"Gumshoeing It"
John G. Cawelti
Chicago Sun-Times, 28 Aug. 1977, Sec. 3, p. 8.
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Richard Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 is, as the title suggests, a put-on of the hard-boiled detective story.

Capitalizing on the current fashion for popular culture nostalgia and parodistic versions of the traditional popular formulas of western adventure, thrilling detection, pulp romance and secret agentry, Brautigan presents a tongue-in-cheek version of one day in the life of C. Card, a remarkably incompetent San Francisco private investigator. In fact, Card is the ultimate schlemiel, a soft-bodied dick with a mother complex.

On this day in 1942, Card stumbles through a bizarre mystery involving a rich and sexy blonde who can drink innumerable beers without showing their effects, a tough police sergeant and an assortment of bodies, one of which Card is hired to steal. Not only does Card fail to bring the criminal to justice, he doesn't even discover what the plot is all about and at the end of his day, he is just as poor, miserable and fouled-up as when he began, except that has the corpse of a rather attractive prostitute in his refrigerator and doesn't know what to do with that either.

Many of Card's difficulties result from his constant daydreaming about an imaginary Babylon (note heavy symbolism: Babylon in decadence—America in throes of World War II) in which he is a great hero and has a beautiful and sexy secretary. These daydreams give Brautigan the chance to pepper his narrative with parodies within parodies, since Card imagines his adventures in Babylon in the form of pulp magazine stories.

All this seems very slight and highly predictable, a pastiche of fashionable literary trends. Brautigan has always had a nice sense of proportion; his style is crisp and quick and his usual brevity seems appropriate to the slightness of his inspiration. Reading Dreaming of Babylon is, therefore, a painless experience, but not a memorable one.

In the midst of a number of contemporary takeoffs on the private eye, Brautigan's work seems pale. Andrew Bergman's two recent put-ons, The Big Kiss-Off of 1942 and Hollywood and LeVine have fewer literary pretensions and lack Brautigan's stylistic verve, but they are infinitely more entertaining. On the other hand, several movies of the last decade have treated the ironic and symbolic implications of the hard-boiled detective story with greater power and subtlety.

The put-on is an art of the trickster and the shape-shifter, and it is an appropriate and inevitable art for an age so skeptical as ours. It is a way of making statements and telling stories while evading a fixed committment to the significance or seriousness of one's creations. The chief sign of the put-on is our inability to be sure of just how seriously the author takes his statement. Some of our best contemporary writers have been able to use this manner of unstable and deceptive narration to hint at truths too bleak or too complex to be expressed directly in language.

The master of this mode is Thomas Pynchon, and two of its most effective practitioners are Kurt Vonnegut and E. L. Doctrow, both of whom are able, at their best, to imply a depth of seriousness beneath the parodistic surfaces of their fables. Brautigan uses many of their tricks, but the richness of implication is simply not there. Dreaming of Babylon is a sleek but sophomoric parody, and that's about all.

"Richard Brautigan: Un Privé à Babylone"
Christophe Cheval
Page Noir ***?***.
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Richard Brautigan est né en 1935 à Tacoma, dans l'Etat de Washington. Il publie son premier recueil de poèmes en 1958, mais ce n'est que dix ans plus tard qu'il accédera à la célébrité avec la parution de La pêche à la truite en Amérique. Il devient alors le symbole de toute une génération. Il décide néanmoins de se retirer dans le Montana où, malgré le soutien de ses amis, il va peu à peu s'enfoncer dans la folie paranoïaque et l'alcool. Richard Brautigan s'est donné la mort le 25 octobre 1984 dans sa maison de Bolinas.

C. Card a deux vies. Dans l'une il est "l'œil", détective "privé d'affaires" à Chicago en 1942, dans l'autre il est le héros polymorphe de Babylone en 596 AVJC. Evidemment, gérer ses deux vies dans des journées de 24h n'est pas facile, il est donc contraint de sacrifier sa vie réelle sur l'autel babylonien de sa fantasmagorie: "A mon avis, l'une des raisons pour lesquelles je n'ai jamais fait un très bon détective privé, c'est que je passe trop de temps à rêver de Babylone".

Pas terrible en effet le détective, toujours à Babylone, toujours fauché, toujours perdu, et pour tout dire un peu simple d'esprit. Pas étonnant donc qu'il n'ait pas vu de clients depuis trois mois, mais peu lui importe qu'on le prenne pour un minable paumé, lui sait qu'il est à l'envie et tour à tour: joueur de base-ball vénéré, cow-boy ou détective adulé, il lui suffit de penser à Babylone.

Si Card pâtit de sa duplicité, le lecteur lui jubile "Je ne sais pas comment font les gens pour vivre comme moi. Mon appartement est si sale qu'il n'y a pas longtemps, j'ai remplacé toutes les ampoules de 75 watts par des ampoules de 25 watts pour ne plus être obligé de voir tout ça.".

La galerie de personnage crée par Brautigan est hallucinante, tous sont les fils naturels d'Audiard et Vian, du médecin légiste unijambiste danseur mondain à la poupée aristocrate buveuse de bière gargantuesque qui ne va jamais aux toilettes. Attention ne le lisez pas dans le métro, vos pouffements dérangeraient à n'en pas douter les 3/4 du wagon.

Brautigan n'est pas un auteur de polars, il s'ingénie donc à piétiner les poncifs du genre. Le livre se déroule en une journée, et se lit plus vite encore, si vous êtes fanatiques d'intrigues bien ficelées et de romans à énigmes, laissez tomber, si vous attendez d'un personnage qu'il évolue au fil de l'histoire, n'espérez rien de C. Card, indécrottable rêveur qui ne s'implique que dans sa vie fantasmatique. Ne vous attendez pas non plus à ce que les questions soulevées au fil des pages trouvent toutes une réponse. Attendez-vous par contre à ne plus relever le nez du bouquin avant la fin, et à passer un pur moment de bonheur.

Un Privé à Babylone est un polar parce qu'il le fallait bien, les personnages ne pouvaient évoluer à leurs aises que dans une littérature "populaire," mais plus qu'un roman noir, c'est un roman bleu, en effet, L'œil, s'il est très agaçant, n'en reste pas moins très attachant, et son inadéquation au système si elle nous fait sourire nous inspire également une pointe d'amertume, comme un regret, une envie.

"The Sam Spade Caper"
Joe Flaherty
The New York Times Book Review, 25 Sep. 1977, Sec. 7, p. 20.
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The subtitle of Richard Brautigan's novel, "A Private Eye Novel 1942," should have served as a tip-off. Brautigan, or his publisher, or his editor—or maybe all three in concert—wanted to spell it out for the reader to make sure we got it. The up-front shill announces that the writer is using a genre to display his talent. I have news for them.

On page 1 the shamus-narrator C. Card (to be differentiated coyly from S. Spade) tells us that he was 4-F in World War II, but he wasn't unpatriotic because "I had fought my World War II five years before in Spain and had a couple of bullet holes in my a—to prove it." By using a common anatomical vulgarity, the link with the 1940's is immediately ruptured.

The heroes of 40's fiction were down-at-the heels puritans who would have used "butt," "tail," "duff" or something more elaborate, such as, "I had two bullet holes in a place so tender it turned me into a standup drinker."

This puritanical streak in 40's detective fiction carried over to the 50's in Mickey Spillane's writing to the vengeful point where all trespassers of the code ended up on the wrong side of Mike Hammer's .45. Women who were openly carnal in Spillane's fiction usually met violent ends, and the one survivor from book to book was Hammer's secretary Zelda, who, (in the spirit of all-things-come-to-those-who-wait) used to tell Hammer she was saving "it" for him till they got married. "It" was a withheld eroticism that worked, since in the naïve 5O's "it" was as beclouded as Eisenhower's syntax.

What Brautigan has done is to impose a 60's mentality on what he supposes to be a 40's form. C. Card is our current impotent hero-super schlep. He is broke, behind in his rent, without a car and even without bullets for his gun. Add to this that he has an overbearing mother whom he is terrified to telephone and to whom he owes money and who also blames him for the accidental death of his father. His own private oy vey!

The "Babylon" reference is to his personal dreamland, where he sojourns from reality. Babylon was first induced when he got beaned by a baseball while trying out for pro ball. In Babylon's exotic clime C. Card has comic-strip adventures with his luscious friend, "Nana-dirat." All this is to engage the 60's heads who hold Brautigan in such high esteem.

Brautigan's book makes the same mistake as Peter Bogdanovich's "nostalgic" movies. Both men think that by surrounding their works with the proper dated artifacts they have captured a period, while all they have caught are the labels. That a philosophic stance existed in the 40's has escaped them. And their efforts can't be defined as parody or homage, since the original material must be understood before one can be contemptuous or affectionate toward it.

So the result in this basically plotless book is cartooning. Brautigan delivers a litany of screwups and lame jokes. It's the ice age seen through Fred Flintstone.

But it should be remembered that Brautigan has graced his public in the past, and all writers have off days. His editor should have served him better. Instead of encouraging him on this caper, he should have sent Brautigan off fishing somewhere in America.

"Stepsons of Sam: Re-Visions of the Hard-Boiled Detective Formula in Recent American Fiction"
Larry E. Grimes
Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 29, no. 3, Autumn 1983, pp. 535-544.
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During the past decade, a small industry has developed, using American hard-boiled detective stories as its primary raw material, Both films and fiction have been made from this well-established formula. A partial list includes such successful films as Chinatown, The Late Show, Foul Play, Play It Again, Sam, and Murder by Death. Joe Gores' Hammett, Roger Simon's Moses Wine books, the le Vine novels of Andrew Bergman, and Andrew Fenady's The Man With Bogart's Face are representative of the wide range of popular detective novels (serious, upbeat, comic, nostalgic) derived from the formula. Indeed, interest in the formula has spilled over into the world of serious fiction in recent years. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the effect of that spill-over on the formula. To do so, I will examine re-visions of the formula in novels by three nondetective writers of some literary repute. The works I will discuss are Jules Feiffer's Ackroyd, Richard Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon and Thomas Burger's Who is Teddy Villanova?

I have chosen to hyphenate "re-vision" quite deliberately, for something more radical than "revision" has taken place in the novels at hand. The relation of these works to the hard-boiled formula is complex. They are not blood descendants of the Hammett-Chandler school. Rather, it seems that these novels were reared in minds full of Freud, Kafka, Jewish New York, Ionesco, Joyce, Nabokov, and, in the instance of Brautigan, Algerian hashish. They were certainly more than toddlers when they were brought into the family and formula of Marlowe, Spade, and Archer. Nevertheless, their authors present them to us as members of the hard-boiled clan. Hence the tag of "stepsons."

[Text deleted here . . .]

Like Feiffer, Brautigan makes formula fiction the playground of the fictive self. Hardly a novice to the art of re-visioning formula fiction, Brautigan had tinkered with the historical romance (The Abortion), the gothic novel and the western (The Hawkline Monster), and the mystery story (Willard and His Bowling Trophies) prior to Dreaming of Babylon. And like its predecessors, Dreaming is a spacey, comic tribute to its original.

Brautigan always touches base before he runs. Dreaming opens as should all good hard-boiled novels - with the private eye down at the heels of his gumshoes. A good news-bad news joke begins this first person circular narrative. The good news is that on this day, 2 January 1942, C. Card, private eye, has been declared 4-F. The bad news is that he'd "gotten a case that [he] needed a gun for but [he] was fresh out of bullets." He is also fresh out of money and just about out of shelter. He is behind on his rent, and previously he has been forced to sell his car and to fire his secretary. As Card puts it (he usually talks in exaggerated hard-boiled similes), "here I was with no bullets for my gun and no money to get any and nothing left to pawn. I was sitting in my cheap little apartment on Leavenworth Street in San Francisco thinking this over when suddenly hunger started working my stomach over like Joe Louis. Three good right hooks to my gut and I was on my way to the refrigerator." (DB, 4)

Card's problems do not get particularly worse, although his similes do. We have to put up with them as Card wanders from police station to mortuary in his search for free bullets to fill his gun. His quest for bullets and the slow turn of the clock toward his scheduled rendezvous with his client are all we are given to keep us going (speaking of hunger) for the first 114 pages, slightly more than half of the book. That and, of course, Babylon.

Not only is Card a detective; he is also a dreamer. Beginning with a fastball to the head, which ended his attempt to become a big league player, Card has been subject to sudden "head trips" to ancient Babylon. There Card is a baseball hero named Samson Ruth. There he is the author of a private eye serial featuring villain Dr. Abdul Forsythe and detective Ace Stag. Ace is replaced later by detective Smith Smith in such classics as "Smith Smith Versus the Shadow Robots."

Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, action intensifies and becomes both absurd and morbid in the second half of the novel. Card meets his client, a petite, beer guzzling blonde woman who never takes a piss. The blonde offers Card $1,000 to steal the corpse of a hooker from the morgue. She tells Card she has picked him for the job, rather than any one of a number of better known detectives, because "you're the only one we could trust to steal a body for us . . . The other detectives might have some scruples. You don't have any." (DB, 130) Card acknowledges that she is right and that he isn't offended by the charge. So much for the ethical attributes of the hard-boiled hero.

Card has considerable difficulty stealing the body because a pair of body-snatchers has been hired by the same lady to compete with him. Morbid humor and hard-boiled perversity dominate the scenes at the morgue as Card watches his cop friend, Rink, interrogate the bungling body-snatchers. Even Card has difficulty finding similes to fire the scene: "There are no words to describe the expression on the hood's face when Sergeant Rink pulled him out of the refrigerator. He opened it up just a crack at first. You could only see the guy's eyes. They looked as if Edgar Allan Poe had given them both hotfoots" (DB, 171).

There is violence, absurdity, and adventure enough in the last forty pages of the novel. Card is chased around town by angry blacks who threaten to make him into stew meat. He is forced to hide the abducted corpse in his refrigerator. And, although he keeps vigil, he is unable to retain his $1,000. Even worse, at the cemetery he is caught by his mother and upbraided by her for causing the death of his father. In retrospect, Card concludes his narrative of 2 January 1942 with this observation: "I was right back where I started, the only difference being that when I woke up this morning, I didn't have a dead body in my refrigerator." (DB, 220)

The effect of Dreaming in Babylon on the hard-boiled formula is, as I have suggested already, similar to the one Ackroyd has. But significantly different are mode and tone. Ackroyd is, basically, a serious novel, even when it is absurd. Dreaming is a comic work that parodies the formula even as it reshapes it.

Both form and theme in Dreaming stretch the formula beyond its usual shape by making it clear that there is a tension between the facts of life and the meaning of life. Facts include no bullets for one's gun and a corpse in one's refrigerator. They have no intrinsic meaning. But Babylon has. It exists only because it is an active extension of mind. Meaning, then, is connected with Babylon, with the pure imagination, and not with objective fact. The implication for the formula is clear. According to Brautigan, nothing meaningful is gained by taking murder out of the drawing room and placing it in the streets. The real and the meaningful are not synonyms. This is the case because, at least in Dreaming, the world of facts is patently absurd—guns but no bullets, refrigerators stocked with corpses.

So the world turns, accumulating facts but not revealing patterns. That being the case, a rich imagination, a lush fantasy life, is to be preferred to a life of adherence to objective facts of objectified codes. Card agrees. He is not, once you get past the marginality and the similes, a very hard-boiled hero. He is, rather, an unembroiled hero—detached from the world, narcissistic. Card. Smith Smith. Ace Stag. Call him what you will. He is more protean than daemonic. The fictive hero strikes again.

[Text deleted here . . .]

An overview of this literary study shows that the re-visions of the hard-boiled formula undertaken by these various hands have much in common. First, although urban setting has been preserved, it now signifies a reality different from that in the hard boiled formula. If the hard-boiled formula converted the city from "object of wonder" in classical detective fiction into an image of modernity, corruption, and death, then these recent revisions have given the screw another turn and have exchanged the existential vision of the hard-hailed formula for an absurdist view of the city. In these novels the city has become a stage for absurdist activity and theater. The city and its inhabitants serve as catalysts for actions that are unpredictable and ever changing.

The plot of the hard-boiled formula has been modified accordingly. Significant causes for action are hard to locate in these novels, or when located turn quickly to absurdist mist and mirth. The result is a plot of infinitely incomplete action. The formula's demand that the detective become more than a detective is put to the service of plot at this point. As I noted in the study of Teddy Villanova, detectives are pushed beyond detection in these re-visions too. But they become writers or dreamers and not moral selves as a result of the push.

Of course, the effects of the re-visions are most striking when we turn to character. The novels examined here suggest that a third stage in the evolution of the detective hero has begun: from rational man to daemonic-code hero to protean hero and fictive self. Clearly, all three authors agree that their characters cannot live effectively in their surroundings as adherents of a code, even a personal one. A personal code presumes a definite sense of personhood. The central characters in the three novels I have examined are all better understood as "works in progress" than as "code personalities." The phrasing is deliberate, for another distinguishing trait in the re-visions is the substitution of style for morals. Imagination and not integrity is the ingredient essential to a meaningful life in the world of the hard-boiled formula revisioned. Or, to build around Chandler's vision of the hard-boiled hero, once it was said that down these dark streets a man may go if bright reason is by his side. Then it was said that down these mean streets a knight must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. But now it is written that through strange and ever-changing streets a man must twist and turn, slip and slide.

"An Alas and Alack for this Babylon"
Lee Grove
Boston Globe, 6 Nov. 1977, p. A32.
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You dirty rat, Brautigan, you dirty rat. You almost pulled the caper off. Your prose is trigger-happy, God knows, peppered with so many fast shots: "She was wearing a loose bathrobe that covered up a body that would have won first prize in a beauty contest for cement blocks."

And what a made-to-order target to have fun with—the archetypal Frisco Kid, a Forties private eye. Except you keep missing it. What counts, the bull's eye, the story.

C. Card, shamus on the skids, may have a lot of clownish aces up his unlaundered sleeve. But he loses out, finally, because the story's shot to pieces. And even if it doesn't matter to Brautigan, even if that's what he intended, it does matter.

Lovers of Brautigan, who were bowled over by Troutfishing in America, who have stuck to their Brautigan guns, are getting fed up. No bowling trophies for wobbly gutter balls, no matter how slick the arm.

Card, of course, is flat broke, a deadbeat private dick whose laundry, what there is of it, was cleaned decades ago and who hits the panhandling turf wearing one sock. His apartment is so dirty that he "replaced all the seventy-five watt bulbs with twenty-watters" so he wouldn't live to see it. Jungle growth has invaded his fridge.

Fortunately, there's a job in the offing for him. Unfortunately, he has no bullets for his gun and winds up begging .38s from an attendant at the morgue, who had once made minor celebrity-hood by shooting an already dead ax-murderer on ice for an autopsy, and who comes to Card's rescue and lends him the bullets. Only they're .32s.

So he forks over his own gun, in order that our schlemiel shamus can keep his rendezvous in a bar with Mystery Woman, who wants Card to make off with a corpse from the morgue. Make off with it, filch it.

Only she's also hired a trio of dodo hoodlums to do the same job. They abscond with the wrong corpse. Card beelines it out with the correct dead whore, stuffs her in the trunk of his car, zooms Bullitt-like through the streets, outwits the pursuing chowderheads, and finally stashes the corpse in his fridge for safekeeping, momentarily displacing the jungle.

Then he sneaks off to a cemetery at night, where he overhears a Prime Beef of Cop and Mystery Woman conferring, and where he also discovers, of all people, his own mother, who berates him a la Jewish hausfrau for setting his sights so low.

All the while, he dreams of Babylon, a Walter-Mitty Paradise where he is either a heroic baseball player, Samson Ruth, or a smoothie private eye, tended to by Nana-Dirat, a princess who gives him pre-game massages or plays Mary Astor to his Bogart.

What goes wrong? Everything.

Thomas Berger's "Who Killed Teddy Villanova?" showed us splendidly how a sleazy detective can at once become a figure of high comedy while the real madness of urban violence can nonetheless remain serious.

Brautigan seduces us into believing that the detective's hijinks may come into a potentially disastrous head-on collision with what seems to be the stuff of a murky film noir. He invokes the sinister and then, unfairly, turns it into sausage.

Mystery Woman and Hoods, all of them, are flat and moronic cartoons. Brautigan's wit is fresh and perky, but I smell a rat here. And while Card is dreaming of Babylon, we are dreaming of better novels.

"Lacan and Postmodernism in Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon"
Mark Hedborn
Literature and Film in the Historical Dimension. University Press of Florida, 1994, pp. 101-110.
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As Linda Hutcheon says, postmodernism "gives equal value . . . to that which is inward-directed and belongs to the world of art (such as parody) and that which is outward-directed and belongs to the 'real life' (such as history)." Dreaming of Babylon is a postmodern novel. It is schizophrenic, a parody of itself, a pastiche tenuously glued together by an ironic treatment of the detective novel genre, and its pattern clearly reflects the tension of Hutcheon's definition. Questions raised by the text are the same ones running through the discourse on what postmodernism is and on postmodernism's effects on art and notions of history. Specifically, what are the consequences of postmodernism if we posit that such a thing as the postmodern self exists? A Lacanian reading of the postmodern elements of Dreaming of Babylon seems to confirm through the allegory of a painfully fragmented self that the postmodern self, although often schizophrenic in the way that Fredric Jameson describes, is also potentially highly creative.

Two key concepts used by Jameson to define the postmoderm are (1) "the transformation of reality into images," which, loosely translated, he equates with schizophrenia, and (2) "the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents," which he equates with pastiche (Postmodernism and Consumer Society (PC) Fredric Jameson 28). Let me clarify now how far I am willing to use and agree with Jameson's definition of pastiche.

Unlike Hutcheon, Jameson excludes parody from his definition of postmodernism, replacing it with pastiche. Where parody distorts a norm to create a comic commentary, pastiche is "a neutral mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic" (PC 16). He uses Star Wars (1977) as an example of pastiche, or what he also calls the nostalgia mode: "One of the most important cultural experiences of the generations that grew up from the 1930s to the 1950s was the Saturday afternoon serial of the Buck Rogers-type alien villains, true American heroes, heroines in distress, the death ray or the doomsday box, and the cliffhanger at the end whose miraculous resolution was to be witnessed next Saturday afternoon. (PC 19)"

I might parenthetically add that this tradition survives today in reruns. Star Wars is a nostalgia film in that it hearkens back to those serializations, bringing past into the present, and helping to fragment time, to take it from one place and put it into another. "We seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself remains forever out of reach" (PC 20).

Let me offer a more current example of this fragmentation and stereotyping of the past on Video Hits One, a rock video channel similar to Music Television (MTV). One very short segment called "Milestones" takes documentary news footage and inserts it between the music videos. Right after Madonna and right before Michael Jackson we see and hear John Kennedy exhorting us to "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country," or Richard Nixon claiming that he is not a crook, along with the film of him leaving the White House just after his resignation. These clichéd "Milestones" are not put into context historically, are not framed by narrative. Far from creating context, the images that surround the clips drag them into the now. In a way, the segment becomes just another music video in a schizophrenic progression. History comes to mimic postmodern video and becomes pastiche. It becomes, as Ann Kaplan says of anything presented in the style of MTV, part of "the hypnotizing of the spectator into an exitless, schizophrenic stance by the unceasing image series."

Pastiche is a useful defining aspect of one strain of postmodernism. It illuminates the "Milestones" segments beautifully. Still, I would prefer to include parody and humor in a more optimistic, flexible definition; otherwise, for instance, one would have to exclude from the postmodern a Michelle Shocked video that parodies the objectification of the female body in music videos. The collage of images and camera angles presented, reflecting various video genres, is typically postmodern. The singer, in a tight outfit, dances in the foreground in a manner reminiscent of exercise videos. Behind her, in flashes, we see her class, men in bathing suits—shots of muscled flanks or close-ups of male buttocks. Throughout, it is a parody of music videos in general (though there are specific references to videos by Robert Palmer). The point being that although it is parody, it is also pastiche.

I am taking the time to map this out because Dreaming of Babylon fits the postmodern pattern so dramatically; furthermore, it can be read very compellingly in Lacanian terms. The two readings work together to illustrate the dichotomy of postmodernism—its simultaneous alienation and liberation of the artistic figure.

Clearly at one level the plot can be read as a simple parody of the detective novel or film of the 1940s. C. Card is the "traditional" down-on-his-luck private eye hired by a mysterious blonde and working in opposition to Sergeant Rink, a police detective. The story revolves around the mysterious killing of a nameless prostitute, and Card's immediate goal is to steal the prostitute's body from the city morgue at the behest of his new employer. He manages to bribe his morgue-attendant friend Peg-leg for the body, then he hides it in his refrigerator at home. However, quite mysteriously, the blonde hires two gangs to also steal the body. Consequently, Card spends his time trying to outwit his competitors and figure out the motives of his employer. When he finally makes it to the rendezvous with the blonde, where he expects to receive his money and discover her motives, something goes wrong. He sees that Rink has handcuffed the blonde and is trying to get her to confess. Rink fails and, uncuffing his prisoner, walks off to have a beer with her. The end. Card's final words are "I was right back where I started, the only difference being that when I woke up this morning, I didn't have a dead body in the refrigerator."

Obviously, this ending leaves many unanswered questions: Who is the dead prostitute? Who killed her? What was the motive? Why did the blonde want the body? Why hire three competing groups to steal it? Why did Rink suspect the blonde? What was his evidence? Why does the story have so many loose ends? Using the logic of parody, the ending might make sense. Most mystery readers expect the ends to be tied up. Doing just the opposite makes a humorous comment of the genre. Parody also seems to explain why C. Card wears only one sock, and why he spends half the novel just trying to acquire bullets for his gun. Parody can even offer an explanation, although a reductive one, for this text's oddity of oddities, Babylon—Card's powerful fantasy world, his realm of hallucinations—an ancient setting where he completely loses track of the real world, where he casts himself as hero in a conglomeration of pulp fiction roles. Babylon is the reason, simple parody would say, that C. Card is so unsuccessful and down on his luck; he simply daydreams too much.

What parody cannot explain is why Babylon is structured the way it is, something only postmodernism can explain. And parody cannot explain why the text dwells on the creative process used by Card to produce so many oddly interesting scenarios for Babylon. The book is as much about artistic creation as it is about the pathology of a psychotic character, something Lacanian reading offers as explanation for the excesses of the psychosis and its creativity.

Babylon and what goes on there are postmodern—a series of fragmentary pulp stories in which Card plays the hero, a world he scripts from films and comics, a world where he is always successful. C. Card dreams of Babylon, his imaginary world, at the most inopportune moments, but interestingly, Card's discourse on Babylon contains as much material on how he creates it as on how much he enjoys it. The chapter titles illustrate the various scenarios that run through Card's mind: "The 596 B.C. Baseball Season," "A Cowboy in Babylon," "Terry and the Pirates," "Ming the Merciless," "Drums of Fu Manchu," "Smith Smith versus the Shadow Robots," and "The Babylon-Orient Express." Card picks titles and bits of plot, villains and character names from the genre fiction he has seen, and then pastes them together in his imagination to create Babylon.

For example, the chapter called "Ming the Merciless" begins with Card, sitting on a park bench, as the postmoderm artist: "I decided to borrow Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon to be the villain... I had to change his name and alter his character slightly to fit my needs. That wouldn't be hard. Actually, it would be an immense amount of pleasure for me. I had spent a very pleasant part of eight years making up situations and characters in Babylon, unfortunately to the point of being a detriment to my real life, such as it was."(DB 62-63)

From "Terry and the Pirates": "Sometimes I played around with the form of my adventures in Babylon. They would be done as books that I could see in my mind as I was reading, but most often they were done as movies, though once I did them as a play with me being a Babylonian Hamlet and Nana-Dirat being both Gertrude and Ophelia . . . Someday I must return and pick it up where I left off . . . My Hamlet will have a happy ending."(DB 59)

In "Smith," Card brainstorms for his own character's name, eventually choosing Smith Smith: "I had used the name Ace Stag for my name in the detective novel about Babylon that I had just finished living, but I didn't like to use the same name for myself in my Babylonian adventures. I liked to change my name . . . Smith . . . I ran some variations of Smith through my mind.

"Errol Smith  Carter Smith
Cary Smith  Rex Smith
Humphrey Smith  Cody Smith
Wallace Smith  Flint Smith
Pancho Smith   Terry Smith
Lee Smith  Major Smith (I liked that one a lot)
Morgan Smith
"Gunboat" Smith  "Oklahoma Jimmy" Smith
"Red" Smith  FDR Smith

"There certainly are a lot of possibilities when you use the name Smith." (DB 7)

Babylon is also schizophrenically postmodern in that it pops up in fragments to suddenly immobilize Card, lifting him out of the real world. It is like Kaplan's hypnotic state. He will wake with a start to realize he has lost anywhere from a moment to hours of his life. He is trapped in his own progression of images, his private MTV.

Thus Babylon, or postmodernism, in this text exhibits excess as well as creative potential. This excessiveness is clearly explained by Lacanian psychology. Lacan maps the human psyche into three registers, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. Through the interaction of these registers, one's self identity is formed. The Imaginary can be seen as a "realm of images in which we make identifications," and it is closely related to Lacan's famous mirror stage. The child is initially only vaguely aware of itself, but in the mirror stage it becomes aware of itself through a Gestalt image. This could be its own reflection in a mirror, or an awareness of its mother as itself, or an identification with another infant. "The ego, first glimpsed at the mirror stage, is the reified product of successive imaginary identifications and is cherished as the stable . . . seat of personal 'identity.'" However, there is no stable self; it is imaginary, "no thing at all" that "can be grasped only as a set of tensions, or mutations, or dialectical upheavals within a continuous, intentional, future-directed process."

Clearly, Babylon, the postmodern, and Lacan's imagery register are similar. All three are fragmentary. All three are mutations, combinations of images. Babylon draws the other two together. Card uses postmodern art to create his illusory "stable . . . seat of personal identity" (Structuralism and Since: From Levi Strauss to Derrida (SS) Malcolm Bowie 131). But why is he so extreme about it? Why does it act as a detriment to his life? Lacan would say that he has not been fully integrated into the Symbolic register.

Movement into the Symbolic register, that of language, law, culture, and familial relationships, occurs with the onset of the Oedipal conflict. The child's illusory, stable, unified self constructed in relation to its desire for the mother is interrupted by the father. The desire is repressed and displaced; there is a lack, and it is in trying to fill this void that the self is constituted in the Symbolic register. "According to a successful Oedipal resolution each child will choose as love object a member of the opposite sex and identify with one of the same."

A second type of initiation into the Symbolic, which helps create a "normal" personality, is the "Fort-Da" game that Sigmund Freud describes, where a child throws a toy with a string attached and pulls the toy back. When the toy is out of sight, the child cries "Da" (there), and when the toy is pulled into sight again, the child says "Fort" (here). This symbolizes the acquisition of language and its power to make invisible or absent objects present. "The sounds . . . replace the action and are then substituted for unattainable objects of desire." "The symbol shows itself first of all as the killing of an object, and this death constitutes in the subject the externalization of his desire" (UL 512). This is the key to Card's psychosis. Just when he is being initiated into the symbolic register, something tragic, something he sometimes represses, happens. He is playing ball with his father, and as his father goes to retrieve the ball that Card has thrown (da), he is hit by a car and killed. What should be an event only in the Symbolic, the death of an object by its absence, becomes for Card an event in the Real. Jameson's rather oversimplified definition of the real is that "it is simply History itself." It can also be described as that which can only be described from within language, for instance death, but which exists outside the system of language (Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Science "Understanding Lacan" (UL) Eugen Bar 517-518).

This episode in Card's life propels him into the creative/torturing psychosis that drives the whole novel. As Lacan says: "it is in an accident in this register [the Symbolic] and in what takes place in it, namely, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father in the place of the Other, and in the failure of the paternal metaphor, that I designate the defect that gives psychosis its essential condition."

We can postulate that Card forecloses the Name-of-the-Father when his father dies. From that point on whenever he tries to enter fully into the Symbolic realm he cannot, because the Imaginary (Babylon) intrudes to ruin his opportunity. Here Bar expresses the pattern of the whole novel:

What happens is that the subject, after his primal rejection of some important value, must thereafter constantly fight the symbolic or, as Lacan sometimes says, the Other and its intrusion. The subject continually has to make up for what he rejected, and he does this, since his three categories are disturbed, with a curious mixture of the three, namely, hallucinations. (UL 519)

Clearly Babylon represents the intrusion of the Imaginary into the Symbolic via hallucinations. Card's narcissistic success in Babylon is a series of repeated attempts to regain the illusory stable self constituted by the infant in the mirror stage.

For Card the artist, this lack of continuity, this continual surfacing of fragmentary self images compels more creations and creativity; Card will go back and back to Babylon and keep tying to make up for the hole in the Symbolic. His lack, his desire, generates his creative material. As Lacan says of situations such as Card's, "For the novelist these situations are his true resource, namely, that which makes possible the emergence of 'depth psychology'..." (Ecrits: A Selection (ES) Jacques Lacan 217). Clearly the postmodern has a powerful role to play in Card's production. It has a less beneficent role in his personality, on the self presented in the text. Perhaps the more disturbing aspects of postmodernism are linked to pastiche in Jameson's more restrictive sense, in that they are more cut loose from a posited, stable, narrative history, more aware that the postmodern self is closer to the stream of unstable images that constitutes the Lacanian psychotic self. At the same time it is important to point out that Lacan would say that the search for a stable, unified self is always frustrated, even in people who are not psychotic. This potentially opens the "stable" postmodern self to the creative power of the images through which it constitutes itself.

"Brautigan's Mythical Trip into Bogart Country"
Seymour Krim
Chicago Tribune Book World, 25 Sep. 1977, Sec. 7, p. 3.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan is in a niche by himself. Like Vonnegut, he has with artistic confidence and none of the traditional restraints created a spaced-out world that seems a much better clue to what is real in the American '70s than foot-dragging realism. Reading him is effortless. His books seem to write themselves without the usual sweat and pain we associate with serious writing; and even though he has a devoted audience of regular (mostly young) readers, it is brother writers who are always taught a lesson when they pick up the latest Brautigan.

"If only I could do it this simply," is the typical unspoken quote that springs to the writer's brain while he/she shakes his/her head in honest wonder. Brautigan puts none of the usual novelistic furniture between himself and the reader. The prose is as clear and transparent as a mountain stream. It sometimes wanders a little aimlessly, but by this time you're so hooked on the unobtrusive adventure of the style that you're ready to follow it anywhere. Without making any pretentious claims for Brautigan, it is gift that D.H. Lawrence and Hemingway (more deliberate in his craft) also had and it makes reading an almost sensuous pleasure for tired-eyed book reviewers like this one.

Brautigan takes off on the private-eye myth in this new entertainment, but he does it in his usual unpredictable way. The story is told with dead-pan straightforwardness even when the incidents are so outrageous that they could only exist in a dream. You might even call his work dream-realism to try and pin down its elusive flavor.

At any rate, the scene is San Francisco, naturally, and the private-eye antihero who tells the story is an unsavory punk named C. Card. The time is 1942. C. Card has 4F'd his way out of Army service, grifted, stolen, hustled his own mother for money, but he's still without a client. He is probably the world's worst private eye and most embarrassing of all for the image, has neither office nor secretary.

But he has one saving grace. When life gets too tough for him—and Brautigan has real knowledge of the seamy side of San Francisco which you don't associate with his reputation as a fantasist—C. Card takes refuge in an imaginary Babylon built up in his mind. In Babylon he has a beautiful private-eye office better than Sam Spade's and a secretary named Nana-dirat who puts Effie to shame. He is known and loved all over Babylon. He has his own radio station near the Hanging Gardens and flies an airplane of his own invention "propelled by an engine that burns honey." C. Card really swings in Babylon, as you can see.

But things start to pick up in the so-called real world, so he has to tear himself away from Nana-dirat and a Babylonian production of "Hamlet" that he's thinking of starring in. A beautiful blond right out of every legitimate private-eye story suddenly hires him to steal a body from the morgue and bring it to a nearby cemetery. He gets a $500 advance, just like a real Bogart kind of shamus. Another $500 waits for him when the deed is done.

With the complicity of his friend, Peg-leg, the San Francisco morgue keeper who gets his kicks by having affairs with handsome dead ladies. C. Card does indeed steal the body. It looks as if he's finally going to make it to that real office and real secretary. But—without giving the plot away, which includes sticking live bodies in the morgue refrigerator, four razor-wielding black fried-chicken cooks, a millionairess who drinks nothing but beer and never goes to the john—it doesn't quite work out. C. Card is a bum whom fate has wisely decided to keep in that condition.

I say "wisely" because there is very little illusion in C. Card's vision, apart from the head-trips to Babylon. The same can be said for Brautigan. He sees things for what they are with a cool but merciful eye; if the nonsentimental compassion weren't there, we'd probably get a bleak nihilism in his books about as pleasurable to confront as a noose around the neck. There is nothing fanciful about the cold hurts of C. Card's childhood, his whining mother, the seedy rooms where he's spent his adult life, the swindling and small-time cheating that gets him through his days. He is one of the anonymous men to be found in every big American city. But inside, tenderly hidden under the shell, is a dreamer of giant proportions; one's hunch is that C. Card will finally go to Babylon one day for good . . . if he isn't already there.

People who have regarded Brautigan as a novelty who would sooner or later deflate never reckoned on the iron in his charm. A successful vision is not manufactured overnight. Years of an earlier alienation, as with C. Card, produce muscle in the imagination even when it is most lightly handled without an ounce of literary self-consciousness. But success in America these days does run the danger of repetition or overexposure. Brautigan's talent is now hitched to the machinery of publishing hoopla, and an argument could be made that he is in danger of becoming an exquisite machine himself by the amount of books he's turning out.

Only 42, he's already written 18 of them. No single one has had the impact of his ground breaker, Trout Fishing in America, and fresh and offbeat as the new one is, it doesn't truly extend his vision even though it certainly confirms it.

But all of this is the usual book-review palaver compared to the strange atonal fun that Brautigan gives you and which you can get from precious few others. My only slight worry is that the C. Card inside the author stays lean and wary enough to prevent Brautigan from ever being co-opted by the beautiful blond world of the winners, who always turn out to have a dead talent of some kind stuffed in the refrigerator.

"Depolitization from Within: Not Taking a Fall with Richard Brautigan"
James Murray Miclot
Humanitas, vol. 6, no. 2, 1993, pp. 15-44.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

"We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go."
— Theodore Roethke, "The Waking"

Bell-bottoms are back, and so is Richard Brautigan. His novels achieved something of a cult following in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of the most admired authors of the hippie generation, Brautigan gave expression to a boredom and discontent with things as they are, a wish to dream of new and different possibilities. His books have been the subject of scholarly writing, but it is fair to say that he has received far more popular than critical attention. Most of Brautigan's novels remain in print, and today they are attracting renewed interest. One reason for this continuing appeal may be that his work satisfies the desire for a kind of fantasy that has been gaining strength for some time. It is an imagination that devalues real life, if by "life" is meant regimentation to the dictates of an exhausted, workaday world. The alternative provided by Brautigan is a flight of fancy, an imaginary celebrity in dreamland, where self and world work out just the way we want them.

The same imaginative trend, but in academic circles, may account for a resurgent interest in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the figure who more than any other inspired the modern dream to set aside the tensions of daily life to make room for reverie. The dream of a personal unity duplicated in social space has been the imaginative fixation, the fantasy, of most philosophers since Plato. The resistant nature of political life, its inherent plurality and tension, has inspired these same visionaries to set the real and the ideal in abstract opposition: a metaphysical split between perfection and imperfection, repose and exertion. Whether in ancient or modern form, what is imagined as perfect is a depoliticization of that real life which in its present, historical form must be viewed as deficient, immoral, irrational, too vulgar for lofty thought. Brautigan's novel Dreaming of Babylon provides an opportunity to analyze this habit of world-jumping up close in its personal psychodynamic. The final irony of this novel is that the real world from which its protagonist seeks escape bears features of that very Leviathan which the rationalist philosophers have sought to impose. Brautigan would have us ask, again, which world is real?

"The status of reality in Brautigan's novels and stories is always such that we cannot take them straightforwardly; rather than asserting the value of the real, these texts take their specific and unmistakable quality from a persistent speculation on the very nature of the real, as well as [of] textual activity itself." — Marc Chénetier, Richard Brautigan, 21

In its half-hearted and finally abortive search for reality, Brautigan's art is suffused with a saving virtue; he is tragically funny! And so is the choice we are asked to make, in this book and elsewhere—between the abstractions of the fantastic self and a fanatically imposed world order, between a personal and a public escapism that are equally inhumane because they are mutually reinforcing.

"On the Brooklyn Bridge, a naked man running down the eastbound lane yelling 'It's a beautiful morning. It's a great day!' was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver." — Spy, July-August 1993, 8

Making Yourself Up
Richard Brautigan's novel Dreaming of Babylon is in outward form a hard-boiled detective story cut in the mold of dime paperbacks like those by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. The protagonist is a private eye, but he is no Marlowe or Sam Spade. The novel ends with this bungler wrapping up yet another case unsatisfactorily. Mr. C. Card is the name of the sleuth, in real life. But he has another life too. That life takes place at the same time but not in San Francisco, the setting for the novel. Throughout the novel, whenever he can be, C. Card is in Babylon. There he goes by the name Smith Smith, private eye extraordinaire.

Coming up with that name took some doing. C. Card had already made for himself a series of adventures in Babylon, with suitable identities for each. He had been the street-wise detective, Ace Stag, and the Babylonian baseball slugger. Samson Ruth. He had enjoyed himself just as much as a famous cowboy, a suave nightclub host, and a decorated general. Now his greatest adventure is in the works, and he will need the perfect name for it. "I like the name Smith. I don't know why but I've always liked that name. Some people consider it ordinary. I don't." (DB, 85) From the perspective of the reader, Card's life in Babylon is an entertaining diversion, and an intimate portrait of a life squandered. But from the perspective of Card himself, each escapade in dreamland is transformative. Babylon turns a nobody into a somebody.

Card finds the demands of everyday life too monotonous and grinding. In Babylon, Card can see himself at the center of intense dramas, each one set to redress his near anonymity in the real world he must share. In dreamland he can have the world just the way he wants it—perfect, at least perfect for himself and for a little while. He desires escape. And so do we, when, on occasion, we take up a novel like this one to try on roles and exploits more grandiose than the usual, a vacation in imagination. The mundane tasks of workaday life are surpassed in favor of satisfactions that seem extraordinary. But then, this reaping of merely daydreamed compensations is pretty ordinary, all too ordinary. We all do it.

At the exact midpoint of the novel the character comes to a stirring discovery a kind of epiphany. He realizes that the first name for his hero could also be Smith! Before arriving at this prise de conscience, C. Card expends what seems a considerable portion of his psychic energy ruminating his way through lists of possibility. In a perfect world the first name for his detective must be as perfect as the last.

"Some of the names were good but so far I hadn't come up with the one that was perfect and I wouldn't settle for less than a perfect Smith.

"Why should I?" (DB, 86)

The otherwise passive Card will not settle for less than what he imagines as the perfect turn of events, anonymity turned celebrity. Card insists on turning his life around the easy way, by dreaming himself up. He refuses to take a fall into the nagging circumstances of life, its hard requirements. The real world is viewed as way too tight, uncomfortable, to be worthy of his serious concentration. We all know what that feeling is like, but then it's back to work. Not so for Card. Babylon is indeed an interlude—at first. As that interlude becomes by increments a substitute for active life, Card experiences the real world, not the dream world, as interruption. Yet Card's every transfiguration in dreamland is effected in terms borrowed from that seemingly intrusive, external world. Each of his celebrated imaginary selves disengages from the shared world, yet each imitates all that confers status there—only on terms more comfortable for Card. In Babylon he can find himself so much better situated from the start. There every social setting conforms to his immediate desire. All of Babylon eagerly awaits his next appearance. Once there he can luxuriate in those postures already deemed most enviable by the real world he flees. And he can do so without all its troubles. Whether through the instantaneous workings of the daydream, or the imagining of a far-off and improbable windfall in real life, Card's every turn in identity is worked out in meticulous detail—rather like the marvelous plans we might make while holding a lottery ticket, plans doomed yet loaded with possibility.

Mr. Card's psychic disengagement from the real world is not complete. He remains conscious of the difference between desires unrealized, except as fantasy, and those enacted in the difficult world. "Only for the psychotic do fantasies represent accomplishment as well as wish, thus eliminating confrontation with the obstacles of the real world." [Lester G. Crocker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Quest (1712-1758)]. Card disparages the world of action and interchange precisely because he knows it is a world too hard to change by simply changing your mind. What would it be but madness to see things and people forever working themselves out just the way you imagined? Perhaps a warning is implicit in the lines that close Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory:
"Watch out, Billy, or you might end up like the little boy who got everything he ever wanted."

"What happened to him?"

"He lived happily ever after."

Like us, Card must return, however reluctantly, to regular work whenever pragmatic demands intrude. Babylon appears most enticing when things are going particularly well, or badly. Card's biggest payoff, both monetary and psychological, settles on him after being run over by a car. He lands in the hospital with both legs broken:

"They didn't know how comfortable the hospital was, just to lie there and have all my wants taken care of, with practically nothing to do except dream of Babylon.

"The second I went out the front door of that hospital on my crutches everything started downhill." (DB, 93)

When back, Card scoots through his social surroundings as an almost nameless figure. Two explanations can be gathered for Card's anonymity and these are related. He would prefer not to associate with others, and he owes money to virtually everyone he knows (not least his mother). When he is singled out for attention it is invariably in the manner of his mother's repeated address: "Are you still being that private detective, chasing people with bad shadows? When are you going to pay the money you owe me? You bastard!" (DB, 218)

With the bare exception of two old acquaintances, no one pays him much regard, at least not by name ("See Card"). Police Sgt. Rink knew him best in the old days; so did Sam Herschberger. Rink and Card had applied together for admittance to the police academy. Herschberger fought in the Spanish Civil War, and Card had been there too, already quite disengaged. But in the old days he had not yet become a part-time private investigator or a full-time daydreamer. Perhaps Card had not yet become a missing person because, in those days, he still retained some sense of potential for exercising himself in life. Now hope only takes the form of daydreaming. But is this hope at all? It might rather be said that Card now despairs of life, painting it all in shadow. That painting is a comfort of sorts. Since the real world around him is so very dismal, Card is relieved of the obligation to conduct himself well. Since the world is just rotten, I need not, I cannot, be fruitful.

Finished!
In Babylon, Card acts out his own internal detective serial, Smith Smith Versus the Shadow Robots. This imaginary world is broadcast with ever greater color and coherence as it progresses. Brautigan's novel, likewise, insinuates the reader ever more deeply into Card's imagining of both his real world and his dreamland. Card's life of everyday difficulties is divested of import. His real world is portrayed as relentlessly rotten, tiresome, stagnant. But his dream world keeps moving, both in image and emotion. More than with other arresting novels, we move through this one with an increasing investment in worlds that do not exist. The reader's critical discernment follows hard on the heels of an imaginative participation that is made possible by disbelief suspended.

Every discernment of the real is tensional. This is particularly the case within that enhancement of reality that is worked by the exquisite artifice that we call great fiction. The Brautigan novel is instead a work of not so subtle pacification. In sporadic jumps between worlds—the parallels between them more synchronous than diachronic—his writing intoxicates by divesting narrative experience of its more resistant features: of plot and character development, of complex and subtle experience, the relational tensions of historicity now heightened to aesthetic form. By moving against the imaginary flow our acquiescence in Card's easy world-jumping can be rendered critical. Let us start with the ending.

Card and his mother are walking together out of a cemetery. His mother has made her regular Friday visit, to place flowers on the gravesite of Mr. Card, Sr. The son had come there too, to receive a big payoff—for stealing a prostitute's body from the county morgue—money that he now knows will never materialize. Walking with his mother over the cemetery lawn, broke and broken as ever, C. Card finds another quick opportunity to dream about his more accommodating life back in Babylon. And the novel ends:
"We didn't say anything as we walked along.

"That was good.

"It gave me some time to think about Babylon. I picked up where I left off in my serial Smith Smith Versus the Shadow Robots. After I'd finished talking to the good Dr. Francis, I gave my secretary a passionate kiss on the mouth.

"'What's that for?' she said, a little breathless afterward.

"'Good luck,' I said.

"'Whatever happened to the good old rabbit's foot?' she said.

"I took a long lustful look at her delicious mouth.

"'Are you kidding?' I said.

"'I guess not,' she said. 'If that's replaced rabbits' feet for luck, I want some more.'

"'Sorry, babe,' I said. 'But I've got work to do. Somebody has invented mercury crystals.'

"'Oh. no,' she said, the expression on her face changing to apprehension.

"I put my sword shoulder holster on underneath my toga.

"'Watch out, son!' my mother said as I almost walked straight into an open, freshly dug grave. Her voice jerked me back from Babylon like pulling a tooth out of my mouth without any Novocaine.

"I avoided the grave.

"'Be careful,' she said. 'Or I'll have to visit both of you out here. That would make Friday a very crowded day for me.'

"'OK, Mom, I'll watch my step.'

"I had to, seeing that I was right back where I started, the only difference being that when I woke up this morning, I didn't have a dead body in my refrigerator." (DB, 219-220)

All through this novel Card is jumping between worlds. But in spite of this imaginary exertion, the world that he really makes for himself is never made different for that imaginary effort. Daydreaming does not pay, except in sham compensations to the ego. The reader begins to ask whether these rewards are worth all the trouble for Card or for the reader Even Brautigan seems to see in Card's dreamscape something prodigal, naming it Babylon.

World-Jumping
Gadamer has argued that "Wishing is defined by the way it remains innocent of mediation with what is to be done . . . wishing is not willing; it is not practice." [Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science.] The distinction is valid, but Gadamer is less attentive than Nietzsche, the later Croce, and especially Babbitt, to just how willful that wishing can be. [See Claes G, Ryn, Will, Imagination and Reason.]

C. Card is generally aware of the distinction between doing and dreaming. When jumping between the two he feels the abruptness of the change. So does the reader. The experience is commonplace. Card happens on Herschberger:
"'Excuse me, C. Card, is that you?'

"I looked up, totally returned to the so-called real world...

"'You seemed a million miles away,' he said, now years later in San Francisco.

"'I was daydreaming,' I said.

"'Just like the good old days,' he said. 'I think half the time I knew you in Spain you weren't even there.'

"I decided to change the subject." (DB, 66)

Perhaps we daydream of distant and unlikely possibilities more frequently than we notice. For Card this wishfulness has been invested with a dignity outweighing anything offered by real life. Card will not get a hold on himself; he lets go of the world of common sociability. These enervations of self and world—the retreat from internal and external strenuousness—are intimate and complementary aspects of the same self-evasion. Card must watch his step most closely when the demands of the shared world intrude. Still, he does so only when necessary.

"Got to keep looking at the bright side.

"Can't let it get to me.

"If it really gets to me I start thinking about Babylon and then it only gets worse because I'd sooner think about Babylon than anything else and when I start thinking about Babylon I can't do anything but think about Babylon and my whole life falls to pieces.

"Anyway, that's what it's been doing for the last eight years, ever since 1934, which was when I started thinking about Babylon." (DB, 30)

Mistiming the jump between everyday reality and daydream can be costly. When dreaming of Babylon, the detective repeatedly walks or drives past his destinations. And the consequences are not so amenable to immediate revision as are events in the dream world. When he needs to hold Babylon back, to keep his feet firmly on the ground, Card fixes his attention on his shoes.

"I slammed on the brakes.

"Got to be careful. Can't let Babylon get me. I had too many things going for me. Later for Babylon. So I rearranged my thought patterns to concentrate on something else and the thing I chose to think about was my shoes. I needed a new pair. The ones I was wearing were worn out." (DB, 107)

With the prospect of his first client in months, and far behind in the rent, Card had struggled to put on all the appearances of respectability. "I made sure that I had two socks on. They of course didn't match but they were close enough, not unless you were a world renowned expert on socks." (DB, 98) Out in public Card's struggle is constant. He must deliberately take on that drabness which he imagines all about him, in his real world.

"I walked two blocks beyond my stop the other way, past the street that I lived on, thinking about having the name Smith for a private eye in Babylon, so I had to turn around and walk back again and felt like a fool because I couldn't afford to do things like that when I was just a few hours away from my first client in months.

"Thinking about Babylon can be a dangerous thing for me.

"I had to watch my ass.

"I walked back down Sacramento Street very carefully not thinking about Babylon. As I walked along, I pretended that I had a prefrontal lobotomy." (DB, 87)

Card's fixes on his feet, a grounding principle second in hardness for him only to cash, and his perception of the concrete world as insubstantial, a shadowland, are repeated in the daydream serial featured late in the novel. Smith Smith's diabolical opponent is the famous, and seemingly humanitarian, Dr. Abdul Forsythe. In the laboratory beneath his clinic for the poor, the not-so-good doctor has been busily transforming patients into "shadow robots." Thousands have been subjugated to Forsythe's fiendish will. They are neatly folded and stacked in the cellar. When the doctor acquires just one last ingredient—mercury crystals—the shadow robots will be released upon an ever unsuspecting world. But the reader is privy to the processing of only one shadow, a sandal-maker. Card's shoes are his last tangible link with the real world and sanity. The episode suggests that even this last link is being dissolved, as if by a force exterior to himself. Already the people encountered out there in his real world seem to Card well on their way to becoming shadow robots. When he stops at a bar, the bartender "was so ordinary looking that he was almost invisible." (DB, 75)

Babylonian Epiphanies
Moving through the novel backward we come to central episodes wherein Card experiences a kind of heightened consciousness or recollects earlier moments of epiphany. Each illumination brings a reconfiguration of Card's identity, drawn from dreams of instant celebrity status.

On the way to meeting his client at a radio station, Card thinks up the perfect first name for his perfect detective. "I was a block away . . . busy thinking about my shoes, when the name Smith Smith flashed into my mind and I blurted out, 'Great!'" (DB, 108; emphasis added) The scene is a prelude to one in which Card meets with a rich blonde client (his ticket back to respectability). Then he blurts out, "Smith." The perfect title for the internal serial had just popped into his head, Smith Smith Versus the Shadow Robots. "I was almost beside myself with joy . . . 'Smith—' I said, stopping the rest of the words by sitting a mental elephant down on my tongue." (DB, 118) Card anticipates that, if he goes on blurting, he will be out one rich client and be roughed up by one tough chauffeur, "the neck." In both scenes Card is relieved that no one catches on. But he regrets as well that he cannot go ahead and communicate his single creative production, the daydream. Fully conscious of the hazards, Card has begun nonetheless to spout out his dream life in bits, even as he strains to hold all this back from further notice.

"Too bad I didn't have anybody to share my accomplishment with but I knew if I told anybody about Smith Smith it would be cause for an involuntary trip to the nuthouse, which was where I wasn't interested in going.

"I'd keep Smith Smith to myself.

"I went back to thinking about my shoes." (DB, 108-109)

Card fears the consequences of bringing his imaginings down to earth. He must fear more the tensional engagement that such expression would elicit. Perhaps the greatest threat to his reverie would run something like this: An attentive listener hears Card out, his complete works in Babylon, and replies, "Big deal."

Expression of the daydream might make plain what Card really needs, some willful engagement in the difficulty of making his creativity concrete, a self-reformation. That struggle is the direction in which sanity resides, no matter what its cost to his merely imaginary esteem. Instead, Card has insisted on moving ever further from the struggles of active life—all for the sham freedom of spinning around in a whirlpool of self-enclosure, the false security of a chronic insanity.

Card's imaginings do not count for anything in the real world. He knows that, but remains unwilling to make of his creativity something actual, engaged, and concretely transformative. This character will not recast the spectral but seemingly boundless freedom of insularity into the moderated but incarnate freedom of real world engagement. Part of the rationale behind Card's passivity is implied in the scene that comes between the two blurting episodes.

Having fixed his attention enough to make himself respectable, two socks on, and keeping watch on his shoes, the character arrives at the radio station on time. Card will present himself as a reliable hire, very down to earth. "I wanted to be on time to show that I was a responsible private detective who had better things to do than think about Babylon all the time." (DB, 110) While waiting for the client, having nothing better to do, he envisions again some of the prodigal possibilities that now appeal to his fancy.

"If it was a woman I hoped that she would be very rich and beautiful and she would fall madly in love with me and want me to retire from the private-eye business and live a life of luxury and I'd spend half my time fucking her, the other half dreaming of Babylon.

"It would be a good life.

"I could hardly wait to get started." (DB, 110-111)

As the blurting episodes suggest, Card harbors incompatible desires. He would like to have his dream world communicated. But daydreaming is incommensurate with the very terms of human interchange, the pathos of communication and mutual participation. Card will not have his imaginings mediated through the tensions of empathic consideration, the very condition of sharing anything with another, different human being. He wants to purchase a perfect world, but only on the cheap; he would have a world subjugated to himself alone. An insubstantial, detensional shadowland is put in the place of that other shadowland—in the distance, all about him. The reader might ask with and against Brautigan, which shadowland is really preferable?

Doing Great Things (Almost)
Early in life, C. Card had attempted to make of his dreams some kind of reality. Through a series of disappointments Card found himself at the "Front Door" to Babylon. That door first opened to him during a tryout for a semi-pro baseball team. A more than fair high-school ballplayer, but nothing sensational, Card imagines that he will soon be replacing Lou Gehrig at first base for the Yankees—not an uncommon fantasy for one of his age and circumstance, young and restless. But the shattering of the dream is more traumatic than usual. On the very first pitch the adolescent Card gets beaned at the plate. He is dragged from the ballpark and dumped unceremoniously on a sidewalk. While he is out, Card dreams he is the Lou Gehrig times ten of Babylonian baseball. "The walls of my dressing room were covered with tapestries of my baseball feats woven in gold and covered with precious stones. There was a tapestry of me beheading a pitcher with a line drive." (DB, 53) In the pre-game warm-up Samson receives the sexual ministrations of his perfect concubine, the first of many such interludes.

"I just couldn't get enough of Nana-dirat.

"She was always waiting for me in Babylon.

She of the long black hair and lissome body and breasts that were made to addle my senses. Just think: I never would have met her if I hadn't been hit in the head with a baseball." (DB, 58)

In every real world undertaking Card seems to run through the same cycle: extravagant expectation falls flat, but the lessons of the hard school are not faced, do not take. There is no editing of his ambitions or his actual skills. There is no concrete development. Card refuses to take a fall and then dust himself off. Instead, he turns continually to yet another abundant then flattened field of dreams. And each real world failure becomes the stimulus for another imaginary overcompensation. Deflated aspirations are redressed through retreat into a Babylonian replay. There the original, grandiose desire can be fully preserved and further burgeoned. With each change of roles there is a renewed expectation that now, finally, he will translate fantasy into real world acclaim. With each frenetic shift some aspect of the existing social stratification is highlighted (as with so many of the political philosophers). Yet Card remains unwilling to modify himself in the concrete, rather like Rousseau in his Reveries.

"This wishful or fantasy thinking, which emerges from a current sense of loss, failure, or lack, whether perceived as an opportunity or as a threat, is meant to rearrange events in the mind, imaginatively transforming potential or actual outcomes, to see things another way, the need for which arises from the inability to solve a real problem immediately or to tolerate the significance of important or affecting social events that appear not to be directly within the sphere of one's personal control." — Fred Weinstein, History and Theory After the Fall

The "Private Eye"
"You could have been a good detective, Card, if you hadn't spent so much time daydreaming. Oh, well . . ."

"He let it drop.

"I'd always been a major disappointment to him.

"Rink didn't know that I was living part of my life in Babylon. To him I was just a daydreaming fuckup. I let him think that. I knew that he wouldn't be able to understand Babylon if I told him about it. He just didn't have that kind of mind, so I let it pass. I was his fuckup and that was all right. Babylon was a lot better than being a cop and having to wage the war against crime on time." (DB, 181-182).

C. Card likes to see his fantasy world as more real than the actual. It is not. Babylon is optional. In the real world Card must meet resistances, like it or not. Desires are constrained by wills other than our own, circumstances are other than we wish, things never work out quite the way we envision them. We let ourselves down, and others do too. Yet this real world of ambiguity, interaction, and resistance is itself shaped by imagination, by desires variously enacted. At his best, Brautigan raises the specter of inverted-reality gone public. As desires of low and mean quality become socially predominant, the real world turns unreal. In words and actions most everyone seems to be living out some kind of fantasy, and that fantasizing seems to turn more uniform—to fanaticism—during wartime. Where there is individual integrity, ethical realism, it finds next to nothing in common with that fanatical world, its artificial unities, encircling abstractions, the moralism enforced all around—left and right and always right. "What we need are more principles!" said a Virginia politician recently.

The philosophers also know something of abstraction. Outside the power-plays of scandal, increasingly staged within an exhausted social ethos, the losers daydream of perfect repose, depoliticization, and ultimately philosophical tyranny. Intellectual abstraction and administrative moralism share the same perfectionist fantasy. Designs, policies, and postures make an easy substitute for those reformations that really matter within the difficult, tensional media of concrete imperfections.

Must the real realist camouflage himself, go undercover, in order to survive and subtly transform, even subvert, dimensions of the real world that have gone unreal? Card is no such realist. His evasion is mere complicity. He lacks subtlety. He can't take the tensions of concrete integrity. Perhaps the cheapness of the character's internal fantasy is being implicated as a sideshow to a larger circus. Brautigan, writing in the 1970s, hints at a petty conformism that has grown to the level of fanaticism during wartime. Babylonian Card prefers instead to keep the cavalry on hand for crowd control when Samson Ruth comes to bat. "I think they were glad to be at the ball game watching me hit home runs. It certainly was a lot better than going to war" (DB, 51)

Fixing Reality
You cannot give away the ending to this novel, even if you tell everything that happens. As in other Brautigan mysteries there is no build-up to denouement. The ending does not bring everything together and out into the open. When the story ends, the reader has been with Card through a series of imaginary episodes, and that's about all. Even these episodes would lose dramatic tension but for the intermittent jumps we make, with Card, back to take care of mundane business—find some socks, elude the landlady, find some bullets, elude the mother, find the client, elude the cops, steal a body, elude the thugs. Yet, by the end of the novel, no significant change has occurred in Card's actual circumstance. There is a plot, but it does not thicken. All of Brautigan's experiments with genre are virtually devoid of dramatic action." [Marc Chénetier, Richard Brautigan.] The novel must be sustained entirely by its psychodynamics of world-jumping, and it is as far as that goes.

In the real world which Mr. Card must share and in which he must act, from time to time, the prevailing tone is one of stasis. He is just scraping by, just well enough to elaborate upon what is deemed more important, namely the daydream. When he can most or least afford it Card does not hesitate to venture further into his dreamscape. The darkness of the real world, or its occasional light, now serve equally well as a pretext for reverie. "The world wasn't such a bad place, so I started thinking about Babylon. Why not? I didn't have anything else to do for a couple of hours. It couldn't hurt." (DB, 43)

The real world receives its minimum daily requirement of attention, and it seems to deserve no better. As far as Card is concerned, so far as the reader is led to believe, that real world is difficult to the point of pointlessness. Brautigan plays upon our readiness to mistake imaginative disengagement from such a world for some kind of virtue—good because it disengages from shadowland. In fact, there is nothing in Card's conduct to show that his retreat engenders an integrity superior to that inculcated by the wider social ethos. He mirrors that ethos, whether in Babylon or the real world.

Cash-Nexus and Dream-Nexus
No reasons were ever given or needed for the kidnapping of the body. Card is simply hired for the job by a rich blonde woman. It seems that all he and the reader need to know is, "How much?" Here Brautigan parodies but also changes the preoccupation with money that is a hallmark of dime fiction.

"In real life, as Raymond Chandler said, a private eye "has about as much moral structure as a stop and go sign," but in fiction, he is redeemed by a primitive moral code based on a sense of duty to his employers. He will kill if he has to, but he will never betray his employers. Money, in other words, is more important than anything else; it is at the foundation of the moral code, such as it is, shared by hard-boiled detective fiction." — Edward Halsey Foster, Richard Brautigan

The dime detectives do indeed have a moral code. Money is important, so important that Marlowe refuses to be underpaid or overpaid. He often refuses to cash checks from employers who remain under his own hard scrutiny. One sometimes wonders how Marlowe pays the bills that stack up around him. We cannot imagine C. Card scrutinizing his employer, refusing overpayment, or waiting to cash a check.

Throughout Brautigan's novel, personal relationships are seen as nothing but mutual manipulations, a series of raw deals. Card hires and fires the secretary as his sexual ambitions rise and fall. He bums money or swindles it off the landlady, the tenants, old acquaintances, his mother, even blind beggars. When desperate, Card is reduced to selling pornography in the ever grim alleyways. When working, the job is no more savory. His last case had been a messy divorce:
"A three-hundred-pound husband wanted the goods on his three-hundred-pound wife. He thought that she was fooling around and she was: with a three-hundred-pound automobile mechanic. Some case. She used to go down to his garage every Wednesday afternoon and he'd flick her over the hood of a car. I got some terrific photographs." (DB, 25)

Card must sell pictures (Brautigan must sell books). Like every hard-boiled detective, this character must find himself and others in a shady environment, often brutal and always callous, monotonously callous. A single strain gives Card's real world all the continuity it needs. Just one force there winds everyone up, makes them tick, talk. Even Card is wakened to action by its circulation. Brautigan credits that force with a chapter heading, "Cold Heartless Cash."

"I want you to steal a body from the morgue."

She didn't say anything else . . .

"Sure," I said. "If the money's interesting enough I'll have Abraham Lincoln's body on your doorstep tomorrow with the morning paper."

That was exactly what she wanted to hear.

"How does a thousand dollars sound?" she said.

"For a thousand dollars," I said, "I'll bring you a whole cemetery" (DB, 121)

Still, the strongest currents of continuity and development in the novel take place in Babylon. No wonder that the dreamscape comes to seem more real than San Francisco, and not just to Card. The Babylonian adventure provides a gathering experience for the reader too. What might escape notice is that the value deemed most fundamental in Card's real world has here dropped out. In Babylon, Card's real world desires, money-status-sex, get trimmed to the final two. There the dream itself provides, immediately all that money could ever buy. The intermediation of money has become superfluous, but attentions paid to his esteem retain all their currency. Card's need for regard is satisfied through a perfect, imaginary compliance with his every desire. In the real world, that takes money; in the dream world, it takes only dreaming.

Fragmented, recumbent, devoid of desire to cultivate a real world individuality, Card would place at the center of the universe a self without a substantial center. When dreaming of Babylon, Card makes himself a metaphysical superstar, an unmoved mover, the passive receptacle for every desire that animates his central character and supporting cast.

Held In Detension
Card's depiction of the real world represents a Brautigan ontology. Back in shadowland nothing much changes, in self or world, no matter how much people may come and go. This impression is easily sustained and strangely reassuring, yet misleading. With every hard jump back to San Francisco, the character must again deal with others bent on action. There he meets obstacles to his pristine reverie.

For someone like Card, everyday relationships and resistances must entail a more than normally difficult intermediation of the self. He must scrounge for a living like anyone else. Yet, he has evaded and divested himself by turns, of the very imaginative resources for doing well. Making something of himself has become more and more troublesome but ever more needful. The character of Card remains interesting to the extent that his author expresses a psychodynamic he knows, in real life! The creator and the character (but not those characters dreamed up by Card) provide an intermittent consciousness that the difficulties evaded remain very real. Brautigan and Card know something of what they flee. They know that the particular and intimate disciplines of everyday habit are more fundamental than the whole sideshow of money-gathering to which the real world has been reduced. They know that a more taxing labor has been evaded, the cultivation of some strength of will at the most ordinary level.

"I don't know how people can live the way I do. My apartment is so dirty that recently I replaced all the seventy-five-watt bulbs with twenty-five-watters, so I wouldn't have to see it. It was a luxury but I had to do it. Fortunately, the apartment didn't have any windows or I might have really been in trouble.

"My apartment was so dim that it looked like the shadow of an apartment. I wonder if I always lived like this." (DB, 4)

By the light of Babylon, Card sees his real world dim. As shadows darken, as the world turns ever more uniform, Brautigan more sharply opposes Card's exterior real world, gloomy and static, to his ulterior dream world, bright and dramatic. The opposition is self-deceiving, and deliberately so. Both authors, Brautigan and Card, let on that they do know something of what the daydream is made to eclipse. Like them, we recognize the real world as such precisely because of its inherent tensionality, its unsettling resistances and turns. The world of historicity presupposes plots, the shadows shifting in lightshafts that may be dimmed but not dodged. As Phillipos Legras writes, "Reality is that which, when you don't believe in it, doesn't go away"

So, Brautigan plays upon both a realistic representation and a subtle inversion of experience. In rendering well the inversion, he accords less reality to enacted desires than to those merely dreamed. The latter are rendered as pristine as they are inchoate, but this does not make them innocent. Card's imaginings remain disembodied because they are unmediated by the tensions of expression and therefore by relationship. But there can be no real character where an obstinate negation, an imaginative evasion, is put in place of concrete relation and so of development. Card is almost nobody. Brautigan stimulates our empathy without supplying the grounds for our sympathy. Card's self-enclosure malingers on and on, unchallenged, monotonous, because that's just the way he wants it. Imagining so insular remains unalterable, merely expansive, showing off scales of mere amplitude. This is animation without the subtleties of concrete definition, a cartoon carnival. Babylon exaggerates but does not make lucid the social pecking-order that Card seeks to evacuate. Chicken-hearted, he needs the coop, but would transpose himself to the preferred corner of its chain-link fence.

Brautigan renders well the penned-in quality of this monotonous state. We can readily follow each author's fabrication—knowing just what it is like to try to fill up on empty dreams, and knowing too that the inverted vision, however luxurious or fierce it seems, however prevalent it becomes, must in time puff itself out as pettiness, sham hope, and mere bluster, or much worse.

Imagination can be no richer than the empathic reach of its experience, a tensional history of concrete acting and thinking. Intuition made to stay pristine is not moved to participate in what remains imperfect, a human society. Enacted desire is imperfect, an opportunity for refinement. By way of what we have actually made of ourselves, we know what needs to be done next. The presumed innocence of Card's daydream is purchased at too high a price. As Montaigne said of the mystic philosophers, "They want to get out of themselves and escape from the human. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts; instead of raising themselves, they lower themselves." [Michel Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond.]

House of Cards
"When you leave the house, the
shadow of the Hindenburg enters
to take your place."
— Richard Brautigan, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster

Card's daydream balloons. Babylon is a glamorous facsimile of active life, an interiority that is puffed up but remains all the more inert. To keep itself pristine, untouched, his imaginative appropriation of life must in fact remain static and insular, a mute mimicry, most insistent in its vacation of and from concrete history. Card does not want to make himself known, not even to himself. That would mean trouble, a threat to the dream. Action, expression, and remembrance require comparison and relationship. These are the strenuous terms within which real individuality and knowledge, and the aesthetic sense beneath them, can be cultivated. All the trying that goes into making desire refined—proportionate and incarnate—must embrace the risks and reformations of effective action and critical self-consciousness. This exertion-in-restraint is character in the concrete.

A humility thus engaged does not smack of meekness. It is up to the task of imagining reality, no matter the scale of recondite forms that populate our surrounding environment, no matter that the social imagination that currently plays itself out may seem imposing indeed. "In America the movie screens were as big as the pyramids." [Charles Simic, Hotel Insomnia.] For desires to become refined in such a setting they must contend with many and varied resistances, sell-restraint most of all. But a genuine aesthetic evocation of reality makes right action and thought desirable, the competition notwithstanding. Tensional imagination exposes cliché. It sees through and untwists the prevailing mind-set by way of images that manifest reality anew. As Yves Bonnefoy suggests, true poetic sense is cultivated by the desire not to daydream anymore.

"It is the activity that—overflowing the confines of the impoverished illusions, freeing desire from its entrapment in stereotypical objects, refusing the constraints, the resignations that compensate, through violence, a deep frustration and anguish—keeps life in contact with the intensity one senses in it: an intensity which, when it is fully taken on and understood, could find satisfaction in the simplest things the world proposes. Is not the imaginary the trouble suffered by those who allow themselves to be prisoners of a language that is closed—of ideologies, of desires become fantastical? Dreaming, in poetry is to stop dreaming." — Yves Bonnefoy, In the Shadows Light

The self that turns critical remembers what is enduring in life, its concrete relationships, historicity. The remembered self knows itself as another imperfect story in need of further, severe editing. This self-realization is all in particular expression—by way of concrete action, articulation, and aesthetic creation. But that remembrance and refinement of how things stand, really, requires a strenuous labor and birth. Card's remembrance of why he dimmed his apartment leads him very nearly to a difficult confrontation with his actual past. He almost makes his real problem articulate, remembered, historical, but does not.

"I wonder if I always lived like this. I mean, I had to have had a mother, somebody to tell me to clean up, take care of myself, change my socks. I did, too, but I guess I was kind of slow when I was a kid and didn't catch on. There had to be a reason." (DB, 4-5)

But Card will venture no further, make no embrace of his life as it really is. He turns away from understanding what he has made of himself, and why. Diverted again. The tension of memory, the comparative or self-critical imagination, appears too risky because it is. Unlike the ease of the daydream, remembrance of reality proves a difficult and painful engagement, revealing the energies inherent in desire that is acted out, thought through, and thereby refined—or at least made plain in its need for reform. By the very expression in concrete action, articulation, or art, a seemingly pristine intuition becomes incarnate. It is known by its fruits. The inchoate desire made real is also made different from everything it had expected itself to be. It is transfigured rather than duplicated as concrete engagement disabuses the imagination of self-flattery.

The great idea, intuition, or deed that we would actually do, must become something other and less grandiose when made particular and real. Why then do we turn ourselves to such labors at all? Because they make for something shared, for real participation, and so for a concrete individuality, perhaps even love. However partial and imperfect these efforts must be, we remember satisfactions in our engagements that are more enduring than those in our evasions. What is remembered well of concrete relationship gives us vision enough to embrace the further difficulties of the same and always different, tensional life—the only life we know to be real.

Brautigan's phenomenological inversion, his social ontology, is sustained by the misleading impression that all would change for Card, dramatically, if only he could get rich quick. Card imagines that money makes life like a dream—that the esteem he seeks, a compliance of others to his every desire, can be bought. At the level of motivation, there is no discontinuity between Card's two lives. What he embraces in dreamland is what he has made of himself in the real world, an insular stasis, an identity on the cheap. Off in Babylon, he can have all this, alone, and have it admired, or so it seems.

The daydream demands no substantial effort on Mr. Card's part. It simply mirrors but does not revise and sophisticate his desires. Card's imaginings do not solicit real action because they do not deepen his appreciation, and therefore his desire, for potentialities in self or world that differ from what already prevails. Babylon is of little consequence for that world in which Card must live, like it or not. When all is said and done the external world is seen by Card, and shown by Brautigan, as one so dull and crass as to be unworthy of habitation. But that impression can be sustained only for those who are captivated, for the moment, by the same evasive and vain imagination.

The realworld is shadowland. Unless, of course, you hit it big. Again, it is supposed by Card (and perhaps by the late, post-famous Brautigan) that if, somehow, you could only strike it rich, dreams could be enacted in comfort, and in real life. It is a sentiment in widespread circulation, in our more inflated longings. "If only I had the money and the positioning up front, then I would undertake all those actions that would make me rich and famous. Then all the difficulties of life be damned!" Card turns away from a real world in which he sees himself badly short-changed. He can imagine nothing in dream life other than being paid back in full, but paid in the same tender!

Moving Backward By Standing Still
In Card's fantasy world, the character is portrayed as fabulously energetic and courageous, exemplary, especially when it comes to uncovering and prosecuting evil. At the same time, we notice that the purportedly heroic Smith Smith remains eager to indulge every passing, prurient, even violent desire. In real life such a combination of epic conviction and personal unrestraint would turn out very brutal indeed. Because actual relationships are differentiated—concrete and particular—social interchange can be sustained and satisfying only in mutual regard and self-restraint. As Aristotle and now Kristeva suggest, any genuine and enduring human relationship presupposes alterity, not the duplication of an impositional self (as in Rousseau's Pygmalion). The relative continuity and coherence of the political animal are a consequence of enacted desire—of engagement within a world that does not conform itself to transient whims. If you do not watch your own step, and even if you do, you are bound to take some falls. In the shadow world that Card sees all around him, everyone is watching his step, and everyone else's, in ways too close for comfort. To maneuver himself into engagements that work upon this world Card would need to shorten his steps and thereby make them concrete.

Critics have seen in this and other Brautigan novels a progressive fragmentation. But it might just as well be said that Card's ulterior self makes for altogether too much coherence. Babylon is a consolation prize, a trivial compensation for the game that has been thrown, or almost thrown. Pass or play, the game continues. What has Card desired to forfeit? The shared world, and with it himself. Rather than insular desire writ large, a monopoly, the shared world is interaction with others, a complex historical network of imagination made incarnate. We encounter both tough and subtle resistances. No doubt, imaginative distance is indispensable to negotiate well these differences. But Card can only oscillate between too distant extremes. He moves from trying to figure out how he will pay his rent, in one moment, to fantastic plans in the next—for the stupendous life he will enjoy once he hits it big. But Card is not the only one given to extravagant imaginings. If anything, the character's self-preoccupation distances him from some of the fears that sweep through social life. These fears impinge upon him less than do its sharper particularities.

"My landlady was a bigger threat to me than the Japanese. Everybody was waiting for the Japanese to show up in San Francisco and start taking cable cars up and down the hills, but believe me I would have taken on a division of them to get my landlady off my back." (DB, 2)

Incomplete Empathy
On first impression, Card's active imagination seems to set him apart from the shadowlife of near automatons. Like other hard-boiled detectives, this one has a distinctive voice. But the active creativity of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe presupposed a concrete individuality, an experiential maturity. Being at once streetwise and decent is what held these characters together. Through the dime paperback medium a genuinely tensional reality became more articulate. The American writers raised the detective novel to a fine art by lowering it into the dirty streets. "Rarely do we find dime detectives faced with a complicated intellectual problem, and they do most of their work with their feet or their fists. Instead, dime writers made their detective heroes exemplars of moral qualities."

"Dime detectives, therefore, are exemplars of determination, tenacity, pluck, chivalry, and honesty. The writers usually contrived the action to demonstrate these qualities at work. Although they are by no means universally violent, dime detectives usually demonstrate their /manly' virtues through energetic action. Dime detectives are almost always private detectives." — Leroy Lad Panek, An Introduction to the Detective Story

Dime PIs work for themselves. In his portrayal of a difficult but worthwhile integrity, Chandler makes the novel of detection a stronger art. His imaginative uncovering both breaks and recreates proportions. His expression is both more concrete and less literal than Card's one-dimensional magnification of prevailing psychic structures. Creative imagination prefigures further, deeper, engagement in life's real potentialities. It is engendered by an intensification rather than a retreat from what life is like. In ever new ways strong art prefigures and thereby renews, differently, the active life it stands up and stands up to. By contrast, Card's ballooning aesthetic remains insubstantial, puffed up, detensional. Self-enclosure floats away, bound to drop back again, deflated.

When Brautigan's genre-novels are read with the passivity of his characters we get suckered into a mere simulation of integrity, an imagining that gains in coherence the more it disengages from hard reality. From the seeming calm of this eye in the storm, all fragmentation is made to seem external. What is enervated by this form of aesthetic is genuine agency, concrete individuality, the ability to contend well with real hard circumstance. Brautigan knows this and shows it. The eye of the storm rests at its center, insulated, if only for a time. Chaos whirls around Card because he has refused the active effort needed to realize desire, willfully to engage that compendium of circumstance continually remade which is—himself. An enduring integrity cannot be acted out in desires so easy as those dreamed up by Card. If, as the character realizes, it cannot be gained by conforming to the life of extroverted automatons—shadow robots regimented by the dictates of cold, hard cash—neither does Card's ulterior life provide a worthwhile alternative, a substantial medium of encouragement.

Teletypes
In Dreaming of Babylon, the central character, like his own author, is consciously participating in a distinctive genre, the hard-boiled detective novel. We do not expect from this genre a morality of absolute good and evil, as we do, for example, from so much of horror fiction—except where the two genres combine, as in Blade Runner or Neuromancer. American classics in the dime genre explore the gray areas within social settings that have all the dangerous appearance of being perfectly clean-cut. In these works, irrepressible individuality is rendered as an ethical center that stands out against a backdrop of social regimentation. The hero is imperfect but adept at negotiating the risks of independent action within the murky waters that flow beneath the surface.

The genre is not used for simple parody by either Brautigan or Card. Whole new worlds are tried on for fit. Each is discarded for yet another world. This conscious venturing into new worlds is evident in each of the Brautigan novels of the 1970s. The mixed genre-type of each is often heralded in subtitles: The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971), The Hawkline Monster; A Gothic Western (1974), Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (1974), Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976), and Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1978).

Brautigan moved straight through the genres of the dime paperback. One critic aptly characterized this movement as a "subversion of genres." [Marc Chénetier, Richard Brautigan.] By the end of the decade it seemed as if Brautigan had run out of alternative worlds to explore. Not much later, he ran himself right out of life. "He used sweet wine in place of life because he didn't have any more life to use." [Richard Brautigan, Revenge of the Lawn.] There may be an autobiographical touch to passages in his final novel.

"Soon we had left his voice behind like a voice from a dream dreamt down the road, but I looked back into the dream and I could see him yelling, but I couldn't hear a word. He was just another kid driven crazy by poverty and his drunken father beating him up all the time and telling him that he'd never amount to anything, that he would end up just like his father, which he would." — Richard Brautigan, So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away, 110

C. Card may also have been headed for a kind of imaginative exhaustion. His dreaming provides no resource for seeing the world differently. Every escape from prevailing structures and stratifications amplifies the same in dreamland. Card makes for himself a series of happy endings, mere episodes. These are emptied of any real encouragement for shaping desire differently. And so each Babylonian jump must end by returning the visionary to a reality as discouraging as the original motive for the jump. Card's desire for complete repose is imperious. It takes all the creative tension out of action and imagination. Self-glorification turns monotonous with the exhaustion of every circumstantial or interpersonal resistance.

"Sometimes I played around with the form of my adventures in Babylon. They would be done as books that I could see in my mind what I was reading, but most often they were movies, though once I did them as a play with me being a Babylonian Hamlet and Nana-dirat being both Gertrude and Ophelia. I abandoned the play halfway through the second act. Someday I must return and pick it up where I left off. It will have a different ending from the way Shakespeare ended it. My Hamlet will have a happy ending." (DB, 59)

Seek Hard
"What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall."
— Theodore Roethke, "In a Dark Time," 231

Brautigan seeks to portray a kind of freedom and independence that is alternative to what the routinized world offers. But what real freedom can we find except through the present, concrete conditions within which our creativity must labor, no matter how daunting these might seem? Freedom is always realized imperfectly, by way of potentialities really present, able to be fashioned differently. Such engagement takes hold by wrestling imaginatively with circumstance. The desire to grapple well presupposes an embrace of historicity, a realistic feel for how the various networks of social relationship really stand, right now. What Brautigan depicts as too harsh and brutal an externality is itself the very condition of our freedom, a participatory reality requiring more imagination than a character like C. Card can muster.

A sound individuality is the consequence of difficult labors. It means living up to strenuous particularities engaged and modified, a concentrated contending with the circumstantial self and its resistances—not the least of which is an excessive craving for repose, a discontent with imperfect life. At the level of concrete morality, Card's refusal to conform to the demands of his unsavory environment turns out, upon examination, to be an elaborate posturing. The celebrated characters who inhabit his dreamscape are in fact nothing more than a grand conformity, an embittered passivity writ large, larger than life. Placed before an heroic backdrop, with adoring audience to match, the desires enacted by Babylonian Card are no more noble than the dispirited personality from which they emanate. His magnification of deeds, his immense struggle with diabolical forces, expresses a lack of subtlety in his lived experience. In Babylon the great struggles are fought and won without all the trouble through which real individuality is built up. There is none of the frustration, hesitation, revision, and compromise of real world development. Absent is the self-restrained exertion and the self-interrogating courage through which identity is engaged, but never finally settled, in everyday action.

Pragmatic failure and its deeper companion, a failure of ethical will, are the stimulus to Card's ulterior identity however much this is painted over in endearing colors. A more complete empathy would know what it is like to luxuriate in such escape and also how the enticement of evasion can become more debilitating than anything coughed up by externality, however callous.

The real is not so distant, not even for someone like Card. We are what we do and do not do. Historicity, the consciousness of the interplay of relative particularities within which we find ourselves, can be set at a distance in many ways. The idolatry of repose can be fed by abstraction, moralism, mystery, beatitude, scandal, TV watching. But there is always a corresponding diminishment in the continuity and creativity, the ethical concentration and endurance, that must compose integrity. The novel also makes it clear that reality can be made distant through an incomplete empathy in the reader, an empathy that remains as passive as C. Card's. The author invites us to consider the problem of the real—vicariously, as the character, and self-consciously, as the reader.

Imagining Realities
"What I desired to do in marble,
I can poke my shadow through."
— Richard Brautigan, "The F. Scott Fitzgerald Ahhhhhhhhhhhh, Pt. 2."

Although Card is aware of the difference between doing and dreaming, this is not the case with all of Brautigan's cast of leading losers. For Lee Mellon, the vagrant star of The Confederate General from Big Sur, the distinction between worlds is intermittently blurred. It is fair to say that Mellon is deranged, off and on. Yet, he scrounges by, and more. He dreams and does what he wants, in real life. This quality of energetic engagement marks a difference that has been noticed between these two characters.

"Sometimes the people in the later books— like C. Card in Dreaming of Babylon—may dream, but their dreams are ludicrous. We laugh at him and his dreams, but we would never have laughed at Lee Mellon and his dreams, no matter how emotionally or morally bankrupt." — Edward Halsey Foster, Richard Brautigan, 90

If Mellon is more adept at making his way than Card, at making the world the way he wants it, it is because Mellon's desires are far less conventional and therefore, less grandiose. In navigating the relentless perils set before an itinerant bum, Mellon remains courageous, resourceful, cunning. His freedom is realized in creative transformation of social resistances more daunting than anything that confronts Card. Here the commentators have missed something essential, seeing Brautigan's misfits as simply too gentle for a brutal world. In her discussion of Vulnerable People, Josephine Hendin depicts Brautigan's later characters as gentle archetypes of withdrawal taken directly from real life. She portrays this withdrawal as a strategy that enables the personality to retain its integrity when confronted by a threatening environment. Edward Halsey Foster says of Brautigan's losers, "they are so gentle, so incapable of aggressive action of any sort, that they literally cannot be changed; they are immutable and, therefore, incorruptible."

"They are eternally innocent, and if we do not agree with them, we never doubt their honesty. We trust them implicitly. If we find their inability to alter their lives comic and pathetic—much as the tramp in Charlie Chaplin films is comic and pathetic—we also know that, in their innocence, they will not deceive us; we doubt that they would even know what deception is." — Edward Halsey Foster, Richard Brautigan, 90

Either they, or we, should learn something of deception. Card does indeed look upon his dream world as a substitute for all that is threatening in the actual. But he chooses retreat more often when not threatened at all. As Foster suggests, Brautigan's losers would "withdraw from the world even if it were not threatening." In his evaluation, "what comes first may be the demands of their particular sensibility not a desire to protect themselves—that is, a positive, rather than negative, motivation." Yes, Card's own sensibility comes first and foremost. It does not follow that this motivation is positive. Rather, as in Rousseau's several autobiographies, Card's retreat is aggressive in its defensiveness.

What Card makes happen in Babylon is anything but gentle. The dreamer has nothing other than his own concrete experience of life, or its fitful inversion, to translate into that imaginary world. No matter how lavishly the substitute is portrayed, there is something tawdry about Babylon—and that dream is all that Card has actually made of himself. His aesthetic has served not as a means for editing himself but as a pretext for the dismissal of his real potential. When Card's imagination turns to memory it refuses to go far enough, to face up to his own history of desire. Rather, memory is enlisted simply to legitimate a further flight, to amplify for himself the same psychic and social structures he flees, what Babbitt calls "the narcotic use of history" [Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, 237.]

It makes all the difference in worlds whether you engage life from out of imaginative resources that are garnered from within life's tensional demands, or whether those resources are depleted from within a passivity-inducing, and therefore insular and detensional, mind-set. The tragedy of the author may have been put best by John Keats, "Imagination is like Adam's dream, he woke and found it true."

"Brautigan's tragedy, which he enacted in book after book and eventually in his own life, was that he defined everything, including himself, in terms of an ahistorical imagination. Brautigan wanted to round up life in one mercurial, moving, magic vision, but he recognized that he could produce only 'paper phantoms,' his term for books."   Keith Abbott, Downstream from "Trout Fishing in America"

The most complete tragedy is not when the bad guy wins. It is when the seeming good guy does not lose and learn, and so ends up losing himself. Insulated from taking a fall, Card knows no pragmatic impetus sufficient to require an editing of himself. When what is learned from the hard school is no genuine education, but merely retreat, one loses and does not know it. C. Card has turned himself into a rotten character. He refuses to face this fact; he does not try to change it. Babylon has become a self-alienation writ large. One has a sense that even Brautigan's best readers have not seen this. Hannah Arendt once made the rather exotic suggestion that in Billy Budd Melville had shown that "Virtue finally interferes not to prevent the crime of evil but to punish the violence of absolute innocence." [Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 82-85.] Here she confused virtue with a prudential judgment by the ship's captain which was too unimaginative to be ethical. Pragmatic effectiveness is surely something that virtue cannot do without. But what appeared most efficacious under the circumstances was a procedurally correct and morally wrong decision. More telling for our purposes, Arendt's reading confused pragmatic (and so imaginative) incompetence with innocence. Budd's incapacity to see well and act with fortitude in the face of evil was indeed a fault; it showed immaturity in moral self-constitution, in courage. But this incapacity was not one deserving of those severe judgments handed down, not least by Arendt. Still, there remains a need for some self-judgment on the posture of a virtue which finds itself in imaginative retreat from the shared world and its concrete evils. This unwillingness to engage the always difficult and sometimes overwhelming tensions of life is a form of moral cowardice. It is not much different from our own everyday experience of retreat from what needs to be done. Perhaps it is driven by a deficiency in the personality, an obstinacy more deep-seated than what Brautigan is able to portray.

"They begin to leave who begin to love. Many there are who leave and do not know it. For their walk of departure is a stirring of the heart. And yet they depart from Babylon." — Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 242-244

"Stranger than Paradise." Grimaud, Isabelle. (D.E.A. student, University of Toulouse-Le Mirail)
Caliban, no. 23, 1986, pp. 127-135.

NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Sur sa «route d’écrivain solitaire, de loup qui doucement se glisse dans les bois », Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) a emprunté tous les chemins et s’est faufilé dans bien des genres littéraires : «l’eau de rose » (la «romance » avec L’Avortement / The Abortion : an historical romance, 1966 ; le western : Le monstre des Hawkline, un western gothique ; le roman érotique : Willard et ses trophées de Bowling, une énigme et quelques perversions ; le roman «militaire » : Un général sudiste de Big Sur.

Il était sans doute inévitable qu’il s’intéressât au roman policier, au «Private Eye Novel » comme s’il s’agissait une fois de plus de s’immiscer dans les affaires littéraires classées et étiquetées pour à nouveau les subvertir et déranger notre petit confort de lecteur habitué aux «classiques » et à la répétition des formes. Tranquillement donc, avec sa loufoquerie tragique, Brautigan a fait du grabuge.

Avec Dreaming of Babylon..., il s’attaque certes au polar mais aussi à une certaine image de marque dont on l’a trop souvent affublé, celle du «hippie » fantasque, enfant chéri de «l’Underground » d’une Amérique «bleue » aux douces odeurs de «fumet-tes ».

Si les lecteurs des premiers livres, ceux qui dans «. les années 60 » se passaient de main en main La pêche à la truite en Amérique, n’avaient pas déserté les autres écrits, ils auraient peut-être compris que les qualificatifs d’excentrique et de saugrenu n’étaient pas les seuls valables car, avec des ouvrages comme Tokyo-Montana Express et Mémoires sauvées du vent, Brautigan nous projette dans un univers à part : dérive du quotidien et de l’identité où le passé, dit sans complaisance, est une blessure qui jamais ne se cicatrise.

Brautigan a toujours affirmé la subjectivité de toute œuvre littéraire, non seulement en illustrant les couvertures de ses livres avec des photos où il figure, mais aussi en nous donnant à lire des ouvrages écrits à la première personne par un narrateur écrivain lui-même : Sucre de pastèque ; dans les affres de l’écriture : Retombées de sombrero, roman japonais ; ou qui tente de meubler le vide de son existence avec une construction / affabulation : Dreaming of Babylon...

On sait que dans la littérature de genre le titre est essentiel. Incipit, il donne d’emblée la mesure comme si le récit commençait avec lui. Le «polar » nous a habitué aux titres «accrocheurs » qui montrent la contiguïté du genre avec la violence, la menace, le sang, la mort, un certain anonymat, l’allusion / fantasme de la domination sexuelle de l’homme sur la femme ; tout cela relevé d’une pincée d’argot.

Face à ce tableau plus ou moins morbide, que vient faire Dreaming of Babylon ?... Car s’il est un titre qui ne «fait » pas polar, c’est bien celui qu’a choisi Brautigan. Dreaming et Babylon parlent avant tout à notre imaginaire sans utiliser les codes conventions nels de la littérature policière. Par contre, le sous-titre : «a private eye novel, 1942 » permet au livre de déclarer son appartenance à un genre connu, surdéterminé et de le situer dans une époque doublement historique. «1942 », c’est le moment de la «décennie-apogée » du «Film Noir Américain » et en même temps la guerre en Europe et dans le Pacifique.

En France, le livre est sorti sous le titre : Un privé à Babylone, roman policier, 19A2. La traduction de Marc Chénetier est excellente. Avec une phrase nominale Chénetier pose de façon très nette un contraste et met en place un choc sémantique : Un privé / à Babylone. Ainsi le texte repose-t-il sur une incongruité ; véritable «pied de nez » à la logique du genre Série Noire dont les lieux de prédilection sont les villes occidentales et plus particulièrement les grandes cités américaines.

Un privé d Babylone... affiche dès le départ sa dissidence. Le héros comme d’habitude chez Brautigan est « délocalisé » ; sa présence relève de l’énigme. Un tel titre « fait éclater », « disloque » un territoire de littérature.

Ce polar est un « cas ». Il « balance » par-dessus bord tous les stéréotypes et les projets policiers. L’histoire, meurtre d’une prostituée et vol du cadavre à la morgue commandité par «une blonde buveuse de bière » au «détective » C. Card, à un groupe de truands et à quatre noirs (et ce simultanément), se termine en queue de poisson au cimetière (Saint-Repos à San Francisco) où tous les personnages se retrouvent. Dans ce « lieu-impasse », Rink, un policier coriace à la large carrure, déclare la blonde coupable, comme ça, sans aucun éclaircissement.

« Tout ce que je veux savoir c’est pourquoi vous avez assassiné cette fille et puis ensuite essayé de voler son corps à la morgue. Quand vous l’avez tuée vous auriez très bien pu emporter son corps à ce moment-là. »

Arbitraire total du récit dont Brautigan se joue en faisant dire à C. Card, caché dans les bosquets du cimetière :

«Dommage que je n’aie pas pu entendre ce qui s’était dit quand le Sergent Rink leur avait fourni ses preuves. Ça m’aurait donné une petite idée de ce qui se passait. Parce que moi, là, je n’en avais pas la moindre idée. J’étais complètement dans le noir. »

Le livre de Brautigan ne nous proposera jamais la découverte d’une vérité cachée ; nous n’aurons jamais cette impression fulgurante, même si elle est illusoire, de dénouer l’intrigue, de saisir un instant le monde, de le décoder, de le voir s’ouvrir :

«Souhait en regardant par la fenêtre, tout à coup, comprendre comment «tout se tient » comme dans un roman policier »
Peter Handke : Le poids du monde ; traduit de l’allemand par Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt.

Avec Dreaming of Babylon nous resterons dans le noir, la non-compréhension, une étrange stupeur. Rien «ne se tient » et les personnages Rink et C. Card, alias «l’œil » diront jusqu’à l’obsession :

«Je n’y comprend rien.
Ça n’a pas de sens. >

Brautigan envoie au diable la logique, même à grands renforts d’ «à-points nommés » et de hasards heureux, le texte reste opaque et décide de ne pas nous sauver en nous arrachant à notre ignorance. On se perd dans Un privé à Babglone et, si l’on «décide » de se projeter, de s’identifier au héros, on se dédoublera. La fiction engendre une autre fiction, celle des délires de C. Card, qui honnête et bon joueur nous avait prévenu dans un exergue :

«A mon avis l’une des raisons pour lesquelles je n’ai jamais fait un très bon privé, c’est que je passe trop de temps à rêver à Babylone. »

Dreaming of Babylon est alors un livre qui, avec les ingrédients habituels du policier, nous dit la folie d’un monde dont il ne reste rien, si ce n’est le bruit des choses.

Le Privé, «The Private eye », «L’œil » qui est-il ?...
Si l’on se réfère à Chandler, le privé n’est ni un «tueur », ni un «taré », ni un «apeuré ». C’est un solitaire relativement pauvre qui déambule dans «la rue-du-colt-qui-crache » avec un humour rude pour vaincre l’angoisse et prendre le pouvoir aux autres avec la parole.

«C’est lui le héros.
Il est tout. »
Raymond Chandler : L’art d’assassiner ou la moindre des choses.

C. Card se démarque de ce héros-type. Ce n’est plus «le faire » qui nous passionne en lui, mais son rapport à l’invisible : sa rêverie, sa mythomanie, son acharnement à vivre dans son imaginaire des aventures à Babylone sous de multiples identités : Star du base-bail, super-détective Smith-Smith, chef d’orchestre, cowboy. Cette activité l’exclut, parfois «à son esprit défendant » de 1’ «Ici » où il est le héros de la déchéance. Sa situation financière est catastrophique. Débiteur de tout le monde, c’est un «clodo », un «pauvre mec » comme le lui répètent Rink, sa mère, la propriétaire de son appartement, son ancienne secrétaire. Il avoue lui-même :

« Il y a des tas de choses que j’ai faites et dont je ne suis pas très fier, mais la pire de toutes c’est de devenir aussi pauvre que je l’étais maintenant. »
« J’étais un privé à trente cents. »
« Un privé qui n’a qu’une chaussette aux pieds ça n’intéresse pas grand monde. »

« Zonard », C. Card habite un appartement-poubelle : «humide », «dégoûtant », «tellement sombre qu’on aurait dit l’ombre d’un appartement», «un vrai cul-de-basse-fosse», où le réfrigérateur est plein de «provisions moisies ». Vivant dans un dépotoir, Card est lui-même assimilé à un détritus :

«Un portier a commencé è balayer le trottoir. Il me balayait pratiquement sur les pieds. J’ai continué mon chemin. »

« Le monde habituel, «soi-disant réel », la vie quotidienne est un néant putréfié et pétrifié :

« J’avais entamé l’année 1941 avec une voiture et voilà qu’aujourd’hui, un an plus tard, je ne pouvais plus compter que sur mes pieds. Il y a des hauts et des bas dans l’existence. Au point où j’en étais, ma vie ne pouvait plus que remonter la pente. Pour être plus bas que moi, il fallait être mort. »

Sa vie est un enfer, un cauchemar d’abjection comme si on ne jouait que pour tirer «les sales cartes » («cards »).

Les autres ne voient en lui qu’un imposteur, un guignol, un «minable » qui «rêvasse ». Pour eux, il doit changer de métier, faire quelque chose d’autre : être «groom » par exemple ou s’engager dans l’armée pour aller combattre Hitler en Europe. Il pourrait aussi suivre les conseils de Rink :

«Tu sais très bien que la dernière fois que je t’ai prêté un dollar j’ai dit que c’était fini, alors, qu’est-ce que tu veux ? Qu’est-ce que je peux faire pour toi à part t’indiquer comment on va au Golden Gate Bridge et quelques trucs de base sur la façon de sauter ? »

C. Card est l’avorton du détective, l’embryon qui tente désespérément de naître. Ne passe-t-il pas une grande partie de la journée (vendredi, 2 janvier 1942) à chercher des balles pour son pistolet et à se «détectiviser » en quelque sorte :

«Et puis, ce ne serait pas mal non plus de me trouver un étui pour le porter sous ma veste, ça ajouterait un petit air d’authenticité. »
«Je me suis senti très détective privé en disant ça. J’aime bien garder la forme. »
«Je n’avais aucun moyen de savoir, pour sûr, à moins de descendre de voiture pour me transformer en privé insaisissable et sûr de lui sur le point de voir aboutir la plus grosse affaire de son existence : alors c’est ce que j’ai fait : je suis descendu de voiture... »

C. Card, le personnage sans prénom, est un héros «amputé » non seulement parce qu’il n’arrive pas à devenir un simulacre de privé mais aussi parce que son itinéraire est sans cohérence.

Brautigan modifie le genre. La répétition, celle des stéréotypes, n’est plus au rendez-vous. L’histoire conventionnelle du héros, sa mission salvatrice (rétablir provisoirement un ordre perturbé) n’a plus cours.

Brautigan a «désamorcé » le récit avec ce personnage marginal, «à côté » de lui-même, comme «hors-circuit », mort en somme aux stéréotypes du Privé.

C. Card est aussi et n’en déplaise à Chandler, «un taré ». Face au monde invivable, une seule issue : le rêve dont il ne parle à personne, sachant trop bien qu’on le tiendrait pour fou (quelque chose comme un «schizoïde » ) .

Baylone, c’est bien sûr, l’Espace compensatoire (l’autre Espace... et... l’espace de l’Autre...) où le personnage accède à l’héroïsme, à l’amour (à Babylone existe «la femme idéale» : Nana Dirat...), à la réussite. Le Rêve Américain n’est pas très loin mais, bien qu’allusion fondamentale, il n’en demeure pas moins toujours en fuite puisqu’énoncé selon les modes de la Référence : cinéma («les caïds de la Warner», Western...) et comics (Flash Gordon, Terry et les pirates...).

L’enjeu de Babylone, sa nécessité, c’est le plaisir qu’elle pro* cure :

«Je traduisais les mots en images que j’arrivais à visualiser et à faire défiler à toute vitesse dans ma tête comme quand on fait un rêve. »

La jouissance immédiate est le bonheur de la création, celui peut-être dont parlait Jack Kerouac lorsqu’il conseillait de se lancer dans la mer du langage, de griffonner dans les carnets secrets de l’imaginaire, d’accueillir les signes du rêve en laissant de côté les complexes littéraires et grammaticaux.

On peut se demander si Babylone n’est pas un nouvel «Ouest » même si Brautigan a affirmé :

«Voilà ce que les forces du temps qui passe m’ont réclamé, puis arraché : de l’Ouest un mythe s’en est allé tel le bison et rien ne l’a remplacé. »
Tokyo-Montana Express (L'Homme qui abattit Jessie James). traduit de l’américain par Robert Pépin.

Babylone est le lieu où le sujet accède à une autre vie, «Tailleurs » de l’écriture qui coïncide avec le Roman Populaire, c’est-ài-dire les premiers délices de la lecture. En ce temps-là, Jean-Paul Sartre était «Cri-Cri » et rêvait de libérer les belles prisonnières... C. Card / Smith-Smith fait de même ; il sauve l’institutrice des mains des méchants hors-la-loi... et tant de choses plus héroïques les unes que les autres...

Babylone est donc un havre, un refuge où le personnage liquide ses frustrations à l’aide du «comme si ». Ne pouvant composer, «faire avec le réel » (et il y a de quoi !). C. Card décide d’entrer de plain-pied dans le domaine de la simulation, du jeu («je», inapte au monde, se métamorphose en «il » / «JE », «l’autre » ouvert à tous les passibles). Le rêve permet de se libérer du réel et paradoxalement aide à vivre, à continuer. Oui, il y a bien là une métaphore. Et si être écrivain c’était cela : ne plus pouvoir tolérer le monde, le trouver insupportable au point de «décrocher » par moments pour vivre, grâce au langage, dans un univers parallèle...

Dans le même mouvement cette «schizie » du «je » est interrogée comme si Brautigan tentait de cerner à travers l’expérience romanesque le principe de la création. Les multiples «débrayages », les apostrophes au lecteur / narrataire (répétition des «vous » qui s’adressent à celui qui lit un peu comme le faisait Pierrot / Ferdinand le Fou dans le film de Godard) traduisent à leur manière délibérément ahurie une volonté de détruire l’illusion, pour nous laisser au bord du vide, bien vite comblé. Le «vous » interpelle mais en même temps cautionne et assure la continuation de la fiction :

«Voilà ce que les forces du temps qui passe m’ont réclamé, puis arraché : de l’Ouest un mythe s’en est allé tel le bison et rien ne l’a remplacé. »
«Ce serait peut-être mieux de vous raconter un peu comment mes histoires à Babylone ont commencé. »
«Rendez-vous compte, je ne l’aurais (Nana-Dirat) jamais rencontrée si je n’avais pas pris une balle de base-bail dans la gueule. »

Ce jeu à la fois sérieux et futile participe de la mise en place d’un système de trompe-l’œil qui trouve également ses points d’ancrage dans les références aux stéréotypes du cinéma américain et au genre «fétiché » qu’est le polar. Brautigan va même plus loin en juxtaposant des faits historiques (Pearl Harbor, la guerre en Europe, les méthodes de recrutement du Parti Communiste Américain) et les traces / poussières du monde de l’Image et de la fiction. La folie est peut-être là, dans cette confusion, ce rapport fictionnel à l’Histoire...

Dreaming of Babylon... crée un nouveau stéréotype de Privé. En cela il révolutionne le genre qui passe ainsi du cercle de la répétition à l’axe décentré de la différence. Cette différence tient à l’expulsion du héros («loser » quelque peu «contre-culture») hors du récit traditionnel, déjà connu, et permet la naissance d’un nouveau récit fragmenté et kaléidoscopique (rites des fictions / aventures à Babylone),

C. Card est à l’image de ce romancier japonais rencontré par Brautigan et dont il dit dans Tokyo-Montana Express :

«Dans sa tête, je le vois qui réfléchit aussi fort qu’un roman policier dont les pages se seraient dissimulées derrière un paravent, dont les mots m’auraient été dérobés. »

Brautigan, toujours au Japon, a écrit un poème-énigme :

A mystery story or Dashiell Hammett a la mode
Every time I leave my hotel room
here in Tokyo
I do the same four things :
I make sure I have my passport
my notebook
a pen
and my English-
Japanese dictionary.
The rest of life is a total mystery.

Tokyo
May 26, 1976
June 30th, June 30th.

Difficile d’interpréter un tel poème. La référence à Hammett s’inscrit peut-être dans une nostalgie, celle d’un monde, déjà ancien même s’il n’est pas si éloigné dans le temps, où il était encore possible d’envisager le livre comme une totalité, un système cohérent où les assises de la fiction étaient sûres. Maintenant le livre est hésitant, timide et aussi incertain que la vie elle-même.

Dreaming of Babylon... n’a pas seulement voulu détruire et désorganiser nos habitudes de lecture. Je crois que le lecteur attentif ne peut s’empêcher d’être aveuglé par la brûlure des traces / poussières autobiographiques.

Aucune interprétation. Le seul constat par une mise en rapport de certains éléments du texte avec les fragments d’une vie comme jetée ici et là dans des poèmes et Mémoires sauvées du vent permet le scintillement des éclats du vécu, «l’effroyable texte primitif ».

«1942 » et C. Card erre dans la Chinatown de San Francisco. «1942 » c’est le titre d’un poème qui dit la mort de l’Oncle Edward, blessé aux Midway et mort en Alaska. Dans l’introduction / dédicace du recueil June 30th, June 30th, Brautigan rend hommage à l’Oncle Edward et évoque tout un cheminement personnel qui va de la haine des japonais à «un sentiment de profonde affection ».

Dans la mémoire de C. Card traîne le souvenir d’une balle perdue qu’une mère instable lui reproche sans cesse ; C. Card blessera «Sourire», un des Quatre Noirs, à la jambe.

David, l’ami d’enfance de Richard devait mourir le 17 février 1948 dans un accident de chasse. La balle venait de la carabine de Richard et sectionna l’artère fémorale.

«Si seulement j’avais eu envie d’un hamburger ce jour-là tout aurait été complètement différent. Il y aurait une personne de plus à vivre sur cette planète, qui me parlerait de ses rêves. »
Richard Brautigan : Mémoires sauvées du vent. Traduit de l’américain par Marc Chenètier.

Poussières.

Je suis habité ce soir par des sentiments pour lesquels il n’y a pas de mots, et des faits qu’il faudrait expliquer en termes de poussières plutôt qu’en paroles.

J’ai examiné des petits bouts de mon enfance. Ce sont des morceaux d’une vie lointaine qui n’ont ni forme, ni sens. Des choses qui se sont produites comme des poussières.

Richard Brautigan : La vengeance de la pelouse. Traduit de l’américain par Marie-Christine Agosto.

"Dreaming of Babylon" Adelberg, Scott)
www.dosomedamage.com, Jul/ 9. 2024.

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If imitation is the best form of flattery, what does that make parody? A bit tired of reading seriously delivered, straightfaced crime fiction, I recently decided to go the parodic route and picked up a book I've been meaning to read for ages. I'm talking about Richard Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon, his novel from 1977. I read a few Brautigans years and years ago (A Confederate General at Big Sur, Trout Fishing in America, The Hawkline Monster), and had not returned to him since. He's a quintessentially 1960s to mid-1970s writer, a writer who had a lot of success early in his career but who by the end of the 1970s was out of fashion and not selling well. As his friend Thomas McGuane said, "When the 1960s ended, he was the baby thrown out with the bath water. He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy." Brautigan married and divorced twice and had a daughter, but by 1981 he was living alone in Bolinas, California, in Marin County, in a large house he had bought with his earlier earnings. An alcoholic who had talked many times of committing suicide, he died by self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1984. He had published 9 novels and 10 collections of poetry.

Dreaming of Babylon was his eighth novel. It's set in 1942 and the protagonist is private investigator C. Card, operating out of San Francisco. Down and out doesn't begin to describe him; he's a level beyond that. He's a guy way behind on the rent he needs for his cheap apartment. He has no car, so he has to take mass transportation wherever he goes. He does own a gun, but he's too poor to afford bullets to load it. Besides these problems, he's an incessant dreamer, a guy who has trouble keeping his mind on the business (such as he gets it) at hand. As he says of himself in the novel's epigraph:

I guess one of the reasons
that I've never been
a very good private detective
is that I spend too much time
dreaming of Babylon.

At least he has self-awareness. Dreaming while awake, while engaged in work, while out on a case, is his Achilles Heel, and he does everything he can to fight his weakness. He can't always though, and he winds up dreaming of Babylon wherever he may be, whether on the bus, on the street, or on a stakeout. What is Babylon exactly? I guess you could call it a mental space, a realm inside his head where narratives of his own peculiar devising unfold. It's a place he's been going to for years, since just after high school, and his visits began just after the time when he, C. Card, a fair baseball player in high school, was hit in the head by a fastball. The ball had been thrown by a pitcher when Card was trying out for a semi-pro team. As he says he found out that day, "It was really beautiful in Babylon. I went for a walk beside the Euphrates River. There was a girl with me. She was very beautiful and wearing a gown that I could see through. She had on an emerald necklace.
We talked about President Roosevelt. She was a Democrat, too. The fact that she had large firm breasts and was a Democrat made her the perfect woman for me."

A not unusual male type circa 1942, except this particular male lives all his romances in his mind. And he has to get out of his mind to solve the case he manages to get hired for. He has to borrow bullets for his gun from a cop friend of his named Sergeant Rink, and his investigations take him to the San Francisco morgue, whose main attendant he is friendly with and who has trouble keeping track of the bodies coming and going from the place. The morgue, in fact, becomes a central location for much of Dreaming of Babylon's action, and things go from absurd to doubly absurd as dead bodies get mixed up and Card feels the weight of having to interrupt his work in order to make his regular weekly call to his mother, who is, shall we say, less balanced than he is. It's a novel that has all the earmarks of Brautigan: whimsy, dark humor, suprising imagery, terse but poetic prose. It has the distinct Brautigan feeling of narrative freedom and unpredictability. It's a lark, in other words, albeit one with a tinge of yearning and melancholy, and with this book, Brautigan does for the PI novel what he does for the Western and the Gothic novel in The Hawkline Monster. He pokes fun at a form and its all too often predictable patterns, though he does not do it vicously. I found it a pleasurable and amusing read, just the playful thing I was looking for, an escape from the usual PI tropes that can become at times, let's face it, a little wearying.