Trout Fishing in America

A Note on This Argument

This essay is part of the Resistance as Testimony series. Brautigan is a resistant figure whose resistance takes the form of gentle, persistent longing — for a simplicity, a innocence, a pastoral America that never quite existed and cannot be recovered. His work is a sustained elegy for Eden, written by a man who does not know that is what he is mourning.

The Pastoral as Theology

The pastoral tradition in Western literature is, at its deepest level, a form of homesickness — a longing for a simplicity and harmony with the natural world that civilization has destroyed and that can only be recovered, in imagination, in the poem or the novel. This longing has a theological dimension that the tradition has not always acknowledged: it is the longing for the garden of Genesis 2, for the world before the Fall, for the condition of unashamed belonging that the serpent’s work destroyed.

Brautigan’s work is the pastoral at its most nakedly longing. His America is a country of fishing holes and watermelon sugar and simple human contact, perpetually threatened by the industrial, the commercial, and the violent. The threat is always winning. The pastoral is always already lost. What sustains the writing is the longing itself — the refusal to accept that the loss is final.

What In Watermelon Sugar Reveals

In Watermelon Sugar is Brautigan’s most overtly utopian fiction — a novel set in a community called iDEATH, organized around the making of watermelon sugar and the maintenance of a delicate harmony with the natural world. The community is threatened by the tigers that once spoke and are now gone, by the violence that erupts in the novel’s middle section, and by the general entropy that Brautigan’s fictional worlds are always fighting.

The novel reveals the structure of Brautigan’s pastoral vision: the community of innocence is always already threatened by violence, always requiring the suppression or forgetting of something darker. This is the pastoral’s characteristic evasion — the pretense that the Fall can be reversed by simplicity and good will rather than by the costly intervention that Genesis 3:15 describes.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a world in which the garden is lost and its recovery costs the seed of the woman a bruised heel. Brautigan’s pastoral longs for the garden without acknowledging the cost of its recovery — without acknowledging that the world he longs for is not accessible by fishing the right river or living in the right community, but only through the specific historical act of the Incarnation and the resurrection.

His suicide in 1984 is the most devastating testimony to the inadequacy of the pastoral as a response to the Fall. The longing was real. The river on the other side was real, in the sense that the longing for it pointed to a real condition of human being. But the longing cannot satisfy itself. The watermelon sugar runs out. The garden requires a gardener who is also a savior, and Brautigan’s pastoral has no place for him.