In order to get started, he went to live alone on an island and shot himself. His blood, unable to resist a final joke, splattered the cabin wall in a pattern that read: It is important to begin when everything is already over.
“Beginnings”
In the beginning, then, was the end—the writing may really begin with a renunciation only: of one’s self and, to begin with, of the beginning itself. Death and suicide as sole, albeit ironical, starting points, the end as the true and only warrant of plural beginnings. To renounce one’s self, to renounce life and also, concomitantly, in the same gesture, to renounce the end itself, renounce closure and death: renounce renunciation.
The story “Beginnings” may be emblematic of the tension that permeates Robert Coover’s work, as its writing seems to occur on a threshold, between an acknowledged end (everything is already over) and a deferred beginning (It is important to begin) which somewhere, however, partly overlap (when). Coover’s commitment as a writer temporarily exiled in a friend’s primitive cabin on Rainy Lake may not have been that different from his character’s plight. For as Coover writes of his mentor Samuel Beckett in “The Last Quixote,” Beckett’s trilogy put a definite end to the age of the novel, leaving his young apprentice (young then; young now) on a threshold of sorts: after The Unnamable the page, wiped clean, was now blank again and offered itself generously to all (re)commencements. Well may it be, then, that the celebrated era of “postmodernism” to which Coover is said to belong will, in the end, not have been an epitaph to the modernist past so much as the prelude to an impossible future: writing in the full sense of the word—that is, in its innovative commitment to the contemporary—writing or, in a word, the novel, will only begin with its own renunciation, erasing all traces yet decipherable of what it may (not) have been.
At the very moment you purport to offer a reading of Robert Coover’s work, you catch glimpses of the paradoxical possibility that the work as such may not have begun yet; as if the writing had been all these years merely rehearsing its false beginnings as mere prolegomena or paralipomena, incessantly starting over again, in view of its future advent. But you have second thoughts about this, for, after all, books were published, the first in line aptly titled The Origin of the Brunists as though to insist on its foundational impact . . . And yet, if you look further down the list, you are quickly reminded that things are not as simple as you wish they were, that the little light shed may soon be turned into its own negative, as though the light itself were shadow turned inside out. And so it is that Noir, temporarily last in line, slowly blurs all boundaries, softening the contours of a work that keeps shifting about and disturbing continuities—much like an undecidable figure chalked on the ground, shortly to be erased; and soon, you know, you will be back at the beginnings, free to wander about Brunist territory again: after all, those stories have not ended, only [your] own readings of them. (Noir, 9) This one is on you, then, and it is now your problem: beginning. And having begun: avoiding resolutions. (In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters, 41) For it seems that, despite all bibliographical evidence to the contrary, Coover’s work literally is up-ended, writing itself not from an origin down but rather backwards as it were or, rather, constantly coming full circle in its deliberate attempt to blot out all notions of origin, never to depart from it in a straight line but retrace its steps instead so as to remain before, or antedate, any foundational moment; which, from the very start, then, unavoidably turns into a specious and literally ungrounded act any critical aspiration you might have had, once upon a time, as regards a work that not only remains to be written or begs in the main to be rewritten but, because it also, at the same time, carefully avoids closure and resolution, happens to be open-ended and, yes, endless.
In a way this question of literary beginnings is not a new one; it undoubtedly is at work in any text at any time (Tristram Shandy comes to mind in the midst of countless others), and may even be the literary question par excellence—not what, but when is literature? In this respect, the originality—were there still an ounce of pertinence left in the word—of the way Coover treats the problem may be to send it back to you, as in the mirror of the page.
For Coover’s texts again and again raise the question of their own reading, and, perhaps even more—insofar as it lays claim to being a reading model, or model reading, because a learned one—the question of criticism itself which, by definition, is writing in the second degree, a postscript to the texts it originates from. Not only is criticism here at odds with the texts that, objecting to it, it elevates as its objects, but its very nature is fundamentally challenged as, in order to get started at all and start reading at last, the critic is bound to wait, indefinitely as it turns out, for an end to be put to texts which, however, keep repeating, reinventing, rewriting themselves, starting the whole process all over again page after page, story after story, often blatantly or, in some cases, more surreptitiously, doing away with or at least seriously contesting chronological modes of writing and thinking, thus turning the “first” page into “last” and vice versa, until it appears impossible not to acknowledge that something is wrong, or at any rate not quite right, with the linear way that the texts are conventionally being approached in the course of their critical analysis. One of the texts’ main concerns or effects may precisely be to entice the critic to start learning, once and for all, how to read, to come to terms not only with what reading is but also with what it means or implies to write about it, what kind of conflictual, not to say incestual relationship is then potentially established between text and commentary. For in turn it becomes necessary to act upon the texts themselves and get started at last. Somehow, sometime, you too will have to trigger your reading, but in the meantime, all you can do is resume: the problem, beginnings. And having begun: avoiding resolutions. An exemplary metafiction, “Beginnings” implies that the metafictional text is not only content with interrogating its fiction-making process but also simultaneously deconstructs the way it reads: metafiction may be just another term for learning how to read in the end, not to end it all.
Start reading in the form of a question begging not to be answered: what does it mean to “really read”? Faced with or facing Robert Coover’s work, literary criticism will never have been any closer to what, in the challenge it has to confront, its roots suggest it may at bottom be. For what matters is perhaps not to criticize, judge or decide upon the texts (krinein) so much as to acknowledge the crisis (kritikos, krisis) that they and their reading go through; what matters is not to arrest the critical discourse onto a truth or signification that would have been painstakingly uncovered—even if partial or temporary—so much as to perpetuate or resume the texts’ inherent motion, freely playing with it, towards an indeterminacy conceived of in terms of potentiality or virtuality of meaning and the constant freshening of its possibility, rather than a lack of signification to be nostalgically lamented. Start reading over, then, or overread, the better to challenge criticism’s spurious claims, interrogate the grounds it rests on; resist reading. Renounce. Restart. Rewrite. Read.
And so, with these few general remarks to begin with, you come to ask yourself, and not for the first time either: what are you to do, what shall you do, what should you do? Keep reading, reading on, call that reading, indeed, call that on—for in your situation, how, indeed, if not in deed(s), proceed?
To begin with (in the end, whatever you do, you fall prey to language’s trickeries), the bibliography is not entirely to be trusted, if only because it unfolds chronologically; whatever perspective you choose, it will span from a “first” to a “last” book, positing a beginning and an end which remain utterly foreign to the writing. Of course, you will have an œuvre then, a corpus which might come in handy as it would allow for clean-cut though superficial separations, always more or less the same in each new attempt, namely: 1) “Early Works”—the texts in which critics have usually diagnosed, in the metafictional dimension of The Universal Baseball Association or Pricksongs & Descants, or in the discussion of the way grand narratives, whether history, religion, or politics, shape communities, as in The Origin of the Brunists or the early versions of A Political Fable and Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, the portentous symptoms of . . . 2) The Public Burning—often, if not always, deemed the œuvre’s apogee, its “masterpiece” which, as such, has retained most critics’ attention, much scholarly ink having been spilled on and around the book, almost to the exclusion of all the remaining . . . 3) “Later Works”—texts often ignored or (though there are exceptions) overlooked, leaving but little room maybe for the initial critical focus on history, mythology, or metafiction—so many doors maybe too rapidly opened onto Coover’s work (whether it be under the impulse of the early texts’ themes, the leads offered in Coover’s interviews or, still, the questions raised by the overall focus on postmodernism), while they, like the door opening onto Pricksongs & Descants as “a prologue of sorts,” had perhaps been left too conspicuously ajar. Be that as it may, these “later” works have undeniably shifted focus onto other, if not altogether different, questions, somehow upending or turning them around on themselves, and to this change in focus might be added a feeling of déjà-vu or, precisely, déjà-lu as Coover paradoxically keeps pulling the same strings again and again (pornography, the cinema, or the fairy tale motif . . . ). In any case, since many of Coover’s recent works have roots earlier in his career, it is very difficult (and perhaps contrary to Coover’s ideology) to think of his fiction as “developing” over time. Instead of thinking of his career as a line, then, one might think of it as a plane, with different works occupying different positions on the plane relative to one another, and Coover returning to these positions as needed at different moments in his career. The work is all related and the basic project is the same, but the approach to that project varies quite dramatically.
If the chronological approach favored by most critics was understandable enough at the time when they wrote the first monographs introducing Coover’s work, before long it was confronted by its own limitations or contradictions. What to say, for instance, of a novel like The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, finally published after remaining more than thirty years in the making, if you play along treating it as a “later” work, thus not only paying no heed to its episodic apparitions in one or another literary journal, but also reintroducing a chronology and linearity the novel struggles against? What to say of, and where to situate, stories like “The Dead Queen,” “McDuff on the Mound,” or “Aesop’s Forest,” which reappeared in A Child Again in 2005 after initial publications respectively in 1973, 1971 and 1986? What, again, of Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, appearing first in 1972 to be expanded and republished in 1988? Or, more dramatically still, of “The Fallguy’s Faith” published and republished in 1975, 1976, 1983 and 2005, as though indefinitely to protract the poor guy’s fall, and hence his faith, in language? What these examples show, whether or not this is deliberate on Coover’s part, is that the text, any text for that matter, reaches its readership after an unfathomable history of its own that is often passed over in silence; a history to which publication, yet another of the text’s accidents, does not necessarily put a final end.
The way the work is approached is far from being an irrelevant issue and you know as a consequence that no single viewpoint is to be privileged. In any case, the very notion of œuvre is somehow questioned by the works themselves and the way they constantly echo and impinge on one another, which eventually forbids you to give in too easily to the usual generic or chronological delineations, especially as the texts often raise those questions for themselves: the short story collections all hinge around a central theme and/or formal device that confers upon them a unity and coherence akin to that which you will find in the novels; both novels and short stories alike delight in challenging their own boundaries and disrupting the linearity of the book format that encloses them, along with the chronology that used to support the very idea of a plot; if not altogether absent from such texts as “The Babysitter” or Spanking the Maid, you feel that chronology is rather inscribed as a trompe-l’œil, more as an ironical token of what the text is not and what you, consequently, can no longer do with it, than of what it could be or could have been. You have thus become all too aware that to note such limitations in the course of your analysis, yet slavishly yielding all the while to the ready-made conventions of linear progress and clarity, would unavoidably render you guilty of the worst misinterpretation. Hence, you have no choice, really, but to accede now and again to the disruption of your syntax and interruption of the smooth, linear flow of your sentences; to dispute the organic growth and rhetorical movement of your text from one chapter to the next, so that the diverse parts your argument falls into can read, if only hypothetically, in all directions at once; to question and resist as far as you can usual textual hierarchies, which will lead you to do away with subtexts of any kind, footnotes and quotes alike—for by burying all quotes within your text, while not encasing them within quotation marks (for what function does a quote have, if not to back you up and deferentially reassert your own authority?), you wish to call attention to the unauthorized aspect of your work—a cacography of many voices impinging upon one another. Play the texts at face value and give in to mimicry: Deeds, not words! (The Public Burning, 362)
If Coover’s writing can lay claim to some exemplarity, it is to the extent to which, cornering one rather uncomfortably, it highlights the fact that you still do not know how to read; it is as if the exemplary writer’s role were to conduct you away from your mystification to the revelation of what reading is or can be. This, you feel, does not imply that the writer knows something about reading that you still have not been made privy to, nor that he possesses the ultimate knowledge of both the text and reading. You, for one, cannot pretend to ignore that the “Author” died a while ago and that with him is buried any possible textual knowledge or truth. The text, as such, is not a box you can tear open to see what is inside, a ready-made veil behind which lies, more or less hidden, meaning or so-called truth; rather, you remember, it is a perpetual interweaving, pure process that keeps doing and undoing itself so that in the end the process never stops but starts again, over, constantly: it is then incumbent upon you to take heed—“Now, c’mon, let’s try that again! From the beginning!”—and prolong the texts’ movements, to let them run on and tip into oblivion: from its fake origin to its provisional stop, Robert Coover’s work has (un)built itself around a series of rewritings and rereadings; fresh starts and erasures.
One possible way of approaching Robert Coover’s work would be to see in it so many (parodistic) variations both of previous texts and itself: the texts’ exemplarity may thus reside in their refusal to close down on anything that would be definite, given and realized once and for all—on a “text,” that is, conceived as product: even if indirectly, often along forking bypaths or back alleys (the better to get you lost, dear, although, you are sure of it, you have been here before time and again), Coover’s stories often take you to lands of the once-upon-a-time, this one time that precisely cannot equal any other; there, again time comes to a standstill (Ghost Town), the textual geography shifts about (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre), boundaries collapse (The Public Burning), everything and nothing happens at the same time (“The Babysitter”), and you emerge from the narrative to be immediately swallowed back in (John’s Wife), retracing forgotten steps that reinvent the texts and, reinventing them and the way you look at them, recreate the world and the reading you make of it. You know that independently of your numbered readings, you still have not read those texts whose singularity lies in the free variation at play within each of them, destabilizing them (Briar Rose), exhausting them performatively (Gerald’s Party), even to a degree erasing them (Pinocchio in Venice), all the while getting them ready for other variations, for other freshened possibilities.
The process of learning how to read, started afresh with each new text, with each new reading of the text, is also the process of trying out and learning new modes of perception on the world: reading the world as it is, i.e., as it is not yet, i.e., as it has always been—in motion, in a state of perpetual becoming, of not-yet-being-no-longer. You ought not to stabilize the real in a definition, nor exhaust it in a description; you ought not to enclose the world in a book but, on the contrary, subtract it from the almightiness of signification, liberate it from the tyranny of the logos; build it anew in a reading you shall immediately deconstruct if you can, rereading it. Robert Coover’s work may be nothing but a radical attempt at disincarnating language, un-fleshing the word as it were—sex and pornography become the privileged tools, though not the only ones, of a writing whose movement is from the inside out, and in the course of which mystical depths are made to rise to the surface of the world and the materiality of language: no more mystery, then, no more secrets, no more reserve; only language bodies, emptied envelopes, mere deflated surfaces turned inside out. The writing itself disseminates, seems to exhaust itself and verges, spent, on its outside, breaching all boundaries until its internal and external sides are indistinguishable, leaving you speechless, with nothing else to say, unsure of where to ground the little you could add anyway.
On you read, then, and advance in the texts, casting your eyes on the words and the letters that compose and recompose them indefinitely; you wander about the pages, inventing them, reading through surfaces (a movie screen, the arid ground of a desert, a maid’s fundament, a golf course . . . ), lusting for a breach to penetrate them with your gaze, invent a consciousness for yourself, impregnate them with your meaningful reading; yet something seems to stand in your way, diverts and forces you through other screens (the same again) to rub your face into your reading of them, and you suddenly see no difference between you and Richard Nixon, you and Lucky Pierre, you and Pinocchio—And the Bad Sport, you ask, who is he? fool! thou art! (Pricksongs & Descants, 80)—caught up as you are in the fictions of sense and purpose that entrapped you as you looked elsewhere for . . . for what? a pattern? some understanding? Understanding being overrated anyway, so you read somewhere, now the moral is forced upon you: Got it in the ass! (“Dinner with the King of England”) . . .
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The gap from game to rape leaves you agape . . .
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. . . Again: read on, find your way back in the texts, amid those letters that indefinitely reconfigure language, while the words they decompose wander about on the surface, inventing it, the surface of your inner eye’s sentient lens, laying flat on the page: you are this surface (a movie screen, the arid desert ground, the fundament of a maid, a golf course . . . ), an impregnated writing grazes against you, pierces your gaze and dissolves, through layers of senselessness and purposelessness, this consciousness of yours; but you insist on standing in the way, somewhat erect, on the lookout for a breach in the system that entrapped you, for a way out of it somehow, only to realize that you are out already, having been left out and dropped like a cue from some ancient, forgotten script. As such, you sense you have miscued, playing your part in the wrong performance, not knowing where to look, nor what and how to reflect upon amid all those textual mirrors that surround you and reflect a grotesque image back at you which, though knowing full well it is yours, you fail to recognize, muted by its own vacancy. In the course of such mirror-mirror games, in which the texts keep doubling and redoubling every step you take, you come to an understanding of sorts that you have been cast for two roles at once, caught up as you are, lucky-pierre style, between stylistic mimicry and/or futile redundancy.
In a way, you wish you could go all the way and not be caught up in your own contradictions or constantly have to justify your every move. Again forestalled, reading should somehow be entitled to a corner of the text, freely left to play with and against it, rewriting it, parodying it, offering still new variations for fear it might otherwise, in its critical dimension, hinder the text’s movement, ossify it into indelible truths forever inked on a page which would rather go blank again and try a new thing now and then, a new new thing or a new thing thing if needed, were [your] unquenchable appetite for novelty [not] matched only by [your] unquenchable appetite for understanding (“The New Thing”) . . . Favoring as it does the transience of the gesture over the permanence of beginnings, Robert Coover’s writing appears to celebrate oblivion and erasure, maliciously leaving but few traces behind yet begging for those it unavoidably leaves to be traced and retraced, drawn and withdrawn to the sound of a single tune: lèzi, scrivi—read, write; ever ready to rewrite.
Yes, remember? You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins. Despite its inherent maculation, Robert Coover’s page remains paradoxically blank after all, like the oblivious wall of a cave which forgets the flitting shadows that have danced upon it, or a movie screen at the end of a showing which, its radiant figments dissipated, is restored to its lustrous whiteness before welcoming new performances, the same again certainly, in all their infinite variety.
This, then, as every written work, should be regarded as a mere prologue, the broken cast maybe, of a text that has not been and somehow cannot be penned. The absent text it introduces thereby constitutes this written work, as every written work, as a mere prolegomenon or paralipomenon of a non-existent text that must hence be forgotten, or a parergon which finds its true meaning only in the context of an illegible ergon. This, you are afraid, might be but the counterfeit of a book which as such could not and cannot be written, condemning you, again and again, to begin anew.
