WRITING THRESHOLDS

But can the end be in the middle? Yes, yes, it always is . . .

Pricksongs & Descants

. . . and it follows that the beginning may not be where you expected to find it. Immediately placed, as Pricksongs & Descants opens, in front of a door—“The Door: A Prologue of Sorts”—you “begin,” since begin you must, by seeing that it will be quite difficult, not to say impossible, to step over the threshold: the door as such does not seem to draw any clear line, boundary, or partition between outside and inside, before and after. As in A Night at the Movies, you seem at the outset caught “inside the frame,” whether imposed by a camera or outlined by a door. The story “Inside the Frame” from A Night at the Movies minutely delineates the setting, thus causing diverse frames to be drawn, withdrawn, redrawn constantly (A loosely hinged screen door, the borders of the street, the door and windows of a bus, a young woman [ . . . ] framed by the darkness within, the gate of her house, etc.); yet you find yourself in a textual space apparently devoid of any depth, in which everything is but an undifferentiated middle with no articulation or transition whatsoever from one figure to the next. In such a space, the doors and their likes remain but they are screens in your way (screen door) and you can catch no glimpse of what may lie beyond or behind those proliferating, vulnerable thresholds (its windows opaqued with dust and grease, heard but not seen, framed by the darkness within, All of this is surrounded by darkness, What occurs between them is partly hidden behind six young women, etc.). As you come full circle at the close of the story—Down the street, the door opens again and a young woman peers out (77)—you realize that you have not moved an inch and have remained where you were. Meanwhile, threadbare elements from diverse possible plots and genres (from western to musical) intermittently stand out against no particular background, and, as the door keeps banging, the tentative thresholds that could have ushered you into definite stories keep emphasizing their incompatibility and dissonance rather than the smoothness of any possible transition or dissolve from one to the other. There is no stepping outside the frame as, again, you remain confronted with the same door as before, the same dark space within, a reassurance that is not one. (78) “And the banging door? The banging door?” you finally ask, somewhat perplexed by the fact that if it will not usher you into any definite narrative or setting, it will not close either, thus leaving you inside the shifting frame of a text that remains to be told, on a writing threshold of sorts, or at a crossroads between different narrative possibilities . . .

What Robert Coover’s work suggests, in this display, is the terrible vulnerability of those thresholds which all of a sudden disappear according to abrupt cuts and arbitrary montages in the text’s syntactic arrangement (“Charlie in the House of Rue”) or, on the contrary, repetitiously keep you moving or transiting from one place to another continuously, ceaselessly, seamlessly, or so it seems, in some textual glissando (“Lap Dissolves”)—unless, as in Ghost Town, you are merely here to mark time without being aware of it, your surroundings instead being set in motion. In both cases, whether you imperceptibly slide from one word to the next as images dissolve into one another on a movie screen, or whether you erratically leap from one sentence to the next without end or transition, the very idea of a threshold or door is paradoxically being contested by the writing, along with the concomitant idea of an enclosed, circumscribed, clearly delineated and partitioned space.

What “The Door: A Prologue of Sorts” in Pricksongs & Descants further underlines is that behind the usual reassuring partitions—those, for instance, holding apart “Jack and the Giant Beanstalk,” “Beauty and the Beast,” or “Little Red Riding Hood” that here combine to make up the story—the parts scored for you by the texts are all too familiar; those conventional arrangements that keep reemerging (the old songs, the old lies, old death-cunt-and-prick-songs, old legends, Old stories . . . ) are always the same in the end and have always forced on you those same old interpretations: lumbering through the text, you then remember, as though on cue, the old formula: fill the belly full of stones. (Pricksongs & Descants, 15) Until, that is—Perhaps today then. Perhaps very soon.—the partition collapses, the threshold subsides beneath your feet, and all you can do is extemporize a little: you literally step out of time as the sun seems brought to a strange deadly standstill (18), you sing out of tune and find yourself out of sync as even the friendly rhythmic chucking of the lumberman’s axe seems too close by today, perversely insistent in its constancy (18). Well then, you may decide to change the tempo and eventually manage to still even that finally (19), the sullen beat of the axe you played by—the better to write another score, dear.

When both the door and the text close at the end of the story, though, you barely know where you are. Like the character, you too have been propelled over the threshold but you feel at a loss to say for sure in which direction: if the door closes firmly behind you, you nevertheless feel you have stepped out rather than in, the comedy you have entered, from which you know you can never return, possessing, you are told, its own astonishments and conjurings, its towers and closets, and even more pathways, more gardens, and more doors. (19) You remain on an ephemeral, unstable threshold of sorts, that of a text yet to come or be implemented through an encounter and an emergence (18), both imminent. This prologue “of sorts”—which by the by opens as a mere continuation, almost as an afterthought: This was the hard truth: to be Jack become the Giant, his own mansions routed by the child he was. Yes, he’d spilled his beans and climbed his own green stalk to the clouds and tipped old Humpty over . . . (13)—thus calls for other “prologues” of sorts, always in the middle (where else?) of a still largely expanding, unwritten text in which what footholds you may have secured must be renegotiated permanently: as though the text, and any text of Coover’s, were but a mere preface to all that here flowers about what remains, again and again, a little book-within-a-book (79), always.

Strangely enough, you are meant to enter Pricksongs & Descants not by opening a door—Aha! To begin with: the door was open! (17)—but, on the contrary, by closing it firmly onto all those “old stories” you all too often have read or been told about, like a summation of an old woman’s witless terrors, fierce sinuous images with flashing teeth and terrible eyes, phantoms springing from the sun’s night-tunnels to devour you (17). And while your task may be to keep closing all those old textual doors through which you have read again and again, what Pricksongs & Descants purports to do is simultaneously to hint at and unlock other possible doors you might wish to contemplate for their elaborateness and embellishment rather than for the places they might usher you into; so many poetical doors that so far have been denied you as, for years and years, forever it seemed, you have kept coming here to find—you hesitate: some dim memory—? no, no—that those doors, always, had been closed. (17) In other words, the door into the book—and, somehow, into Coover’s work flowering about—is as much a liberating door out of former constricted arrangements, out of preordained, mythical scripts, out of the usual beaten tracks of sterile imagination. And once “inside,” you thus feel the immediate oppression of the scene behind drop off your shoulders like a red cloak (19) as more doors tentatively present themselves to you: you have been released from the grip of mythology, free to explore at your own leisure a vast, opening, expanding world of ficciones through other innumerable opening doors; like the sensuous one in front of which “The Gingerbread House” has you pause, for instance, vibrant with uncertainty and worth more in itself, certainly, than what it might open onto—but beyond: what is the sound of black rags flapping? (75)—or like the door of an elevator opening on nothing in particular, no definite story, as its function rather resides in the connection and perpetual motion between all stories at once, all of them variations on each other, on a different scale or level . . .

In choosing “The Elevator” as the book’s organizing principle, Coover substitutes a perpetual movement up and down a vertical axis (Pricksongs—he thrusts) around which feminine variations (Descants—she heaves . . . ) hover, for the usual, conventional, Aristotelian linearity of a text with a beginning, a middle, and an end; if linearity is not altogether absent from Pricksongs & Descants, it has been maintained ironically as the book does read from a beginning “of sorts” with “The Door” to a finale gone unsatisfyingly wrong with “The Hat Act” whose last words self-referentially emphasize the sense of an ending: THIS ACT IS CONCLUDED / THE MANAGEMENT REGRETS THERE / WILL BE NO REFUND (256). At any rate, the linearity—also present in the chronology interspersed throughout a story like “The Babysitter” for instance—acts here, you feel, more as a backdrop against which the variational movement of the texts, their constant comings and goings between diverse possibilities, is made apparent.

The notion of progression through the texts and the book is thus somehow invalidated; the writing, because it generates from a double movement of variation—Pricksongs & Descants—draws lines bound to fold back on themselves as they pass through the same points again and again. Also, simultaneously, the boundaries between stories are bound to be porous, much like those separating tales (“The Door”), genres (“Morris in Chains”) or media (“Panel Game,” “The Sentient Lens”). If “The Elevator” is composed of fifteen lexias, each one supposedly numbered after the fifteen floors of the building—One to fourteen, plus “B” for basement (125)—the text does not progress from lexia to lexia, but rather regularly comes back to the different variants of an initial idea it keeps exploring; echoes are thus generated as some lines intermesh with others, much as in “The Magic Poker,” “Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl,” or “The Babysitter.” Yet, despite the sense of an ending created by the elevator’s apparent crash in the last lexia, the story does not reach the logical conclusion it would have strived for from the beginning, nor any final “conclusion” for that matter; instead, it may have merely reached a pause in the narration as Martin continues his tedious climb, pausing from time to time to stare back down the stairs behind him. (137) There is, as such, no conventionally unified plot in “The Elevator” which instead only projects tentative snatches of narrative within a frame imposed by mere analogy or mimeticism with what is being described: the ascent (sometimes the descent) of an elevator. The number of the last lexia is significantly followed by ellipses, so as to suggest that, like the elevator, the story has and is no end in itself, nor is it a closed, hermetic totality which, Martin muses, if reduced by one, and no matter how suffused it may be, would then be as nothing.

The notion of category on which Martin ponders (129) only reinforces the fact that boundaries are arbitrary and that the partition of reality into isolated, particularized elements, a view inherited from Aristotelianism, is partial and reductive. Yet the opposite Platonic view it historically superseded, the grand comprehensive view of the whole, is not itself anything more than a fabrication, also potentially reductive in its comprehensive approach to what, almost by definition, remains in excess; Martin will thus appropriately find himself on the fifteenth floor of the building—Fool! wretched fool! he wept, there is no fifteenth floor! (132)—a narrative move that highlights the reductive aspect of the very notions of both totality and category. You then, like Martin, are led to wonder about the story’s potential “totality,” its unity or completeness outside your reading that puts it in motion; for perhaps that’s all there is to it, after all. Motion and the medium. Energy and weighted particles. Force and matter. [ . . . ] Ascent and the passive reorganization of atoms (129)—the image grips you purely, too: pricksongs and descants, you muse . . .

Each section or lexia in the story appears then, in its reorganization of initial or atomic elements, as the variation of and upon all others: each morning, Martin has to take the elevator up to his office located on the fourteenth floor of the building (in section 7, you witness the reversal of the basic initial situation: Martin is waiting for the elevator to take him down at the end of his working day; yet it continues on its impossible course upwards); from then on, as in most stories, anything can happen. (20) However, this “anything” is not in itself exhaustive but rather points to the multiplicity or infinite variety and/or variability of a singular atomic scene repeated, refracted, retracted, expanded, paralleled, or parodied in each section of the text. And in a sense, anything does happen, i.e., since the totality is as nothing (129), nothing and everything happen(s) in this permanent textual reorganization or reshaping which, etymologically at least, justifies the use of the term “fictions” borrowed by Coover from Borges as an indication of genre.

The fictions gathered in Pricksongs & Descants, a bit like the lexias of “The Elevator,” keep opening up, reaching and expanding outside themselves, and, despite their differences, maybe thanks to them, the way they close (or rather fail to or, still, refuse to) creates resonances or vibrations. Each ending or stop—the stories all converge towards a clearly marked closure: a door is latched (“The Door”), a boat departs from an invented island (“The Magic Poker”), Morris is committed (“Morris in Chains”), Hansel and Gretel are about to be initiated (“The Gingerbread House”), death, literal and/or symbolic, closes each of the “Seven Exemplary Fictions,” an elevator crashes (“The Elevator”), the day or evening draws to a close (“A Pedestrian Accident” and “The Babysitter”), a spiral is completed (“The Leper’s Helix,” itself a conclusion to “The Sentient Lens” triptych)—might then be seen as the suspension of the textual movement rather than its completion, much as an elevator would halt, suspended and vibrant, at a particular floor (129). Each halt is but momentary and the writing feeds on the gaps left open. Something is yet to happen, some other variation is left in abeyance. Each story thus resists the closure it enacts and the writing occurs in-between, just as the elevator’s motion takes place between the floors it opens onto; the writing takes its place in the midst of other stories it contends with; it occurs between sections and lexias, between stories and, almost literally so, between the lines, in the gaps and blanks, what is left untold (“Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl,” “J’s Marriage,” “The Sentient Lens”) or, which paradoxically amounts to much the same thing, what is told in excess in those fictions (“The Magic Poker,” “Panel Game,” “The Babysitter”) that keep adding up and saturating the page with ever-new, contradictory fragments of plots which, instead of focusing your reading onto a meaning made tighter and more univocal as you read on, rather loosen the diverse threads making up the story as much as they unmake it, pulling in opposite directions at once.

“Morris in Chains,” in its stichomythic arrangement between two worlds and two writings (nature/culture, science/pastoral), somehow illustrates what takes shape in Pricksongs & Descants and among each of the stories that compose it. Morris, the minstrel of a pastoral world, embodies a breach in the city’s system with his own patternless and irresponsible life. (48) As Morris decides to keep on the sidelines, remaining in the margins he invents at the very heart of the system, the latter threatens to collapse and come undone; Morris’ position loosens the rigid grid of the city. All of this is emphasized in the transcription of Morris’ interior monologue, significantly placed between parentheses, in which can be read the refusal of all coordination, organization, or hierarchization of and in language and grammar. For all that, and although the system, under the aegis of Doris Peloris, ends up catching up with Morris, he seems successful in turning what appears as a circumscribed and self-enclosed, grammatically subordinated space (the parentheses), into a (non-)space of autonomous creation, perforating holes in the official grammar and unlocking every bolt in the city’s systemized space: nothing is isolated any longer, connections magically operate—as is well known, our parks are not connected. It is not yet clear how Morris forded the concrete stretches, but on the other hand, it is no secret that he has friends in the City. (47)—openings are created, paths forked, networks traced, and the writing expands in the middle, through the middle, by the middle: the ending is once again provisional and already challenged for, you are warned, though he remains in chains, Morris’ story may not be ended. (59)

And indeed, Morris’ story keeps (re)writing itself: “Shootout at Gentry’s Junction” in A Night at the Movies could somehow be read as a variation on “Morris in Chains.” Both stories alternate between two opposite worldviews and the two languages backing them up. Sheriff Hank Harmon, as a warrant of peace and—harmony, is it?—takes the place of the rationalistic city as embodied by Doris Peloris, while Morris is superseded by Don Pedo, the Mexican outlaw who, in a complete reversal of western conventions, will parodically end up victorious in the final shootout. As is the case in “Morris in Chains,” the anti-discourse of subversion can only take its cue from inside the parentheses which, far from confining or subordinating language, unleashes it: words are set free and loose in an oralized language that defies convention and grammatical correctness in both stories (the subversion and minoration is even carried a step further in “Shootout at Gentry’s Junction” with the parasitic Hispanicization and italicization of “proper” English), even if Morris’ direct speech now turns into free indirect speech in Don Pedo’s case, his language somehow extending beyond its source, perverting the narrator’s. The way “Morris in Chains” concludes may sound pessimistic at first—( . . . aah! Rameses! why’d they go and do that to ye for? it’s the motherin insane are free!) (60)—Morris nevertheless has the last word and so does Don Pedo as both stories eventually close on their subversive voices.

Don Pedo, riding west towards the setting sun (Hee hee hee!), is free; Morris, in chains, may not be. Yet Morris has the gift of the gab and it may be this power to link words onto words without end, unpredictably, immoderately, outrageously in tall-tale fashion, that defenders of order in any ungifted ga(r)b are trying to restrict at all costs. “Morris in Chains” thus finds a further echo in “The Wayfarer,” the last of the “Seven Exemplary Fictions” meant for your edification. Unlike Morris, though, the anonymous wayfarer sitting on the edge of a road remains stubbornly silent, even when enjoined by the narrator—a policeman you somehow, though unwillingly perhaps, in your search for understanding, are bound to identify with—to acknowledge his presence by talking to him. It will take a gunshot wound to make him talk: and then he spoke. He spoke rapidly, desperately, with neither punctuation nor sentence structure. Just a ceaseless eruption of obtuse language. (123) It will take another shot, in the head this time, to make him stop. At last. Symbolically, the wayfarer’s death takes the form of an emasculation as the gush of his words accelerates and the eruption of exclamation marks—and it seems difficult to ascertain whether these are meant to transcribe the wayfarer’s ejaculatory intonation or whether they contaminate the policeman’s report—stresses the quasi-orgasmic dimension of a language that, released from all constraints, jars against the background of the policed traffic which uniformly [ . . . ] flow[s], quietly, possessed of its own unbroken grace and precision. (124) Soothed by its melodious rhythm, the narrator will himself unsurprisingly enter the flow.

All attempts at regulating and rationalizing language, at vouching for univocal, uniform, unambiguous meanings—the narrator of “The Wayfarer” notably wishes there could be no further ambiguities (121)—also seek to sterilize the creative process by narrowing or closing down the gaps, eradicating lapses, and channeling all sorts of deviations from accepted norms, rules, and conventions (like Morris, the wayfarer remains on the sidelines, literally on the side of the road, apart from the ongoing traffic . . . ). Such castration, already implicit at the close of “Morris in Chains”—“Now, a sample of your semen, please,” said the doctor turning her back, replacing the stethoscope in her black bag (59)—becomes literal at the end of “The Marker” when the police officer, without ceremony, pulls Jason’s genitals out flat on the tabletop and pounds them to a pulp with the butt of his gun. (91) As though to account and almost to apologize for his gesture, the police officer—who yet has been waiting for this to happen from the very beginning of the story, somehow awaiting his cue in the wings of the text; the narrator’s initial mention of him and his four assistants in the story’s opening line (88) thus highlights the ironical and theatrical aspect of the castration, as well as the rhetorical dimension of the declamation that accompanies it—finally explains: I am not, in the strictest sense, a traditionalist. I mean to say that I do not recognize tradition qua tradition as sanctified in its own sake. On the other hand, I do not join hands with those who find inherent in tradition some malignant evil, and who therefore deem it of terrible necessity that all customs be rooted out at all costs. I am personally convinced, if you will permit me, that there is a middle road, whereon we recognize that innovations find their best soil in traditions, which are justified in their own turn by the innovations that created them. I believe, then, that law and custom are essential, but that it is one’s constant task to review and revise them. In spite of that, however, some things still make me puke! (91) Were you not afraid to meet the same fate as Jason’s—you never know—you could almost venture to say that there is something quite absurd in the narrative situation as exposed: Jason inserts a marker in the book he has been reading, undresses, turns the light off and goes in search of his anonymous wife—a perfect symbol, in Jason’s eyes, of ideal Beauty (John’s Wife might not be very far in the background)—lying naked on their connubial bed, before the light is abruptly turned back on by the police officer intruding with his four assistants upon Jason copulating with his now dead wife whose corpse has been left rotting for three weeks . . . In-between: the room’s darkness and the wife’s laughs while Jason goes / went / is going in blind search through a room whose geography he can no longer recognize.

The policeman’s justification seems to move the story towards some metafictional allegory and offers you several interpretive leads, inviting you to draw connections between Jason’s wife and the book he has been reading, the marker and the castration, or to see in Jason’s wife a new Medea leading him—and you—to his loss . . . Yet for all that, meaning as such resists univocal, authoritative disclosure, tracing instead a “middle road” which, though it undoubtedly taunts you, may actually lead nowhere. This, at least, if not ascertainable in itself, is perhaps suggested by the story’s proximity to “Panel Game” in which the answer given to this big question the text never clearly formulates happens to be “much ado about nothing” (87)—an ironical leitmotiv, you fear, pervading Coover’s work—one of the few Shakespearean titles you, unfortunate Unwilling Participant that you are, forget to mention as you go through them. “The Marker” redoubles this pointless quest for meaning, playing as it does with the instability of the poles and roles surrounding the written text—much in the same way that Spanking the Maid does for instance, forcing maid and master to exchange parts constantly—and thus refers you back to yourself, reflecting a blurry image of you as reader: as such, Jason’s wife may be the metaphor of writing and/or reading traditions—the term “marker” seems ambiguous enough to allow for both—which . . .

a) Jason, as the avatar of the writer, fails to emancipate himself from;

b) Jason, as the avatar of the reader, utterly neglects or disregards, going beyond the limits imposed by good taste and common sense;

c) the police officer, as the writer’s alter ego, accounts for in a speech that turns into a defense of aesthetic choices, echoing . . .

____________________

 

I know, I know . . . here we are in the middle of a book where prologues seem inappropriate, etc. (76) Anywhere “prologues” may be, they do seem to remain inappropriate anyway, usurping a space that was never properly theirs in the first (first?) place. Well, here we are in the middle of a text, too, for that matter, dear Bob (may I?), whose frame and unfolding usually forbid any such interruption, such break and disruption not regulated, that is, by customary conventions, from quotes to footnotes that, is it for fear of contamination?, are usually held apart, kept at a safe remove from the main body of text, merely adorning the foot of a page here, or there handled with extreme care, between tweezers-like quotation marks (some, like myself, merely change the layout . . . ). Some space is thus cleared so that a (putative) “outside” of the text can be allowed in, provided the text remains safely hermetic; but letting the text—or, worse still, making it—leak out, or getting out of the text anywhere but where expected, in a well-earned epilogue or conclusion, is usually frowned upon. Let me say, Bob, that despite all that, I shall try to follow the example you set for me: not giving a hoot for sterile conventions, you get in through the middle from where, immediately, you get out, leaving your characters in the lurch lamenting that the place has sprung a goddamn leak or something! (A Night at the Movies, 183) But can the end be in the middle? Yes, yes, it always is . . . (33), says your narrator in “The Magic Poker.”

Well, I sally here to confess that I am greatly tempted to read in the prologue to your “Seven Exemplary Fictions” that you dedicate to your beloved Maestro Miguel de Cervantes, a theoretical aside, a “sally” of your own—which, I trust you will agree, is in itself already quixotic, is it not?—out of the fictional frames you imposed, even an aesthetic manifesto of sorts, for, justifying the title under which you chose to have those seven short texts appear, you in turn—if I read you rightly—are trying to define the exemplarity of your own writing, confronting it with your Maestro’s Novelas ejemplares, even quoting, sometimes pilfering, from its prólogo.

Cervantes’ writing, you find, is exemplary in more ways than one: not only do his texts embody an example of Cervantes’ art—and, similarly, your “Seven Exemplary Fictions” exemplify yours, both past and to come—but they also constitute for their reader a new form of exemplum, some moral example both in content (un ejemplo provechoso cannot fail to be found in the representation they offer) and form (in their representativeness, making of the writer a representative of the reader, they permit me, for one, to take part, through imagination, in the City’s policies—poner en la plaza de nuestra república una mesa de trucos donde cada uno pueda llegar a entretenerse sin daño de barras). And with help from your friend don Roberto S., you then add that thus [Cervantes’] novelas stand as exemplars of responsibility to that most solemn and pious charge placed upon this vocation: they tell good stories and they tell them well. (77)

There is more: Cervantes’ writing, you find, is exemplary also in that it provides you with a concrete example of how the threshold into a new literary age can be crossed, for like him somehow, we, too, seem to be standing at the end of one age and on the threshold of another. We, too, have been brought to a blind alley by the critics and analysts; we, too, suffer from a “literature of exhaustion,” though ironically our non-heroes are no longer tireless and tiresome Amadises, but hopelessly defeated and bed-ridden Quixotes. “Exhausted,” yes (and your other friend don Juan B. undoubtedly applauded: Ah, splendid, Bob!), all but finished off after the “last Quixote” of them all gave it the coup de grâce—such, at least, is your conviction—with his poor old Malone’s protracted dying out; it nonetheless seems, if I may judge by your own production, that good times were and are still ahead of the “novel” as a literary form, whose name may have never been more appropriate. All you have to do, it seems, is take up Cervantes’ legacy and turn the literary revolution he put in motion up on its head, taking it, that is, a step further still, even if that necessary step now has to be taken against the “novel” and thus—bless him!—Cervantes himself: perhaps, you almost apologize to him, above all else your works were exemplars of a revolution in narrative fiction, a revolution which governs us—not unlike the way you found yourself abused by the conventions of the Romance—to this very day. In other words, dear Bob, you, in this prólogo, call on Cervantes’ spirit the better to stray away from him or, not him perhaps, but the novelistic tradition he breathed long life into, a tradition which now, all but ossified, miserably lags behind contemporary realities; this upheaval of yours, this new revolution, has to be undertaken—you insist, again taking your cue from the Maestro’s example—like all true revolutions somehow, not beside, but from within, from the very core of the dying form. You write: You teach us, Maestro, by example, that great narratives remain meaningful through time as a language-medium between generations, as a weapon against the fringe-areas of our consciousness, and as a mythic reinforcement of our tenuous grip on reality. The novelist uses familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms and to conduct the reader (lector amantísimo!) to the real, away from mystification to reality, away from magic to maturity, away from mystery to revelation. (79)

The literary revolution spurred by Cervantes’ writing—again, like all revolutions for that matter—did not give birth to the “novel” ex nihilo; not yet quite a novel as we came to know it, Don Quixote somehow remains a Romance, albeit a parodic and much more complex one and, following the same impulse, Cervantes’ stories, you claim, struggled against the unconscious mythic residue in human life and sought to synthesize the unsynthesizable, sallied forth against adolescent thought-modes and exhausted art forms, and returned home with new complexities. In fact, no matter how experimental they might at first appear, the stories gathered in your Pricksongs & Descants—like most of your narratives, dear Bob, from the historical novel (The Public Burning) to the western (Ghost Town), from the sports novel (The Universal Baseball Association or Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?) to the detective story (Gerald’s Party or Noir), from the fairy tale (Briar Rose or Stepmother) to the codes of pornography (Spanking the Maid or The Adventures of Lucky Pierre) . . . —do build upon clearly identified familiar mythic or historical forms, upending them, turning them loose against themselves: fairy tales (“The Door,” “The Gingerbread House,” “The Magic Poker”), biblical episodes (“The Brother,” “J’s Marriage”), the pastoral tradition (“Morris in Chains”), popular entertainment—whether street theater (“A Pedestrian Accident”), the circus (“Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady”), TV and/or the cinema (“Panel Game,” “The Babysitter,” “The Sentient Lens”) . . . In a way, the text introducing your “Seven Exemplary Fictions” is no exception to the rule, considering that in itself the “prologue” is part of a literary tradition your Maestro himself willingly abided by: the prologue is this (pre-)textual space authors used to claim as theirs in order to address their dear beloved reader. However, advancing through the text, barber’s basin on [your] head (79), to address your predecessor, you make an appearance as a reader, his reader, thus subverting the genre’s conventions: you turn the prologue into a platform of sorts from which the reader now, gaining some textual space of his own, is free to address his dear beloved author (autor amantísimo!). Willy-nilly, you thus implicitly question, dear Bob, the place and role of every reader in any text and, if you insist on appearing as the writer of those apprentice fictions (76) in the guise of a “postmodern” Quixote, your persona—nevermind mine—can also be seen, in my eyes at least, as an avatar of the reader. One more suggestion, if need be, that writing and reading, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, you and me!—blasphemy!—might actually be much the same in the end . . . To read is already to rewrite; to write, to reread, again . . .

Despite appearances—such is indeed your intention: to probe beyond the phenomenological, beyond appearances (78)—your Dedicatoria y prólogo a don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra whose primary function is to introduce the following “exemplary fictions,” may not be a sally out of the fictional frame which, you will probably agree again, dear Bob, is, as is often the case (The Public Burning, for one, offering a striking example), blurry and shifty. The House of Fiction once envisioned by your illustrious predecessor Henry J., which now and again you seem fond of moving into, long enough at least to toy with the furniture and tinker with the decoration—Gerald’s house, “The House of Rue,” or the lodgings of this other Henry J. in The Universal Baseball Association, of course come to mind, even if those new embodiments of the fictional house now seem to feed on claustrophobia . . . —has slowly been crumbling apart and, behind its pierced aperture(s), whether broad or balconied, or slit-like and low-browed, can no longer be held together by any unifying consciousness (Gerald’s house slowly empties out . . . ). For indeed: a good look has told me that the wider the cracks, the more difficult getting out paradoxically appears, since the walls now no longer trace any clear boundaries between outside and inside, the outside ending up leak[ing] in like some kind of deadly miasma (Gerald’s Party, 309), while the house itself looks like it’s suffering from violent nosebleed (38) . . .

But to the point: a bit like what is happening in “The Magic Poker,” the prologue to the “Seven Exemplary Fictions” rather appears as—if, dear Bob, you will be so kind as to pardon my French—a metaleptic twist than a theoretical pause or sally out proper. The important part played by metafiction in most of your texts would tend to show that while they reflect (on) the rules of their unfolding and composition—I wander the island, inventing it. (Pricksongs & Descants, 20) Thus opens, as with the stroke of a magic wand, “The Magic Poker”: the island (along with the one providing the setting of “Beginnings” as the ironical conclusion of In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters) functions as a metaphor of the text itself, text as process rather than product, with all its false starts, erasures, constant branching and dividing; or, in other words, as a metaphor of the text as I, being invented by it, wander it, reading and re-inventing it at the same time as it keeps reshuffling its five basic components to achieve poker-like new combinations between the narrator, the two sisters, the caretaker’s son, the tall man in the turtleneck shirt, and the magic poker; and as I wonder about them and the connections between them, the text keeps marveling at, playing with and questioning in the meantime, its own (im-)possibilities—while, then, the texts in their metafictional dimension reflect (on) the rules of their unfolding and composition, they also invalidate any separation (necessarily artificial) between “theory” and “praxis,” “criticism” and “fiction,” “reading” and “writing” . . .

Well, then, what I am saying is that your intervention in the text, Bob, in the form of an apparent metalepsis—you pretend to overthrow the fictional frame, as though the fictional frame could (reassuringly) be discarded; but “The Door” shows that once entered, we never return—has an inevitable counterpart, for it is now my turn, with you, to enter the text, and I will not have long to wait until “Panel Game,” the first of your exemplary fictions, designates me, fool though I am, as the Unwilling Participant in this dangerous game that takes place in front of the cameras (one more hint, among many, that I, spectator no more, am now being watched from the outside, unlocatable as the latter has become: the Eyes of the World are upon me . . . ). The frame that the very notion of “prologue” presupposes, thus flickers and implodes: your text takes its place not beside nor outside fiction, but rather defines, ah yes!, “exemplifies” it in all the senses of the word you have listed: triple exemplarity of a text which already exemplifies what it announces in the subsequent stories, which acts for its reader (you, dear Bob, as Cervantes’ reader, also represents me, yours), providing me, for one, with a profitable example of a reading mode I am now able to appropriate and re-present just as you did following Cervantes’ example; for, you say, it is above all to the need for new modes of perception and fictional forms able to encompass them that I, barber’s basin on my head, address these stories. (79) New modes of perception and, a fortiori, of reading, and fictional forms thus inevitably go hand in hand, and it seems to me, if I may, that this is what this prologue to your “Seven Exemplary Fictions” exemplarily highlights.

Somehow, I too wish it had been possible, dear Bob, to dispense with writing these few words altogether, but I felt compelled to acknowledge in some small, albeit undoubtedly inappropriate way, the example you set for me in writing this prologue. I thought I might as well—as far (not very . . . ) as I could—have recourse to my own tongue, which, for all its stammering, did well enough, hopefully, to state some truths that are nonetheless self-evident, though I am all too aware that it would be absurd to expect the exact truth in such matters . . . I do hope, in any case, that I have not strayed too far from the point and your purposes, nor dishonestly disclosed any hidden mystery which exalts the merit of your writing; what I merely meant to suggest was that this exemplary prologue of yours also was an exercise of sorts in performative reading which, much like the subtle art of our mutual friend Pierre Ménard, has enriched, from my perspective at least, the halting and rudimentary art of reading. For following your Maestro’s example, you also inevitably (though perhaps without wanting to) showed me an example of reading, not to say—for I fear I might never be up to such a standard—an exemplary mode of reading, by taking the text at its face value so as to act on it, thus putting it back on the billiard-table for my amusement and recreation as much as for my edification; so as, simultaneously, to snatch and rescue it from its mythified content, which has certainly been accruing all this time, especially with the critics and analysts’ interventions, the same who are now at their wits’ end to grapple with all these pricksongs & descants you have been interpolating from your Maestro’s art and whose main purpose in playing, as your prologue does, with preexisting texts and conventions, may be to exemplify the very nature of the literary text, in that it remains, in itself, contingent and unnecessary—useless to say, once fully registered, this does indeed beg for radical changes in the way I, critical analyst like the rest of them, approach the texts . . .

Well, then, dear Bob, follow you I must, wherever you may be leading me; for this, too, is a calling of sorts—to each Quixote his own Sancho Panza, lagging behind, an honest man perhaps but with very little wit in his pate, and the little he may have all but put to an understanding of his master’s voice . . . Ah, vale, Maestro, saddle up! One last word, though—if you will allow me—as a mere prologue to all that is yet to come on this side of the page (I may be disappearing, yet you have more to face, and even more to suffer from me, I am afraid . . . ), somehow to give me patience to bear all the ill that will be spoken of me, no doubt, by more than one subtle and starched critic: yo quedo aquí contentísimo por parecerme que voy mostrando en algo el deseo que tengo de servir a vuestra excelencia como a mi verdadero señor y bienhechor mío.

Etc.

 

_________ . . . what Coover himself writes in the prologue to his “Seven Exemplary Fictions” as a manifesto of sorts, parodic though it might be: Narrative fiction, taking a cue from Lazarillo and the New World adventurers, became a process of discovery, and to this day, young authors sally forth in fiction like majestic—indeed, divinely ordained!—pícaros to discover, again and again, their manhood. (78) Such a quest for “manhood,” which (literally) animates Jason, is put a painful term to by . . .

d) . . . the police officer, as the critic’s alter ego, as suggested this time by the rhetorical construction of his lines and the use of such verbs as “mean” or “review” for instance, etc.

Yet, when related to the other castrations that punctuate Pricksongs & Descants, the police officer’s role seems to be somewhat qualified for, come what may, he remains in a position of authority and eventually retains power; for this very reason at least, his character, as anywhere else in Coover’s work, remains unreliable. The castration he inflicts upon Jason is twofold: at first literal and explicit, it is then mirrored in the story’s last lines when the officer catches a glimpse of Jason’s book, leafs through it with an expression of mild curiosity (92), and inadvertently lets the marker fall to Jason’s utmost dismay. The police officer has thus erased all traces of Jason’s presence within the book, dispossessing him somehow, disavowing, and canceling out his reading, thus condemning him to reread. The castration puts a stop to the text, closes it down or stitches it off while, around it, several plausible interpretations, yet none averred, seem to loom in the background; meaning as such is thus frozen yet made imminent and multiple in an enigma that, try as you might, will not yield. The police officer may however be right about one particular point: there is a middle road, a road in-between, that is, like that traced by a marker inserted in the middle of a book, a marker that will run sensually through it, caressing its every page randomly—never an end in itself, only a pause, a contemplation, the mark of your motion through it, your incessant desire for it as you feel your way into it . . .

Beyond the apparent absurdity of the situation then, “The Marker” may be highlighting the desire underlying all reading; if Jason is guilty of something, it might be that he interrupted his own reading, that he subordinated his desire for text to his desire for sex, ignoring that they may be one and the same: Jason is sitting in an armchair with a book in his hand, a book he has doubtless been reading, although now he is watching his wife get ready for bed. (88) The term although clearly suggests that in Jason’s mind and possibly the narrator’s, literary and erotic desires are incompatible: Jason thus has a choice to make, reading on or making love . . . Yet the story’s ambiguity or, rather, undecidability, seems to indicate that such opposition has no raison d’être in the first place, Jason’s wife herself maybe nothing more than a mere metaphor of the text as she folds back the blankets of the bed [ . . . ], fluffs her short blonde hair, crawls onto the fresh sheets on her hands and knees, pokes gently at the pillows, then rolls down on her back, hands under her head, gazing across the room at Jason. [ . . . ] Before extinguishing the light behind his chair, [Jason] glances across the room at his wife once more, her tanned body gay and relaxed, a rhythm of soft lines on the large white canvas of the bed. (88-9) The white canvas on which Jason’s wife is couched can also be likened to a white page (fresh sheets, in the printer’s parlance) that gives shape and body to the rhythmic lines that run through it. Jason’s book again acts as an interference to his sexual desire—only when he puts the book aside can Jason smile: He stands, returns her gaze for almost a minute without smiling, and then does smile, at the same time placing his book on the table (89)—while it may actually be the source of it. A bit like John’s anonymous wife, Jason’s anonymous wife, a rhythm of soft lines on a pure white surface, is in herself a fiction of sorts, a fiction of desire for fictions of desire (ad lib.); a purely textual object seen through the prism of Jason’s blind desire: And she: she is beautiful, affectionate, and has a direct and charming manner of speaking, if we were to hear her speak. (88) But you will not. Only her laughter will resonate in the dark; seen through Jason’s eyes—the narrator never departs from his character’s point of view—his wife has no other reality in the text than in her husband’s vision of her, as a mere “image” that fades into an abstraction as soon as the light goes off, eventually to become indistinct and untextured (89), losing all of her appeal in this loss of texture . . . There is finally no choosing between one (the book) or the other (the wife), as discarding the one amounts to killing the other off.

Nowhere in Coover’s work is choosing easy; “The Babysitter” alone conveys the impossibility or pointlessness of choosing or selecting between multiple, often contradictory variants within one single frame. Making sense of what is happening in the course of the evening—hence of the story itself—in a usual, conventional way, indeed entails reducing the text to some of its apparently compatible fragments; that is, considering each of the text’s lexias and the diverse paths through the story that they implement to be mutually exclusive, while the logic presiding over the writing instead leads you to see in them mutually in(-con-) clusive variations. As such, meaning can hardly be said to be relative—that, you know all too well, would amount to nothing more than one last desperate attempt to salvage it—for relativity itself is dependent on the adoption of one referential frame to the exclusion of any other; the frame, however, no longer enough, is what the narrative act strains to explode (meanwhile in “The Babysitter,” Dolly cannot fit in her own girdle anymore . . . ). For to choose here is to put aside or discard as (momentarily, perhaps) irrelevant; to choose is to select certain fragments, i.e., to reject others; to choose is to seize, to freeze, the better to get hold of the text’s meaning while holding its motion in check. Yes, to choose, you are reminded, is to act as a critic, having passed judgment (some things still make me puke!), having deliberated, ignoring all this time the very crisis that meaning goes through and that the text stages for you. For meaning, you feel, is not buried in the text, there for you to ex-plain or dis-cover; rather, meaning, ungraspable as it is, might be exemplified in Jason’s wife herself, for whatever meaning there might be in her motion exists within the motion itself and not in her deliberations. (88) Meaning is/as motion, meaning is/as a moving threshold—an endless intermission; against deliberation, the liberation . . . To have done with judgment; to have done with criticism itself. To have done, then, with the police officer and his violent enforcement of spurious meaning, compelling you to choose one or the other when it is, has always been, one and the other.

I wander the island, inventing it. I make a sun for it, and trees—pines and birch and dogwood and firs—and cause the water to lap the pebbles of its abandoned shores. This, and more: I deposit shadows and dampness, spin webs, and scatter ruins. Yes: ruins. A mansion and guest cabins and boat houses and docks. Terraces, too, and bath houses and even an observation tower. All gutted and window-busted and autographed and shat upon. I impose a hot midday silence, a profound and heavy stillness. But anything can happen. (20) And, you understand this now, or seem to, the opening lexia of “The Magic Poker” revolves almost solely around the word “and” which even seems to contaminate other words (I w-and-er the isl-and . . . ), setting the tone for this logic of the and that gives shape to the entire story (and, beyond, you feel, even Coover’s aesthetic as such) which, but for this no doubt calculable formula of event and pagination (40) as a writing constraint, could proliferate ad infinitum. Against the univocal, relative logic of the or—whether associative or disassociative, the conjunction or forces you to consider only one of the terms in the alternative at a time: your reading skills are limited—which pushes you to read decisively, cutting your way through the texts according to their surface coherence, Coover here, as anywhere, it seems, in Pricksongs & [yes: and] Descants and much of his work, leaves it up to you not to choose, or to see for yourself how futile choosing has become—a futility made explicit in the closing lexia of “The Magic Poker”: they have probably forgotten why they built all the things on this island in the first place, or whatever possessed them seriously to concern themselves, to squander good hours, over the selection of this or that object to decorate the newly made spaces or to do the things that had usually to be done, over the selection of this or that iron poker, for example. (45) Instead, Coover’s writing proceeds from the middle, through the middle—the narrator of “The Magic Poker,” wandering the island, inventing it, proceeds both ex nihilo and in medias res, as suggested by the scattered ruins, vestiges, even if fake, of former times, remnants of a ruined chronology and/or linearity. Incidentally, he imposes a hot mid-day silence on his creation . . . —coming and going, between different voices and points of view that progressively mix and undifferentiate themselves in the weaving of the text’s intricate web (24), rather than starting and finishing: the story itself, being organized around the girls’ arrival on and departure from the island, is one of “wandering” rather than “wondering,” thus doing away with your questions and uncertainties, disease of your western mind, even before you were given the chance to formulate them. If writing is a journey—exemplary adventures of the Poetic Imagination, high-minded journeys toward the New World (78)—this journey is without beginning or end as both imply a false conception of voyage and movement; in the course of such wandering, the crossed thresholds, the opened doors, are but transitory, arbitrary stops steps en route toward the constant reinvention of the “New World,” a new world constantly sabotaged, withdrawn and redrawn by the poet’s imagination, somewhere in the middle, in-between the text inked on the page and what, trying to fix its mirrored counterpart here, you could ever say about it.

For somehow there is a cycle, a flow, a current of meaning; meaning is not here or there, meaning is what “passes,” and claiming to stop it in order to grasp it is nothing more than condemning yourself to miss it. The writing furrows and burrows—you merely borrow—the grooves through which meaning can pass, before stitching them up to court others eventually, displacing them, filling them in, saturating them, all the while folding and, it seems, closing itself back upon itself, looping its loops in tautological fashion, challenging you to figure it all out. “Klee Dead,” in its entirety, might even be read as the tautological duplication or prolonged stutter of its title: Klee, Wilbur Klee, is dead, possibly having committed suicide, yes, surely he has, perhaps he has, and, then, but maybe there is no connection, for if you wish to assume a cause-and-effect relationship—that he is dead because he jumped from a high place—well, you are free to do so (106), yet in any case, he—who? Klee: Wilbur Klee was Wilbur Klee, that’s where it starts and ends. And already I may have pushed too far, perhaps that’s not his name at all, I may have made it up, very likely in fact, given my peculiar and unprincipled penchant for logogriphics—but no matter! (107)—no matter, indeed, for Klee is dead . . . In fact, no narrative will ever be able to account for his death better than the title already does, and the text can only stammer and restart regularly, from its very begin-end—Klee, Wilbur Klee, dies. Is dead, rather. I know I know: too soon. (104)—having no other option but to fold back upon itself, short-circuiting the linearity of its telling, thus canceling itself out in the (non-)process and, unavoidably, condemning you to critical tautology and to grasp, somehow like Klee falling from his rooftop, at thin air . . . For saying, as you are, that the narrator is unable to tell the story of Klee’s death, is not much different in the end than elaborating a mere paraphrase of the text. The narrator, beating you on your own turf, has even deftly included you in his act as his gentle lector—and not “reader,” as you might have expected, as though all you could do was merely to recite the text’s lesson word for word, without the least significant departure from it . . . —whose (non-)reading he has thus programmed: We didn’t start all this to search out a comforting headstone, God knows. No, no, in the end, in truth, we are left virtually with nothing: an overlooked eyetooth, the P.A. left howling, a stained and broken ostrich feather, the faint after-odor of the fireman’s fart. Abandoned. And a good fifteen, twenty minutes shot to hell. (111) The story significantly (?) closes on insignificant details—thin air, you said? More like passing wind, it seems . . . —and the narrator seemingly wriggles himself out by making amends, offering you two tickets to the circus (111); or, again: in the end, not much, “in truth” . . . Mere words on paper pointing to still more text . . . The gap opened by the story’s title—if only in the sense of your own expectations, thus raised—is immediately closed, the story coming back full circle, folding back upon its starting point it never really departed from: Klee, Wilbur Klee, is dead, and if at first it seems quite legitimate for you to want to understand why, the questions that might cross your mind are from the start declared foolish. (106) The short intradiegetic stories about Millicent Gee—I’m not entirely sure why I told you about Millie. Certainly, she can have nothing to do with Wilbur Klee. (106)—and Orval Nulin Evachefsky—I am reminded for no clear cause of the case of Orval Nulin Evachefsky. Let us hope for some link, some light, and drive on. (107)—will eventually impart you with nothing much valuable even if, in the second instance, like Klee—provided Klee did . . . —Orval committed suicide: It only remains to be observed that Orval Nulin Evachefsky suffered from a mental disturbance marked by melancholy and irrational terrors, more or less sat upon, which [ . . . ] drove him hastily to his self-annihilation. Whether Klee’s suicide, however, was the result of a mere disease of his private reason, or if, more simply, reason itself was Klee’s disease, we will, I am sorry to say, never know. (111) Yet, by closing up the gap where meaning could have passed—Klee’s gesture and/or death remains literally meaningless, neither you nor the narrator being able to account for it in any way in the end—the story points to another, unbridgeable gap, the abyss separating you from the text. The narrator’s final gesture as compensation for the waste, supposedly, of your reading time, is but a simulacrum anticipating both on “Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady” whose setting is the circus, and the end of “The Hat Act,” another story that literally runs vacuously, interrogating the nature of illusion and, by extension, a bit like “Klee Dead,” any reading of a reality whose very essence, because it resists any attempt at making it signify, any attempt at including it in a narrative that ultimately transforms it into what it is not, might be purely tautological.

As such, “The Hat Act” stages the audience and their expectations as much as, if not more than, the artist’s act onstage. The public’s terse reactions—the sentences (if “sentences” they still are in their barrenness) describing them barely have any articles or verbs—appear in italics and, rather than responses to the magician’s tricks proper, they seem to direct and somehow dictate to the artist his every next move. Thus carried away by an audience who sounds more and more demanding, the artist ends up—or so it seems, paradoxically enough, for how can you be sure, deprived as you are of the necessary distance in the absence of “narrative” as such? The mere, minimalist that is, description of what is going on both onstage and in the audience offers you, literally, an immediate access to the “show” (and thus the text) which, consequently, because there is no secure narrative boundary able or willing to keep the illusion at a (safe) remove from the real and vice versa, can no longer be said to be one . . . —the artists ends up killing his assistant. However, the elliptic style of the story and its abrupt petering out makes it impossible for you to ascertain whether or not the assistant’s death, staged or real, is part of the act. The ambiguity persists when the story (and the book) ends, as the mention that THIS ACT IS CONCLUDED (256) could very well come as the logical and predetermined ending of an act that would obtusely not provide its audience with the standard return to “reality” after a conventional staging and concomitant, successful catharsis . . . Well you may wonder then, with the “heroine” of “Intermission” in A Night at the Movies: isn’t there always a happy ending? Has to be. It comes with the price of the ticket . . . (134)

What the character’s belief in “Intermission” reveals—and yours, somehow, when, taking up your task dutifully, you professed to go in quest of the texts’ meaning or “truth” as gratifying tokens of a job being faithfully and well performed: you are nothing if not a professional, after all . . . —along with the final reaction from the narrator of “Klee Dead,” is that, somehow, somewhere, a transaction takes place; has to . . . And what all the texts do again and again, more or less differently from book to book, is precisely to question this belief by investigating their nature and foundations. What, for instance, “The Hat Act” and a story like “Intermission” question, is the very status of illusion: for what these texts do—and others too, starting with Gerald’s Party or The Adventures of Lucky Pierre—is to cancel the very possibility of illusion as such if the latter is defined, at least etymologically (in-lusio), by the passing over of a threshold, the entry into a game. Without boundaries, illusion as such is impossible, the game, the staging, the fiction no longer distinguishable from the real (Ah well, what the fuck, it’s all just a—farff! foo!—fiction anyway, claims the dying Vic somewhere in Gerald’s Party . . . ). Yet for all that, the ensuing undecidability—in the full sense: the utmost impossibility for you to adopt a critical stance on the text, crucially incapable as you are to decide on such basic elements as what may be happening, plotwise, in the text: are Vic and the magician’s assistant really dying or are they just playing their parts; and is this alternative really one?—displaces the illusion, making it paradoxically work fully since you are now meant to see its strings being pulled: the staging takes on all the attributes of reality (a murder in both cases) while the real simultaneously turns into a hoax or imposture (like a counterpoint to Vic’s death, Gerald remarks early on about the artificial color of Ros’s blood): while the management regrets there / will be no refund (Pricksongs & Descants, 256), Gerald may well have missed just about everything, and it is almost as if, in the end, he had been to a different party, or so his wife tells him . . . (312) There has been—no matter the price of the ticket—no transaction between artist or actors and audience, the implicit contract between them, and the so-called reading contract it may well stand for, has not been met (what kind of a party is this—?!), the spectator/reader gaining nothing from it in the conventional sense, no valuable experience in itself but the pleasure of reading as it were for nothing (fifteen, twenty minutes shot to hell, says the narrator of “Klee Dead” . . . ): for nothing happened, really, which is yet, on a certain level, but the very definition of illusion; just a fiction anyway . . .

With “The Hat Act” as its ending piece, Pricksongs & Descants leaves open the door you found ajar at the beginning of the book with “The Door: A Prologue of Sorts.” You thus somehow leave the book as you found it, unsure of ever having stepped inside, yet wondering if you have yet found your way out of it . . . All you can do is open and close and open the door behind/before you, again and again, not knowing where you are, if you are. As exemplified by “The Hat Act,” the book refuses all partition between fiction and reality, staging and accident, writing and rewriting, leaving you somewhere in-between—on the threshold of variation at the heart of Coover’s work, unbegun, unending—in what Gerald’s Party terms an endless intermission (181); in the very middle of an unbounded, expanding, vibrant textual space in the form of a door, that door, perhaps, left intact after John’s passage in John’s Wife: Majestic. Inviting. But opening onto nothing. [ . . . ] The door as ‘magical threshold,’ as Kate called it, promising access to some mystery beyond or within. And what John had done, she said, was strip the door of all illusions, reminding us that all magic was nothing but sleight of hand, and thresholds were mere artifices in the middle of nowhere. (264)

But since—I owe you something, insists the narrator of “Klee Dead”—the reading contract has to be met at all costs (for, that there might be nothing to read, after all their reading is done, who could bear it?), what Coover’s work generously, unflaggingly offers—and that indeed is a lot, a lot too much already for poor Alfred, doomed, in “In a Train Station,” to repeat the same scene again and again, unrepeatable as it nevertheless, by nature, is: a murder . . . —are the pleasures of recommencing . . .