Mark Thomas's Blog - Posts Tagged "sombrero-fallout"
SOMBRERO FALLOUT, by Richard Brautigan, 1977
“Plot” is never a primary focus in a Brautigan work, but here’s an overview of events in SOMBRERO FALLOUT, anyway (It’s sort of fun to talk about the book as if it were a conventional piece of fiction): A sombrero falls from the sky and lands in the middle of a small-town American street. That incident is supposed to be the beginning of a whimsical short story, but the main character, a writer known as “the American humorist,” doesn’t like it and throws the papers into a garbage pail. The story, however, continues to write itself while in the trash can. In that extended, self-written story, two people compete for the honor of picking up the sombrero to present it to the town’s mayor. That trivial bit of tension inexplicably escalates into a riot where hundreds of townspeople maim and kill each other. The survivors of that initial conflict then band together to fight government forces sent in to restore order.
That’s one plotline. The sombrero-induced carnage is interspersed with chapters describing the American humorist’s incapacitating grief when he is dumped by his Japanese girlfriend. (The woman’s ethnicity is a big part of his obsessive attachment, and that seems a little cringy to a modern reader.)
In a way, the cartoonish violence of the sombrero storyline satirizes the American humorist’s near-paralytic reaction to the breakup. He can barely function now that his girlfriend is gone, and he stares at one of her cast-off hairs for several chapters. Conversely, the trivial appearance of a sombrero inspires townspeople to hold off an assault by the US army. At the very least, it’s an odd yoking of psychotic flattened affect and hyperactive over-reaction. But frankly, a Sparks Notes rationale for the juxtaposition of the two storylines probably doesn’t exist.
The American humorist thinks his lifelong love of tuna fish sandwiches has exposed him to toxic levels of Mercury and worries that his writing will be affected. So maybe the wildly divergent stories are intended to be evidence of that brain damage.
More likely, the disparate narratives are simply a technique pulled from the absurdist writer’s toolkit. In Brautigan’s case, it’s a natural extension of his small-scale tendency to pair wildly dissimilar objects. (Think of his little poem “Loading Mercury with a pitchfork” or the scene in TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA where a hardware store sells sections of trout stream, racked up like vinyl siding.)
The presence of the title sombrero is never explained. But by the end of the book, thousands of people have walked past the hat without seeing it, so it is offered up as a trite symbol of collective myopia: “there’s more to life than meets the eye.” That’s a simple-minded platitude, though, from someone who revels in the bizarre, someone who wrote books like THE ABORTION and REVENGE OF THE LAWN.
Brautigan’s books are all concerned with the process of writing, and I think the appearance of the “sombrero” is part of that over-arching theme because it functions like a classroom writing prompt. I suspect that Brautigan, the celebrated burnt-out hippie author, dropped a hat amongst a collection of characters then retreated, Godlike, to see what would unfold. When the incident couldn’t carry a book-length story all by itself, it was jammed into the broken-relationship narrative.
Kurt Vonnegut once admitted to repurposing his weaker ideas by attributing them to Kilgore Trout, a science fiction writer who makes frequent guest appearances in the novels. Maybe Brautigan is practicing a similar type of economy. He can’t bear to (really) toss the quirky sombrero idea into the trash, so he allows it to live after being discarded.
Anyway, I’m sure Brautigan fans are familiar with the iconic picture of him on the cover of TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA, where he wears a domed, broad brimmed hat. The hat in that famous photo is NOT a sombrero, but it’s a first-cousin piece of western-wear, similar enough to make me think Brautigan is playing with the idea of an author’s relationship to the books he writes. We don’t know much about the title sombrero, but it “was not made in Mexico” and it belonged to an unnamed someone who “was very far away.” The hat is untouched by the whirling human chaos around it, much like the emotionally distant Brautigan. The sombrero is size 7¼ and if that matched Brautigan’s actual hat size, I’d confidently say he wrote himself into this book as an empty hat.
Of course, Brautigan tries to distance himself from the doppelganger philandering-hippie-writer characters that populate his novels. Yukiko, the American humorist’s girlfriend, says: “interesting . . . One would never imagine this by reading his books . . . he was going to be quite different from his books.”
But I don’t buy that separation, I think it’s a defensive posture intended to insulate Brautigan from fans who think they have him completely figured out.
SOMBRERO FALLOUT is partly a social critique, in that Americans (inexplicably) worship senseless slaughter. In the “sombrero” storyline, the town’s inhabitants go berserk, riot, then band together to fight the state police and national guard. Federal troops finally re-take the town but there are 6,000 deaths including 162 children. So, what was the “Fallout” (or consequence) mentioned in the title? “The town was declared a national monument and became quite a tourist attraction with the huge cemetery there being featured on millions of postcards.” That sounds like a dig at Arlington and the hyperbolic reverence paid to America’s civil war. In Brautigan’s book, the mayor’s bullet riddled body lies in a barber chair and receives a tongue-in-cheek eulogy celebrating his pointless, quintessentially American, death: “He had done his best. It wasn’t enough. But still he was a brave man. He had fought his hardest. What else can you say? He was an American.”
There’s nothing glamorous about the violence; the town librarian gets both her ears shot off, then her corpse is trampled into hamburger. The survivors are traumatized and mystified by their own atrocities. “All they knew was that once they started, they couldn’t stop.” The behavior is obviously being critiqued, but it’s hard to take seriously, coming from Brautigan. According to his daughter, Arianthe Brautigan, in her memoire YOU CAN’T CATCH DEATH, Richard frequently got drunk and shot guns inside his own Montana ranch house; he considered lashing out with gunfire a valid emotional reaction. Considering his own behavior, it’s not surprising he has a degree of sympathy for the townspeople’s frenzy.
Of course, the most remarkable quality of any Brautigan book is its casual poetry. Sometimes, the effect is purely comic, a Chandleresque exaggeration: “Her smile was so subtle that it would have made the Mona Lisa seem like a clown performing a pratfall.” More often, Brautigan’s prose is a sophisticated collection of images, and surprising word usage. Here’s an entire chapter called “Suburb” that could easily appear in a San Francisco poetry chapbook:
Yukiko rolled over.
That plain, that simple.
Her body was small in its moving.
And her hair followed, dreaming her as she moved.
A cat, her cat, in bed with her was awakened by her moving, and watched her turn slowly over in bed. When she stopped moving, the cat went back to sleep.
It was a black cat and could have been a suburb of her hair.
Here, Yukiko’s hair is at least partly responsible for her existence, “dreaming her” while she moves. It makes me think that the act of creation is cooperative, Yukiko is a bit of raw material that is turned into a finished product by an independently living head of hair. A few lines later, another living creature—the cat—is described as an extension of that hair. In other chapters, the cat assumes primary importance and its purring is essential for Yukiko to remember her father.
This is typical of the strange power inversions in Brautigan’s books where trivial things often assume great importance. In that context, it makes sense that a sombrero could start a civil war, and a can of tuna could incapacitate the American humorist. And it partly explains why Brautigan is considered an anti-establishment icon: he always notices and champions the insignificant.
But it’s the surprising turn of phrase, rather than any underlying philosophy, that has turned me into an enthusiastic Brautigan fan. “A suburb of her hair.” Beautiful.
That’s one plotline. The sombrero-induced carnage is interspersed with chapters describing the American humorist’s incapacitating grief when he is dumped by his Japanese girlfriend. (The woman’s ethnicity is a big part of his obsessive attachment, and that seems a little cringy to a modern reader.)
In a way, the cartoonish violence of the sombrero storyline satirizes the American humorist’s near-paralytic reaction to the breakup. He can barely function now that his girlfriend is gone, and he stares at one of her cast-off hairs for several chapters. Conversely, the trivial appearance of a sombrero inspires townspeople to hold off an assault by the US army. At the very least, it’s an odd yoking of psychotic flattened affect and hyperactive over-reaction. But frankly, a Sparks Notes rationale for the juxtaposition of the two storylines probably doesn’t exist.
The American humorist thinks his lifelong love of tuna fish sandwiches has exposed him to toxic levels of Mercury and worries that his writing will be affected. So maybe the wildly divergent stories are intended to be evidence of that brain damage.
More likely, the disparate narratives are simply a technique pulled from the absurdist writer’s toolkit. In Brautigan’s case, it’s a natural extension of his small-scale tendency to pair wildly dissimilar objects. (Think of his little poem “Loading Mercury with a pitchfork” or the scene in TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA where a hardware store sells sections of trout stream, racked up like vinyl siding.)
The presence of the title sombrero is never explained. But by the end of the book, thousands of people have walked past the hat without seeing it, so it is offered up as a trite symbol of collective myopia: “there’s more to life than meets the eye.” That’s a simple-minded platitude, though, from someone who revels in the bizarre, someone who wrote books like THE ABORTION and REVENGE OF THE LAWN.
Brautigan’s books are all concerned with the process of writing, and I think the appearance of the “sombrero” is part of that over-arching theme because it functions like a classroom writing prompt. I suspect that Brautigan, the celebrated burnt-out hippie author, dropped a hat amongst a collection of characters then retreated, Godlike, to see what would unfold. When the incident couldn’t carry a book-length story all by itself, it was jammed into the broken-relationship narrative.
Kurt Vonnegut once admitted to repurposing his weaker ideas by attributing them to Kilgore Trout, a science fiction writer who makes frequent guest appearances in the novels. Maybe Brautigan is practicing a similar type of economy. He can’t bear to (really) toss the quirky sombrero idea into the trash, so he allows it to live after being discarded.
Anyway, I’m sure Brautigan fans are familiar with the iconic picture of him on the cover of TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA, where he wears a domed, broad brimmed hat. The hat in that famous photo is NOT a sombrero, but it’s a first-cousin piece of western-wear, similar enough to make me think Brautigan is playing with the idea of an author’s relationship to the books he writes. We don’t know much about the title sombrero, but it “was not made in Mexico” and it belonged to an unnamed someone who “was very far away.” The hat is untouched by the whirling human chaos around it, much like the emotionally distant Brautigan. The sombrero is size 7¼ and if that matched Brautigan’s actual hat size, I’d confidently say he wrote himself into this book as an empty hat.
Of course, Brautigan tries to distance himself from the doppelganger philandering-hippie-writer characters that populate his novels. Yukiko, the American humorist’s girlfriend, says: “interesting . . . One would never imagine this by reading his books . . . he was going to be quite different from his books.”
But I don’t buy that separation, I think it’s a defensive posture intended to insulate Brautigan from fans who think they have him completely figured out.
SOMBRERO FALLOUT is partly a social critique, in that Americans (inexplicably) worship senseless slaughter. In the “sombrero” storyline, the town’s inhabitants go berserk, riot, then band together to fight the state police and national guard. Federal troops finally re-take the town but there are 6,000 deaths including 162 children. So, what was the “Fallout” (or consequence) mentioned in the title? “The town was declared a national monument and became quite a tourist attraction with the huge cemetery there being featured on millions of postcards.” That sounds like a dig at Arlington and the hyperbolic reverence paid to America’s civil war. In Brautigan’s book, the mayor’s bullet riddled body lies in a barber chair and receives a tongue-in-cheek eulogy celebrating his pointless, quintessentially American, death: “He had done his best. It wasn’t enough. But still he was a brave man. He had fought his hardest. What else can you say? He was an American.”
There’s nothing glamorous about the violence; the town librarian gets both her ears shot off, then her corpse is trampled into hamburger. The survivors are traumatized and mystified by their own atrocities. “All they knew was that once they started, they couldn’t stop.” The behavior is obviously being critiqued, but it’s hard to take seriously, coming from Brautigan. According to his daughter, Arianthe Brautigan, in her memoire YOU CAN’T CATCH DEATH, Richard frequently got drunk and shot guns inside his own Montana ranch house; he considered lashing out with gunfire a valid emotional reaction. Considering his own behavior, it’s not surprising he has a degree of sympathy for the townspeople’s frenzy.
Of course, the most remarkable quality of any Brautigan book is its casual poetry. Sometimes, the effect is purely comic, a Chandleresque exaggeration: “Her smile was so subtle that it would have made the Mona Lisa seem like a clown performing a pratfall.” More often, Brautigan’s prose is a sophisticated collection of images, and surprising word usage. Here’s an entire chapter called “Suburb” that could easily appear in a San Francisco poetry chapbook:
Yukiko rolled over.
That plain, that simple.
Her body was small in its moving.
And her hair followed, dreaming her as she moved.
A cat, her cat, in bed with her was awakened by her moving, and watched her turn slowly over in bed. When she stopped moving, the cat went back to sleep.
It was a black cat and could have been a suburb of her hair.
Here, Yukiko’s hair is at least partly responsible for her existence, “dreaming her” while she moves. It makes me think that the act of creation is cooperative, Yukiko is a bit of raw material that is turned into a finished product by an independently living head of hair. A few lines later, another living creature—the cat—is described as an extension of that hair. In other chapters, the cat assumes primary importance and its purring is essential for Yukiko to remember her father.
This is typical of the strange power inversions in Brautigan’s books where trivial things often assume great importance. In that context, it makes sense that a sombrero could start a civil war, and a can of tuna could incapacitate the American humorist. And it partly explains why Brautigan is considered an anti-establishment icon: he always notices and champions the insignificant.
But it’s the surprising turn of phrase, rather than any underlying philosophy, that has turned me into an enthusiastic Brautigan fan. “A suburb of her hair.” Beautiful.
