The Secret Relationship: Gray Brechin and Brautigan.

For this post I will focus primarily on Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America in relation to Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco. My purpose in comparing these to texts is because one clearly sheds light on the other. That is, Brechin’s text gives the reader a lucid frame of reference to read Trout Fishing In America. Ironically enough, we read Brautigan before Brechin, but this makes my point even more clear. Without Brechin’s historical work, Brautigan, at least in my opinion, seems like, to paraphrase a line from a well-known film, as readers we are lost children walking into the middle of a movie. In other words, the sections of the novel seem like descriptions of fishing and other randomness. With Brechin’s frame of reference however, we see the Brautigan in his text constantly refers to the destruction of the natural by way of modern advancement in mining and the construction of San Francisco as a Metropolitan city. To illustrate my point I will examine one section of Trout Fishing in which a person looks to buy a lake that has been sectioned off and sold bit-by-bit, from the actual lake to the nature and scenery surrounding it, as well as cite various points in which Brechin alludes to the destruction and commercialization referenced subversively in Trout Fishing in America.
As Gray Brechin puts it early on the text, “Thousands of men armed with such simple weapons initiated an arms race against the earth that devastated the Sierra Nevada and the Central Valley (32-33)”. As the gold rush initiated, so began the process and mining and industrialization on the earth of San Francisco, and so the begot the destruction of the natural earth revered by characters like those in Trout Fishing in America. Moreover, as Brechin articulates, the earth became section off and sold in pieces, “ By rendering nature into the abstract and interchangeable units of the marketplace, the ‘Change succeeded in dividing and distancing it, as a slaughterhouse rendered the carcasses of animals into precise units of tinned meat (38)”. This fact is addressed and responded to throughout Brautigan’s text. Specifically, in the previously mentioned section the main character ventures into a store in which he hears of a lake for sale. When he meets with a sales person he learns that the lake is sold per measurement and that the surrounding wild life and scenery is sold separately, though most all the animals have been sold already. Without Brechin’s text or a vivid understanding of the historical development of San Francisco, the text is either taken literally or the obvious metaphor is lost without a frame of reference. From Brechin, we understand that Brautigain is referring the new stream of industrialization that has been introduced and that, metaphorically, that which natural has been seized, sectioned off, and sold.
We again see the parallel between the two texts when we examine references to fish, which seems inescapable in Brautigan’s text given the name, Trout Fishing in America. Brechin articulates that, “…Hydraulicking had proved itself a great advance in land disturbance…the Yuba River, reported one observer, ‘once contained trout, but now I imagine a catfish would die in it (50)”. Brautigan also refers to the poor conditions of rivers and the fish within them subversively in a scene where a couple begin to have sex in a river when suddenly many dead fish carcasses rise up from under water and touch the semen of the man. Alone this imagery seems necromantic or at the very least, depending on your taste, disturbing. However, with Brechin in mind we see that Brautigan is in fact alluding to the conditions of rivers and animal life within them. We also see, upon closer consideration, that the fish breaking the floating semen is not merely sexual imagery, but a metaphor for natures interaction and death with the motivational essence of the men of the time, manifest destiny.
My point is simple, but a little more complex than merely drawing parallels between the two texts. What I mean to say, by drawing these comparisons, is that the two are deeply interrelated. Even more so, I mean to say that Brautigan’s work is subversively working to depict the destruction of nature at the hands of man within the formerly natural San Francisco. Alone, at least in my uninformed mind, it can be difficult to pick up on what Trout Fishing in America really aims at. At times, it seems merely like a devout man searching for trout. However, with Brechin as a guide, the subversive nature of the text becomes all too clear.