Brautigan Begin Again

"The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America" is probably one of the most bizarre things I have ever read, so let's go on an exciting adventure of self-discovery and close reading and try to figure out what in the hell.

Right away he's talking about how the autopsy of his novel is like what Lord Byron's autopsy would've been, so first thing I had to do was figure out who Lord Byron was. Turns out he was real famous and his life was super well-documented, and I didn't really have the patience to read the entire Wikipedia page but I did garner that he was some sort of romantic revolutionary. Also he wrote Don Juan, a piece I have a cursory knowledge of. So there's that! But then it talks about if he had never seen the shores of Idaho again, which I don't really get becaue Idaho wasn't incorporated as a state until almost 70 years after this Byron dude had shuffled off this mortal coil. Now I don't know much about Idaho except that it's awful and like four people live there, so I have nary a clue as to where the Byron-Idaho parallel comes from. Brautigan also makes a point of listing off real specific bodies of water, which may or may not exist, and that could mean something too. To the best of my knowledge though, Lord Byron didn't have any particular inclination toward hot springs, creeks or ducks, so I'm left thinking that it's just kind of Brautigan's style to bandy about names for the sake of completion.

But what the heck does all that mean in the grand scheme of the chapter? Well it's definitely not the cause of death, the first part of the autopsy proper. Trout Fishing died of sudden asphyxiation, Byron died of a cold. The suffocation bit could have any number of meanings, but with Brautigan being a post-beat sort of fellow the first meaning that jumps to mind is society throttling his creativity, killing off his work. But I also read on the brautigan.net website that one of his friends said he used trout fishing as a metaphor for living in the moment or doing things immediately and impulsively or something along those lines. Thinking in that vein, it could mean that we all suddenly (for some reason) have to structure our lives so we lost all that impulsiveness.

Both those sentiments could well be read into the next portion, where it describes the utter solidity of the skull of the "victim." It pretty much sounds like he's robustly saying "it was thick-skulled," but with like six times as many words. If that is, in fact, what he had in mind, then he could be talking about the single-minded pursuit of impulsiveness, or the unassailable steadfastness of societal norms, man.

Then he quips about the kidneys being large but healthy, and the bladder being small. I guess that just means Trout Fishing peed itself just before it died? Either that or it had to go to the bathroom all the time. Brautigan either likes obfuscated potty humor or this part is completely lost on me.

The date of death is May 2nd of 1824, the same year of Byron's death but a little less than a month later. I have a feeling the death year isn't all that it has in common with the lord, but boy howdy is it hard to draw any other real comparisons. Then he says the body's with lots of booze and he mentions Idaho again.

I have a feeling that I get the tip of the poem, but lots of it is definitely still lost on me. MY QUESTION TO YOU IS what the heck do Idaho, trout fishing, and a dead Greecian hero guy have in common? Give up?? Me too.