Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Magdalena Šedrlová WATERMELON SIXTIES: Analysis of Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar on the Background of the 1960s Counterculture in the United States Bachelor ’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr. 2008
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
…………………………………………….. Author’s signature
2 Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr., for his pertinent remarks, useful hints, patience and support.
3 Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………..6
PART ONE:
A CULTURE COUNTER MAINSTREAM: Explaining the Counterculture …………8
Chapter I: Origins………………………………………………………………10
Chapter II: The Sixties………………………………………………………….17
1. Philosophy and Style…………………………………………………20
A) Peace………………………………………………………...20
B) East…………………………………………………………..21
C) Non consumerism…………………………………………...22
D) Love…………………………………………………………23
E) Turn on, tune in, drop out – the drug culture……...…………24
PART TWO:
WELCOME IN WATERMELON SUGAR……………………………………………27
Chapter I: Richard Brautigan – A West Coast writer…………………………..27
Chapter II: The Story of In Watermelon Sugar ………………………………...29
Chapter III: Thematic and Symbolic Analysis…..……….………………….....34
1. In Watermelon Sugar as a mirror of the contemporary society……...34
A) iDEATH – a model of a utopian community ………………34
B) The Forgotten Works – cemetery of the technocracy…….…39
2. In Watermelon Sugar as an LSD vision…………….…………….... .41
4 3. Once upon a time there was In Watermelon Sugar as a fairy tale….44
A) Genre clichés………………………………………………. .44
B) Style……………………………………………………… …45
4. Undermining elements……………………………………………….46
A) The Tigers…………………………………………………...46
B) Emotional vacuum at iDEATH……………………………...49
CONCLUSION ……………………………………………………………………...52
APPENDICES ……………………………………………………………………….53
WORKS CITED ……….….….….……………………………...……...….………..63
5 INTRODUCTION
It is incontestable today that the 1960s were one of the most significant decades in American history. The ten years between 1960 and 1970 meant radical changes in many spheres of life of all Americans. The scope of these changes, which include new political developments, the rise of the black movement and the fight for the rights of black Americans, the American involvement in the Vietnam war, and also many new trends in culture and social behavior, is of course too wide to be covered in this thesis and so is the work of Richard Brautigan. That is why I decided to focus the thesis solely on one of Brautigan’s best known novels, In Watermelon Sugar , and on its relation to the rising youth counterculture.
In fact, Richard Brautigan constitutes a linking element between the 1950s emerging counterculture, represented by the beat generation, and the boom of the hippie movement, which flowered fully in the mid 1960s. While the beats can be regarded as a relatively small group, the hippie life style was embraced by millions of young people, almost by a whole generation, as John Phillips put it in his song “San Francisco.” The age difference is quite important when speaking of the contrasts between the beats and the hippies, because, by the time the beats had moved from New York to the jazz cafés of San Francisco’s North Beach, most of them were already in their early thirties; whereas the hippie crowds of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury were mostly teenagers or young people under twenty five. Nevertheless, the terms “hipster” and “hippie” show a clear link of continuity between each other. “Hipster” was used to designate at first jazz musicians, and then jazz fans, drug dealers and other sorts of half criminals whose lives were miles off the daily routine of the “regular” citizens. “Hippie” came into usage in
6 its today’s sense in the early 1960s and referred to a beatnik who moved to Haight
Asbury.
Although Richard Brautigan settled in San Francisco as early as in the mid
1950s, he was never a real part of the beat movement, though he knew the beat authors and some of them were also his good friends. However, it is hard to decide whether he was or was not a beat, because even literary critics are not sure about where to put him.
The facts are that: he is certainly mentioned in some beat anthologies, his early poems were published in beat magazines, and Larry Keenan included him in his 1965 photograph called “The Last Gathering of the Beats,” which was taken in front of the
City Lights bookshop (see appendices 1 and 2, pp. 53 54 ). His ties to the beats are therefore not negligible, but it is also true that, as a twenty year old poet (he was born in
1935) giving out his poems in the streets, he was not taken much seriously by the ten years older beat stars. In addition, he did not gain literary prominence until the 1960s and he is best known as a hippie writer.
In the afterword to the bilingual English Czech edition of In Watermelon Sugar
Martin Hilský claims that this novel is as closely connected with the second half of the
1960s as Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby is with the 1920s or Kerouac’s On the Road with the 1950s (184). Although this may appear an exaggerated statement, it certainly has some factual basis. Why is that so? That is what I will try to explain in this thesis, which will include a description of the hippie counterculture, an in depth analysis of In
Watermelon Sugar and parallel relations between the two, and thus will answer the question why the novel became so popular with the young generation and what were the features which the hippies found the most appealing.
7 PART ONE: A CULTURE COUNTER MAINSTREAM:
Explaining the counterculture
Before I start accounting the story of whatever one understands under the term
“counterculture,” I would like to make a distinction between a counterculture and the counterculture.
For the former, I will use the definition from The Making of a Counter Culture by Theodore Roszak, for whom a counterculture means “a culture so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all” (42), which is a general explanation that fits any time and any place. Throughout the history there have been many instances of smaller or larger social or cultural movements that were in opposition to the prevailing values established by the ruling classes, and that either lead to a kind of social revolution or at least introduced some new trends in arts, or they did not achieve much and ended up forgotten. However, we can be sure that these undercurrents hidden under the surface of the mainstream society are essential for any kind of development, and that they are very often the first impulses for a change. Development and change are just other synonyms for evolution, and thus, without what goes counter to the official culture, no society could move further from a dead point towards novelty.
By the word “ the counterculture,” I mean, in terms of time, the 1960s counterculture and, in terms of space, the American counterculture. Furthermore, I have to point out that neither does this time and space narrowing bring any clear specification, because the counterculture is a puzzle with many pieces, as Roszak suggests: To one side, there is the mind blown bohemianism of the beats
and hippies; to the other, the hard headed political activism of the student
New Left. […]
The tension one senses between these two movements is real
enough. But […] there exists, at a deeper level, a theme that unites these
variations and which accounts for the fact that hippy and student activist
continue to recognize each other as allies. (56)
Roszak thus divides the counterculture into two big groups, the idle hippies and the politically active New Left. But there were also other groupings that could be labeled with the term counterculture, such as the Black Panthers, who were involved in the fight for the rights of black Americans, or even the motorcycle gang The Hell’s Angels.
Although the range is therefore quite wide, it is only the hippie who became one of the most glittering icons of the sixties, it is the icon of a counterculture that eventually became “mass” culture. The hippies were a subculture with specific values, goals and style; and that is what will be the subject of the first part of this thesis, where I will use the term “counterculture” as a synonym for “hippie subculture.”
9 Chapter I: Origins
If we are looking for the roots of the sixties counterculture, we have to examine closely the previous decades and their social evolution. As the making of a culture is not a matter of a single year, we cannot say that the counterculture was born exactly in the year XY or that on 1 January 1960 we entered the sixties, and so suddenly the hippie boom began and thousands of barefoot children crowded the United States. It is rather a series of, at first invisible, developments and events that cumulate onto each other until they become strong enough to produce what we call a counterculture.
Naturally, whenever there is a debate about the sixties and their importance, one cannot forget to mention the fifties, and any time anybody talks about the hippies they do not omit the beats and their stays in San Francisco during the fifties. Some people even provide dates – all that pre hippie thing started in 1955 when the famous reading at the Six Gallery took place, or it was in 1956 when Ginsberg’s “Howl” was published, or it could also have been in 1957 when On the Road was released. But I say No. Of course, in no way do I mean to deny these facts which are true, I only want to stress that these were all merely the individual and very specific events that made the public notice what had been happening long time before.
If I say we must look back in time, it is not to the fifties, it is to the forties.
Moreover, we must also leave San Francisco and move eastwards, to New York. Does it seem a bit too much? It may. But what the hippies read and what you read about in On the Road happened ten years prior to the publication. And so the beat decade is rather the forties, the time during which the four main members of the beat movement, by some critics, such as Kenneth Rexroth in his essay “The Second Post War, the Second
Interbellum, the Permanent War Generation,” considered the only members, Jack
10 Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs met, contemplated jazz, experimented with drugs, traveled across the country, became friends with Neal
Cassady and at the same time were producing a great deal of literature.
These figures challenged the traditional values of American society on many fronts. First of all, they represented a strict opposition to the puritan morals of the majority of Americans. This opposition was manifested in their sexual and semi criminal behavior. Ginsberg and Burroughs being overtly homosexual, and Kerouac being undoubtedly bisexual, and all of them highly promiscuous, the rest of the society could only despise them. However, the beats, and Ginsberg – a dedicated follower of
Blake and Whitman – especially, set to fight for a sexual liberation of the individual.
What is concerning their unlawful activities, it is a well known fact that both
Corso and Cassady spent some of their teenage years in correction houses/reform schools for stealing cars, Ginsberg received stolen goods in his flat, all of them were good friends with various dubious individuals, and Burroughs even killed his wife
(although unintentionally).
Secondly, they also refused traditional notions of family and protestant work. In fact, they only worked when they needed some source of finance, and these were for the most part just odd jobs. This is due not only to their individualism and unwillingness to conform to any kind of authority, but also to the fact that it is not usually in a bohemian writer’s nature to have a regular eight hour a day job.
Another important beat feature is their penchant for the blacks and for black music – the bebop. In fact, the beats were among the first to consider the blacks equal and very often their culture even superior to the white. It was Kerouac who once wrote that he was wishing he were “a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me [him], not enough life, joy, kicks…” (163) and it was
11 Norman Mailer who called the hipster “the white negro,” because they indeed, in many respects, copied some patterns of the black life style. They were hanging around black neighborhoods, they were going to black cafés, they loved black jazzmen, they slept with black girls/boys and they talked black slang – the word “hipster” itself is a proof.
The term comes from the word “hip,” which started to be used by black jazz musicians to describe someone who was “in the know” about the emerging jazz culture, and “hipster” was an expression that originally designated a jazz fan, rather than the performer. Later on, in the forties, it became a label for white youths who tended to adopt black style (l.bosh).
Now, what is the hipster’s philosophy? What does he represent? In Gates of
Eden Morris Dickstein provides an apt explanation: “The hipster cuts through and exploits the hypocrisy of the period, the rampant cynicism about honor and social role playing that lies just beneath the surface of its official pieties [and he is] the figure of a
Nietzschean adventurer seeking experience beyond good and evil” (53).
To end this listing of the beats’/hipsters’ infractions of unwritten or even written laws, we should mention their religious practice. Kerouac once said that the beat generation was very much a religious generation and it was him who enriched the word
“beat” with another possible meaning, as a shortcut for “beatific” (which he talked about also in his 1967 interview for “Radio Canada”). In a sense, it was really a religious generation, but again not of the kind which the mainstream Americans could appreciate. Kerouac was a Catholic, Ginsberg was a Jew and both of them ended up as
Buddhists. It was Gary Snyder, a poet and student of Zen Buddhism (he had even spent some time in a Japanese monastery), whom they met in San Francisco, who introduced them to the basic principles of that oriental teaching. Kerouac, at the beginning very keen on becoming a good Buddhist, even wrote several theoretical treatises on this
12 topic, but this passion of his did not last long and by the end of the fifties he had already returned back to his Catholicism. On the other hand, Ginsberg did stick to Buddhism very firmly, became its life long advocate, and was certainly one of those who helped popularize it among the young of the sixties.
With the advent of the fifties, there comes a certain change, which does not consist in a change of the beat/hipster behavior, but is manifested by the fact that it only became more visible. Gradually, there arose a sort of interest in the beats and other discontented youths who thus became subjects of serious scholarly works, mainly of
Mailer and Goodman, as well as topics for articles of popular magazines. In “The White
Negro” Mailer examines the features of the hipster figure and stresses his “macho and violent side” (Dickstein 81). On the other hand, Goodman, in “Growing Up Absurd,” which is a work about “a society which gives its youth no word to grow up in, [and] fails to provide satisfying roles and models. Hence the young do not simply drop out; rather, they act out a critique of the organized system that everybody in some sense agrees with,” (Dickstein 77) highlights the “anxiety and displacements [and] the lack of any experience that felt real” (Dickstein 81). In a sharp contrast to these works were articles published in magazines such as Time or Esquire . These tended to show only the sensational side of the beat/dissent movement, because, after the publication of On the
Road, the public was suddenly very eager to discover more about the beat life style, and the press had to respond very quickly to this demand. It did not matter that the picture it provided was somewhat distorted, the main thing was, as usual, the sales. Roszak sums it up in this way: “Whatever these things called ‘beatniks’ […] originally were, or still are, may have nothing to do with what Time, Esquire, Cheeta , CBSNBCABC,
Broadway comedy, and Hollywood have decided to make of them. Dissent, the press has clearly decided, is hot copy” (37).
13 The fifties were thus important from several points of view. First, in the late fifties, a number of books, “creative as well as analytical, that were deeply hostile to the dominant spirit of the age” were published, a good deal of which became “canonical works of the sixties” (Dickstein 54). What is concerning the analytical works; we have named Goodman and Mailer, whose contribution was essential for the formation of the counterculture of the sixties, which proved that their interest in, at that time relatively minor social developments, was not futile. This is sustained also by Dickstein when he claims that:
It was prophetic for Mailer and Goodman to draw serious attention to the
new bohemian subculture of the late fifties, in tandem with the upsurge
of youthful delinquency and rebelliousness. In retrospect, those
developments foreshadowed a great deal of the communal utopianism,
urban restlessness, and street violence of the sixties, but at that time they
were treated with no such seriousness. The media played up both the
beats and the juvenile hoodlums as isolated spectacles of inarticulate
exhibitionism. Mailer and Goodman undertook to become spokesmen for
this discontent, interpreters of all the ‘acting out,’ who could read in
withdrawal and youthful anomie a complex critique of the system and its
values. (80)
As for the creative books, the fifties are of course the decade of publication of most beat works, among which “Howl” stands out as “a founding document of the counter culture” (Roszak 67). The gathering of poets at the Six Gallery, where “Howl” was read for the first time in public, was thus a “declaration of independence from the rigid, authoritarian order the beats believed was throttling the nation” (Isserman and
14 Kazin 149). The declaration, or rather the statement about the present state of things, is expressed in Ginsberg’s verses in the following way:
I saw […] / angelheaded hipsters […] / who poverty and tatters and
hollow eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold
water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, […] / who
were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on
the windows […] / who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with
dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol […] / who let
themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists and screamed
with joy, […] / who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the
sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, […] / who went out
whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night cars […] / who drove
crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a
vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity […] (Ginsberg 9 14)
Even from this relatively short excerpt from “Howl,” it can be seen that it contains many features that were discussed a few pages above, where I outlined the beats’ nonconformist life style, and that the young dissenting people could identify with.
These were the importance of jazz music, dropping out of colleges, drug consumption, unrestrained sex, traveling, crime, and also companionship (as in the last verse of the quotation: “who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision,” which suggests a great deal of willingness to travel a long distance just to see a friend for almost no reason at all). This part also contains some instances of Ginsberg’s religious rhetoric (“purgatoried”, “saintly”, “seraphim”),
15 which partly support the religious looking at the beat generation and also show his rhetorical means that made him a prophet for the new generation.
Secondly, it is during the fifties that the beats moved to San Francisco and joined its local bohemian atmosphere and literary circles, which had been thriving in the area even before they even saw the city, to give rise to the grounds of the hippie movement.
At that time, also Richard Brautigan chose this city for the place of his residence.
During the fifties, the centre of the San Francisco bohemia was located in the North
Beach, a neighborhood that became a great pole of attraction thanks to its numerous jazz cafés, galleries and events such as live poetry readings accompanied with jazz music. There was also the City Lights bookstore and publishing house that released many beat authors, and which was sued for publishing Ginsberg’s “Howl,” considered by countless critics as obscene. All in all, the whole city seemed to be irradiating a certain bohemian glow that allured many young people to come and settle down in San
Francisco.
16 Chapter II: The Sixties
By the early sixties, the heart of the counterculture had progressively shifted from the North Beach to the Haight Ashbury district, which was an area with cheap rents that were affordable for students and intellectuals who shared the houses, and it could thus become the ground for the future hippie communities. However, the Haight
Ashbury is not the only location where the hippies decided to set up their households.
There were many places all around the country, as Isserman and Kazin comment in
America Divided :
By the early ‘60’s, youth communities had sprung up on the outskirts of
college campuses, often in cheap housing available near black or Latino
ghettos. South Campus in Berkeley, Mifflin Street in Madison,
Wisconsin, and the neighborhood behind the Drag in Austin, Texas, were
among the more famous of such venues. Surrounded by one’s peers and
largely free from the responsibilities of career, family, and mortgage,
young people could experiment with their bodies and minds in ways that
usually shocked and enraged older people raised amid the constricted
horizons of the Great Depression and World War II. (150)
Nevertheless, the hippies were not only city or college based; there were also groups that decided to leave urban areas to live on farms only from what they grow themselves.
Let us however concentrate on San Francisco, because this was the place with the highest density of hippies per square meter, as thousands of barefooted and longhaired kids were step by step crowding the Haight. The amount of teenagers who decided to join the movement is well illustrated by Vojtěch Lindaur’s statement that almost every other family in the United States was missing a son or a daughter who had
17 become hippies (44), or by Roszak’s observation that “The FBI reports the arrest of over ninety thousand juvenile runaways in 1966; most of those who flee well off middle class homes get picked up by thousands each current year in the big city bohemias” (33).With no money and no intention to work they were looked after by the
Diggers – one of the first San Francisco’s hippie communities – who cooked cheap meals and set up a free store where used second hand clothes could be got for free.
Many commentators claim that the climax of San Francisco hippie movement came in 1967, when there was, on 14 January, a huge event called “A Gathering of the
Tribes for a Human Be In.” This was a sort of happening that included performances of prominent rock groups, such as Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and
Jefferson Airplane, and speeches delivered by various poets, political activists and other gurus of the young generation. In fact, it was a display of who is who in the counterculture, the list of guests included old time beats like Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder as well as brand new figures like
Timothy Leary and Jerry Rubin (see appendices 3 and 4, pp. 55 56).
After the Human Be In, another huge wave of runaway teenagers reached the city. By that time, the whole nation had already been paralyzed by the flower power mist that was effusing from San Francisco, and nationwide magazines proliferated numerous articles about the hippies. Only Time magazine, according to Time online archives, brought, during the decade 1960 – 1970, 395 articles, from which 31 cover stories, that in one way or another concerned the hippies. Therefore, Time being a weekly, it means that more than every other issue featured a mention about them. As there are countless periodicals in the United States, for which the figures may be similar, it shows that the interest that the media took into the counterculture was enormous.
18 As a result, being a hippie became soon a matter of fashion, all of a sudden, everyone wanted to be or at least to look like one, everyone wanted to go to San
Francisco and wear flowers in their hair. There were even travel agencies that organized special trips, “the Hippie Hop Tours,” around the Haight Ashbury. Simply, the counterculture was a good business. However, the original inhabitants of the Haight, such as members of rock bands Grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding
Company, claimed that by the time that the whole world learned about San Francisco’s hippies and the movement started to spread internationally, the original spirit of the place had vanished away. This is also well illustrated by Lawrence Frelinghetti’s recollections of that time, which appeared in San Francisco Chronicle :
Before, up through the Human Be In, the Haight was really sort of
innocent, clean. […] During the Summer of Love, I got the impression
kids from all over the country were descending on the Haight Ashbury.
Word had gotten around the country, and they all came to San Francisco,
just out of high school, still in high school, college kids. It was about that
time that things began to fall apart. Really heavy drugs came in. […]
Things just degenerated more and more. […] All the main aspects of the
hippie counterculture were ingested into the middle class: The music, the
clothes, the colors, the psychedelic colors, the anti war movement.
Herbert Marcuse spoke of the enormous capacity of the dominant society
to ingest its own most dissonant elements. That's just what happened.
19 1. Philosophy and style:
So far, I have presented the time development of the hippie subculture, that is its origins and heyday, and I have also emphasized the importance of the role that the city of San Francisco had for the birth of the movement. In this part, I will comment on the specific goals that the hippies were trying to achieve, what means they chose and why they chose them.
A) Peace
It has already been said that the hippies shared many objectives with other groups of the young dissenters and the universal enemy that almost everyone fought against was the Vietnam War. The American involvement in Vietnam dates back to the
1950s, when, first of all, American troops were only helping France to keep its colony
(after the World War II the French colonial empire was crashing down and France was doing its best to maintain its position at least in this region, and the United States, as an ally of France, felt obliged to intervene). However, the war became gradually a matter of fight against the communist regime in North Vietnam. Although the United States did not want to invest large sums into a war somewhere in Asia, they believed that, according to the so called “domino theory” (first put into words by Dwight D.
Eisenhower in 1954), if they let the communists win over the South, soon after other countries in the area would come under the communist regime too. And that was a threat for the entire non communist world. Nonetheless, during the 1960s the number of
American soldiers sent off to war was still growing, but with no remarkable results. In
20 consequence, the young people felt that the war was totally useless, because millions of people were dying there for no apparent reason at all, and started to protest.
The protest could have several forms, either you could take part in a politically active attitude, organize or just join protest peace marches and fight on your own front against the police, or you could opt for a more passive and more truly hippie solution – burn your draft card and indulge in drugs or some Eastern mystic teaching.
B) East
Indeed, Eastern philosophies, be it Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Hinduism or the
Hare Krishna movement, saw a big boom during the sixties, and that was not only thanks to their devoted promoters like Ginsberg, Snyder or even the Beatle George
Harrison. Without a doubt, these teachings had many things to offer to the young. First, they are primarily concerned with peace among all living creatures and non killing, which fitted very well into the spirit of the time, and second, Eastern religions call into question the Western scientific worldview that prevails, according to Roszak, in our contemporary technocratic society. And so, “Eastern religion, with its heritage of gentle, tranquil and thoroughly civilized contemplativeness, […] that calls radically into question […] the supremacy of cerebral cognition [and] the value of technological prowess […] has become one of the strongest strains of the counterculture” (82 83). It is not without interest to remark that Richard Brautigan also had an inclination to the
Eastern countries, especially Japan, where he spent some time, and he also married a
Japanese woman. The popularity of Eastern philosophy could be also seen in the visual style of the hippies – their clothes very often copied the Eastern fashions and included embroidered tunics or long dresses, leather thongs and lots of strings of beads, some of
21 which were Buddhist rosary beads. Many hippies, eager to find out more about the
Eastern life style, even set off to travel to Asia or to the Middle East, and thus cities like
Katmandu or Marrakech became another hippie centers.
C) Non consumerism
Another aspect of Eastern religions is that they promote a simple life without unnecessary luxury. This also attracted the young generation, who, having been raised in Levittowns (see appendix 6, p 57) where their parents competed with the neighbors in who will have a bigger swimming pool, a bigger car, a better washing machine or whatever one can think of, began to feel uneasy about all that hunt for fortune and status. Thus, with no aspirations for a well paid job and therefore no real need or willingness to work at all, the hippies traded the comfort for personal freedom. Their reluctance to work was of course criticized by many people and along with their sexual mores was the biggest eyesore for the good citizens. For instance Hans Toch, author of
The Social Psychology of Social Movements and professor at State University of New
York, reproaches to the hippies their “consuming but noncontributing” way of living and insists that they are “parasitic,” because they accept and even request social services without contributing to the economy (qtd. in Roszak 36). Nonetheless, Theodore
Roszak is on the hippies’ side and he argues that the economy does not even need their participation at all:
We have an economy of cybernated abundance that […] can do […]
without all this labor. How better, then, to spend our affluence than on
those minimal goods and services that will support leisure for as many of
us as possible? Or are these hippies reprehensible because they seem to
22 enjoy their mendicant idleness, rather than feeling, as the poor apparently
should, indignant and fighting mad to get a good respectable forty hour
week job? There are criticisms to be made of the beat hip bohemian
fringe of our youth culture – but this is surely not one of them. (36)
All in all, it is certainly true that the hippies refused to work, while demanding some services, but on the other hand, they also lead a rather simple life: they lived in shared households; they wore self made or second hand clothes; and so they did not actually need to work at all, because, first, their expenses were minimal, and second, many of them were financially supported by their family.
D) Love
“Make love, not war” goes the famous hippie slogan. The “not war” part has already been discussed, now it is time to have a look at the “make love.” First, “love” can be taken as a term meaning “harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding, no more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions,” just to quote from some of Hair lyrics. Indeed, most hippies endorsed a philosophy of tolerance and peaceful attitude towards all human beings and actually towards the planet as a whole. This meant, in practice, ecological behavior, living in harmony with nature, helping out to each other and so forth, but also drug consumption, because the drugs were taken as means of widening of perception and gaining knowledge and understanding of the world around.
Second, “love” obviously refers to physical love, that is sex. The hippies were infamous for their sexual practices free of any kind of prejudices. This promiscuity can be seen by some people as a “love without love,” but if we return to the previous, wider
23 definition of “love,” we must agree that for the hippies sex was just another means of reaching a) harmony of souls and b) personal pleasure and a kind of nirvana also in the religious sense of the word.
E) Turn on, Tune in, Drop out – the drug culture
The two most popular drugs with the hippie counterculture were marijuana and
LSD, (lysergic acid diethylamide # 25). Marijuana had already been known and widely used in bohemian circles for decades, and although it had been illegal since 1937, it was largely widespread in the hippie communities and almost as common as beer or cigarettes. Its illegalization represented another hot issue that divided the children and the parental generation, because the young considered the ban utterly absurd, as “the parents’ drugs” – alcohol and tobacco, despite their obvious harmfulness to the public health, were available without any restrictions (Isserman and Kazin 155). In the sixties, smoking “pot” became a matter of sharing common goals, philosophy, being a part of a peer group and an act of rejection of parental viewpoints.
When you sucked on a joint, you inhaled not simply some smoke, but
you inhaled this whole complex of cultural attitudes, not only opposition
to the war, but a liking for madras bedspreads, an inclination to taste new
and interesting foods, to feel less guilty about cutting class, to disrespect
authority more because they were trying to make you a criminal for
having these experiences and changes of perspective. (Michael Rossman,
one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement, for San Francisco
Chronicle )
24 LSD was discovered accidentally in 1943 by a Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, and after the World War II it became an object of scientific research. In the United
States, the first experimenters with the substance were the CIA and bohemian artists, such jazz musicians like Thelonius Monk or Dizzy Gillespie. The CIA believed that the acid could bring enormous benefits to the espionage and tested it even on unwitting subjects (such as prisoners or mental patients), which lead to a few suicides and a great deal of psychoses (Isserman and Kazin 156). On the other hand, for the artists LSD was a means of broadening of the mind and arriving at a higher level of artistic creativity.
In the early sixties, a junior professor at Harvard’s Department of Psychology,
Timothy Leary, started a research on the chemical and its effects on the human mind and consciousness. After he was expelled from the university, he became its devoted promoter and, as Roszak puts it, “a high priest of psychedelia nonpareil” (164) because he managed to “embed the younger generation’s psychedelic fascination solidly in a religious context” (165).
Undeniably, the drug action is powerful. If you are on a “good trip,” it opens your “doors of perception” (just to quote the famous Blake’s phrase, which was later used by Aldous Huxley for the title of his account of his own experience with hallucinogenic drugs), which can range from kaleidoscopic hallucinations that show you the surrounding world in new extraordinary shapes and colors, to an overwhelming feeling of a sudden awakening and understanding of the sense of life (like in Buddhist satori). However, the psychedelic experience can also turn the other way round and the
“tripper” can go through a hell of anxiety, fear, madness or suicidal thoughts.
Roszak makes a distinction between a culturally experienced consumer of LSD, such as Huxley, for whom it is indeed a way of “moving sophisticatedly toward cultural synthesis,” and a young teenager who cannot really fully appreciate the potential the
25 drug could have on his consciousness, because he only “blow[s] his mind and [is] bemused to see all the pretty balloons go up. But when all the balloons have gone up and gone pop, what is there left behind but the yearning to see more pretty balloons?”
(159 160).
LSD was officially banned in 1966, which only added to its spreading popularity. Nevertheless, it never achieved such a wide acceptance as marijuana, although it became an “indispensable rite of initiation” and belonging (Isserman and
Kazin 158) because, first, it “opened a portal to the extraordinary, [and] it also screened out the rational” (ibid.), and second, as critic Geoffrey O’Brien remembers, “drugs were the fundamental text. If you had not read the book, you couldn’t participate in the discussion that followed” (qtd. in Isserman and Kazin 155).
26 PART TWO: WELCOME IN WATERMELON SUGAR
Chapter I: Richard Brautigan - A West Coast Writer
Richard Brautigan’s literary career started in the mid fifties in San Francisco when he became a part of the local bohemian literary circles. According to his biography at “Brautigan Bibliography and Archive” web pages, he settled in the city in
1954, being only 19 years old, and soon he became associated with the beats, for a time he even shared an apartment with Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. At the beginning, he was known rather as a poet, who very often gave his poems away on the streets for free.
Although Brautigan always maintained he was not a member of the beat movement and neither did the beats appreciate him very much, many of them were good friends of his.
He also participated in numerous poetry readings at popular beat gathering spots around the city, such as The Place or Vesuvio. In addition, his early poetry was published in beat publications such as City Lights Journal . His first poetry collections were published in the late fifties.
During the sixties, he became involved in many Diggers’ activities, including their “Communication Company,” which was a community publication business that printed the Diggers’ poetry and also various advertising leaflets for their events, such as street theatre performances and others (see appendix 6, p 58). In fact, at that time,
Brautigan was one of the core members of the Diggers’ community, he enthusiastically handed out their little posters on the streets and they also printed some of his poetry. He continued to write free poems, some of which were even printed on packets of seeds
(which have become objects much valued by collectors, see appendix 7, pp 59 61).
Furthermore, this decade saw the publication of his first prosaic works A Confederate
27 General from Big Sur (1964), Trout Fishing in America (1967) and In Watermelon
Sugar (1968, written in 1964, for the cover see appendix 8, p 62) – that catapulted him into national fame, because of the following features that all of them, according to
Jaroslav Kušnír, share:
1. the main protagonists’ rejection or neglect of the contemporary society’s
materialistic values
2. their alienation, separation and escape from this society
3. their establishment of an alternative way of existence and its certain
idealization representing different approach to and vision of the world
than the official and institutionalized (“Exiled Worlds”)
Brautigan started to be invited to poetry readings around the country, and during the
Summer of Love he was taken for the one writer who represented best the sentiments of the countercultural movement centered in San Francisco.
During the next decade, he continued to write and publish other prosaic as well as poetry works, but his fame started to decline. This was also due to the fact that many critics regarded him as an ephemeral phenomenon of the American literature associated solely with the hippie movement and thus no longer of any interest.
By the eighties, he had already become seriously troubled by alcoholism, insomnia, and paranoia, which eventually lead to his suicide in 1984.
28 Chapter II: The Story of In Watermelon Sugar
In Watermelon Sugar is a novel about a village, a small town, or one could call it also a fantastic land, world … simply a place, called Watermelon Sugar, and the life of its inhabitants. In Watermelon Sugar, everything is made mainly of watermelon sugar, but there are also other materials used for making things, such as pine wood or stones.
Nevertheless, the watermelon sugar is the predominant substance of everything there is; as the narrator explains at the beginning of the book: “Our lives we have carefully constructed of watermelon sugar” (Brautigan 8). Just to provide a few examples: there can be watermelon sugar dresses, watermelon sugar window panes or even watermelon sugar ink, and all that smells of a sweet watermelon sugar scent.
In the land of Watermelon Sugar most inhabitants live in modest shacks and lead a contended and gentle life. Except of countless watermelon sugar objects, there are also numerous statues of vegetables and animals scattered about the landscape; there are hundreds of rivers and streams of various widths with many bridges over them and many trout swimming and jumping in them, including the Grand Old Trout; and on the riverbeds there lie glass coffins with foxfire that glow at nights. The life in Watermelon
Sugar is very particular also because the sun there shines each day a different color and so there are different colors of watermelons too.
In Watermelon Sugar, there are two special places, iDEATH and the Forgotten
Works, which represent two opposite tendencies. Although I will analyze them separately in the following parts of the thesis, it is necessary to comment on them at least briefly, as they are crucial for the understanding of the work. iDEATH is again, like Watermelon Sugar itself, a place which is hard to specify because of its fantastic surrealistic shape and ever changing nature. “Just before I arrived at iDEATH, it
29 changed. iDEATH’s like that: always changing. It’s for the best” (Brautigan 28) says the narrator. The easiest definition of iDEATH would probably be that it is a gathering place for the members of the Watermelon Sugar community, maybe also a kind of pub or canteen, because they take their meals there (but some of them live there permanently), which has physical characteristics of both indoor and outdoor space, because there are, for instance, trees and rivers in the living room. The people at iDEATH are good, satisfied, gentle, working for the profit of the community and happy as they are.
On the contrary, the Forgotten Works are a place that most of them avoid, as it is a sort of junkyard of remnants of a previous civilization, where a villain inBOIL and his gang live and make whiskey out of the heaps of forgotten things that are there. The
Forgotten Works stand out as a negation of all that is represented by iDEATH. While iDEATH is a place of a gentle and happy life, the Forgotten Works constitute a source of evil.
So far, I have concentrated on what the Watermelon Sugar looks like, now I will focus on the characters and the storyline.
First of all, it is important to point out that the main character and narrator at the same time is nameless. In the chapter entitled “My Name,” he gives the reader many possibilities of how to define his 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 is my name. […]
30 Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around.
That is my name.
Perhaps you stared into a river. There was somebody near you
who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before
it happened. Then it happened.
That is my name. (Brautigan 12)
This section is followed by a list of other six “that is my name’s” and establishes the narrator’s anonymity, and at the same time gives the reader an enormous freedom of interpretation not only of the narrator’s identity, but also of the whole meaning of the novel. Because actually these “that is my name” instructions can be applied also to iDEATH or to Watermelon Sugar as a whole, you can have thousands of “that is iDEATH” (as it is constantly changing) or “that is Watermelon Sugar.” As Kušnír concludes, “this narrator emphasizes reading as a creative process in which the meaning is never given [and] celebrates the power of imagination” (“Diversity”).
So we have a main hero with no name, who lives in a shack near iDEATH, and is writing a book about iDEATH, which is actually the book the reader is holding in hands and reading. In truth, this is a very strange activity in Watermelon Sugar, because it is the first book to be written there in the narrator’s life time; there had been a few others written before, one about owls and one about the Forgotten Works, but most books are found in the Forgotten Works and most of them are used as fuel.
The main hero used to go out with Margaret, but she was the only inhabitant of
Watermelon Sugar who manifested a certain curiosity about the Forgotten Works; she visited inBOIL and the area increasingly more often and she even started collecting forgotten things, and that is why she fell into disfavor and the main hero broke up with her. She eventually hanged herself, but it is not very clear what was the reason that
31 pushed her to do it, whether the end of her year long relationship with the main hero or inBOIL’s death.
At present, the main hero is going out with Pauline, a nice and beautiful young girl who cooks at iDEATH. She is an ideal of all virtues, she even cares for Margaret’s psychic condition after the break up, and what is more she hates inBOIL as everyone else.
As far as inBOIL is concerned, he once lived at iDEATH too, but then “he turned bad. […] He kept getting mad at things that were of no importance and […] began spending a lot of time at the Forgotten Works” (Brautigan 86). Soon after, several other men joined him to form the gang.
InBOIL’s brother Charley lives still at iDEATH and is a well respected member of the community. In fact, Charley and inBOIL are true opposites. Charley is the unspoken leader of iDEATH and the guard of iDEATH’s peace, order and “delicate balance.” On the other hand, inBOIL represents an act of rebellion against the latter.
The prevailing nature of In Watermelon Sugar as a book is descriptive. The narrator writes about the simple life the inhabitants lead, about what iDEATH looks like, about food, about the times of tigers (once there were tigers, which could speak and ate adults but not children, living in Watermelon Sugar, but they were killed off) and about the trout hatchery that was built at the place where the last tiger was burnt.
There are chapters devoted to the bridges, to the statues of vegetables and so forth.
“Chapters” when talking about In Watermelon Sugar are not the usual chapters one imagines, that is pieces of text several pages long, Brautigan’s “chapters” can comprise only a few lines.
Since the narration in In Watermelon Sugar is quite fragmented – the reader learns about most of the events that happened in the past from memories and dreams
32 that are intertwined with descriptions of present, quite banal, events and conversations – it is relatively difficult to establish a plot that would have an exciting dramatic action.
However, the one action point, and the climax that the story is centered on, is the moment when inBOIL and his gang come to iDEATH and demonstratively kill themselves by cutting off their thumbs, noses and ears to show their version of the real sense of iDEATH. Nonetheless, this act lacks an explicit logical explanation and seems to be quite useless as no one can really understand it. After that, Pauline immediately starts to mop up the mess, the dead bodies are carried away on a wheelbarrow and burnt, and everyone is happy and relieved, except Margaret, who later on commits suicide too. What follows next, is the description of her funeral and the book closes at the point of a kind of funeral afterparty with dance and musicians, because that is the way all funerals are done in Watermelon Sugar.
33 Chapter III: Thematic and Symbolic Analysis
1. In Watermelon Sugar as a mirror of the contemporary society:
A) iDEATH – a model of a utopian community
Before proceeding to the discussion of the symbolic value of iDEATH, it is useful to decrypt the name itself. Critics, such as Carolyn Blakely, argue that the interpretation of iDEATH depends on how the word is pronounced, and this can be done in two ways, you can stress either the “idea” part or the “death” part. The first option suggests that iDEATH represents a certain new idea about or a way of living.
The other option, and probably, judging by the way the word is written, the more correct one, suggests the “death of the I,” that is the dissolution of the individual self for the creation of the collective “we” of the iDEATH community. In fact, both of the interpretations are valid and in a way similar to one another.
The idea of rejection of the contemporary society and establishing of an alternative way of living is not new in the American history. There had already been attempts at various forms of communal living detached from the mainstream society, such as the 19 th century Brook Farm, which was a Transcendentalist experiment during which the residents tried to live in a self reliant community in harmony with nature.
Neil Schmitz brings the following analogy:
A good part of In Watermelon Sugar was written in Bolinas, a small
coastal community in northern California as remote from the Oakland
San Francisco complex as Brook Farm was from nineteenth century
Boston. […] And while Bolinas is not specifically organized as a
34 socialistic commune, it does in some sense represent a collective, if only
in its shared vision of its difference from contemporary life in the United
States. In any event, the town sheds a bucolic ambiance and the people
who live in it: artists, academicians, dropouts, the aboriginal
townspeople, zealously guard that ambiance.
iDEATH, as a portrayal of an exemplary utopian community, has the following features: self reliance, self contained existence with no bounds to the exterior, interdependency of the members on each other, simplicity, respect of the nature, and non violent and harmonious behavior of its members.
The self reliance is manifested in the fact that the community lives only from what the inhabitants grow themselves or what is found in there. The main crop in
Watermelon Sugar is of course watermelons, which are used for making almost everything, as I have already explained. Besides them, there are also trout, which, on one hand, are truly respected and admired as living creatures, especially the oldest of them, the Grand Old Trout, which is expressed by the narrator in the chapter entitled
“The Grand Old Trout,” in which he tells: “The Grand Old Trout [was] raised as a fingerling in the trout hatchery at iDEATH. I knew this because he had the little iDEATH bell fastened to his jaw. He is many years old and weighs many pounds and moves slowly with wisdom. […] The Grand Old Trout looked over at me. I believe he recognized me, for he stared at me for a couple of minutes” (Brautigan 76, 78). On the other hand, the trout are used as a source of trout oil, which is later mixed with watermelon sugar to burn in lanterns. Other important natural resources in Watermelon
Sugar are vegetables and pine wood. There is no evidence that the community buys or sells anything to anybody else.
35 This leads to the claim that the people in Watermelon Sugar live closed from and with no contacts with any other communities, except probably the Forgotten Works, because that is where Charley’s brother inBOIL lives and he appears from time to time at iDEATH, and also Margaret likes to make trips in there. However, the rest of the inhabitants show no interest in that area, which can be seen also from the following quote: “Nobody knows how old the Forgotten Works are, reaching as they do into distances that we cannot travel nor want to ” (Brautigan 96, italics mine). All this proves that, with no need to communicate in any way with the exterior and with a great ability to live on its own resources, Watermelon Sugar is a highly successful community.
What is also helpful to its success is the division of labor, which makes each member of the community useful and important for the others: “Old Chuck says that everybody should have something to do and lighting the bridges is his thing to do.
Charley agrees with him” (Brautigan 26). Hence we have Old Chuck whose task is to light the lanterns on the bridges, Pauline and Al who cook meals at iDEATH, Fred who makes planks out of watermelon sugar at the Watermelon Works, Carl the window maker, Charley the leader, and the narrator who used to make statues and now is writing the book. As a result, each one is necessary and does a job that the others appreciate.
As for the simplicity, the life in Watermelon Sugar is indeed very modest. Most people live in shacks furnished in a quite austere manner and do not overwhelm their homes with unnecessary things, although sometimes the few things they do have may seem totally useless. This is well demonstrated by the narrator’s description of his own possessions: “[In] the chest that I keep my things in […] I have nine things, more or less: a child’s ball (I can’t remember which child), a present given me nine years ago by
Fred, my essay on weather, some numbers (1 24), an extra pair of overalls, a piece of
36 blue metal, something from the Forgotten Works, a lock of hair that needs washing”
(Brautigan 82).
The rejection of the contemporary industrialized society by a retreat to nature is also something that Brautigan and the Transcendentalists have in common and that many critics agree about:
Brautiganians want to escape the corporate state, characterized by
pressures of an all pervading economic machine, the mechanisms of
urban life, a society whose main objectives are producing and
consuming, and the degradation of everything to a commodity.
Inevitably, then, Brautigan’s heroes have become heroes of a youth
movement that is militantly anti competitive, anti commercial, and at
odds with what John Kenneth Galbraith calls the “imperatives of
technology and organization.” Not so inevitably, the evasion of such
imperatives is strongly reminiscent of nineteenth century predecessors,
who are summarily referred to as Transcendentalists. (Pütz)
For the Transcendentalist, the nature was an object of admiration and each element had its symbolic and religious value, as they maintained that even the minutest part of the nature is a manifestation of God. The inhabitants of iDEATH also show a great deal of esteem for the nature around them. As we know, there are statues of vegetables and animals all around, and what is more, iDEATH is place where rivers flow in the living room, there are sofas by the rivers, people sit in the trees, and all that suggests that the life at iDEATH is very much tied to the landscape and natural elements.
As the last feature that makes iDEATH a model community I have chosen the non violence and peacefulness. Indeed, the people at iDEATH always act in respect to the other and never show any kind of strong negative emotions. As the narrator says,
37 “There is a delicate balance in iDEATH. It suits us” (Brautigan 8). However, according to some critics, like Carolyn Blakely or Patricia Hernlund, there is a substantial lack of strong positive emotions too, but this will be discussed later. On the other hand, Jeffrey
M. Foster, for instance, holds an opposite point of view and argues that the “gentleness that lies at the core of iDEATH is an expression of love toward all of existence.”
In fact, the perception of iDEATH as an idyllic and exemplary community has gone so far with certain critics that they equal it to another Eden:
In many ways the new Eden [that is iDEATH] 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. (Leavitt)
38 B) The Forgotten Works – cemetery of the technocracy
If iDEATH is to be taken for a place of eternal happiness and peace, an exemplary community where most hippies probably would have liked to live, or in a more religious rhetoric, a new Paradise, the Forgotten Works, as its true opposite, must be seen as a Hell. Indeed, one cannot overlook that the sign, which hangs above the gate to the Forgotten Works:
THIS IS THE ENTRANCE
TO THE FORGOTTEN WORKS
BE CAREFUL
YOU MIGHT GET LOST (Brautigan 98) is somewhat reminiscent of what is written above the entrance to the Inferno in Dante’s
Divine Comedy : “All hope abandon, ye who enter in!” This suggests that the Forgotten
Works are really a rather dangerous place from which it is better to keep away.
Moreover, the landscape of the Forgotten Works is totally different from what iDEATH looks like. While the latter is full of lush vegetation, rivers, animals and colors, the former seems to be a dead moonscape, because “there were no plants growing and no animals living in the Forgotten Works. There was not even so much as a blade of grass in there, and the birds refused to fly over the place” (Brautigan 102), which evokes that there is something sinister about the place. In fact, the scenery of the
Forgotten Works is made only of thousands of piles of forgotten things, which we might have recognized as cans, wheels or other objects, but these are not at all familiar to the inhabitants of Watermelon Sugar. To the common reader, the Forgotten Works represent something like a waste dump. Unfortunately, the waste is too similar to the objects of our everyday experience, and consequently, this leads to the conclusion that
39 the Forgotten Works are a representation of our own corrupted consumer society, or at least of what has remained of it.
Theodore Roszak calls the ensemble of what the counterculture was opposed to the “technocracy” and this includes also consumerism and industrialism. He explains that the technocracy is a “social form in which an industrial society reaches its peak of its organizational integration. It is the ideal men usually have in mind when they speak of modernizing, up dating [and…] ever higher levels of affluence” (5); and this is exactly what the young people of the sixties, as well as Brautigan’s heroes residing in
Watermelon Sugar decided to reject.
The inhabitants of iDEATH refused to live in such a society and set up their own alternative way of existence, which is, in contrast to the contemporary civilization where “the more” means “the better,” and where people, under the influence of omnipresent advertising, only accumulate unnecessary objects and goods, based on simplicity or even primitivism. This concept is sustained also by Kušnír, as he claims:
“An allegorical reading of the novel can show ‘Forgotten Works’ as symbolically representing a denial of contemporary civilization, material and technical progress […] in favour of […] preference for different existence, different alternative or way of life through different imagination” (“Exiled Worlds”).
40 2. In Watermelon Sugar as an LSD vision:
Richard Brautigan and his California prose poetry is “an eminently greasy brand of verbal psychedelicatessen ,” wrote Michael Feld (italics mine). And indeed, this quote is a very pertinent epithet to characterize In Watermelon Sugar , which will be shown in the following lines.
As we already know, Watermelon Sugar is a strange place where the sun shines every day a different color. To be precise, Mondays are red, Tuesdays are golden,
Wednesdays are gray, Thursdays black, Fridays white, Saturdays blue and Sundays brown. As a result, the watermelons grow in corresponding colors on corresponding days and the things that are made of them keep their color. The air and the sunbeams are, too, of that same color. The following passage will serve as an illustration: “A crack of gray sun shone through the window and lay quietly on the floor. I went over and put my foot in it, and then my foot was grey. […] Everything was touched with grey: Cattle grazing in the fields and the roofs of the shacks and the big Piles in the Forgotten Works all looked like dust. The very air itself was grey” (Brautigan 58, 60). Consequently, the final picture the reader gets looks like a scenery watched through a stained glass.
To this regularly changing color spectrum of Watermelon Sugar, we must also add the lay out of the landscape, where it is not always sure whether you are indoors or outdoors, and where it is not a wonder to see people sitting in the trees. The combination of these elements therefore creates an impression not unlike “Lucy in the
Sky with Diamonds” and fits perfectly into the time’s visual esthetics, which in many respects reflected the psychedelic experience.
In Watermelon Sugar, there is also another peculiar thing – the Statue of Mirrors
– where, if you concentrate enough, you can see the entire world. According to the
41 narrator, “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. An hour or so passed as my mind drained out. Some people cannot see anything in the Statue of Mirrors, not even themselves” (Brautigan 150). This description clearly evokes either a state of meditation
(which may be a correct interpretation taking into account Brautigan’s interest in Zen), or a state of a broadened mind which can be reached after you have taken a drug. In either case, you are not supposed to await any effect at all; you have to let it come by itself.
The last question that is to be discussed is what the “watermelon sugar” really is.
Of course, it is the material out of which the world in Watermelon Sugar is made.
Nevertheless, I believe that it can be something more. The narrator says: “Our lives we have carefully constructed from watermelon sugar and then travelled to the length of our dreams” (Brautigan 8). Obviously, if it is merely a material, like wood, stone, glass or any other, how can you construct your life from it? You can only use it to make things, objects such as houses or furniture, but if we accept that a life can be
“constructed” from something, it should definitely be something more abstract, an essence. Tony Tanner thinks that watermelon sugar is “the sweet secretion of the imagination,” which suggests that Watermelon Sugar is made entirely of imagination. If we pursue this logic a little further, we must arrive at the conclusion that Watermelon
Sugar does not really exist, as it is solely a product of someone’s fantasy. Maybe it is a collective hallucination of all of its inhabitants. And maybe watermelon sugar is not as innocent as it seems, because it might very well be the substance that causes this hallucination. It is the essence of life and a chemical that enables you to “travel to the length of your dreams”… the resemblance with the LSD lies ready to hand. Even
42 Martin Hilský does not deny this connection, as he says that we can do almost anything with Brautigan’s prose, we can even eat it, as it is made of watermelon sugar, a substance that can provoke certain hallucinatory states of mind and liberate us for a while from rational perception of the world (183).
What might also be of some interest is the name itself – watermelon sugar – that is something sweet in contrast, or as a parallel, to the acid as something sour, which would make a nice name for a drug. In fact, the very first sentences of In Watermelon
Sugar read in this way: “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. 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. I hope this works out” (Brautigan 8).
This passage clearly suggests that watermelon sugar must be, if not a drug like LSD, at least a magical potion, which allows the consumer to see and experience things that are, under normal conditions, too far to reach. If the narrator’s life is done again and again in watermelon sugar, it only shows that he is a regular user of this substance, let us say a regular “tripper,” who visits the land of watermelon sugar quite often. The land is so far to travel, because it does not really exist, it is just imaginary, and how can you get there but with the means of watermelon sugar – the drug? The last bit that is to be incorporated to this drug reading of the novel is the “I hope this works out,” which evidently expresses the lack of confidence about the result of the trip, because you never know beforehand how it will end up, whether you will get a good trip or a bad one, all you can do is hope. And so the narrator just hopes that his taking you to his imaginary acid (or rather sugar) paradise will work out fine.
43 3. Once upon a time there was In Watermelon Sugar as a fairy tale:
“In Watermelon Sugar has the charm of the fairy story it almost is,” wrote the author of “Polluted Eden: A Review of Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon
Sugar” in Times Literary Supplement and in many respects he or she was right, because the novel indeed has some features that allow a certain fairy tale reading.
A) Genre clichés
The first thing that links In Watermelon Sugar with the fairy tale genre is the black and white stylization of the characters. The reader knows immediately who is good and who is bad, and the heroes keep their qualities until the end, they do not undergo any change. What is more, each character has a role that can more or less correspond to a fairy tale concept.
As a result, we have Charley, the leader of the community, who performs the role of the good and wise king. The chief antagonist of the novel and the villain is inBOIL, who is not only an alleged source of all evil, but he is also the only initiator of dramatic action. The princess of In Watermelon Sugar is without any doubt Pauline, beautiful and admired by all, the girlfriend of the protagonist.
Besides that, we can find also other fairy tale elements in In Watermelon Sugar , such as animals (tigers) that talk and sing and, as I have already mentioned, the whole
Watermelon Sugar’s landscape, the interpretation of which lies in the eye of the reader.
An adult and experienced person will attribute all those fantastic watermelon sugar curls to an effect of a drug, as he or she cannot conceive of a possibility that a world like that could normally exist, and will naturally search for a rational explanation. On the
44 contrary, the innocent mind of a child, that is still able to accept this imaginary realm without reservations, will be able to read the story as any other fairy tale.
B) Style
When talking about children, it is important to point out that they could easily read In Watermelon Sugar also thanks to its very simple, some could say primitive, prose style. Indeed, when you first glance at the sentences, you might think that even an average ten year old pupil could come up with a more sophisticated text. Just for a brief illustration, I will provide the following example: “I live in a shack near iDEATH. I can see iDEATH out the window. It is beautiful. […] I have a bed, a chair, a table and a large chest that I keep my things in. I have a lantern that burns watermelontrout oil at night. […] The rivers are cold and clear and there are trout in the rivers” (Brautigan 8).
The rest of the book is written in a very similar way.
For his specific style, some critics even refuse to admit that Brautigan’s works are novels. For example, Robert Adams claims, “one can’t call them novels or even fictions — they may well go down in literary history as Brautigans”. This statement might look at first denigrating, but Lew Welch turns it into a compliment:
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.
45 4. Undermining elements:
So far, I have been presenting In Watermelon Sugar , and iDEATH in particular, as a very pleasant, almost heavenly, place to live, which contrasts sharply with the repulsive image of the Forgotten Works. This seems to be the very first interpretation that may come to the reader’s mind; but there are some features that could undermine this theory, though. First of them is the presence of the tigers, the meaning of which is not easily decipherable. The other is the supposed lack of emotions, which, some critics believe, reigns at iDEATH. I will try to provide some sort of explanation to these tricky issues in the following sub chapters.
A) The Tigers
As I have already foreshadowed, in some indefinite past, there were tigers living in Watermelon Sugar. Their character was ambiguous, because they killed adults, but they always spared children. They could talk and they are said to have beautiful voices.
The narrator himself lost his parents in this way – one day, when he was a little boy, the tigers just came to his shack and ate 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 killed my
mother. […] I was still holding the spoon from the mush I was eating.
“Don’t be afraid,” one of the tigers said. “We’re not going to hurt
you. We don’t hurt children. Just sit there where you are and we’ll tell
you a story.”
One of the tigers started eating my mother. […]
46 “We’re sorry,” one of the tigers said. […]
“We wouldn’t do this if we didn’t have to, if we weren’t
absolutely forced to. But this is the only way we can keep alive.”
(Brautigan 52, 54)
While the tigers were eating the narrator’s parents, they also helped him with his arithmetic.
The question that arises is how it is possible for such an ideal community as that of Watermelon Sugar to include such a destructive element as the tigers. Sure, the tigers belong to the past, and for that reason, they might represent a certain precedent stage of the community’s evolution, which had not been so perfect. Eventually, they were killed off anyway, although, surprisingly, the community did not feel totally happy about it, which is proved also in the following passage: “‘The tigers are so nice. Why do they have to go and do things like that?’ I said. ‘They can’t help themselves,’ Charley said. ‘I like the tigers, too. I’ve had a lot of good conversations with them. They’re very nice and have a good way of stating things, but we’re going to have to get rid of them.
Soon’” (Brautigan 56).
Dan Williams makes an analogy between Brautigan’s tigers and those of
William Blake. Blake’s tigers can be symbols of innocence as well as experience, depending on who is watching them. They will not be dangerous for an innocent child who cannot really understand that they may kill him/her, but an experienced mind of an adult will inevitably fear them. Similarly, Brautigan’s tigers, by killing only adults, provided a valuable service to the community, because they preserved its innocence.
Thus, the narrator’s father, who wanted to defend himself with a gun, had to be killed just because of this simple reason: he was experienced, whereas the narrator, at that time still innocent, was saved.
47 Consequently, by killing the tigers, the members of the community lost the natural way of keeping their innocent state of mind, and thus individuals like inBOIL, whose evil reposes, according to Williams, in the fact that he became too experienced, have no other possibility but leave the community and live in the Forgotten Works. It is highly probable, that, were there still the tigers, they would be killed by them.
Interestingly, it is inBOIL who seems to sense it the first, as he claims during a quarrel at iDEATH:
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 been 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.
(Brautigan 126, 128)
As we can see, it is rather complicated to find out what role the tigers have in In
Watermelon Sugar . On one hand, they can be regarded as a mere source of violence and death that had been troubling the community for a long time, and by killing the tigers the people in Watermelon Sugar reached a more peaceful and less anxious existence.
However, to be attributed only this purely negative part, they are depicted too nicely: they talk in beautiful voices, they help children with arithmetic, they are intelligent and you can have a pleasant conversation with them. So, on the other hand, there must be something positive about them, too. The contribution they bring to the community might be manifested in the fact that they preserve its natural order and innocence, which, presumably, also inBOIL agrees with.
48 B) Emotional vacuum at iDEATH
Some critics argue that iDEATH is a place without emotions. They criticize the narrator’s lack of pity when he is exposed to the death of his parents and the cold reaction of the inhabitants of iDEATH to inBOIL’s and Margaret’s suicides. When the narrator watches the tigers devour his parents, he only sits there and continues eating his breakfast, he does not even cry or manifest any other sort of feeling. He behaves in a similar way when he discovers Margaret’s body hanging from the apple tree. Charley, after inBOIL’s suicide, says only “I hope you think you’ve proved something, I don’t think you’ve proved anything” (Brautigan 130) and Pauline is only angry because of the mess they (inBOIL and his gang) have made. The critics believe, and Patricia Hernlund is one of the most stubborn advocates of this theory, that this is the great flaw of the watermelon society which shows its imperfection. She claims that due to this apparently overt absence of any kind of emotions, and partially also to the seemingly repetitive and boring style of writing, the “life in watermelon sugar may be literally the same as dying.”
I must, however, disagree with such interpretations, and for this, I have several reasons. As for inBOIL’s death, we know that he is the prime antagonist of the novel, he only drinks whiskey, never does anything useful, rejects the peaceful life at iDEATH and bawls about its real sense; he is clearly the villain, everyone hates him. So why should be anybody bothered about his suicide? Jeffrey M. Foster holds a similar opinion: “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?” The answers may vary from reader to reader, but I daresay that at least
49 some of them would contain words like “indifference” or “relief” rather than
“mourning” or “grief.”
Nevertheless, it is true indeed that the inhabitants of iDEATH could be somewhat more emotional than they actually are, but it is right in this emotional detachment where lies the key to their happy existence. Foster explains:
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.
It is evident from this extract that the inhabitants of iDEATH deliberately rejected any forms of strong emotions whatsoever, because these would only keep them in a vicious circle of desire and frustration. This also corresponds to the Buddhist, and Brautigan’s, vision of the world, where people should not be influenced by any intensive emotions such as passion, hatred, envy and so forth. The only people at iDEATH who did not accept this philosophy are inBOIL and Margaret, and this finally leads to their self destruction.
According to Foster, there is a kind of emotion, though, and this is the
“gentleness,” which is the underlying principle of iDEATH, because it is a pure expression of love towards the whole world.
The conclusion that springs out of this discussion is thus simple: in order to live a “gentle” life in a “delicate balance,” the residents of iDEATH have opted for a rejection of all emotional ties to the world, because it protects them from disappointment and corruption. They seek a higher guidance in nature. Margaret breaks
50 this rule as she becomes more and more curious about, and thus attached to, the forgotten things and inBOIL, which results in the end in her suicide. Analogically, inBOIL is too interested in the past of iDEATH and thus he is, as Margaret, doomed to fail. This might be the message carried by the novel to the real inhabitants of the hippie communities, which might have broken up because of their lack of discipline and temperance.
51 CONCLUSION
The aim of this thesis was to shed some light at one of the less appreciated figures of American literature, Richard Brautigan, and his novel In Watermelon Sugar .
The reason why he is often an overlooked author is presumably his close connection to the hippie culture, which prevents certain critics to acknowledge his work in a wider context. Nevertheless, I believe that this connection should not be regarded as a negative one; on the contrary, it should be stressed that, in his works, he managed to portray perfectly the atmosphere of the times. As John Marshall put it, “Richard
Brautigan was the writer who captured the tangerine dream flavor of the 1960s better than almost anyone.”
If we now look again at the statement of Martin Hilský, which I used in the introduction to this thesis, we have to conclude that his claim about In Watermelon
Sugar being as closely connected to the second half of the sixties as for example On the
Road is with the fifties, is not at all a blown up bubble. Although I am not saying that
Brautigan is another Fitzgerald or Kerouac, it should be clear by now that In
Watermelon is at least a perfect document that illustrates the features that were, at that time, crucial for the hippies, such as communal living, philosophy of non violence and peace, as well as drugs. In Watermelon Sugar is therefore a book that brings excellent evidence about the time of its creation, and this even without being realistic. In fact, realism and rational perception of the world was what the hippies wanted to escape from, and so what other kind of book should have become their “bible” if not such a fantastic surrealistic psychedelic imaginary fairy tale as In Watermelon Sugar ?
52 APPENDICES
Appendix 1: THE LAST GATHERING OF BEATS, POETS & ARTISTS, CITY LIGHTS BOOKS North Beach, San Francisco 1965, taken by Larry Keenan This photo was taken out of the initiative of Lawrence Ferlinghetti who wanted to document the 1965 beat scene in San Francisco in the spirit of the early 20th century classic photographs of the bohemian artists and writers in Paris. Front row L to R: Robert LaVigne, Shig Murao, Larry Fagin, Leland Meyezove (lying down), Lew Welch, Peter Orlovsky. Second row: David Meltzer, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Daniel Langton, Steve (friend of Ginsberg), Richard Brautigan, Gary Goodrow, Nemi Frost. Back row: Stella Levy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Because this is a vertical image, about half of the Beats attending are not shown. (see app. 2) National Portrait Gallery: www.npg.si.edu/img2/rebels/keenan.jpg
53 Apendix 2: THE LAST GATHERING OF BEATS POETS & ARTISTS, CITY LIGHTS BOOKS North Beach, San Francisco 1965, taken by Dale Smith This is another picture of the same event, this time it is vertical and so some more people attending can be seen. Julie Baker Fine Art Gallery: www.juliebakerfineart.com
54 Appendix 3: THE COVER OF THE FIRST ISSUE OF SAN FRANCISCO ORACLE announcing the “GATHERING OF THE TRIBES FOR A HUMAN BE IN” Designed by Rick Griffin www.hippy.com/article 303.html
55 Appendix 4: Another promotional poster for the HUMAN BE IN www.allposters.com/ sp/The Human Be In A Gathering Of The Tribes Posters_i2076865_.htm
56 Appendix 5: LEVITTOWN PICTURES cas.buffalo.edu/classes/eng/willbern/BestSellers/Lectures/levittown.jpg
INTERIOR of a Levittown house content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/3/3d/400px Levittownhome.jpg
57 Appendix 6: THE VERY FIRST COMMUNICATION COMAPANY LEAFLET stating its policies and goals www.diggers.org/comco/cc001_opt_m.jpg
58 Appendix 7: BRAUTIGAN’S SEEDS POEMS, published as a collection named PLEASE PLANT THIS BOOK, Santa Barbara, California: Graham Mackintosh, 1968. It was a limited edition of 6 000 copies all for free distribution. The folder (cover photographs of Caledonia Jahrmarkt by Bill Brock, a Haight Ashbury photographer) contained eight seed packets (four of flowers, four of vegetables). The front of each packet was printed with a poem titled for the type of seeds contained in that packet. Planting instructions were printed on the back, the same for all eight packets. Any particular order for the seed packets is unknown. Folder front Back cover provided publication information. www.diggers.org/plant_this_book.htm
59
60
61 Appendix 8: REGULAR FIRST EDITION COVER of IN WATERMELON SUGAR San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1968 Front cover photograph of Brautigan and Hilda Hoffman by Edmund Shea Novel’s opening sentence used in lieu of title and author's name inwatermelonsugar.com/ www.brautigan.net/watermelon.html
62 WORKS CITED
Books:
Brautigan, Richard. V melounovém cukru / In Watermelon Sugar . Praha: Argo, 2004.
Dickstein, Morris. Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties . 1977.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989.
Isserman, Maurice and Michael Kazin. America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s .
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road . 1957. Introduction Ann Charters. 2nd ed. London: Penguin
Books, 2000.
Lindaur, Vojtěch. Šance sněhových koulí v pekle . Praha: Maťa, 1999.
Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Thechnocratic
Society and Its Youthful Opposition . 1968. 3rd ed. London: Faber and Faber,
1973.
Afterword:
Hilský, Martin. “Cukrová pastorála Richarda Brautigana.” Afterword. V melounovém
cukru / In Watermelon Sugar . By Richard Brautigan. Praha: Argo, 2004. 182
190.
Essays:
Rexroth, Kenneth. “The Second Post War, the Second Interbellum, the Permanent War
Generation.” The Alternative society: Essays From the Other World . New York:
Herder and Herder, 1970. 97 123.
63 Poems:
Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.” Howl and Other Poems . 1956. San Francisco: City Lights
Books, 1966.
Song lyrics:
Rado, James and Gerome Ragni. “Aquarius.” Hair . 1967. 12 Apr. 2008
Internet sources scholarly journals:
Blakely, Carolyn. “Narrative Technique in Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar. ” CLA
Journal 35 (1991): 150 58. 20 March 2007
Foster, Jeffrey M. “Richard Brautigan’s Utopia of Detachment.” Connecticut Review
14 (1992): 85 91. 20 March 2007
Hernlund, Patricia. “Author’s Intent: In Watermelon Sugar. ” Critique: Studies in
Modern Fiction 16 (1974): 5 17. 20 March 2007
Kušnír, Jaroslav. “Richard Brautigan’s Exiled Worlds.” Studia Philologica 7 (2000): 69
77. 20 March 2007 index.php?page=Ku%C5%A1n%C3%ADr+2000+Brautigan%27s+Exiled+Worl ds>. Leavitt, Harvey. “The Regained Paradise of Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar .” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 16 (1974): 18 24. 20 March 2007 Pütz, Manfred. “Transcendentalism Revived: The Fiction of Richard Brautigan.” 64 Occident Spring 1974. 20 March 2007 meadows.net/tiki index.php?page=P%C3%BCtz+1974+Transcendentalism+Revived>. Schmitz, Neil. “Richard Brautigan and the Modern Pastoral.” Modern Fiction Studies 19 (1973): 20 March 2007 index.php?page=Schmitz+1973+Brautigan+and+the+Modern+Pastoral>. Internet sources books: Dante. “Inferno.” The Divine Comedy . Trans. H. W. Longfellow. Christian Classics Ethereal Library . 10 Apr. 2008 Internet sources periodicals: Adams, Robert. “Brautigan Was Here.” New York Review of Books . 22 Apr. 1971. 20 March 2007 index.php?page=Adams+1971+Brautigan+Was+Here>. Feld, Michael. “A Double with Christina.” London Magazine . August/September 1971: 150 152. 20 March 2007 index.php?page=Feld+1971+A+Double+with+Christina>. Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. Interview with Jesse Hamlin. “Summer of Love: 40 Years Later.” San Francisco Chronicle . 20 May 2007. 15 Oct. 2007 bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/20/MNSOLFERLINGHETTI20.DTL>. “Polluted Eden: A Review of Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar.” Times Litterary Supplement . August 14, 1970: 893. 20 March 2007 65 index.php?page=TLS+1970+Review+of+Trout+and+Watermelon>. Marshall, John. “New on the Bookshelves for Brautigan’s Fans.” Seattle Post Intelligencer . 12 May 2000. 20 March 2007 Rossman, Michael. Interview with Joel Selvin. “Summer of Love: 40 Years Later.” San Francisco Chronicle . 20 May 2007. 15 Oct. 2007 bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/20/MNSOLROSSMAN20.DTL>. Welch, Lew. “Brautigan’s Moth Balanced on an Apple.” Rev. of In Watermelon Sugar, by Richard Brautigan. San Francisco Chronicle . 15 Dec. 1968: This World 53, 59. 20 March 2007 Internet sources – video: Kerouac, Jack. Interview. “De Jack Kerouac à Ti Jean Kerouac.” With Fernard Seguin. Le Sel de la Semaine . Radio Canada. Montreal. 1967. 19 Apr. 2008 Internet sources visual appendices: “A Human Be In.” Allposters.com . 13 Apr. 2008 Human Be In A Gathering Of The Tribes Posters_i2076865_.htm>. Brock, Bill. Cover. Please Plant This Book . By Richard Brautigan. Santa Barbara: Graham Mackintosh, 1968. 13 Apr. 2008 Griffin, Rick. “Pow Wow: A Gathering of the Tribes for the Human Be In.” Hippy.com . 13 Apr. 66 “Interior of a Levittown house.” 13 Apr. 2008 Levittownhome.jpg>. Keenan, Larry. “The Last Gathering of the Beats.” 1965. National Portrait Gallery . 13 Apr. 2008 Shea, Edmund. Cover. In Watermelon Sugar . By Richard Brautigan. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1968. 13 Apr. 2008 Scherschel, Joe. “Levittown picture.” 13 Apr. 2008 Smith, Dale. “The Last Gathering of the Beats.” 1965. Julie Baker Fine Art Gallery 13 Apr. 2008 “The Communication Company.” Diggers.com . 13 Apr. 2008 Other internet sources: “Biography.” Brautigan Bibliography and Archive . 20 March 2007 Kušnír, Jaroslav. “Diversity of Postmodern Fantasy: Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar and Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father. ” Brautigan Bibliography and Archive . 20 March 2007 < http://www.volny.cz/yettinka/hippies.html>. Tanner, Tony. “Fragments and Fantasies (Donald Barthelme and Richard 67 Brautigan).” Conclusion. City of Words: American Fiction 1950 1970 . New York: Harper & Row, 1971. 20 March 2007 Time magazine homepage . 10 March 2008. Williams, Dan. “A World Within: Solipsism and Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar. ” Brautigan Bibliography and Archive . 20 March 2007 68