Richard Brautigan: The Off-Beat Writer of the Beat Generation

Richard Brautigan - poet and novelist: What makes one writer historical and important where another writer of similar quality is doomed to obscurity? California writer Richard Brautigan presents an interesting test case for this question. Richard Brautigan was a talented writer of poetry, short stories, and novels. He lived and wrote in northern California in and around the 1960's. His writing was contemporary with the Beat novelists Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey. Brautigan's most famous novels are: The Abortion and Trout Fishing in America.

Brautigan and the Western Cannon

Renowned literary critic Harold Bloom wrote a book in the 1990's called The Western Cannon. In an era of multi-culturalism, pluralism, and cultural relativity, Bloom's book was seen as a strike against the inevitable leveling of the literary world by "political correctness". The fear was that once we all (rightly) agreed that all the world's cultures are of equal quality, we would also say (wrongly) that all books are of equal quality, thereby raising the folktales of Romania to the same literary status as War and Peace.

Bloom wrote in defense of the notion that a body of work does exist, stemming from the King James Bible and Chaucer and continuing through Whitman, Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner. This body of literature acts as one body. The works included in the canonical body are referential to one another and represent a sort of abstracted artistic and stylistic conversation that has taken place over hundreds of years.

Writers are important and canonical, Bloom wrote, in so far as they participate in this conversation.

T.S. Eliot would have agreed that there is great virtue in maintaining a history of letters. The real poet, Eliot said, writes with history in mind.

The writer who does not write with history in mind and who does not participate in Bloom's great conversation is not canonical and is not historical.

Richard Brautigan is one such writer.

Perhaps this point is a tantalizing one to make because of the persona Brautigan employs in his fiction. The protagonists from The Abortion are outsiders who look in to the world of popular culture from beyond the pale of caring about the action taking place there, inside the culture.

Brautigan and the Beats

Unlike Ken Kesey and Jack Kerouac who wrote books from the inside of a counter-cultural movement, Brautigan's The Abortion did not situate the writer within a counter-culture or a culture.

Richard Brautigan, it would seem, was an outsider writer working outside the outsider circles.

Brautigan's writing is crisp and sharp and witty and he has a great penchant for metaphor. His short stories as well as his novels move along at a rapid pace reminiscent of certain Southern California writers (John Fante, Charles Bukowski) and they concern young men and women.

This subject was shared by both Kesey and Kerouac, with Kerouac especially attempting to understand his place in the world by writing it out and asserting what he was.

Where Kerouac jumped out to shout his assertions very loudly into the cosmic void he so adored, Richard Brautigan took a more relaxed approach and quietly stated his confusions as to why things were they way they were in 1960's America.

Was Richard Brautigan a less historically aware writer than Jack Kerouac or Ken Kesey? Why is Brautigan an obscure name in 2010 when Kerouac is a household name?

Was The Abortion, as a novel, any more outside of the Bloom's canonical conversation than On the Road?

Never one for playing up his complexity, Brautigan is attributed with this quote, which may, in a way, explain his movement toward obscurity:

"It's strange how the simple things in life go on while we become more difficult."

Sources & Further Reading

http://www.listal.com/author/jack-kerouac

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/richard_brautigan.html

http://www.brautigan.net/biography.html