I chose to do a close reading of "The Message" in Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan's poems are ripe with symbolism and at first glance, I felt that this poem's symbols lay somewhere within my grasp. What I made (or did not make) of the symbolism made me feel something, a kind of agreement with or fondness of Brautigan which I thought would be really difficult to do.
Based on some key words and phrases like "army banner", "Adolf Hitler", and "Stalingrad" I assume the theme is war, or actually, the opposition to war. His style is one of a kind, A Brautigan(hah), more like a short story which makes it effective, engaging, and entertaining.
There has to be a more accuate word than palendrome, but its the first that comes to mind. Perhaps cyclical is a better word. Anyway, I like that the end of the story becomes the beginning and that the body of the poem is mostly concerned with the re-occurence of the sheep event.
Certain symbols I had trouble with. Sheep could easily translate into soldiers or the masses, sure, but what is the bellmare? She seems almost mystical. And "Adolf Hitler, but friendly"? Is it just the juxtaposition of the face of evil in modern times and casually nice people like the public librarian? Or perhaps the friendly Hitler is representing someone in a position of power on our side...someone maybe just as evil, only its veiled by our partisanship? Whether I understand the symbolism or not, the tone seems somewhat clear. Brautigan and his companion are spectators, and the passing of the sheep in front of them is not a pleasant experience. I also noticed that he seems to have an odd obsession with the sheep. Its a tone of impatience, reluctance, rebellion, and maybe amusement? The tone seems most clear to me when they are traveling back the way they came, expecting to see sheep and they saw "only the shit in front of us on the road. As if it were a game invented by the sphincter muscle, we knew what the score was."
If I read into this as sincerely as I felt I did, then I think that this idea of being an outsider looking with annoyance, disgust, and amusement upon a mass of young blinded soldiers following their friendly-looking-dictator into war, then it really seems to follow the Beat movement, their counter-culture, and what their stance was on the recent wars they had written about.
Q. What the hell does trout fishing in America mean? Im sorry, most of this goes way over my head. My idea was that maybe it represents the American Dream....but I want to know other people's opinions on this.
2 comments:
I can sort of see trout fishing in america as being representational to the classical American representation of a life at peace, especially on the west coast and in the "newer" parts of the country. But I guess all of Brautigan's work has that kind of symbolism that can be interpreted a million different ways, and that's one of the things I really like about it. Any one of his poems can mean a million different things to a million different people. Sometimes I do find myslef grasping at straws though; the unsure symbolism that makes Brautigan's writing so great cna sometimes be really hard for me to follow. Loved your analysis of the poem with it's war symobols, I totally agree abotu the sheep. No idea about the bellmare, thoguh, that's a mystery.
Yes, even though it's difficult to resist decoding TFA or RB's images for certain, I think it's most useful to do what you did here...that is, think about what the images remind you of. This could be a bunch of ideas; doesn't have to be a one-to-one translation. So, we could look at TFA as partly a play on the ideal of the natural (Thoreau and Emerson and some other earlier writers write about this too, and RB references them)... a world that isn't industrialized or troubled by a lot of the strangeness described in the stories.
I like your reading of the sheep as well... soldiers are a definite possibility. At least we could say the sheep are connected with a mass of people, as you say.
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