The Shenevertakesherwatchoff Poem
Because you always have a clock
strapped to your body, it's natural
that I should think of you as the
correct time:
with your long blond hair at 8:03,
and your pulse-lightening breasts at
11:17, and your rose-meow smile at 5:30,
I know I'm right.
Brautigan's poem "The Shenevertakesherwatchoff Poem" caught my eye as I skimmed through The Pill versus the Springhill Mining Disaster mainly because I often feel like the subject of the poem, as I'm sure most people in this crazy modern world of ours do. This poem comments on the state of our culture as one that has become a slave to time and perfection. Brautigan calls the woman in the poem "the correct time," which suggests the idea that not only is this woman the perfect member of modern society, always on time and always living up to the correct standards, but she embraces this fate of being essentially chained to her watch and therefore to her schedule.Because you always have a clock
strapped to your body, it's natural
that I should think of you as the
correct time:
with your long blond hair at 8:03,
and your pulse-lightening breasts at
11:17, and your rose-meow smile at 5:30,
I know I'm right.
The only describing characteristics of the woman in the poem is her "long blond hair," "pulse-lightening breasts," and "rose-meow smile." These descriptions convey a softer image of the modern woman, as well as an ideally feminine one. These soft images of femininity are juxtaposed against specific times, such as "8:03." The specific nature of these times puts further emphasis on the subject's devotion to time, as well as her desire to not waste a single second. After all, doing something at 8:03 exactly because there is another task to be done at 8:05 is a common occurence in the modern world, a world which Brautigan sees embodied in the woman who never takes her watch off.
Question for Week 4: The surreal nature of Brautigan's short story often seem cryptic and extremely strange. They are also often associated with nature and riddled with strange and vivid imagery. Does Brautigan's application of the surreal yet naturalistic (almost Kafkaesque) create a dream-like tone at all, or does it simply alienate in an attempt to confuse or shock the reader?
4 comments:
I think that your analysis is extremely compelling in terms of his description of the woman and the time. I think that you had it exactly right when you consider the woman to be "chained to time" it is just another example of the approaching modernity that Brautigan was encountering at this point.
I've been thinking about Brautigan engaging with the idea of wilderness no longer existing in this world or collective consciousness of ours.
I think this poem is an example of how that idea may be extended to say that humans are no longer 'natural' creatures. Brautigan's beloved fuses with capitalist time, it is part of her body. We are so used to the structures that society imposes on us that they have become part of what we are.
Trippy!
I agree with you that Brautigan's repetition of specific times makes this poem (fairly abstract for Brautigan) very easy to relate to.
I say we all throw away our watches and clocks and see what happens.
This si a great analysis of Brautigan's poem. His work is strange and so precise that you can't help but wonder, is he making all this up to create a strong sense of surrealism and chance effect, or is he actually telling the truth?
In a lot of Brautigan's work I feel like he is brutally honest. Each one of his stories resonates with this honesty in a way that it seems almost to good to be true. As far as his tone, I find it simple and honest. His far fetched stories (like his "Cleveland Wrecking Yard" and various others) are obviously fiction, but he does a good job of combining these seemingly truthful accounts with not-so-turthful ones. This balance of the unreal in reality does create a dream-like tone throughout his works.
Johanna... ah, the time concept creeps into our discussion of RB! And on another layer, we get to play with qualifiers/ideas like surreal, nature, modern. They seem to bounce off each other to no end in RB's works! But I like what you say about the contrast between mechanized time and the softer/less-mechanized images of the woman, in your reading - very useful. The human images are attached to these really tender descriptions, as you point out, and I for one have such a hard time tying those up with strict descriptions of time. But yet...
Here's something I'm puzzled about, though: what happens if the woman doesn't have her clock - does her hair change? Does it become less "long blond"? Does her smile not have the same rose-meow quality?
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