On one of
the books that greatly expanded my sense of what literature can be and do.
It’s not
at the top of the list of the
reasons why Mr. Heartwell was my favorite and most influential English teacher,
but it sure didn’t hurt: he had a large and full bookshelf at the corner of his
room from which students were welcome to pick out and borrow any books they
wanted. Both of my parents had bookshelves like that too—I’m pretty sure I
first encountered David
Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident
(1981), also in high school, by pulling it off of a shelf of my Mom’s—but there’s
something about a totally unexplored shelf, you know? A whole new frontier,
waiting for this budding literary pioneer to follow his own Oregon Trail and
find untapped rivers of gold from which to—okay, shelving the metaphor. In any
case, it was a great resource, and one of the books I pulled from that shelf
that made a significant impression was Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967).
By this
time I had encountered plenty of stylistically innovative and experimental
authors and works, but there was still something about Brautigan’s book that,
to quote Emily
Dickinson’s definition of poetry, made me “feel physically as if the top of
my head were taken off.” To be honest, I had no idea what I was getting into
and not much more of an idea what to make of it once I did—per the above link, one
of Brautigan’s rejections from a publisher remarked with confusion that “I gather
from the reports that it was not about trout fishing,” and I know how he or she
felt—but I know that there was something compelling, irresistible even, about
that state of reading. As with many experimental texts, it’s difficult to
describe adequately or sufficiently the book’s style and voice; but this short
sample chapter, “A
Walden Pond for Winos,” is a good place to start. The mix of realism and
poetry (or at least a poetic sentiment); the dark humor and yet shared
humanity; the balance of the narrator’s individual voice and a more communal set
of experiences and identities; the fact that the chapter has precious little to
do with trout fishing, or even with those that come before and after it, demanding
that we create a sense of structure ourselves since he’s damend if he’s going
to do it for us—all key elements to Brautigan’s style and novel.
I don’t
want to misrepresent my relationship to Brautigan’s novel—I haven’t touched it
since that high school reading, and have thought more about it in the time I’ve
been writing this post than I had in most of those intervening years—but the
fact remains that when I was brainstorming which high school-era book to
highlight, it was the first one that came to mind. And the reason, again, is
quite simple but very significant: it wasn’t like anything else I had read. I
was a pretty well-read kid, across many different genres and eras and
traditions—but I was still a high school kid, and as such had that delightful
teenage combination of ignorance and yet a certainty that I knew what was what.
Brautigan’s was one of the books that reminded me how much I had yet to
experience and learn, how much more than
was in heaven and earth than I had dreamt of in my philosophy (we read Hamlet that year too). A pretty valuable
lesson, and one that has helped carry me forward into can American Studier’s
life of continual learning and growth.
Next
shaping book tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
Thoughts? Books that shaped you? I’d love to hear ‘em, for lots of reasons
including the weekend’s post!
8/29
Memory Day nominee: Temple
Grandin, the doctor and
professor of animal science who is also and most significantly one of autism’s most vocal and inspiring
advocates and voices.
No comments:
Post a Comment