The linking of disparate images creates a new reality. The narrator-dreamer, in a state of passivity, is powerless to direct his will, thus is most surrealist in his mode of narration. "Everything is reflected in the Statue of Mirrors if you stand there long enough and empty your mind of everything else but the mirrors, and you must be careful not to want anything from the mirrors. They just have to happen" (IWS, p. 112). In mirroring the events of iDEATH, the narrator becomes the mirror of iDEATH. The clusters of images in the chapter "The Statue of Mirrors" create the same unexpected tangencies of real and unreal that circumscribe the enigmatic quality of the novel as a whole and illuminate its imagistic patterning. The "gentle" events of living form one structure of images. The deeds of watermelon sugar which form a repetitive and unchanging pattern, the innocent and indifferent sexuality in iDEATH, the soundless clocks which refuse the passage of time, and the lighted tombs of the dead are the carefully articulated images of iDEATH.

The substructure of images which act in counterpoint to those within the narrator's consciousness are repressed yet omnipresent. The moths that flutter around the tombs appear in a dream balanced on an apple; the apple is associated with the tree on the clock-maker's grave, and, finally, with Margaret's own lack of balance, her "broken heart."

The narrator's world which is made from the juice of watermelons worked "into the shape of this thing that we have: our lives" can be related to a web of images as well as to cotton candy, clouds seen from above, fruit leather, polyurethane foam. The image thus created is in itself surreal, but Brautigan goes a step further and juxtaposes on the same plane of reference the Watermelon Works with the Forgotten Works, where objects of the destroyed culture are forbidden artifacts, where books were written in the millions, and where industry created a technological society which then destroyed itself. The assumption is necessary, for iDEATH carries its own seeds of destruction. Though inBOIL and his gang are dead and Margaret hanged on the apple tree, still a deadly knowledge is there, and it cannot be suppressed. Thus, iDEATH is to be defined not only in terms of the Watermelon Works imagery and not only in terms of the Forgotten Works imagery, but rather in terms of both, one superimposed on the other. Life is not merely passive or simply violent; life and death are not contraries; neither is innocence a stable commodity. Janus-like, watermelon sugar is polyurethane foam.

The disparity that is life in iDEATH culminates in the chapter "The Statue of Mirrors," for the eyes which reflect the watermelon sugar deeds of iDEATH are, of course, the narrator's own. His detachment from his own sensory perceptions to his ultimate detachment from emotion is made clear in the chapter, "Shack." He describes his eyes as, "statues of eyes." His ultimate alienation from self is reinforced in the chapter, "Margaret, Again, Again, Again, Again, Again" when, after the death of Margaret, he states, "The trout had trouble sleeping" (IWS, p. 129). The transference of guilt is complete. The "very pretty young woman" has become a "cold undelightful body" and the significance of loss is known only to the reader through the alchemy of imagery. Mutilation, violence, death—inBOIL's metaphor for the spiritual blindness of iDEATH—culminate in flower-strewn parades which become "a vase filled with flowers" for the narrator. For the reader, who watches Pauline's rebirth in the flames of inBOIL's ashes, the dreadful irony inherent in the "gentle" land of iDEATH is that the black and soundless Thursdays, "Thor's Days," are the longest of the week.

Whereas the story of Margaret and the narrator in In Watermelon Sugar is the most conventional of the four levels of narration in the novel, the story of inBOIL is most significant to the structure of the novel from a surrealistic point of view. If the whole novel is seen as dream vision, then the story of inBOIL is a dream within a dream, for the narrator presents it as a recounting of a dream that he had. In Chapter 32, "A Nap," the narrator has two dreams. The first dream of a moth balanced on an apple is an immediate link to the Margaret-death-guilt narration. The other dream is the history of inBOIL and "that gang of his and the terrible things that happened just a few short months ago" (IWS, p. 60). Chapters 33 through 61, the end of Book II, are a narration of inBOIL's story. The final words in Chapter 61 are, "I dreamt." The narrator gives no space to his dream about the moth balanced on the apple, but through the associations that the reader makes of apples, moths and Margaret, the dreams become comments on each other. Thus, within the whole dream, a parenthetical dream is contained: / ------ (     ------ /. We can now illustrate two narrative structures, the conventional (Margaret's story): ∧and the flashback (inBOIL's story): / ------ (     ------ /.

In addition, two other structural patterns are apparent—one that moves with a single rising action (the articulated dream vision): / and one that moves with a simple falling action (the inarticulated deep structure unknown to the narrator but revealed to the reader): \. These movements are more subtle and depend more on breath and pace than on story line. At the end of the first chapter the narrator says: "I'll tell you about it." Consequently, everything that follows builds in consecutive and anticipatory rising actions to the final sentence of the novel: "It would only be a few seconds now, I wrote." At the same time that the reader experiences this rising movement, there is a simultaneous falling movement accomplished not only by the substructure of images but also by a gradual decline in the number of words used in each of the major divisions of the novel. Book I contains fifty-three pages; Book II contains forty-five pages; Book III contains thirty-three pages.

Thus, four structural movements occur at once, and action joins with image and setting to reinforce the effect of simultaneity and to create the whole mirage, rich with the intensity of whirling movements, chance encounters, startling images, absurd actions, suffused with light and dark, pleasure and pain.

Such polarities form the base of the surrealist vision of In Watermelon Sugar. Conceived in analogical terms, opposites move toward identification, and at a point at once abstract and precise, the point sublime, the contraries are identified. This identification follows recognition of the surrealist image which is defined as the sudden confrontation of distant entities on an inappropriate plane. The sudden confrontation produces feelings of shock, surprise, and tension, but also a crystalline vision of unity out of multiplicity. This suddenness is also a kind of violence, a cruelty, causing Breton to insist that the most vital element in the surrealist experience is a beauté convulsive.

In the finite world, polarities are recognized as opposites, their chance juxtaposition seen as absurd, but in the infinite, the contradictions are nullified. In In Watermelon Sugar, time and space shift like visions in a dream; each experience is a synthesis of opposites, a balancing act, a collage of images, a mosaic of allusions. The novel is a Hall of Mirrors where the concrete and the abstract mask each other. In Watermelon Sugar is the Surrealist aesthetic. It is an exercise in language, a magical incantation in which words link in syncretic fashion—the I and the not I, the interior and the exterior, the dream and reality, even silence and speech. Breton writes: "I had begun to cherish words excessively for the space they allow around them, for their tangencies with countless other words that I did not utter." Fowlie comments that the language the Surrealists hoped to capture "is that which lies just beneath the silence of man's immediate thought."

At the end of In Watermelon Sugar the black and soundless sun is ready to sink. The musicians are poised with their instruments. The categorical imperative will be lost in the vertigo of the waltz. All is ready to be done and done again as life is done in watermelon sugar.

Schroeder,1989

"Rhetorical Depth or Psychological Aberration: The Strange Case of Richard Brautigan"
Michael L. Schroeder
Mount Olive Review, vol. 3, Spring 1989, pp. 45-49.
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.

The study of literature owes much to psychological criticism. It has provided profound insights to some of the world's greatest writers. My goal here is somewhat less lofty: I want to offer a solution to a critical debate concerning one of America's least respected writers, Richard Brautigan. My approach is neither Freudian nor Jungian; I would call it People-magazinean.

The critical debate focuses on the peculiar combination of values—gentleness and love on the one hand, and violence and heartlessness on the other—that can be found to some degree in all of Brautigan's novels. This combination is most puzzling in In Watermelon Sugar (written in 1963 but not published until 1968), in which the narrator reflects the conflict as he describes a fantasy world. Some critics see In Watermelon Sugar as a depiction of a pastoral haven (for example, Terence Malley and Manfred Puetz); others see it as an ironic picture of the dangers that result from abolishing genuine emotion (such as Robert Adams and Neil Schmitz). Patricia Hernlund focused on the issue in her 1974 article, "Author's Intent: In Watermelon Sugar," in which she argues that Brautigan intends for the book's utopian community and apparently gentle narrator to be seen negatively. However, she did not settle the argument; as recently as 1983 a critic has insisted that In Watermelon Sugar should be read without Irony, as a guide to survival in "the post-Christian era" (Foster 88).

Brautigan's other early novels—Trout Fishing in America, The Abortion, and The Confederate General from Big Sur—have also created problems of interpretation. Each book contains violence and destruction and waste that suggest a dark meaning, but this content is often subordinated to the tone established by the narrators, who sound like peaceful children of the Age of Aquarius. Brautigan said little to clarify the resulting ambiguity, which clouds any consideration of his thematic intentions. The firsthand anecdotes about and descriptions of Brautigan that emerged after his death do not explicitly solve the critical questions either, but they do point towards another way of approaching the question of Brautigan's purpose: perhaps the ambiguity is less a matter of intention than a reflection of the author's own confused values.

When some early critics saw Brautigan's narrators to be spokesmen for the author, they were assuming Brautigan actually to be like the persona he cultivated, the image that led to his being labeled "the gentle poet of the young" by Life (Stlckney 49). The long hair, granny glasses, and archaic clothing of the "Brautigan" pictured in magazine articles and on the covers of his books create an image that fits well with the tone of his narrators, with their simple style and unconventional imagination. This identification is especially easy to make in the case of In Watermelon Sugar. The nameless narrator presents his story with such seductive sweetness and lyricism that it seems natural to associate him with the Brautigan persona. In fact, critic Terence Malley, who minimizes the distance between author and narrator, goes so far as to insist that "we can say (for what it's worth) that this narrator is an autobiographical projection of the author, reflecting more or less directly, Brautigan's point of view, perceptions, values" (116). Obviously, critics with such views are not going to find significant irony in the narrative strategy.

In Watermelon Sugar Expresses An Affirmative Approach to Life
For those who maintain this positive reading, In Watermelon Sugar's communal society, iDEATH, illustrates the advantages of burying all those things that make contemporary life so disturbing and dangerous. Threats to the communal peace, including talking, man-eating tigers that might symbolize man's aggressiveness (Malley 125), have been done away with. Now, materialism and competition are rare, and violence to others seems unthinkable. The people suppress their egos - hence the name iDEATH, which suggests "death-of-the-I" (Malley 126). They also avoid deep thinking and powerful emotion, which might threaten to upset the "delicate balance" (Brautigan 1) they find so important. Most of their time is spent enjoying the simple things in life, such as eating and talking about eating.

However, this "delicate balance" is threatened by a character named inBOIL, who has left iDEATH to spend his time drinking and laughing with some followers. These rebels reside near the Forgotten Works, a vast junkyard of artifacts from some earlier civilization. For readers who view the narrator's opinions as reliable, the Forgotten Works are appropriately shunned as the place where the people of iDEATH have shut away "all the violence, evil, and cruelty of civilization" (Foster 88). When the narrator's girlfriend, Margaret, starts looking for important "things" there, and when she refuses to see inBOIL as a threat, she alienates herself from the community, and the narrator loses interest in her. Then, claiming that they are demonstrating the true meaning of iDEATH, inBOIL and his companions methodically and bloodily commit group suicide. The only character to respond with an emotion other than anger is Margaret. Though she is left in shock, the narrator drops her completely and turns to Pauline, another resident of iDEATH. Margaret is obviously hurt by her rejection, and a few months later she hangs herself. To those who view the novel positively, these deaths are for the best: "the natural Utopia of Watermelon Sugar has asserted its reality and, what is more, its superiority to competing forms of the real world" (Puetz 43). The fact that Margaret's funeral is followed by a dance, complete with party decorations and refreshments, shows that the residents of iDEATH have developed a healthy acceptance of death—at least this is the view held by those who find the book to express an affirmative approach to life.

In Watermelon Sugar Expresses a Negative Approach to Life
On the other hand, those who see the book negatively are likely to be bothered not only by the deaths but also by certain characteristics of the narrator. In a society that has rejected the ego, the narrator shows signs of egotism. For instance, one day, after speaking with the teacher about an essay he once wrote on clouds, the narrator observes that the teacher "was talking about something very important. I could tell because he pointed back to me, and then he pointed at a cloud that was drifting overhead" (Brautlgan 53). There is no reason to assume that the cloud is "very important"; it seems more likely that the narrator sees the importance in the references to himself.

Even if a reader accepts the premise that the "delicate balance" requires a reduction of strong feeling, he is likely to find the narrator's total lack of most emotions to be chilling. One particularly disturbing example appears when he describes his response to witnessing tigers eat his parents: he can say little more than "those were my folks," and then he asks the tigers for help on his arithmetic. His passivity comes across all the more powerfully because his description is so starkly brutal: "One of the tigers started eating my mother. He bit her arm off and started chewing on it" (Brautigan 39).

The narrator also shows himself to be rude and untrustworthy. When he and Margaret are walking back from the Forgotten Works one day, he shows gross inconsideration by not volunteering to carry her heavy basket for her even though she is hot and sweaty and must stop several times to rest. Then he explicitly lies when he tells her he is not mad. He obviously is. Later, he apparently lies to his readers when he insists that "almost everybody" dislikes Margaret (Brautigan 20). At least three characters show genuine concern for her after she has been spurned by the narrator.

The narrator suggests that Margaret has alienated herself from the people of iDEATH by becoming too attached to the things of the Forgotten Works. Perhaps her hobby of bringing back artifacts is evidence of a materialism that is inconsistent with the society (Malley 128; Tanner 418). Yet her collection seems to antagonize no one else. Indeed, many of them find the things she retrieves to be interesting; iDEATH even has a metal bridge that inBOIL brought from the Forgotten Works, and nobody seems to mind its presence.

For those reading the novel negatively, the narrator rejects Margaret out of egotistical jealousy. He is angered by her friendliness with inBOIL, who seems genuinely to want to help her find interesting things for her collection. And it is a smile that bothers the narrator more than anything else: "That really disgusted me: a decent woman smiling at inBOIL. I could not help but wonder, what next?" (Brautigan 88). Like the Duke in Browning's "My Last Duchess," he cannot bear to see "his" woman smiling on anything he disdains. When Margaret tries to defend inBOIL and his companions, she only lowers herself further in the narrator's eyes.

His subsequent treatment of Margaret is particulariy disturbing. She is deeply shocked by the mass suicide of inBOIL and his followers, yet the narrator deserts her at the time she needs him the most. He apparently has no sympathy for her, even though they have been lovers for years. Later, he watches her commit suicide with the same sort of passivity he showed when the tigers were eating his parents: "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 in the air" (Brautigan 185). The others do not react so coldly: Fred suddenly looks tired (Brautigan 139); Margaret's brother's eyes grow dim (Brautigan 142); Pauline becomes "very upset" and cries (Brautigan 146). To Pauline's reaction, the narrator says, "I guess she really liked Margaret" (Brautigan 147). Emotion is rarely seen in iDEATH, but only the narrator can remain totally detached in this situation.

In this negative reading, then, the narrator is the villain. He tries to create an image of himself as a sensitive, caring person, yet he contributes directly to the death of a former lover without demonstrating any grief, much less guilt. But did Brautigan intend the novel to be read this way? Many critics would steadfastly insist that the blithely simple Brautigan is incapable of such rhetorical complexity. Furthermore, circumstantial evidence implies that he did not. He indicates that the book was completed in a few weeks, suggesting that he probably did not have time to plan an ironic narrative strategy. In addition, nothing in his comments about himself or his work, or in the comments of others, hints at any such plan.

The Problem of the Narrator
Then how does one explain the presence of a narrator who is disarmingly lyrical and placid while at the same time harboring such ugly traits? Perhaps an answer is provided by a consideration of Brautigan himself, as he is described by those who knew him best. The Brautigan that emerges is, as Tom McGuane puts it, "very complicated—as free of clean edges as anyone I've ever known" (qtd. in Manso and McClure 112). His darker side became more dominant as his success—and his alcoholism—grew, but even when he was a young man he had been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and committed to the Oregon State Hospital (Wright 59). Later, his mood changes became notorious: "He could go from being real exuberant to very dark and depressed, or he could get mean and nasty, or nostalgic or sentimental, and sometimes transcendent, philosophical" (Siew-Hwa Beh, qtd. in Manso and McClure 112).

Brautigan's egotism revealed itself in various ways. First, he could not abide negative criticism and insisted that his works deserved greater critical appreciation than they received. Of course, such egotism is common, and perhaps necessary, among writers, but Brautigan could spontaneously end old friendships on the basis of suggestions intended to be helpful. When his agent informed him that one of his later manuscripts was best left unpublished, he responded with a curt note of farewell, "as if he were writing to the bank" (Helen Brann, qtd. in Manso and McClure 114). He had also been rude and discourteous to Don Allen?, the publisher who had taken a chance by first publishing Brautigan's early novels, only to be dropped without any hint of appreciation when Richard Lawrence offered Brautigan a contract (Don Allen, qtd. in Manso and McClure 66).

Egotism might also be seen in his treatment of women. Don Carpenter explains that "Richard's desire to be loved, when he expressed it, was so overpowering, it invariably drove his women away" (qtd. in Wright 37). When living with a woman, he would openly have affairs with others, and then expect his companion to accept quietly the arrangement (Siew-Hwa Beh, qtd. in Manso and McClure 112). With his second wife, Akiko, he demanded other qualities: "Richard had created a persona for her, this female ideal, and when she betrayed this image of her, he became frighteningly violent" (Wright 40).

His violent side emerged in other situations as well. Once, when Akiko lost a ping-pong game, he destroyed the table (Wright 40). And there was his obsession with guns: "He liked to shoot anything, beer cans, books, record albums, his television set. One month a telephone repairman came to Richard's house three times to repair his phones. The first two times they had been shot. The third time they had been burned" (Wright 38).

Yet those who remained friends with him until the end continued to see his other side. To Peter Manso, Brautigan "was not vicious or cruel or mean or petty. I mean, he was all those things, but his overall character was not" (Manso and McClure 116). And to Tom McGuane,

"between the alcohol spells a sweet, whole, loving person emerged. We subconsciously believed that was the real Richard, even though the Richard that we mostly saw drove us nuts. But it was like a nickelodeon. You run those images, and then another image floats up from behind; the image that was trapped inside this monster was a really good fellow." (qtd. in Manso and McClure 116)

This image could fit the narrator of In Watermelon Sugar as well, though some readers might want to reverse the terms. Perhaps the narrator is outwardly a good fellow with the monster trapped within. In either case, he shares with Brautigan not only the divided personality and the attempt to project a wholly favorable view of himself, but also several other character flaws: egotism, rudeness, unreliability, and a tendency to demand too much of women, using them largely for his own ego gratification. The narrator of In Watermelon Sugar does not reveal the degree of physical violence that Brautigan did, but his calm acceptance of violent acts suggests him to be little better.

When a book provokes such conflicting interpretations as In Watermelon Sugar has, the question of intention becomes particularly intriguing. Perhaps Brautigan did intend for the reader to see his narrator favorably. On the other hand, Brautigan might be demonstrating more literary sophistication than many readers would give him credit for. An ironic reading of In Watermelon Sugar allows it to exemplify Philip Stevick's generalization: "Naivete in fictional narration is highly rhetorical. There is . . . almost always indirection, feigning, irony" (88). Even so, the question remains: Did Brautigan consciously give his character elements of his own darker side, or did they appear without his being aware of the self-revelation? Whatever the case, the correspondences between the author's faults and his narrator's are too direct to be purely coincidental. With In Watermelon Sugar Georges Poulet's dictum that "an author creates himself as he creates his work" (qtd. in Polletta 188) might find a more literal application than Poulet ever intended.

Tanner,1970

"The Dream and the Pen"
Tony Tanner
The Times [London], 25 July 1970, p. 5.
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Tony Tanner welcomes "one of the most original and attractive novels to have come out of America during the last decade", the work of a West Coast writer who has constructed an exhilarating experience out of America's present taste for self-destruction.

American literature has a great tradition of realism, of a fiction which finds out the facts of the matter, or what is the matter with the facts. But increasingly American writers are using the liberations of fantasy to counteract the constrictions of the contemporary environment. No one does this with more economy and delicacy than Richard Brautigan.

He seems at first like a very local (San Franciscan) writer, but the implications of his work cover the whole of America, and his appeal should be instantly felt in England. Trout Fishing in America, which is both very funny and very poignant, seems to me to be one of the most original and attractive novels to have come out of America during the last decade.

If there is any narrative line in the book it concerns indeed the author's various attempts to find good trout fishing: but Trout Fishing in America becomes a person, a place, a hotel, a cripple, a pen nib, and of course a book. Protean and amorphous, it is a dream to be pursued, a sense of something lost, a quality of life, a spirit that is present or absent in many forms. Because Brautigan exercises complete freedom with words he can sit Trout Fishing in America down with Maria Callas for a meal, produce a letter from him/it saying that he is leaving for Alaska, or start a chapter "This is the autopsy of Trout Fishing in America"—and leave us concluding that the book is an autopsy of the whole American dream.

Certainly the book is full of death. There are endless references to graveyards, mortuaries, cemeteries, wreaths, memorials, omens of the decline and passing of things. The feeling of fertility gone sour, of a once beautiful land given over to deadness, hangs over the book. Specific references to criminals like John Dillinger and "Pretty Boy" Floyd add to the sense of the destructive violence which has entered into America's heritage.

The narrator's quest for good Trout Fishing in America is a series of disappointments, It brings him finally to the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, another version of that terminal dump of waste and used things which for so many American writers seems to loom up as a possible end to the American Dream. In the Yard a trout stream is being sold by the foot, stacked up in a room containing piles of toilets and dusty lumber. The touch of surrealism only deepens the muted sense of something precious lost.

One could call Brautigan's book an idyll, a satire, a quest, an exercise in nostalgia, a lament for America, or a joke, but it is a book which floats effortlessly free of all categories, and it is just this experience of floating free which is communicated while one is reading it. There is certainly a feeling for a pastoral America which has vanished or has been despoiled by mechanization, crime, accumulating garbage, and various kinds of poison and violence.

But the book is nothing like a polemic, and Brautigan, it is clear, would not engage in anything so recognizable as an established genre. The list of contents, the chapter divisions, the "characters", the narrative episodes, all mock the forms of conventional fiction by pretending to add up to a recognizable structure which is not there when you come to look for it. Among other things the book is a typographical playfield.

Clearly all this might add up to a recipe for whimsy and a style with such a light touch it cannot always avoid coyness, false naïveté and sentimentality. These can all be found in Brautigan's work, but not in this novel. The evanescent quality of the . . . elusive metamorphosis of sense and form (like clouds over the Pacific), nevertheless leave one in possession of ... extremely haunting, evocative and capable of making subtle solicitations to a whole range of authentic feelings.

Towards the end of the book the narrator dreams of a modern American Leonardo da Vinci who invents a new "lure" for trout fishing in America: it will take a great artist to entice back that idea, ideal or dream. . . . the narrator is given a golden nib with the following admonitions:

"Write with this, but don't write hard because this pen has a got a gold nib, and gold nib is very impressionable. After a while it takes on the personality of the writer. Nobody else can write with it . . . It's the only pen to have. But be careful."

To which the narrator adds:

"I thought to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark trees pressed against the shore."

The dream will enter the writer's pen, with the characteristic instruction to write simply and individually, avoid other people's versions, and not leaning too heavily on his own. While Trout Fishing in America is foundering in the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, it is still flourishing in the writer's imagination. It is perhaps one of the most pervasive themes of contemporary American fiction that these two realms—Wrecking Yard and the imagination—are in a permanent struggle for possession of "America", but I doubt if any writer has posed the opposition so delicately as Brautigan.

The opposition appears again in In Watermelon Sugar. The narrator lives in a happy commune called, mysteriously, iDEATH. The prevailing material there is watermelon sugar, which may be food, furniture, fuel, or more generally the sweet secretion of the imagination. 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 an ugly place called the Forgotten Works. This is the ultimate Wrecking Yard, the realm of dead trash which the imagination insists on leaving behind. There is a confrontation between inBOIL's gang and the happy commune which leaves the latter finally undisturbed and well rid of the death-obsessed, trash-minded defectors.

In Watermelon Sugar is a charming and original work, perhaps a little too obvious in its parabolic form though the parable itself is extremely relevant. The main thing is to welcome the appearance of a refreshingly new, unhysterical, unegotistical, often magical American writer. In Trout Fishing in America Richard Brautigan has already added a minor classic to American literature.

Taylor,2007

"On Brautigan"
Justin Taylor
Lost magazine, no. 17, September 2007.
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The smartest thing anyone has ever written about Richard Brautigan, probably the smartest thing that ever will be written about him, appeared first in a San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle review, and lately reigns as top blurb on the blurb-page of the Houghton Mifflin omnibus editions of his books: "There is nothing like Richard Brautigan anywhere. Perhaps, when we are very old, people will write 'Brautigans,' just as we now write novels. This man has invented a genre, a whole new shot, a thing needed, delightful, and right."

Brautigan's novels are short, composed in brief—sometimes single-sentence—chapters whose titles often pull double-duty as retroactive punchlines. His novels each present some handful of at-odds premises and then spend their economical page-counts weaving the disparate narrative and conceptual threads into brightly-colored, but heavily shadowed, tapestries of love and sadness, frivolity and loss. His books are queer, in the head-cocked squinty-eyed sense of that term, anchored by his slightly unhinged deadpan, buoyed by a sedate but entrancing magical realism. His stories split the difference between wide-eyed hippie daydreams and the always just-blinked-back tears of the true melancholic.

Most of Brautigan's narrators are writers, or might as well be (the narrator of The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 is a librarian). Obviously that invites a reading of the narrator as a stand-in for the author, and in Brautigan's case I think such a reading is appropriate. In Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976), a man identified only as "an American humorist" rips up the opening pages of a story he's working and spends the rest of the book crawling around on the floor of his home, combing his carpet in search of shed hairs belonging to his newly minted ex. Meanwhile, in the wastebasket, the torn-up pages have come to a sort of life and are forwarding the tale that the humorist gave up on—a story about the mysterious appearance of a sombrero in a small town, and the series of increasingly devastating events triggered thereby. The book is both laugh-out-loud funny and bitterly sad—often in the same breath—and somehow even pulls triple duty as an effective parable about the insanity of Cold War arms racing and so-called nuclear deterrence.

Brautigan's influence has been deeply, if not exactly widely, felt. To get a sense of how various his appeal is, and how hard he is to pin down, consider his influence on music. There's a British folk-rock outfit named after his novel Trout Fishing In America, the industrial post-punk band Machines of Loving Grace took their name from one of his poems, and Neko Case's "Margaret vs. Pauline"—off 2006's country-indie crossover Fox Confessor Brings the Flood—was inspired by In Watermelon Sugar, which Case described in an online diary as "a very sad and lonely book with beautiful imagery."

Published in 1968, a year after the surprise breakout success of Trout Fishing in America made Brautigan into an international superstar, In Watermelon Sugar is an astonishing book, a work of understated beauty and grace. It begins with these inviting, confounding, emblematic words: "In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar." I'll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant. Though not as popular as Trout Fishing in America, and not as funny as some of his later works (Sombrero Fallout, for example, or Willard and His Bowling Trophies), In Watermelon Sugar is my favorite Brautigan. I believe it's the best book he wrote.

In Watermelon Sugar is set in and around iDEATH, a commune outside of an unnamed town. The narrator is also not named. "I guess you are kind of curious as to who I am," he writes in a chapter called "My Name," "but I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind."

The novel is essentially a pastoral. iDEATH has a trout hatchery, glass tombs where the dead are decked in foxfire before interment so that they shine forever, a bridge that goes nowhere, enormous statues of vegetables, couches on the edge of the river, shacks where people can go to spend time alone. ("We who do not have regular names spend a lot of time by ourselves," writes the narrator. "It suits us.") At the Watermelon Works "[w]e take the juice from the watermelons and cook it down until there's nothing left but sugar, and then we work it into the shape of this thing that we have: our lives." Different color watermelons are used to make the different watermelon sugars, which are the base material for every object, tool, or other commodity the iDEATHers need. Color of watermelon is determined by the sun, which shines a different color everyday.

An ongoing source of concern for the denizens of iDEATH is the Forgotten Works, an unfathomable wasteland-cum-junkyard. Over its gates, the words YOU MIGHT GET LOST. Things once but no longer of use to the world simply wind up there. Great stacks and hills of them go on forever. Trails weave endlessly through the piles of "forgotten things," though some people, such as the narrator's friend Margaret, are attracted to them. Though he doesn't like the Forgotten Works, he sometimes accompanies her on her trips there. He especially dislikes her camaraderie with inBOIL, an angry drunkard in rebellion against all of iDEATH. inBOIL, the brother of iDEATH's leader, Charley, lives with a group of fellow dissidents in shacks at the edge of the Forgotten Works, where they forage for forgotten things that they use to make whiskey. When the narrator falls for Pauline, an extraordinary cook and all-around sweetheart (in the words of Neko Case's song: "everything's so easy for Pauline"), Margaret begins to spend more time with inBOIL's bad gang. Charley and inBOIL's fraternity, and the love triangle that strains the communal atmosphere at iDEATH, infuse the gathering tension and inevitable showdown with the gothic overtones of a family romance.

Brautigan's success held steady until the mid-'70s; then the world moved on. He continued to write and publish, but was largely ignored. His star fallen, he became depressed. He drank too much. He killed himself—Hemingway-style—in 1984 at the age of 49. All told, he wrote about 20 books of poetry and fiction. Most or all of the fiction is still in print; almost none of the poetry is.

As with all writers who become genres unto themselves, even Brautigan's lesser works are treasures, simply because they are one of a finite number of relics of a mind admired as much for its idiosyncrasy as its skill. (I think immediately of H.P. Lovecraft, Gertrude Stein, and W.G. Sebald.) And as with a true love, his weaknesses appeal as much as his strengths. Each Brautigan is a unique little world. Getting lost, then, is not the risk but the reward.

Thomson,1978

"Objective Reporting as a Technique in the Experimental Novel: A Note on Brautigan and Robbe-Grillet"
George H. Thomson
Notes On Contemporary Literature, vol. 8, no. 4, 1978, p. 2.
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The convention of objective reporting, practiced in varying degrees by conscious realists from the later nineteenth century onwards and theorized upon so eloquently by Joyce's Stephen Dedalus has undergone a strange transformation in the experimental novel of recent years, though in fact Joyce had already carried through the transformation in Ulysses by his multifarious combinations of minutely reported detail and subjective point of view.

Objective reporting as a narrative style is associated with a certain kind of realism in which ostensibly reality speaks for itself while the implied author concentrates on his fingernails. Because language is value saturated, an illusion of objectivity is difficult to achieve. When we encounter it, therefore, we can be very nearly certain it is the result of extreme calculation. This will be even more obviously the case when, as is some recent fiction, reportorial detachment is used only incidentally to create a realistic effect and primarily to disguise an unlikely and discontinuous subject matter.

> I have in mind novels like Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur (1955) and Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar (1968). In such works, objective reporting is good at rationalizing improbable and fragmented content because it is natural for an objective account to omit explanatory connectives such as motives and causes. As a result, a character, event, or setting, may seem dissociated from its surroundings without the effect of appearing forced. Moreover, the selection and arrangement of story material may be extremely arbitrary since the implied author or narrator, with respect to justifying the nature and order of details comprising the narrative, has contracted out of any obligation except that of creating an initial illusion of realistic surface.

Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur (1955) is relentlessly reportorial. But we soon notice there is something strange about the mind to which the report is tied. Is the observation obsessional? Is it a product of fantasy? We cannot at first be sure. The sense of reality and order is undermined while at the same time it is urgently insisted upon by the unfailing meticulousness of the reported observations. The sense of an objectively coherent reality is both asserted and denied.

Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar (1968) has another end in view. The first person narrator, who appears detached, fails to mention what motives or causes might explain the events of the story. More than that, the world he describes, within which chronology is sustained but the logic of events is abolished, has the strangeness of fantasy. Brautigan puts his detached style of narration in the foreground only to undercut and then displace its effect by his reliance on fantasy-like subject matter. On the other hand, Robbe-Grillet puts his realistic style of narration in the foreground and then undercuts but does not displace its effect by his use of confusing, obsessional, and bizarre subject matter. Though the approaches differ, the technique in each case is designed to allow the author under the guise of order and detachment to introduce discontinuity and improbability: literal fantasy in Brautigan, psychological fantasy in Robbe-Grillet. It is striking, too, that in these novels we encounter no strong sense of unconscious ordering, and this in spite of our being locked into a single point of view within which time and space are subjectivized. What we feel rather is a thoroughly calculated technique of combining first-person point of view (subtly interlaced with third in Le Voyeur) with objective reporting.

The result is deliberately to subvert the kind of realism originally aspired to by the fictional practitioners of reportorial objectivity. The subversion in these novels has not been taken any further than Joyce took it, though within narrow limits it has been exploited a little more fully, especially by Robbe-Grillet. And the moral to the story is that even an apparently conservative technique can readily be stood on its head by the modern novelist intent upon the calculated disarrangement of realistic expectations.

Villar,1975

"The Myth as Consumption: Richard Brautigan"
Raso M. Villar
Camp de l'Arpa: Magazine of Literature, vol. 19, 1975, pp. 23, 25.
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"I live a happy life in a cabin. A happy life I see from my window. It's beautiful. I can see it with eyes closed and touch it . . . I do not fail to travel with (the) watermelon sugar. Our lives are made of a base of watermelon sugar and then we take them to the road of dreams along roads of pines and stones." (In Watermelon Sugar, New York, Delta, 1968)

Based in an extraordinary preciousness, that does not necessarily have a firm perception in reality, the American myth returns to resurge from its ashes in Brautigan with strength so extraordinary that makes one think that once myth existed but, by careful manipulation, it has stopped working. It is the European intellectuals of the Enlightenment, with Rousseau at the head and the sentiment optimism of the XVIII (Eighteenth Century), who inspires its modern arcadia of the XIX (Nineteenth Century) to the American sensibility, with a rural, agrarian and puritanical society open to all that offers, according to Thoreau, a healthy, solitary hedonist, friendly and of easy acquisition, that is present not only in painting and literature but also in the half-realized American subconscious.

In the history of popular American imagination, there is not a date for this arcadia or perfect land of harmony. At no time has it been left to the individual to take a pill nor has it appeared of consistent form in his initial literature. But now Hawthorne demythified it in Brook Farm and Poe destroyed it so much in his beginnings. Without doubt, including today, as Brautigan demonstrated, the dream or the nostalgia of this arcadia continues being possible and is sold, conveniently tried, in an incredible form. In the first novel, Margaret, passionate for archeology, hangs herself from an apple tree in front of a statue of mirrors. She tried to deform the myth looking toward the past. More, the myth is not in history but in nature, therefore, in her death. In Pauline, on the other hand, who loved streams and forest and the natural life as it exits, without distortions, nostalgias, or yearnings, without complexities or intellectual complications, that is to say, living the ideal that is potentially feasible or it must be, the pastoral ideal sickly sweet of watermelon sugar—that, perhaps, in its same erotic strength—receive a more exact and full acceptance on the part of the protagonist writer. With Margaret, his wife, "the false one had problems sleeping." With Pauline on the other hand, "her body filled me with dreams with the force of a band of trumpets . . . Pauline was the girl who carried for me the lantern in our nocturnal walks. Pauline was the girl who I looked for with feeling of unease in all roads—encountering her in this place, this bridge, this river, these trees, this pine forest."

The beauty of this world of watermelon sugar is non-navigable, its problem is its existence, but that is not important or it intimidates Brautigan that to fish its trout "naked and without hiding," like Whitman, in a land always green and that has achieved liberty for itself from the aggressive life of the rest of the country, feeling therefore a perfect refuge for the modern world, inclusive over and above abortion and transgression, as in his third novel, The Abortion: An Historical Romance (New York; Simon and Schuster, 1970), where myth, also, is consumed. The Abortion takes place, in the same way, in a community of free men that is California with "sea gulls that enjoy a sweet liberty and so full of feeling" like the body of the protagonist: "this body that is you and to which you must accustom your self because it is all that you have and from which you cannot hide." Body so beautiful that the town could make of it a national park, that has the power to transform our lives, that of the writer, that once the abortion was accomplished, he will be left to his suffocating work in the library (the archeology of Margaret), for the explosion of a new life together with the protagonist, "Life" ("Vida") with whom to revive again in nature.

With novels like, In Watermelon Sugar, Trout Fishing in America, and The Abortion: A Historical Romance, together with a mythological language of happy symbols where "ideath" means "happy life, etc., Brautigan touches all the American myths entering, by false doors in the great current of this literature, in the simple life predicted by Emerson and practiced by Thoreau, in the mountain streams in those that Hemingway accustom to head and guard his heroes in youthful perfection, in the popular current of Whitman that contributed so much to maintain alive the myth of progress and the attractive American democracy so generous to all. And the least of it is that in Trout Fishing in America, the rivers have converted to streets below which run smelly sewers or that the trout lower the dead into contaminated rivers of the country in which the protagonist sees himself obliged to ejaculate, as quickly as possible, his semen that joins with the trout and share the same fate of swimming down stream. That which is important is that the sentence is happy and has easy impact. The product is of little or no real import, that life in nature is or is not possible and that there remain forests of the type where that life is possible. What is important is that the American dream remains alive and continues, that the myth of arcadia is not dead and that in the imagination of all we reconstruct and "play our instruments" even in the middle of monstrous cities like New York or San Francisco.

Once dead and buried, Margaret—"it is the custom here to have a dance in the fish farm. All the world comes and there is a good orchestra and a good dance . . . The people arrive at the cities for the dance half an hour before nightfall . . . All the world is content. The musicians take out their instruments and await for nightfall . . . The trout swim in the near environs. We all dance around. Pauline is very beautiful . . . I write."

Warsh,1970

"Out of Sight"
Lewis Warsh
Poetry, March 1970, pp. 440-446.
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In the last few years poetry has become incredibly accessible. The increase in the number of books, magazines, and anthologies published as well as the opportunity given poets to read their works has created an audience which in turn creates the demand for more poetry. John Giorno's Dial-a-Poem—you can dial ten numbers and hear ten different tapes of poets reading their works—has received (as of April 1969) approximately one million calls! Even those poets who work best in isolation are realizing that the people interested in poetry have grown less identifiable as a group, as the group grows larger.

Feeling perhaps that the "straight" method of reading—the poet gets up, is introduced, then reads his work—was too rigid, or that the audience needed more to hold its attention, poets—in New York and elsewhere—have begun experiments with tapes, lights, films, and the various means of communication that have now become so available. The poet, however, remains a human being, and ultimately—for me—it's his personality, the way he delivers his works, that's most interesting. Of the readings I've attended that make use of technological equipment I've been excited by very few if only because nothing of the poet himself as a person comes across to me through the wires. When asked for his opinion of the Beatles in a recent interview in Singout! Bob Dylan stated: "...they work much more with the studio equipment, they take advantage of the new sound inventions of the past year or so. Whereas I don't know anything about it. I just do the songs, and sing them and that's all." Dylan and the Beatles are proof that both the personal and the technological, when executed well, are valid means of presenting and expressing one's poems.

Tom Clark and Richard Brautigan are aware that this audience exists, but their way of giving, like Dylan, is confined to the human voice reading the poem or to the printed page—where someone reads it. I've seen Clark read several times. He's very cool, letting the poems speak for themselves. He doesn't talk to the audience or tell anecdotes between poems, nor does he attempt to persuade the audience to like him, in any way but through the pleasure they derive from hearing his poems. I've seen Brautigan read only once, at St. Mark's In-the-Bowery Church, in New York, and after each poem he paced slowly around the front of the church, standing in a different place, in a different relationship to the audience, every time he started to read. Both Clark and Brautigan reveal a definite sense of themselves while reading, giving to their work a perspective where as human beings they appear as real people dealing with the world they know directly and honestly.

[Text deleted pertaining to Tom Clark and his poetry . . .]

Richard Brautigan also lives on, and is from, the West Coast—a fact which is relevant to understanding the ninety-eight poems in his book. Brautigan writes poems whenever an interesting thought or phrase strikes him, or when something occurs that he feels needs to be celebrated or described. His poems are easy to read, which is a pleasure in itself, and there is very little literary feedback—that is, you're startled by what's being set down, or by a single twist either in content or in image, or by the honesty with which the poet is expressing himself, and then you continue, turning the page, without having to look back. Instant understanding is possible if you can get through Brautigan's tone, and this is where being from the West seems important, as the tone that directs these works is straightforward throughout, like a cowboy who tells a good story, only it's a new type of cowboy whose understanding of his landscape involves a mixture of peace and pleasure in everything that passes in front of his eyes. What struck me most was that there was no pressure at all to write any of the works in the book except for the knowledge and feeling that the poet could do it. Brautigan has learned from Jack Spicer about the limits and the possibilities of humor, of how far you can go in your own head while still remaining in control of the poem. The delicateness of this balance leads to an intensity which, when successful, overshadows the sometimes self-indulgent choice of subject matter. Both Tom Clark and Richard Brautigan are dealing with the direct transformation of life into art, if art in the simplest sense be the writing of words on paper:

"I lie here in a strange girl's apartment.
She has poison oak, a bad sunburn
and is unhappy.
She moves about the place
like distant gestures of solemn glass."

"She opens and closes things.
She turns the water on,
and she turns the water off."

"All the sounds she makes are faraway.
They could be in a different city."

"It is dusk and people are staring
out the windows of that city.
Their eyes are filled with the sounds
of what she is doing."

The readability of Brautigan's poems makes me not want to think about them too hard; they exist to give pleasure to anyone who wants to go along.

"Reduce intellectual and emotional noise / until you arrive at the silence of yourself / and listen to it" is a section from Brautigan's poem "Karma Repair Kit" and perhaps best identifies, in the poet's own words, the place from which he is writing. In his poems and novels (In Watermelon Sugar is the third novel published so far) the pace—whether you're in the poet's mind or in the minds of his characters—is incredibly slow, almost listless: most of the activity seems the cause of something happening outside the persons involved. In Watermelon Sugar takes place in a type of commune called iDEATH, and much of the narrator's life is taken up eating, sleeping, and in conversation with members of the commune. He also has two girl friends between whom there is some conflict, and he is writing a book, presumably In Watermelon Sugar.

Like Brautigan's other novels, this one is written in very short sections, so that a single consecutive activity like getting out of bed and going to have breakfast often takes several sections; and this is where the possibilities of transition or pacing take control of the book, for it's just as much how you read—how fast or slow—as what has actually been written that is important, how you let the weight of that simplicity stay in your head. One entire chapter, Hands, is quotable, and reads like the poems: "We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have traveled back from making love."

[Text deleted pertaining to Fernando Alegria's poem "Instructions for Undressing the Human Race" . . .]

Welch,1968

"Brautigan's Moth Balanced on an Apple"
Lew Welch
San Francisco Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1968, This World, pp. 53, 59.
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.

Those who'd read Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America will be pleased to know that his new book, In Watermelon Sugar, is even better than that, and is even more beautiful.

Nobody understands where Brautigan got his way of putting words together. I suppose you have to call it prose—there they are, little blocks of paragraphs that go from margin to margin on the page. And I suppose you have to call In Watermelon Sugar a novel—it has chapters and a plot, people fall in and out of love, and there is even gore and violence in it. But there is nothing like Richard Brautigan anywhere.

Perhaps, when we are very old, people will write "Brautigans" just as we now write novels. Let us hope so. For this man has invented a genre, a whole new shot, a thing needed, delightful, and right. At the same time and this is very important, Brautigan's style, strange as it is, is as easy to read as the plainest prose of say, science fiction or detective stories. You start in, and within three pages you are trapped until the book ends.

In Watermelon Sugar is mainly a landscape, a place of Mind, gentle, haunting, and beautiful. There is something called iDeath, a small village or living room or something, surrounded by the Forgotten Works, a sort of super-dump of Mind. Ordinary people wander about doing their deeds with a gentleness and grace as precarious as a "moth balancing on an apple." That last quote is from the book. But there is something very ominous about In Watermelon Sugar.

It's as devastating as End Game for the same reasons, even though it gets there from an entirely different direction. In End Game Beckett arrives at his vision through images of unrelenting despair and ugliness. In Watermelon Sugar moves through images of relentless poignancy and beauty. It is almost too beautiful, too simple, tender and sweet. Like watermelon sugar itself. But he pulls it off, and drags us into a world of love and peace and simple reward. A place where we could eat, talk, make perfect love, with a minimum of bother to ourselves and to the world.

What gets you in the gut is we're probably not good enough for that, it would drive us crazy, and besides the Forgotten Works are looming there, all around us, and it would be so easy. It would be so easy. And it won't happen. Except a few of us are doing it right now. And it never was. Except it went that way for those with the heart to do it. All through time. In every Place.

It's the same old end game, but Richard chooses to go down with nothing less than the most beautiful girls, meals, daily deeds, and long night walks, looking at our total Loss. Yours and mine. If we let it.

To get the point fully, you have to know how Richard is. Not who he is, that would be impossible to write. Even Richard may never be able to do that.

Richard Brautigan is now 33 years old. In the days of the Beat Generation he was a precocious guy—20 years old when everybody else was 29. He wrote a lot of poetry, fathered girls, and tried to raise them. He succeeded. They are still alive and living somewhere else. He didn't dump them. They, and their mother, just went away.

Every book of Richard's has a picture of a different and more beautiful chick on the cover. It's his trademark. The sign of a man who is often lonely, but seldom alone.

One of the youngest members of the Beat Generation, he is one of the oldest members of the Hippie Thing—the Haight Ashbury side of it all. He is a Digger. One of the people who fed the mob on that now sad street. Many of his poems were free poems, poems printed by the Communications Co. and given away, free. On the street.

This man is a real writer, an inventor of Form, Man of the street, and first-rate human being.

Williams,unknown

"A World Within: Solipsism and Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar"
Dan Williams
***?***.
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.

Beginning perhaps with Thomas More's Utopia, and extending to the present day, literature that centers on the idea of a perfected society has been prolific. In our own century we have seen supreme examples of this kind of literature in such works as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Zamyatin's We, and George Orwell's 1984. These three works are particularly significant in that, besides being exemplary additions to the genre of "utopias," they have, more than any other such works, established the possibility of "negative utopia;" that is, they depict societies that are flawless, but that achieve their flawlessness by way of systems that are often inhuman or, as in 1984, absolutely evil. The emergence of these negative utopias can readily be seen as a twentieth-century phenomenon arising from man's sense of hopelessness in the face of such horrors as the first and second World Wars, mass industrialization, and the prospect of thermonuclear annihilation. What these works have done in the way of criticism concerning utopias has been to inspire a new terminology that distinguishes the positive types from the negative: "utopia," which simply means "no place," thus becomes "eutopia," meaning "good place," or "dystopia," meaning "bad place."

Because of the extreme differences that exist between these two types—the largest being that of intention—it has become principal to the analyses of twentieth century utopian fiction to classify each work as belonging to one or the other categories.

In Watermelon Sugar, by Richard Brautigan, is one work of utopian fiction that seems to have defied such subclassification. Dissension among critics on this subject has been so great, in fact, that the argument itself is detracting from what may be more worthy of exploration.

Patricia Hernlund has described the world of In Watermelon Sugar as being a place where life is "literally the same as dying," and provides much support for her view of the novel as dystopian. In contrast, Harvey Leavitt has called this world "the new Eden," and the evidence for his analogy is substantial. In short, attempts to judge Brautigan's novel as either "dystopian" or "eutopian" have been futile, and have perhaps even caused more problems than they have solved.

But whether a "good place" or "bad place," Brautigan's world is more a "no place" than can be found in most any other utopian fiction to date. The resemblance to our own world and experiences is almost nonexistent, and in this respect In Watermelon Sugar stretches the boundaries of traditional utopias, and borders on pure fable. For however much the tradition of utopian literature has evolved, one thing that has been common to all is a connection to some societal structure that already exists. Hence, in Brave New World, we recognize its hypothetical future as being founded on the industrial and scientific concerns of Huxley's day.

In In Watermelon Sugar, what takes the place of realism is solipsism, a stylistic rarity in fiction of any form. As one critic has said, solipsism is the "controlling agency" of Brautigan's novel (see Hansen). Thus, before we seek to subclassify this utopia as "good place" or "bad place," we may be better served by first acknowledging and defining the unique manner in which it is, first and foremost, "no place." To do this, we must have an understanding of solipsism and how it applies to In Watermelon Sugar. Such understanding will be best attained through an examination of what "watermelon sugar" represents.

First, "watermelon sugar" is the name that Brautigan has given to his world. It is named such, apparently, because watermelon sugar is the only substance, besides pines and stones, from which it is constructed. Even the lives of its community, the narrator tells us, are constructed from watermelon sugar: "we take the juice from the watermelons and cook it down until there is nothing left but sugar, and then we work it into the shape of this thing we have: our lives." Clearly, "watermelon sugar" is more than what it would seem on the surface, and nowhere is this more apparant than in the first two paragraphs:

The deeds were done and done again as my life is done In Watermelon Sugar. I'll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant. Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. (IWS, p. 1)

Tony Tanner has defined watermelon sugar as being "the sweet secretion of the imagination", a definition that goes far in establishing an adequate vision of the solipsistic nature of Brautigan's novel. For if watermelon sugar represents the imagination, so all things that it constructs are imaginary, and in In Watermelon Sugar, this includes nearly everything. Even the lives of the people who live In Watermelon Sugar are so constructed.

But not only does watermelon sugar represent the imagination, it is also a product of the imagination, or, more specifically, Brautigan's imagination. Thus, watermelon sugar as a symbol for the imagination can not be proved. For as a product of what it represents, it is trapped within itself and offers no point of reference with which to prove it. This is solipsism, and the foundation on which much of Brautigan's novel is built.

Arlen J. Hansen views this use of solipsism as damaging to Brautigan's novel in that "it tends to create an atmosphere that is so highly personal as to be obscure". Considering the outlandish setting of In Watermelon Sugar, it is easy to understand how Hansen has arrived at this conclusion. Statues of vegetables are scattered here and there, rivers connect living rooms and kitchens, and the sun shines a different color every day. Indeed it is "far to travel," and what is necessary is a giant leap of acceptance.

Brautigan realizes the problem inherent to his solipsism and offers "watermelon sugar" as a key to this acceptance. If we cannot accept this, if we view watermelon sugar as simply nonsensical, or as being a sort of science-fiction version of bricks and mortar, we will soon find ourselves in a state of confusion in the face of what will unjustly appear as either utter nonsense, or very poor science-fiction. In short, if we are to know what "deeds were done," the world in which they were done, and the people who did them, we must first "travel" watermelon sugar.

To better comprehend this unique approach, C.D. Rollins offers a definition of "epistemological solipsism" as distinct from a purely metaphysical solipsism that could not serve any practical usage in communication. Rollins explains epistemological solipsism as the idea "that to any given person, the intelligibility of existential claims originates in his own immediate experience" (490). Thus, If someone makes the existential claim that our house is on fire, we will have no trouble finding the intelligibility in that claim, for in our own immediate experience we are familiar with the concepts of "our house," and "fire." The connective, "is on," will likely incite a disagreeable response because our own experience tells us that "our house" and "fire" do not make for a congruous connection. This is a simple concept, and a universally held belief in nearly all philosophy since Descartes.

However, a more complex idea that arises from epistemological solipsism is the concept that "there are qualities or features of immediate experience necessarily describable only in a private language—or at least that there is the possibility of such a language (Rollins, p. 491). In large part, In Watermelon Sugar seems to be Brautigan's attempt to prove that possibility.

One chapter, entitled "My Name," though less significant an example than "watermelon sugar," may offer the most substantial proof of Brautigan's concentration on epistemological solipsism. Here, the narrator has the simple task of telling us his name, but interestingly his name is no simple matter:

"I guess you are kind of curious as to who I am, but I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me what ever is in your mind.
If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was raining very hard.
That is my name."
(IWS, p. 4)

The proposed "names" the narrator suggests for himself go on and on, and only seem to end superficially. What is implied by each is the necessity for us to look inside ourselves and find some "name" that would be representative of the feelings that each example might evoke from us. The narrator leaves no room for question as to whether such a name exists, for even if we "do not know the answer," that is his name. Implicit to this name-game is the idea that underlying all modes and events of our own immediate experience is something that can only be described in a private language.

The last "name" the narrator gives himself is unique from all the others in that it blatantly departs from the realm of our own experience, and lapses into the narrator's own: "Perhaps the trout swam in the pool but the river was only eight inches wide and the moon shone on iDEATH and the watermelon fields glowed out of proportion, dark and the moon seemed to rise from every plant. That is my name" (IWS, p. 5). These are elements of the novel itself, and, like "watermelon sugar," go unexplained, or are unexplainable. iDEATH, for instance, is the thematic center of In Watermelon Sugar, but all the narrator can tell us about it is that "it is cold and turns like something in the hand of a child" (IWS, p. 1). This final "name," then, goes a step beyond the ones before it. For while the others are meant only to impel us toward a realization of our own private language, this last, which inevitably has the same effect, is also a brief summary of signifiers that Brautigan has invented as a means of communicating his own private language.

It will be assumed that the intended effect of this chapter is threefold: one, that we are to recognize the undercurrents of consciousness that belie our own immediate experience; two, that we are to accept the possibility of these undercurrents being externalized into actual language, as theorized in epistemological solipsism; and three, that such language, however private, is able to communicate beyond itself, to be translated into shared experience.

Clearly, this third assertion is the most difficult to fathom, and the burden of support cannot rest solely on the substance of the novel. Granted, how well each creation is presented and enhanced will have some determination in its accessibility. Ultimately, though, the burden lies with us and how well we are able to access the undercurrent of our own immediate experience. For if we believe, as Brautigan apparently does, that this undercurrent is transmittable, it must follow that we believe that same undercurrent, in whatever its representations, to be essentially a shared phenomenon. Such a belief clearly cannot be proven by existential means. But if we do believe, we cannot merely seek to interpret Brautigan's creations using objective experience as the reference—we must recreate them for ourselves from the undercurrent of our own immediate experience.

At this point, it will be worthwhile to note another key difference that exists between the philosophies of metaphysical solipsism and epistemological solipsism. As C.D. Rollins explains, while metaphysical solipsism holds that "experience is essentially immediate. . . and it is had by one person only and is private to him", epistemological solipsism "does not assert that there is one and only one self which is the source" (490). For the purpose of definition, this distinction will allow us to retain the view of Brautigan's creations as solipsistic, and still hold to the assertion that they may be interpreted—or recreated—through commonality.

Yet there is at least one fault to be found in Brautigan's use of epistemological solipsism. It was said before that in order to gain an understanding of Brautigan's creations, we must recreate them from the undercurrent of our own immediate experience. But as Rollins points out, even through epistemological solipsism, "immediate experience . . . is not strictly shared". What this means is that not all of Brautigan's creations will be accessible to all readers. For although these creations are expressions of something which underlies immediate experience, still they are very much reactions to that experience. And while Brautigan may seek out those reactions which are most common to the immediate experience of others, there will inevitably come those instances when either the experience (in this case unspoken) is not shared by the reader, or when the reader, however familiar he may be with the experience which incites Brautigan's reaction, may not have experienced the same reaction himself. Of course, the first problem—that of the immediate experience not being shared—is one that may be encountered in any type of communication. The solution is simply to seek out the experience. For instance, if we do not understand the denotative meaning of a particular word, that word is not a part of our immediate experience. To make it a part of our immediate experience, we only need a dictionary. But, by the same analogy, Brautigan's creations are rather like the personal connotation of a word made manifest into a word itself. Thus, we may hold a word and its meaning in our immediate experience, and yet feel differently about what the word connotes. This is the primary fault in Brautigan's use of epistemological solipsism, that so much relies not only on common experience, but on the commonality of feeling regarding experience itself.

In order to examine this problem it appears necessary that I turn briefly to personal experience. Though this approach may breech standard ettiquet in formal writing, the "highly personal" nature of Brautigan's style seems almost to demand it. In so doing, I turn now to the chapter entitled "The Watermelon Sun."

Here the narrator tells us about the unusual nature of the sun in his world: "We have an interesting thing with the sun here. It shines a different color every day" (IWS, p. 38). He goes on to explain that the sun's color depends on the day of the week. Mondays are red; Tuesdays, gold; Wednesdays, gray; Thursdays, "black, soundless"; Fridays, white; Saturdays, blue; Sundays, brown (IWS, pp. 38-39). When I was a child, I strongly associated days of the week with certain colors. I remember it vividly, and can still feel the pull of those associations. I even remember which colors went with which days: Mondays were red; Tuesdays, orange; Wednesdays, a sky-blue; Saturdays, red again; and Sundays were white. I do not believe there were strong associations for Thursdays or Fridays—at least I can't remember them. I know that I am not alone in this day-color association, for I have spoken with many others who feel certain that they share my experience. I have also spoken with those who not only have no recollections of such associations, but who have expressed skepticism as to the possibility that this may occur in others.

As one who has experienced such sensations, it seems clear to me that Brautigan's intended effect is to resurrect the "feeling" that comes from day/color association in order to reflect the state of childlike innocence which defines the inhabitants of Watermelon Sugar. And yet there are many who have not had this experience, and for whom the creation of "The Watermelon Sun," along with whatever significance its "feeling" may have in relation to the rest of the novel, is inaccessible.

In summary, I turn to the previous analogy of a word and its denotative meaning representing immediate experience that is readily accessible. In the case of "The Watermelon Sun," we may say that the days and the colors presented are like such words. That is, the words "Monday," and "red," and their denotative meanings are readily accessible in our immediate experience, like "house," and "fire," mentioned earlier. Even if they are not, we can make them so with the simple use of a dictionary. But "Mondays are red," though perhaps recognizable in our common experience as a metaphoric device, will only have literal connotations in the minds of some. Brautigan gives manifestation to this connotation through "The Watermelon Sun." Hence, figuratively speaking, the scenario of "The Watermelon Sun" is like the personal connotation of a word made manifest into a word itself. Literally speaking, it is the undercurrent of immediate experience being externalized into actual language, as previously discussed. As we have seen in the example of "The Watermelon Sun," this language is not always transmittable into shared experience.

Not all of Brautigan's concentration on this "undercurrent of immediate experience" manifests itself in solipsistic creation. Traditional myth and symbolism are also dominant in In Watermelon Sugar. Biblical allusions appear in many places, and references to the works of William Blake play a significant role. Edward Halsey Foster has even found evidence of Zen Buddhist myth being a large factor in the novel. But Richard Brautigan is by no means a traditionalist, and his innovation in employing these myths and symbols often results in outright transformation.

Consider, for instance, Brautigan's manipulation of Blake's Tyger symbol. First, we may view the tigers that once roamed the world of Watermelon Sugar and iDEATH as a reference to Blake's Tyger because they are persistently accosiated with fire. Here are a few examples:

"two tigers were trapped on the bridge and killed and then the bridge was set on fire" (IWS, p. 14);

"the tigerexternal link burned with a great orange glow for hours and hours. . ." (IWS, p. 32);

"There is a statue of the last tiger in the hatchery. The tiger is on fire in the statue" (IWS, p. 92).

With such imagery so prevalent, it is difficult not to make a connection to the opening lines of Blake's poem, "The Tyger," which read, "Tyger Tyger, burning bright! In the forests of the night. . ." (148). To understand the thematic significance of Brautigan's tigers and their connection to Blake's Tyger, a close examination of each will be helpful.

First, the origin of the tigers appears to be unknown to those who live In Watermelon Sugar. The closest we come to such knowledge ourselves is through a conversation between Pauline and the narrator, in which the narrator says, "'Charley says maybe we were tigers a long time ago and changed but they didn't'" (IWS, p. 31). As for the period of their existence, which the narrator has called "the time of the tigers" (IWS, p. 12), it reaches back at least to the establishment date of the Forgotten Works (also unknown), and extends to the time when the narrator is twelve years old. Patricia Hernlund has called the establishment of the Forgotten Works the "cut-off date" of all history In Watermelon Sugar, and, by thorough analysis, dates it at 171 years from the present time of the novel. Previous to their extinction, the tigers are the only mentioned cause of death in the community, after which, suicide is the only mentioned cause, Clearly, then, the extinction of the tigers marks a significant overall change in the community.

It is interesting that, while the only function of the tigers is to bring death to the communitity, they are remembered so fondly. Old Chuck remembers "'how beautiful their voices were'" (IWS, p. 19). Charley calls them "'helpful'" (IWS, p. 35). And Pauline recalls how as a child she witnessed the burning of the last tiger, and gives us this description of the scene: "'I remember people threw flowers on the pile and stood around crying because it was the last tiger'" (IWS, p. 31). It is as though the tigers, in killing members of the community, have provided a valued service to the community at large. However illogical this may seem, an understanding of Blake's Tyger does provide some clarity.

Blake's Tyger can be either a symbol of innocence or of experience, depending upon the eye of the beholder. In his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Blake presents the Tyger symbol in both ways. In his poems, "The Little Girl Lost," and "The Little Girl Found" (135), we find a lost child, Lyca, kept safe in the company of wild animals: "Leopards, tygers play!" Round her as she lay." When Lyca's parents, who have searched far and wide for their daughter, find "their sleeping child!" Among tygers wild," the vision has a transforming effect on them. No longer do they "fear the wolvish howl!, Nor the lion's growl." Because of Lyca's innocent perception, The Tyger is not a danger to her. Lyca's parents see this, and their experienced perception is somewhat returned to a state of innocence, and they no longer fear.

Parallel to this poem is "The Tyger." Consider the first four lines:

"Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

Here we see the Tyger viewed strictly from an experienced point of view. The speaker here, unlike Lyca, finds the Tyger "fearful." As David Weiss, in his analysis of the poem, explains, "It is only a 'fearful symmetry' to the speaker in Experience who is riddled with the prejudices of Experience, predjudices regarding what is good and what is evil, what is rational and what is irrational, or wild". Also worth noting is Weiss's assertion that "Even as the adult speaker of 'The Tiger' can see only a fragmented world which his imagination is too weak to unify, so the child—speaker cannot see the fragments that comprise the world" (254).

It is facsinating how much the people of iDEATH are like such children who "cannot see the fragments that comprise the world." We might say that all of the "forgotten things" in the Forgotten Works represent such fragments. In contrast, iDEATH's Statue of Mirrors, in which "everything is reflected," is like a looking-glass of childlike perception, where only the unity of the world can be known (IWS, p. 112). And as Edward Halsey Foster has said, for the people of iDEATH, the Forgotten Works are really the "Forbidden Works" (85), because the preservation of innocent perception is vital to the preservation of iDEATH, the center of Watermelon Sugar.

The chapter entitled "Arithmetic" is by far the most revealing example of how Brautigan's tigers and Blake's Tyger come together. Here the narrator tells us how, when he was twelve, he watched the tigers kill and eat his parents: "One morning the tigers came in while we were eating breakfast and before my father could grab a weapon they killed him and they killed my mother" (IWS, p. 33). As for the narrator, the tigers tell him, "'Don't be afraid. . .We're not going to hurt you. We don't hurt children'" (IWS, p. 33). And the narrator is not at all afraid. Rather he asks the tigers to help him with his arithmetic.

This fearlessness on the part of the narrator is Brautigan's exaggeration of innocent perception. It is by this perception that the tigers recognize him as a child—indeed, an exaggeration of Blake's Lyca. In contrast the narrator's father, who albeit never got hold of his weapon, is nonetheless implied to have had the idea in his mind. Thus the father is implied to have been fearful, and thus tainted by experienced perception.

Brautigan's tigers, in their symbolic correlation to Blake's Tyger, act as a sort of cleansing agent in the community—preservers of communal innocence. This view is affirmed by Morton D. Paley's observation that "with the Tyger burning in the night forests, Blake was using a figurative conception familiar to him in the writings of the prophets. The allusion is to the Wrath of the Lord burning through the forests of a corrupt social order" (75).

When the tigers are all killed, the utopian innocence of the community is threatened. inBOIL, who is dubiously treated as the novel's prime antagonist, is the first to reach a state of experience. Without the solution of the tigers available, the community can only ostracize inBOIL as he retreats to the Forgotten Works where he is soon joined by others who have become experienced. Thus, from the death of the tigers comes "inBOIL and his gang" who spend their days roaming the Works and making "whiskey from forgotten things. . ." (IWS, p. 61).

But inBOIL brings a new solution to iDEATH. In a confrontation at the trout hatchery, he tells the people of Watermelon Sugar that "'Without the tigers there could be no iDEATH, and you killed the last tigers and so iDEATH went away, and you've lived here like a bunch of clucks ever since. I'm going to bring back iDEATH.'" inBOIL and his gang then proceed to commit a sort of ritualistic mass suicide by hacking off their sense organs. Hernlund has said that the reason for inBOIL's self-mutilation is to show that "the people of iDEATH have cut themselves off from every reality of the senses . . . to avoid being bothered by life". But, more likely, it is to show the people of iDEATH that the only way to truly avoid being bothered by life is to literally cut off one's senses, that to merely repress sensation can never be enough to preserve a state of innocence indefinitely.

That Brautigan's book is utopian can hardly be denied, and its signifigance in this regard is substantial. Yet it has not been the writer's intention to explore this aspect of In Watermelon Sugar, and to reach a conclusion as to its being "eutopian" or "dystopian." Rather it has been to explore something which may be of greater overall significance when considering the general importance of Brautigan as a writer, and that is his incomparable style. An abundance of attention has been paid to the "substance" of In Watermelon Sugar without an adequate exploration of its complex use of language. Perhaps by holding Brautigan's style in the first regard, we will find the substance more accessible.

Lynch,1981

"Paradise Lost">br> Lynch, Dennis>br> "Of The Coming World: The Forgotten Works In Watermelon Sugar and its Tunnel Music."
Singletary, Taylor
Everything2, 6 Dec. 2002. Towers, no. 57, Northern Illinois University, Fall 1981, pp. 12-17
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's In Watermelon Sugar has been the most misunderstood of his many works. The misreadings of this novel have contributed as much as any other single factor to the-widely held notion that Brautigan is a naive flower child, one who simplistically believes, as Johnathan Yardley suggests, that "happiness is a warm hippie." [1] But a close reading of In Watermelon Sugar reveals that the author is doing much more than merely heralding some organic millennium. Instead, as in Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan offers a profoundly disturbing view of a dream become a nightmare.

It should not be too surprising that In Watermelon Sugar lends itself to misinterpretations. On first reading it is a difficult book to understand; even trying to determine the setting of the story, when and where it takes place, causes problems. The action occurs at some undetermined time in the future. No books have been written in the past thirty-five years and only twenty-four in the last 171 years. [2] A total of 375 people, we are told, live in the place called in watermelon sugar, a place that includes a town, some shacks, and a kind of commune called iDEATH where the main characters live. Other action occurs at the Forgotten Works, an incredibly huge rubbish heap that just goes "on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on," a place where "there were no plants growing and no animals living ... There was not even so much as a blade of grass in there, and the birds refused to fly over the place" (86). Though the narrator has no idea as to what caused the Forgotten Works, we might surmise that it is the rubble of a civilization destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, a holocaust, incidentally, that Brautigan himself feels is inevitable. Perhaps, too, whatever trauma that destroyed the Forgotten Works is responsible, too, for some of the other oddities of in watermelon sugar: the talking tigers, the sun that shines a different color every day, the stars that are always red, the rain that always comes on October twelfth. The people of in watermelon sugar lead an almost agrarian life, living in modest shacks, tending the trout hatchery, and processing the strange watermelon sugar out of which they "carefully construct" (1) everything from clocks to wooden planks to their lives.

Though the setting of this story is astounding, the plot is fairly simple: the nameless narrator has a girlfriend, Margaret, who becomes more and more fascinated by the Forgotten Works and by a gang of toughs led by someone named inBOIL. After inBOIL and his gang mutilate and kill themselves, the narrator drops Margaret for their mutual friend Pauline. Margaret then kills herself, is buried by the commune in an elaborate ceremony, and the book ends.

From this plot, many critics have deduced that Brautigan is holding iDEATH up to be an ideal society. There is no question that the narrator likes iDEATH. "It is beautiful," he says. "There is a delicate balance in iDEATH. It suits us" (1). He adds, "I have a gentle life" (2). Echoing these thoughts, one reviewer called iDEATH an "egoless world of vision and imagination" where "all is watermelon-sugar sweet." [3] Another wrote that Brautigan created "a backwater civilization reminiscent of Tolkien, a fragile world of polite chitchat, talking tigers and multicolored suns." [4] Harvey Leavitt calls the setting of the book a "regained Paradise" and calls the work a "utopian novel" in which Brautigan offers "the utopian dream for the post-industrial age of affluence." [5] Tony Tanner calls the setting a "happy commune" and the book "a pastoral dream." [6] Likewise, Terence Malley calls iDEATH "idyllic" and sees the lives of its inhabitants as "serene, gentle, uncomplicated." [7] Summing up the book's commercial success, Patricia Hernlund suggests that most readers view the book as a "lyric description of a successful counterculture" and she adds that In Watermelon Sugar "has become a fad book popular in college classes because students have heard that it describes 'their' way of life." [8]

To some, the book's view of this so called idyllic life is too simple. A review of Brautigan's book in the Times Literary Supplement began thus: "To older generations, one of the more baffling aspects of the hippie protest movement is in its cult of simplicity. The hard-line hippie has no time for all the laborious qualifications that older folk might want to append to words like 'peace' and 'love.' This in turn leaves the older folks wondering whether the hippie might not have more hair than brains." [9] In a similar vein, Tony Tanner concludes that In Watermelon Sugar "is a charming and original work with touches of magic, but it is perhaps too obvious in its parabolic form. It suggests a commitment to a rather to simple-minded version of things which the previous novels avold." [10] Finally, one critic argues, "In Watermelon Sugar has the charm of the fairy story it almost is. But it has neither the emotional complexity, nor the imaginative ingenuity, nor the implicit historical and cultural awareness of Trout Fishing in America. In important respects it really is more sentimental, less radical. In fact, many of the insights of the one book undercut the sugary values of the other.' [11]

All of these readings utterly miss the point of the book. All is not watermelon-sugar-sweet and gentle in the world Brautigan creates. It is no idyll, but is instead a place of death and betrayal. In Watermelon Sugar is not a utopia but a distopia; not a picture of Paradise regained, but a picture of Paradise lost once more; not a pastoral dream, but a pastoral nightmare. True, the narrator does embrace the values of iDEATH and endorses them. But we readers make a.terrible mistake if we confuse the narrator with Brautigan. Terence Malley, among others, does exactly this when he writes, "Based on the little that Brautigan has chosen to tell about himself, and without straining our inferences too much, we can say (for what it's worth) that this narrator is an autobiographical projection of the author, reflecting more or less directly, Brautigan's point of view, perceptions, values." [12] This is utter nonsense. Brautigan himself has remarked that the narrator of In Watermelon Sugar, "like many of my narrators, including the narrators of A Confederate General from Big Sur and The Abortion, is a jerk." [13] If critics, like many college students, continue to associate Brautigan with his simple-minded narrators, it will be no surprise if they continue to dismiss his work. But Brautigan, unlike some of his narrators, is no naive flower child; he is, instead, a writer of amazing depth. Moreover, In Watermelon Sugar is in no way undercut by Trout Fishing in America. Instead, both works reinforce each other, for both are searingly ironic portraits of the human condition.

The misreadings of In Watermelon Sugar extend to the mispronunciation of the setting itself. "About eighty per cent of the people who talk to me about the book pronounce 'iDEATH' as they do the word 'Edith,'" says Brautigan. "It's astounding and misses my point entirely. It's pronounced 'iDEATH'-'I' followed by 'death."' Harvey Leavitt has missed the point when he writes, "In Watermelon Sugar takes us back to the beginning, for this is Eden, with its syllabic and accented soul mate iDEATH reconstructed." [14] However, In Watermelon Sugar is much more about death than it is about Eden. In Book One of this "gentle," "idyllic" story, the narrator's parents are eaten by tigers; in Book Two inBOIL and his gang grotesquely kill themselves; and in Book Three Margaret commits suicide. Death, then, is central in iDEATH.

What is especially curious-and telling-is the narrator's lack of emotional response to any of these deaths. After his parents are gobbled up before his very eyes, the narrator simply asks the tigers to help him with his arithmetic (39) and then thanks them. When inBOIL and his gang slay themselves, the commune merely says "That's that" (115) and cleans up the mess. When the narrator sees in the Statue of Mirrors that Margaret has killed herself, he calmly notifies Fred, who then in turn handles all of the arrangements for her funeral. The funeral itself is rather festive: "Everyone seemed to be in fairly good spirits" (166), and there is a dance afterwards. This utter lack of emotion and human feeling cannot help but trouble any sensitive reader. In the land of iDEATH, though, what happens to people no longer really matters. The "I," an individual's own life, has been reduced to an "i," something of little importance. What is of importance in this world is the commune; this, above all, must survive. Brautigan privately has expressed a distrust of any movement that places an idea above individuality. "I belong to no political party, no clubs, no groups, no causes. People are important, not movements." In iDEATH, though, the "iDEA" always comes first.

Anything that would upset the "delicate balance" of iDEATH is viewed as a threat. Though the narrator says that iDEATH is "always changing. It's for the best" (18), the environment in fact changes very little. The sun is always gold on Tuesdays, always gray on Wednesdays, and so on; the first rain of every year always comes on October twelfth. In this stasis the people over the commune find comfort. However, Margaret and inBOILS's fascination with the Forgotten Works is a major threat. The Forgotten Works represents all of the knowledge of the previous, now lost, civilization. If iDEATH is an ironic Eden, the Forgotten Works is its Tree of Knowledge. Most of the members of the commune avoid the Forgotten Works. Because it is likely that a misuse of knowledge led to the holocaust that destroyed the Forgotten Works, the unwillingness of most of the characters to learn about the place is understandable. However, just as understandable is the desire of Margaret and inBOIL to visit there: it is simple human curiosity. The narrator, though, cannot understand why anyone would visit there, even for art's sake: "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" (82). Anyone who wants more knowledge, then, must have something wrong with him. Knowledge threatens the status quo; knowledge brings change.

And change does come through the insights gained by inBOIL. As his name indicates, he is boiling within, and he is the most passionate of all the residents of in watermelon sugar. To Pauline, and to many critics, inBOIL is simply "an asshole" (114), but this reading is too pat. The more one thinks about inBOIL, the more troubling he is; he cannot be dismissed. But the residents of iDEATH do not bother to think of him much. inBOIL is the "id" in iDEATH, and if in iDEATH we find the death of the "I," the ego, then we also find the death of the id. Violence and passion must be purged from this society. Terence Malley claims that the residents of iDEATH "approach that transcendent state celebrated by Blake, in A Song of Liberty (as well as in other poems), in which 'Everything that Lives is Holy!' [15] However, this reading ignores the fact that the people have killed off the tigers (hardly respecting their "holiness") just as later they will ostracize inBOIL and Margaret. With the ego and the id gone, all that remains is the superego: rules, convention, order.

During the self-mutilation of inBOIL's gang, Charley says, "I don't think y.ou've proved anything," but inBOIL says, "We've proved iDEATH" (113). In a profound way, he is right.

"OK," inBOIL said. "This is what it's all about. You don't know what's really going on with iDEATH. The tigers knew more about iDEATH than you know. You killed all the tigers and burned the last one in here. "That was all wrong. The tigers should never have peen killed. The tigers were the true meaning of iDEATH. Without the tigers there could be no iDEATH, and you killed the tigers and so iDEATH went away, and you've lived here like a bunch of clucks ever since. I'm going to bring back iDEATH. We're all going to bring back iDEATH. My gang here and me. I've been thinking about it for years and now we're going to do it. iDEATH will be again." (111)

inBOIL's point is that society needs the id; it needs the tiger. Insane though inBOIL is, the reader cannot help but understand him. Blake said "Without contraries there is no progression," and inBOIL, I feel, would agree. In iDEATH the tigers are killed, and only the lambs - or "clucks" - remain. Without inBOIL and Margaret, iDEATH has no contraries; it is merely a place of numbing sameness.

Throughout this reading I have been suggesting though the narrator may have one viewpoint, Brautigan would not have us share it. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the narrator's reactions to Margaret. On the back jacket of In Watermelon Sugar, the novel is described as "a story of love and betrayal." But who betrayed whom? To many critics, Margaret betrays the commune. Albert H. Norman claims that "The delicate balance of iDEATH is upset by Margaret's jealousy and inBOIL's scheming." [16] Another critic writes, "Margaret, jealous of Pauline and no longer feeling peaceful-sweet and tranquil-high, feels some kind of affinity with inBOIL and spends more time in the Forgotten Works." [17] Tony Tanner adds that Margaret's "interest in 'things' is, in turn, symptomatic of her inability to love in the free and gentle manner of the other members of iDEATH." [18] The implication of all this is that Margaret's suicide is somehow a just dessert.

However, there is not a single indication in the text that Margaret feels any jealousy towards Pauline. On the contrary, it is the narrator who is jealous of Margaret. He is jealous not only of her interest in the Forgotten Works, but he is also jealous of what he darkly suspects-with no foundation-is going on between her and inBOIL. Moreover, Margaret does not, as the middle quotation in the preceding paragraph implies, turn towards the Forgotten Works after the narrator turns to Pauline. Indeed, quite the opposite occurs. The narrator becomes disenchanted with Margaret only after she begins visiting the Forgotten Works. In addition, Margaret never loses her "peaceful-sweet" personality. She is to the end loving and kind. While the others berate inBOIL, Margaret says only, "They're always very nice to me" (95). The narrator, reflecting later, becomes very angry at Margaret. "Her performance at dinner had really disgusted me" (96). Surely this is an over-reaction, one that Margaret does not deserve. After inBOIL's death, only Margaret expresses the very human emotion of shock (120);even this bothers the narrator. There is indeed betrayal in In Watermelon Sugar, but it is not Margaret who betrays anyone; instead it is Margaret who is betrayed by her lover, the narrator, and Pauline, the woman with whom she is "almost sisters" (31). It is the narrator and Pauline who fail to love in a "free and gentle manner."

In addition, the narrator and Pauline constantly refuse to accept any responsibility for their actions, and they refuse to consider alternatives to their behavior. "I feel bad about this," Pauline says. "Margaret and I were such good friends .... I'm sorry that things had to work out this way, but there was nothing we could do about it" (31). She is simply wrong; she and the narrator could have done differently. Later, after Pauline and the narrator's actions have led to Margaret's death, Pauline says again,"! just didn't expect things to turn out this way, but they have, and I guess there's nothing we can do about' it." "That's right," the narrator replies, "Just take things the way they happen" (159). Such complacency, such bromides offered in the face of tragedy, are not to be endorsed. Earlier, when Pauline has shown just the barest bit of concern for Margaret's feelings, the narrator has said: "Don't worry about it. Everything will be all right" (47). He is dead wrong. And when soon after this Pete tells the narrator that Margaret is "really pining for you," and the narrator replies, "I don't know about that" (55), he is lying. "

While Margaret was alive, the narrator had tried to block her out. "I wish Margaret would leave me alone" (5), he says, and he refuses to open his door to her. He even tries to deny her individuality when he writes, "This morning there was a knock at the door. I could tell who it was by the way they knocked, and I heard them coming across the bridge .... I did not acknowledge their knocking because I just wasn't interested. I did not want to see them" (3). The narrator uses the impersonal "them" to describe a woman who until very recently has been his lover. Try as he might, though, the narrator cannot stifle Margaret's individuality. She, among all the members of the commune, is the only one who ever steps on the plank in the bridge that makes noise. "They always step on it. I have never been able to figure this out." Indeed, the narrator never will be able to understand Margaret. Moreover, she has qualities he will never be able to match. "I can walk across the bridge hundreds of times without stepping on that board, but Margaret always steps on it" (3). Margaret did not endorse the actions of inBOIL, but their deaths rightly shocked her. Though Tom McGuane says that In Watermelon Sugar possesses "a springtime of moral emptiness," there is a moral center to the book, and it is Margaret. [19]

To find moral emptiness, one need look no further than the narrator. One of his most damning acts involves a note Margaret leaves him on the very morning that she kills herself. "It was good to be back at my shack, but there was a note on the door from Margaret. I read the note and it did not please me and I threw it away, so not even time could find it" (65). Why is there this curious silence from the narrator about the content of the note? It is not too farfetched to guess that this note was a final cry for help from Margaret before her death. This might explain why the narrator took such pains to get rid of the note. His reaction to the note is totally insensitive; instead of going to help Margaret, he takes a nap. After Margaret's funeral, we can imagine that she is forgotten forever.

Indeed, the solution to everything that is troubling to the people of iDEATH is either to destroy it, or to forget it, or to do both. After the tigers eat the narrator's parents, he burns down the shack he had lived in with them, moves to iDEATH, and seldom mentions them again. When the last tiger is himself killed, his body is brought to iDEATH, and everyone gathers as the body is burnt. Pauline says, "It burned until there was nothing left but ashes, and then the men began right then and there building the trout hatchery at iDEATH, right over the spot where the last tiger had been burned." She adds, significantly, "It's hard to think of that now when you're down there dancing" (37). Later, after inBOIL and his gang have killed themselves, Pauline will suggest, "Take them to their shacks at the Forgotten Works. Burn them. Burn their shacks. Burn them together and then forget them." Charley says, "That's a good idea" (117), and that is what is done. Finally, after Margaret dies, she is taken to the trout hatchery (the site where the last tiger was burned), and is buried in the river. The townspeople then gather at the hatchery for a dance; because the hatchery is built over the same river Margaret lies buried in, the people of iDEATH are in effect dancing on her grave. The philosophy of iDEATH, then, is to destroy and to forget all that troubles or threatens. In this world, "Out of sight, out of mind" is a credo.

The people of iDEATH cut themselves off from simple human emotions such as grief and sympathy, and, for all practical purposes, they are emotionally lobotomized. Likewise, these people are physically incomplete; they fail to make full use of their senses. It is very telling that before inBOIL and his men kill themselves, they first cut off their thumbs, then their noses, and next their ears; one also puts out his eye. These men, then, have desensitized themselves; that is, they have deprived themselves of the senses of touch, smell, hearing and seeing. However, what they are doing overtly is only what the people of iDEATH have been doing symbolically. All of the people of the commune seem cut off from their senses; no one ever seems to experience much pleasure. Even sex is bland and lifeless. When the narrator beds Pauline he can only say, "We went over and lay upon her bed. I took her dress off. She had nothing on underneath. We did that for a while" (34). After what is simply "that" is over, the narrator says, "I liked Pauline's body and she said that she liked mine, too, and we couldn't think of anything to say" (35).

The only sense organ that inBOIL and his gang do not mutilate is each man's tongue. This is entirely fitting, for taste is the only sense that is used much at iDEATH. In Watermelon Sugar includes a great many references to food. Indeed, food is the main topic of conversation in iDEATH, and the conversations go for great lengths. This has bothered many critics. Tom McGuane writes that the book is "concrete to the point of a kind of studied anti-selectivity. Through whole pages people talk assiduously of nothing whatsoever." [20] Malley adds, "Surely Brautigan runs the risk of simply boring his readers in chapters like 'Meat Loaf' and 'Apple Pie,' the main business of which is a discussion among the narrator, Fred, and Doc Edwards about what they want for lunch." [21] However, that the characters spend so much time discussing food is exactly Brautigan's point about them. All that's left for these people, cut off from almost every intellectual pursuit and emotionally deficient, is food. Moreover, Malley misses the subtle points Brautigan is trying to make in "Apple Pie" and "Meat Loaf." In "Meat Loaf" we find out that the restaurant has been serving the same meal on the same day for as long as anyone can remember. When everyone orders it, this is indicative of the bland conformity of most of iDEATH. However, in "Apple Pie" Fred dares to defend Margaret to the narrator. Fred says,

"Why are you mad at her? You don't think she has anything to do with inBOIL just because everyone else does, except Pauline and me?
"There's no proof. It doesn't even make sense in the first place. It was just a coincidence that linked them together. You don't believe she had anything to do with inBOIL do you?" (130)

To these sensible words, the narrator can say only, "I don't know" (131). However, right after this when Fred orders a piece of pie, the narrator, for the first time in the book, does not join him. Thus, he is subtly showing his displeasure with Fred, and he is indirectly indicating that he really has formed some opinion of what has happened between Margaret and inBOIL. "Meat Loaf" and "Apple Pie" are not wasted chapters, then, but are instead telling chapters that are simple only on the surface.

Though taste is the only sense fully exercised by the people of iDEATH, much of the food they eat is as bland and unappealing as their lives. Al, the main cook, puts carrots in everything. "If I eat another carrot this week I'll scream" (6), says Fred in the book's first reference to food. The last reference occurs on the next to last page of the book', when the narrator says that Pauline and Al "made a potato salad that somehow ended up having a lot of carrots in it" (165). The menu at iDEATH, then, is almost as unchanging as the lives of the people there. But bland as it is, it is all they have. Thus, it is not surprising that in iDEATH there are numerous statues of vegetables.

There is a statue of an artichoke near the shingle factory and a ten-foot carrot near the trout hatchery at iDEATH and a head of lettuce near the school and a bunch of onions near the entrance to the Forgotten Works and there are other vegetable statues near people's shacks and a rutabaga by the ball park. (29)

Food is the deity of this land, and it must be honored.

The world of In Watermelon Sugar, then, is a stale world of unchanging conformity. But change at any price is not the cure for iDEATH, and so the way of inBOIL cannot be endorsed. But just as surely, the reader cannot endorse the way or· Pauline and the narrator. Perhaps the character who comes closest to combining the good qualities of inBOIL and the people of iDEATH is Margaret. She unites curiosity and a thirst for knowledge with gentleness and understanding. Brautigan's unreliable narrator paints a picture of "a good place," but the sensitive reader will see that this kind of world must be rejected, for a world without passion and without intellectual curiosity is a sterile paradise indeed. A masterpiece of irony and an underrated and misunderstood book, In Watermelon Sugar is a frightening and sobering parable of a world gone wrong.

NOTES
1. Johnathan Yardley, "Still Loving," New Republic, 20 March 1971, p. 24.
2. Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar (1968; rpt. New York: Dell, 1974), p. 11. All further references to this work appear parenthetically in the text.
3. "Polluted Eden," Times Literary Supplement, 14 Aug. 1970, p. 893.
4. Albert H. Norman, "Energy and Whimsy," Newsweek, 29 Dec. 1969, p. 55.
5. Harvey Leavitt, "The Regained Paradise of Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar," Critique, 16, 1 (1974), 55.
6. Tony Tanner, City of Words (1971; rpt. London: Johnathan Cape, 1976), pp. 412-413.
7. Terence Malley, Richard Brautigan (New York: Warner, 1972), p. 116. 8. Patricia Hernlund, "Author's Intent: In Watermelon Sugar," Critique, 16, 1 (1974), 5.
9. "Polluted Eden," p. 893.
10. Tanner, p. 413.
11. "Polluted Eden," p. 893.
12. Malley, p. 116.
13. All of Richard Brautigan's comments used in this paper come from conversations I had with him in San Francisco (1979), Chicago (1980), and Pine Creek, Montana (1981).
14. Leavitt, p. 18.
15. Malley, p. 126.
16. Norman, p. 55.
17."Polluted Eden," p. 893.
18. Tanner, p. 413.
19. Tom McGuane, "Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, In Watermelon Sugar," New York Times Book Review, 15 Feb. 1970, p. 49.
20. McGuane, p. 49.
21. Malley, p. 139.

Singletary,2002

Lynch, Dennis "Paradise Lost" Towers, no. 57, Northern Illinois University, Fall 1981, pp. 12-17
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.

In Watermelon Sugar is my favorite book in the universe.
It has tigers, bad people, good people, math
good food, creaking bridges, rivers, trouts,
and the sweetest sugar one will ever find.
Spoilers may follow, but not really.
It doesn't matter.

The clearest vision of reality is often the most abstract. While the rise of science and progress suffocate the notion of an extrasensory experience within the reading of literature, the phenomena persist. Meanings are communicated, participating in a magnificent cosmic-cultural aura, penetrating a communication of meaning, intent, and scandalously--truth. There is a process of intertextuality occurring, a conversation between authors, texts themselves, and the readers who venture to interpret them. Richard Brautigan's imaginary novel, In Watermelon Sugar converses well with a poem written many years after his death, Tunnel Music by Mark Doty. This conversation appears to be about the collapse of our techno-egocentric society.

Because of the cryptic nature of In Watermelon Sugar, it aids analysis to offer some form of comparison to its labyrinthine meanings. Through the lens of Mark Doty's poem, a particular feature of the novel is offered a clarity and relevance of vision: the Forgotten Works are indicative "of the coming world." (Doty 27) Allow me first to outline the basic feeling of the novel and how the Works figure into their lives. To paraphrase William James, generally there is a smell of watermelons.

At once the novella details a simple community of nature-minded folk, centered on a compound called iDEATH, a place "always changing" (Brautigan 16) with trees, and a river "flowing out of the living room." At iDEATH, the sun shines a different color every day, making the watermelon crops reflect that color. The people of iDEATH make "a great many things out of" watermelon sugar. (Brautigan 1-2) Sculpting their lives from this sugar, and mixing it with trout, they have lantern oil. Brautigan once said "everything in America is about trout fishing if you've got the correct attitude." (McDonnell) Rivers run everywhere here, they take the qualities of whatever the reader would like them too, if you look hard enough--everything can be a river. "Some of the rivers are only a few inches wide. . . I know a river that is half-an-inch wide. . . We call everything a river here. We're that kind of people." (Brautigan 2)

Beyond iDEATH and the trout hatchery are the Forgotten Works. They "go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on." (Brautigan 69) They are "hammered out" as Mark Doty puts it. The Works are "much bigger than we are." There is a gate at the entrance, and beside a statue of a "forgotten thing" there is a sign that reads:

THIS IS THE ENTRANCE TO THE FORGOTTEN WORKS
BE CAREFUL
YOU MIGHT GET LOST.

Since this novella's release in 1968, literary analysts and readers alike have attempted to decode the significance of the Works, through their skillful manipulation of its mysterious contents. It is from the dead, forgotten things stacked so high that inBOIL, a character who exiles himself from iDEATH, and his gang make their whiskey from. Terence Malley offers some concise observations:

The Forgotten Works have become a kind of graveyard for unneeded, unwanted things. The names, purpose, and even nature of many of the objects heaped there have literally become forgotten… But if the objects piled up in the Forgotten Works have faded or are fading from conscious memory, the Works themselves are anything but forgotten. (Malley 122)

The Works' heavy symbolism on the characters living their lives in watermelon sugar is intuitively apparent, offering a contrast and contextualization to the (then) modern world of the 1960s. However, leaving the Forgotten Works here as merely a weight on the so-called "good" characters' backs is problematic.

The Forgotten Works are "so utterly of the coming world," our world. (Doty 30) Mark Doty's poem reads like a detailing of the possibilities of the Forgotten Works, giving a musical praise to its forgotten possibilities that the nameless narrator of In Watermelon Sugar refuses to place with it. Parts of the Forgotten Works are like many people's reaction to poetry; when confronted with an unknown object from the Works, the narrator "didn't know how to hold it." He "tried to hold it like you would hold a flower and a rock at the same time." (Brautigan 7) This Forgotten Works establishes a sense of time/period in the novella, providing a reference point to our own world of "infernal industry, the tunnels under Manhattan broken into hell at last." (Doty 2-3) inBOIL and his gang are like my perceived image of the homeless within Doty's poem, getting drunk on old things, having to create their own music to counter a world that doesn't understand them. They take "artifacts of wreck... a century's failures reworked" (Doty 17) and shape their lives out of it, unlike those shaping their lives in watermelon sugar. When inBOIL leads a gang into iDEATH and they all chop their fingers, ears, and noses off, claiming that that was "the real iDEATH." (Brautigan 93) This provides a unique perspective as to the dynamic between the Forgotten Works and the idyllic commune of iDEATH. It makes me think of inBOIL as something "dinged, busted or dumped" being "beaten till it sings." Certainly his conclusion has "a kind of ghostly joy in it, / though this music is almost unrecognizable." The music of he and his group's suicides are what he says they symbolize, "the tigers (being) the true meaning of iDEATH." I have forgotten to mention the tigers. They existed within watermelon sugar at one time, but they were violent, though they had wonderful singing voices, and had to be killed. Here, inBOIL mixes metaphors: by "bringing back iDEATH," he is raising forgotten things, the "infernal industry" (Doty 3) of his forgotten whiskey, made from forgotten things, the spirit of destruction channeled from the tigers, and the fearful energy of the inBOIL clan's self-massacre. Music.

Kathryn Hume observes that "those (characters) whose possessive and aggressive emotions are stronger" than an "even-tempered life and feel no need for... marriage... and nine-to-five" jobs, "commit suicide". She then notes that "whatever his plot's source in hot anger, Brautigan tries to transmute such feelings to something else"--the music of the novel. The great contradiction, the paradox if you will, of Brautigan's delineation of characters, are their interpretations of both what iDEATH means, what the Forgotten Works were & are, and the passivity of seeking answers to those questions. The thrust of their existence, that "the deeds were done and done again in watermelon sugar" (Brautigan 1) represents a circular life cycle, a return to the community-oriented non-contextual time environment of humanity's roots. The Forgotten Works, like the crafty descriptions in Mark Doty's poem, are the constant threat to the people of iDEATH (here on earth, and in the novel) because the past potentates a thirst for a wider future, it infects the ideal. inBOIL says that he has "forgotten more iDEATH than" the people "will ever know." (Brautigan 64) "This isn't iDEATH at all. This is just a figment of your imagination. All of you guys here are just a bunch of clucks." A century's failure will be reworked. (Doty 17) "So utterly of the coming world it is."

* Please note that while I feel somewhat happy with the above interpretations, I in no way assume them to be anywhere near "the truth" of how I feel about the novel. I am fractured.

WORKS CITED
Brautigan, Ianthe. You Can't Catch Death: A Daughter's Memoir. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.
Brautigan, Richard. In Watermelon Sugar. New York: Dell Publishing, Inc., 1968.
Calvino, Italo. The Uses of Literature. Trans. Helen & Kurt Wolff. Florida: Harvest/HBJ, 1982.
Doty, Mark. "Tunnel Music." The Conscious Reader. 8th ed. Caroline Shrodes. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001, 477.
Hume, Kathryn. "Brautigan's psychomachia." Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature. Winnipeg: Univ. of Manitoba, (34:1) 2001, 79-80.
Malley, Terence. Writers for the 70's: Richard Brautigan. New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1972.
McDonell, Terry. "FISH THIS" Sports Afield. April 1996 Vol. 215, Issue 3