ABSTRACT
Richard Brautigan’s attitude towards philosophical and intellectual utterance has always been somewhat wry, and the authorial ‘we’ that opens The Tokyo-Montana Express writes of being ‘cloaked like trick or treaters in the casual disguises of philosophical gossip’. The familiar cloak of the indeterminate signified, used in In Watermelon Sugar for the narrator, takes over again from the undefined or polysemic signifier of ‘Trout Fishing in America’ in Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan has the decency and humour not to lean crudely on trendy supports of that sort. The connection is in any case more fundamental. Brautigan’s roller-coaster mind takes us on thin threads of narrative drama into strange peaks and dips of language and the imagination; it generates fantastic circuits where the most interesting details are the signs that point out the objects of interest.
