Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 95

The Astro-Turf Garden

87

They watched a path that came down through
the trees and then circled a large black stump and led
to a deep pool. Trout were rising in the pool. The FBI
agent watched the path, the trees, the black stump,
the pool and the trout as if they were all holes
punched in a card that had just come out of the
computer.
The initial sensual perception of the trout rising in the pool is
transformed into far different conception of perforated cards spewn
from the computer. In another section (1967, p. 87) Brautigan describes
a favored location for trout fishing:
It used to take me about an hour to hitchhike to
that creek. There was a river nearby. The river
wasn't much. The creek was where I punched in.
Leaving my card above the clock, I'd punch out again
when it was time to go home.
Brautigan is suggesting a temporal invasion of rural life by city
life. The clockless freedom of the trout stream is invaded by the life
of regimentation in the factory or office, as represented by that
symbol of the industrial age, the time clock.
Brautigan associates grotesque events as well as grotesque
characters with urban industrialism. In a chapter titled "The Mayor
of the Twentieth Century", Brautigan effectively juxtaposes the
pastoral ideal with industrial reality, dressing the Mayor in the
costume of trout fishing in America. Trout fishing in America
personifies the pastoral ideal, the Mayor of the Twentieth Century
the domination of time and the oppressive industrial state com
mitting atrocities under a benevolent guise.
Like Kesey and Brautigan, Nor man Mailer has taken a
fatalistic view of technology and urged resistance to it. In his early
work (1959, p. 339) Mailer found a creeping totalitarianism and a
"slow death by conformity" in American life, a conformity that
stifled every creative and rebellious instinct. Mailer embraced the
Nietzchian adventurer, the hipster the outlaw, seeking the
experience beyond good and evil to transcend the threat of
technological and totalitarian domination. The totalitarian