After Restitution:
Robert Coover and His Fictional World
(A Proposal for Doctoral Dissertation)
By Chen-hsing Tsai
This dissertation deals de facto with Coover’s art of “rewriting” in the fields of some important literary genres ranging from folk/fairy tales, exemplary novellas, detective stories, effective history, theology, parody, inter-/hypertexuality, revolving around forms of novelistic discourse in Coover’s literary output. Thus, the aim of this project is to reexamine Coover’s thirteen works (three short story collections, three novellas, and seven novels) and to see how Coover destitutes and restitutes the ossified forms of traditional novels so that he can institute his renovated narratorial techniques and constitute his own voice in the intellectual climate of the 1990s.
There is little doubt today that Coover’s works signal some of the most challenging and influential postmodern literary texts of the last sixty years, along with Umbetto Eco, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon. Dispersed across a variety of literary genres, Coover’s writings are extensive and numerous, including some critical essays on Beckett, Borges, and others, and fourteen fictional works (three novellas, three short stories collections, and seven novels). Despite a reputation for bawdiness, atheism, and self-deprecation in his writings, Coover remains serious in his fiction-making process.
Though Coover regards himself as a realist, he does not mean to be a traditional realist. Coover is a writer whose works elude easy categorization. His writings straddle the genre fence of fairy tales, historiographic metafiction, the fantastic, magic realism, and postmodern fiction. While most of his writings belong to all these genres, they, nevertheless, fall subject to none. Thus, this dissertation does not wish to arbitrate the question of Coover’s fictional genres as such, in that Coover is still finding his way to writing itself in the hope of triggering an infinite conversation between the author and the reader, the text and the world, the writer and the idea of writing, and son on.
Coover did not begin his literary career as an event, but his narratorial technique did create an event. His literary intervention began with his “pricksong” and “descant”, two terms Coover borrows from music, so as to insert himself into the house of fiction.
Coover’s re-situating of reality as only an image of reality has to do with his theory of language. Drawing inspiration from Jackson I. Cope’s parallel analysis of Coover and Bakhtin (though his discussion is not fully developed), I would argue that Coover, like Bakhtin, Benjamin, and others, rejects a fixed, claustrophobic correspondence between signifier and signified. While Bakhtin is strongly against the abstract objectivist theory of language that stablizes language at the cost of “its real mutability and the creativity of its users,” Coover favors a sentient idea of language and interrogates the ontology of language in his Pricksongs & Descants, The Public Burning, Pinocchio in Venice, and A Theological Position.
My objective in this study of Coover’s literary output is to look as deeply and thoroughly as I can into his short stories, novellas, and novels. Though such an investigation has been undertaken by Thomas E. Kennedy, Larry McCaffery, Andersen, Lois Gordon and others, their treatments do not include Coover’s recent novels, such as Pinocchio in Venice and Gerald’s Party.
Besides, even if they have treated Coover’s earlier fictions (for example, Pricksongs & Descants), they fail to look at the potential of “pricksongs” and “descants” as alternatives to the existing forms. Seen from this perspective, I will focus my dissertation on what has never been discussed in depth about Coover’s works.
What follows is my working table contents:
Introduction
Coover on CooverChapter one
Narratorial Polyphony in Pricksongs & DescantsChapter Two
A Postmodern A/Theology in The Origin of the BrunistsChapter Three
Game and/as Mythin The Universal Baseball Association
Chapter Four
The Nixon Trilogy:Carnival, History, and Subjectivity
Chapter Five
How Pinocchio’s Corpse Becomes a BookChapter Six
Spanking the Maid: An (Inter-)textual AnalysisChapter Seven
Gerald’s Party and the “Paradox of the Real”Chapter Eight
Parody in Theological Position andA Night at the Movies
Conclusion
After Restitution
Chapter one invites the reader to look at “pricksongs” and “descants,” two terms conveying the basic strategic polyphony characterized by multiplication of perspectives, causal shifting of point of view, and circular structure of narrative, all of which render the narrative open-ended, indeterminate, and polyvocal, though troubling but interesting. My examples can be found in “The Door,” “Morris in Chain,” “The Gingerbread House,” “Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady,” “Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl,” “A Pedestrian Accident,” and “The Babysitter.”
In chapter two, I deal with The Origin of the Brunists, what one critic has termed Coover’s “440-page lampoon of Christianity.” In this chapter, I’ll look at the rupture between appearance and fact in the self-fashioning myth of the Brunists, its chance and mutability, religion and myth, spirituality and materiality in the two contrasting groups of characters: the unhappy siblings Bruno and Marcella, and a would-be happy union between Tiger Miller and Happy Bottom. Their interaction weaves a complicated human relationship where religious opposition, sexual repression, and libidinal desire are acted out in length.
My third chapter proffers a discussion on Coover’s site of imagination on the playing field of a table-top, where he concretizes imagination in the form of play.
Moreover, play, as envisaged by Heraclitus, Schiller, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, will be treated. For Coover, play creates a world which becomes a legend that is itself a myth in the end.
In the Nixon trilogy, viz., Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus?, A Political Fable, and The Public Burning, I point out the nuances between the historical documents and Coover’s execution of them, with a special focus on three thematic constellations: first, Nixon’s identification process in the political terrain and Gus’s self-fashioning process, as observed by his Jewish friend-narrator, Mayer, in sports; second, his idea of history as political fiction in the form of narrativization rather than an objective Truth universally acknowledged; and third, the carnivalization of subjectivity.
Chapter five examines Pinocchio in Venice in terms of magic realism and the fantastic. Interestingly, the fantastic world of Collodi’s Pinocchio is rewritten by Coover into a Pinocchio, himself a professor emeritus who won two Nobel prizes and is thinking about finishing his final work. In Coover’s hands, Pinocchio in Venice traverses magic realism and the fantastic. I will discuss how Coover uses “dream time” to get access to these two worlds and deal with the main thrust of a writer’s dilemma—writing and/against death—a theme not uncommon in Coover’s ouvre.
Chapter six is an intertextual analysis using Bakhtin’s, Kristeva’s, and Barthes’s theories of intertextuality to explain, construe, and interpret Coover’s Spanking the Maid, a text with no beginning and no end, which defies monologic interpretation.
Chapter seven deals with Coover’s “poetics of deferral” and “the paradox of the real” through the examination of Ros’s truncated body/corpse, a nude model who is already dead before Gerald’s party begins.
In chapter eight, I trace the genealogy of parody and offer an explication of text to Coover’s A Theological Position and A Night at the Movies—the former being a parodic translation from fiction into play/film, and the latter a parodic translation of play/film into fiction.
Primary Sources
Coover, Robert. The Origin of the Brunists. New York: Norton, 1966.
_____. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. New York: Random House, 1968.
_____. Pricksongs & Descants. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969.
_____. “The Last Quixote: Marginal Notes on the Gospel According to Samuel Beckett.” New American Review 11 (1971): 132-43.
_____. A Theological Position. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972.
_____. “The Master’s Voice.” American Review 26 (1977): 61-88.
_____. The Public Burning. New York: Viking, 1977.
_____. The Hair o’ the Chine. Bloomfield: Bruccoli-clark, 1979.
_____. A Political Fable. New York: Viking, 1980. Originally entitled “The Cat in the Hat for President,” New American Review 4 (1968): 7-45.
_____. Spanking the Maid. New York: Grove, 1981.
_____. In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters. Providence, R. I.: Burning Deck Press, 1983
_____. Gerald’s Party. New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1986.
_____. A Night at the Movies or, You Must Remember This. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
_____. Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1987.
_____. Pinocchio in Venice. New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1991.
_____. John’s Wife. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Secondary Sources
A. Books
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Andersen, Richard. Robert Coover. Boston: Twayne, 1981.
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Goldstein, Jan, ed. Foucault and the Writing of History. London: Blackwell, 1994.
Gordon, Lois. Robert Coover: The Universal Fictionmaking Process. Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1983.
Gray, Paul. “Uncle Sam Takes on the Phantom.” Rev. of The Public Burning, by Robert Coover. Newsweek 8 August 1977: 42-43.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. London: Methuen, 1985.
_____. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988.
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Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.
Joris, Pierre. ‘Coover’s Apoplectic Apocalypse or “Purviews of Cunning Abstractions”.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 34.4 (1993): 220-31.
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Malmgren, Carl Darryl. Fictional Space in the Modernist and Postmodernist American Novel. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1985.
McCaffery, Larry. The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1982.
Maltby, Paul. Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991.
Menton, Seymour. Magic Realism Rediscovered, 1918-1981. Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1983.
Messenger, Christian K. Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.
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_____. Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
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_____. Seeing Films Politically. Albany: State U of New York, 1991.
B. Articles
Ames, Christopher. “Coover’s Comedy of conflicting Fictional Codes.” Critique 31.2 (1990): 85-99.
Andersen, Richard. “The Role of the Artist: An Examination of Some Uncollected Short Stories by Robert Coover.” Zeitschrift-fur-Anglishtic-und-Amerikanistik 32.1 (1984): 41-48.
Balitas, Vincent D. “Historical Consciousness in the Novels of Robert Coover’s Fiction.” Kwartalnik-Neofilologicznz 28.3-4 (1981): 369-79.
Bass, Thomas Alden. “An Encounter with Robert Coover.” The Antioch Review 40.3 (1982): 286-302.
Berman, Neil. “Coover’s Universal Baseball Association: Play as Personalized Myth.” Modern Fiction Studies 24.2 (1978): 209-22.
Black, Joel. ‘“You Must Remember This”: The Intimate and the Obscene in Filmic Narrative.’ Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 40 (1994): 89.
Burgess, Anthony. “The Spirit Is Willing, but the Wood Is Weak.” The New York Times Book Review. Jan. 22, 1991.
Delta: Revue du Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur les Ecrivains du Sud aux Etats-Unis 28 (1989). Special Issue on Robert Coover.
Dillard, R.H.W. “The Wisdom of the Beast: The Fictions of Robert Coover.” The Hollins Critic 7.2 (1970): 1-11.
Estes, David C. “American Folk Laughter in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.” Contemporary Literature 28.2 (1987): 239-56.
Frisch, Mark F. “Self-Definition and Redefinition in the New World: Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association and Borges.” Confluencia 4.2 (1982): 13-20.
Frick, Daniel E. “The Prison House of Art: Aesthetics vs. Politics in Robert Coover’s Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?” Studies in Short Fiction 31.2 (1994): 217-23.
Gabert, Charla. “The Metamorphosis of Charlie.” Chicago Review 32 (1980): 60-64.
Gado, Frank. “Robert Coover.” In First Person: Conversations on Writers and Writing. New York: Union College Press, 1973.
Gallo, Louis. ‘Nixon and the “House of Wax”: An Emblematic Episode in Coover’s The Public Burning.’ Critique 23.3 (1982): 43-51.
Gonzalez, Ann. “Robert Coover’s The UBA: Baseball As Metafiction.” International Fiction Review 11.2 (1984): 106-109.
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Hertzel, Leo J. “An Interview with Robert Coover.” Critique 11(1969): 25-29.
_____. “What’s Wrong with the Christians?” Critique 11 (1969): 11-24.
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Klahn, Bernd. “From Entropy to Chaos-Theories: Thermodynamic Models of Historical Evolution in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover.” Reconstructing American Literary and Historical Studies. Eds. Gunter H. Lenz, Hartmut Keil, Sabine Brock-Sallah. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1990.
Lee, L. L. “Robert Coover’s Moral Vision: Pricksongs & Descant.” Studies in Short Fiction 23.1 (1986): 63-69.
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___. “‘Playing Monsters’: The Games of Memory and Language in Robert Coover’s Gerald’s Party.” Modern Language Studies 18.4 (1988): 3-32.
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