Trout Fishing in America Mind Games

The effect of Brautigan’s random and nonsensical use of the phrase “trout fishing in America” in this series of discontinuous anecdotes is to destabilize habitual perspectives on both language and reality, perhaps pointing readers toward greater freedom of thought. “Trout fishing in America” is wielded by Brautigan as a foreign word with no analogous term in English, leaving his audience grasping for determinacy. As I began to read the book, I assumed that “trout fishing in America” would quickly show itself to be some thinly-disguised abstract concept, and of course snidely assumed that I would just use my superior brain power to quickly decode the Ultimate Meaning of the book and find it edgy in a quaint sort of way. Not so. My anxiety mounted as I read on, still unsure what the heck Brautigan was trying to say. What is “trout fishing in America” supposed to mean?
In vain I scoured the pages of the book, furiously scribbling notes about motifs or stylistic quirks, anything that might lead me closer to the holy grail of meaning, the common denominator linking this assemblage of “trout fishing in America”s together. Yet despite the quintessential San Franciscan elements—old Italians; beatniks; nods to the “contado” notion with references to Mill Valley, Big Sur, and locations as far as China and Hawaii; et al.--I still have no idea what the phrase is supposed to represent (87, 92, 102-3). I could analyze how this text relates to San Francisco or what it says about San Francisco, but I find it so confounding, uncomfortable, and especially embarrassing that I am not able to pick up on its secret meaning, that all I can do is write about it and comfort myself with theoretical musings as to why it has no meaning . . . thus giving it a meaning.
For example, I’ve decided that rather than making a statement about some concept like “the pastoral,” “sustainability,” or “rugged pioneer individualism,” “trout fishing in America” is actually a didactic process. I mean to say that the phrase itself has no real denotation and instead functions either to mock us or to teach us something. Although it obviously does both, as I gather from the ironic tone of chapters like “The Horse That Had a Flat Tire” where he declares gobbling down apple turnovers like a turkey as “probably a more valid protest than picketing missile bases,” I’m declaring the peculiar repetition of “trout fishing in America” didactic and not mocking for the same reason that I’m insisting the phrase serves a purpose or has any meaning at all: it’s more comfortable. Therefore, this trout fishing semantic experimentation and the feelings of groundlessness it evokes in the reader serve to point out just how uncomfortable humans are with uncertainty.
As I neared the last quarter or so of the “novel”, I eventually eased up and stopped looking for meaning. I repeated to myself the wise words that an old friend once passed on to me: “Just go with it!” Once I let go of grasping for higher meaning, I began to enjoy much more acutely the immense humor and creativity in the stories, as well as recognize the genius behind the mundane/fantastical similes. Comparing the sun to “A huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match and said, ‘Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper’” is definitely genius (6).
“Trout fishing in America” allowed me to experience on a small scale the defamiliarization, reframing of reality, and eventual submission to the unknown that are reported to coincide with the use of hallucinogenic drugs. In a way, the novel made me think like a schizophrenic, feeling sound or “hiding something from the other parts of […my] mind" (57, 69). It was quite effective at illustrating how freeing the mind can turn it into an enormous well of creativity and wonder rather than into a frightening “bad trip”. Brautigan does as the “Negro woman” in room 208 and uses the phrase “to it’s best advantage, when surrounded by no meaning and left alone from other words”(69). In doing this, he gives us the “trout fishing in America nib” secret—people should not “write too hard,” or impress their views upon reality too strongly, because after a while those views become the only possible view, following us around “just like a person’s shadow.” The beauty is that “nobody else can write with it” so it is up to us to write whatever we want (110). Perhaps insanity is not something to fear after all--a San Franciscan idea?