Richard Brautigan by Marc Chenetier (review)

166 Western American Literature Richard Brautigan. By Marc Chenetier. (New York: Methuen, 1983. 96 pages, $4.25.) This brief monograph on a novelist known for his offhand brevity shows that even in literary criticism good things can come in small packages. Yes folks, a book that delivers more than it promises, not the other way around, and does it by uncovering how this elusive and allusive sort-of-psychedelic tall-tale teller does the same. As Chenetier admits, Brautigan is hardly a forgotten writer, but neither is he well understood. Critically, Brautigan has come to be viewed as a one-book writer, and that book, Trout Fishing in America, floats as a footnote from North Beach to the Haight to Woodstock. So Chenetier rolls his VW bus up and casts about for a new way to fish these waters. As he puts it, “Mapping out a territory is as important as settling it.” Indeed one could claim it’s more important. Count up the settlers that farm Melville, Faulkner, and others and then count up how few people actually seem able to examine an unmapped writer, a Brautigan, and define their project so that others will realize there’s new territory to farm. Without some hardy mapmakers, our sense of the tradition, of literature, would stagnate. In mapping Brautigan and opening his work for serious settlement, Chenetier largely ignores the fished out thematic streams and jumps over Brautigan’s sense of form to subordinate these matters to the question of Brautigan’s style and its implications: Brautigan is a writer concerned with defying language’s fixities and points of reference; indeed, I believe all his books are motivated by one central concern and activated by one central dialectic: they are driven by an obsessive interrogation of the fossilization and fixture of language, and by a counter-desire to free it from stultification and paralysis. This tack allows Chenetier to establish two major points: First, he demon­ strates that Brautigan’s radical sense of linguistic play requires us to reread and re-evaluate Brautigan’s earlier and better known work. Second, this same perspective allows Chenetier to demonstrate the essential continuity between Brautigan’s earlier work and his later work, even though that later work is usually viewed as a departure from the earlier and dismissed even by those critics who praise the earlier work. All of this is to say, read the book, but not quite to say that Chenetier has caught his limit. For one thing the book at times asserts more than it is able to define or demonstrate. For another it at times substitutes jargon for clarity. Chenetier writes of Trout Fishing in America'. Since most parts of the text are polysemic, a plural reading is the only way to unify it. Not only do the signifiers take over from the thematics ; they provide the only propelling element in a book that is otherwise simply anecdotal. . . . The interplay of signifiers in their harmonic development gives the book its strongest structural reality. Reviews 167 Yet as Chenetier has warned, he is out to map, not settle. And if the decon­ structionism threatens to wag the dog, at least it jolts us to recognize the potential free play of Brautigan’s style and reminds as well how new criticisms seem to emerge in tandem with new senses of language and structure in literature. So even my minor quarrels with Chenetier’s book suggest its value and accomplishment. Meet you at the stream. Good fishing. TIM HUNT, Nova University Quicksand and Cactus: A Memoir of the Southern Mormon Frontier. By Juanita Brooks, with an introduction by Charles S. Peterson. (Salt Lake City, U T : Howe Brothers, 1982. 52 + 342 pages; maps, illustrations, $19.95.) The publication of Juanita Brooks’memoir after forty years in manuscript is timely: these unassuming but by no means artless recollections of her girlhood and growing up speak to us in the clear tones and fresh colors of unclouded early memory and add her own story to the chronicle of the Brooks and Leavitt families she has already told elsewhere. An overview of Juanita’s career by Charles S. Peterson as introduction and two letters by...