"Blown away like apples by the fickle wind of the Twentieth Century”: Counterculture Resistance and the Wilderness Condition in Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America // Resistencia contracultural en Trout Fishing in America

Many critics consider Richard Brautigan’s 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America a coming-of-age account of a wayward, outsider narrator discovering that the pastoral mode is no longer viable in mid-century America. However, these readings often ignore Brautigan’s explicit political affinity and his conscious engagement with a specific setting—southern California in the mid- to late-60s. This paper explores Brautigan’s Counterculture ethic, which critiques the mindless prevalence of mainstream, middle-class America’s habit of consumption, production, and destruction of the natural world. Linking the lack of individual free will with the postwar technology boom, Brautigan engages with the natural landscape and in communities of one’s own making. As a result, the novel is peopled with alienated drop-outs, the victims of America’s technocracy. The “trout fishing in America” refrain, with its many incarnations, is one of the modes through which these characters’ operate within Counterculture principles, namely through their self-imposed poverty and criticism of the way America uses and abuses its citizens and the natural world. Resumen Muchos críticos consideran la novela de Richard Brautigan Trout Fishing in America (1967) un relato iniciático de un narrador forastero y obstinado que descubre que el modo pastoril ya no es viable en los Estados Unidos de mediados de siglo. Sin embargo, estas lecturas a menudo ignoran la afinidad política explícita de Brautigan y su compromiso consciente con un escenario específico - la California sureña de los últimos años de los años 60. Este ensayo explora la ética contracultural de Brautigan, que critica la preponderancia ciega de la clase media de los Estados Unidos y su hábito de consumo, producción y la destrucción del mundo natural. Conectando la falta de voluntad propia con el "boom" tecnológico posterior a la segunda guerra mundial, Brautigan se implica con el paisaje natural y en las comunidades de creación propia. Como resultado, la novela está llena de bohemios alienados, las víctimas de la tecnocracia estadounidense. El refrán "trout fishing in America," con sus muchas encarnaciones, es una de las formas en las que estos personajes actúan dentro de los principios contraculturales, concretamente a través de su pobreza auto-impuesta y del criticismo de la manera en que los Estados Unidos usan y abusan de sus ciudadanos y del mundo natural.

Metaregionalism: The Global Pacific Northwest

This chapter examines the metaregional dimensions of the Pacific Northwest and the ways in which its very inscription as a region elucidates the fraught and contested relation between text and place in American literature. Elettra Bedon coined the term “metaregionalism” to describe a self-conscious manipulation of certain forms of dialect. On analogy with metafiction, metaregionalism might be said to foreground the assumptions involved in traditional ascriptions of place. The chapter first considers the epistemology of space before discussing how the Pacific Northwest was tackled in the writings of Gary Snyder, Ursula Le Guin, and Richard Brautigan. It also analyzes the fiction of William Gibson and Douglas Coupland; Gibson deploys Vancouver to achieve critical distance from the behemoths of U.S. capitalism, and Coupland brings his native Pacific Northwest into the wider oceanic orbit of Asia and Australasia in order to chart a generational passage away from domestic security and entitlement.