Because The World Was Hollow

The writing in Watermelon Sugar represents an example of the traditional formalism that had dominated prose since the late eighteen hundreds. Even with the early modernistic writings of T.S. Elliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the rules of structure that had set the boundaries of stylistic approaches to prose had reamined intact since the Victorian era. The San Francisco Beat scene that permeated in North Beach during the l950's sought to break this internal strangle-hold on prose, and free the writer, giving prose a more sporadic and open style; while allowing themes into literature that had been hidden under a cloth of respectability by earlier generations. A revolution of the mind was beginning to take hold in North Beach, and it was spreading, but it was not without precident. A movement, especially one in literature, is not ill-planned. It is cultivated and grows in the early morning dawn, as a garden feeds off morning dew after the cool rains of spring.

Once the cautious reader opens the hard bound book of In Watermelon Sugar, he is met with the phrase "Writing 21." Writing 21 refers to a large variety of classes offered at Berkley in the l970's, where groups of writers would meet, sometimes to compose the best of experimental literature at that time. Harmless in appearance, this simple word followed by a seemingly insignificant number, must have struck a note of fear in the hearts of the adherents of formalism that had held reign over literature until the 1950's; for it carried the key to the overthrow of a stale prosaic style based on the hollow promises from a cold barren age.

Brautigan's form of writing was a simple stripped-down from of minimalism.

"......Richard Brautigan's poetry mimics the naivete' of Corso's but with a success born of literary sophistication. Brautigan's method is to maintain his stylistics at such an elementary level that his pared sentences seem logically incontrovertible, his bad analogies inexplicabley luminous." (p.134-135. Kiernan)

He would not only carry this into his poetry, but his prose as well, but even the minimalism of Brautigan could trace its roots to formalism, whose patterns were borrowed from the great thnker and writer Jack Spicer.

" As a student of linguistics, Jack Spicer troubled by the disjunction between language and its referents and came to believe that the poet's task was to minimize that disjunction by cultivating an extreme passivity in the creative process. Like Blake and Yeats before him, he believed "voices" dictated his poems, and his goal after the mid-1950's was apparently

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