HIC!—REQUIESCET CORPUS TUUM!
(TEXTUAL INTERCOURSE)

Try to follow them as you might, the texts, you feel, disappear in the very movement of their inscription; they flit away through your fingers before you even had the chance to grasp them. Like John’s Wife, they all somehow wither away, withdraw, subside, much as a fading memory sinks away and is gradually lost to recall . . . Forget, then, in order to rewrite. Reread, in order to forget. Leave nothing behind, no trace, erase what “meaning” you attach to the texts; embark upon them, and draw a blank line, a line erased as soon as drawn, thus celebrating, not the line, dull as death itself, but the motion that has made it. (Pinocchio in Venice, 258) Silent though the surface may be—the water of a canal here, there a screen, a canvas, a mirror muted by its opacity, a page whose blankness is already, has always-already been wasting away—the cacography of some undifferentiated sound, some unveiling rumor or white noise, like that spreading all over Gerald’s consciousness, is already, has always-already been rippling, piercing, perforating, damaging it; wiping it out, like a forest burning on the edge of a town.

But there might be no such thing as a blank page to start with. Much like a painter’s canvas, the page is already suffused with residual material of some kind, fragments and clichés running all over it, scraps of enduring stories that the writer might have to sort out or through vying to come alive. The story that is writing itself might literally have to take its place on top of other preexistent, preconceived, or predetermined ones, finding or taking its place, as in Hair O’ the Chine, in the midst of a prearranged, larger tableau, a painting of sorts . . . For, somehow, there must be manuals for this; at the very least, standards have been raised, some expectations are to be met, or there might be occasions to celebrate, like the one facing Phil Gelvin in “On Mrs. Willie Masters,” for instance. Whatever expectations you yourself had before being acquainted with Gelvin’s performance, they were soon shattered by the text’s opening lines—I knew Willie Masters’ missus before becoming acquainted with the gentleman himself, knew her, that is, in the Biblical sense, which is the only way any of us knew her or can know her, and as I am knowing her now. (“On Mrs. Willie Masters,” 10)—which, elucidating the meaning of the title’s preposition, make it quite clear that Coover’s writing, whether here or elsewhere, is always a form of writing on, both in the sense of a continuation, problematic as it can be, and of a physical handling of pre-textual material. For better or worse, the text consents to, or contends with, other texts and/or versions of itself that always precede it, as mere pre-texts that it either aspires to as in Gelvin’s case, or tries to wipe out. Most of the time, though—Gelvin’s occasion, an homage to Coover’s friend William Gass, was after all quite special—such “givens” can be clichés remaining in the way of the characters or narrators, whether or not they are aware of them, as is the narrative voice of a story like “The Milkmaid of Samaniego,” warning you from the outset that [i]t’s almost as though there has been some sort of unspoken but well understood prologue, no mere epigraph of random design, but a precise structure of predetermined images, both basic and prior to us, that describes her to us before our senses have located her in the present combination of shapes and colors. (Pricksongs & Descants, 175)

Those “predetermined images”—call them myths, if you will—constantly impinge on the page, encroach on the stories written in their midst. The page that, supposedly, was originally blank, is in fact already worn down and stained, as though tarnished by the ring from a cup of coffee gulped down by someone who was there before you, a useful reminder that the text you want to flirt with is no longer, never has been, a virgin one . . . In an age of exhaustion probably more than ever, it’s true, the writer plies his trade on a macula of sorts, writing amid diverse blotches, traces, and residues of all kinds that some may want to blot out; but more often than not, it is as though the dark pattern of a wallpaper would still come out beneath all the successive layers of white paint meant to hide it. Coover, however, makes no pretense to conceal the sullied surfaces on which the texts are being written; on the contrary, most of the time he takes it and, somehow wants you too to take it for granted that the very image of a blank page already is a myth which, like any other, needs to be debunked; a moustache may in itself be elegantly trimmed, its appeal is yet never any greater than when pasted on an impossible face like dear old Alice’s in “Alice in the Time of the Jabberwock” (A Child Again). The point, if point there be, is that Coover somehow relishes all those old enduring images the page is already riddled with, for, knowing quite well that wiping the page clean is nothing more than an illusion, one among many, he instead gladly and generously embraces them, indulging them even, not so much to eliminate as to manipulate those predetermined images on their own grounds, in their own terms, so that other images built from them, recursively feeding off and looping back on them, in turn can appear, if only flittingly, before the whole process can start again, possibly with your help: for isn’t it, somehow, your duty?

You then have no choice, really, but to step into the texts and engage in and with them bodily, as it were. For, you were told, the purpose of a literary work is the capture of consciousness, and the consequent creation, in you, of an imagined sensibility, so that while you read you are that patient pool or cataract of concepts which the author has reconstructed; a consciousness electrified by beauty—is that not the aim and emblem and the ending of all finely made love? It should then become possible for you to handle the texts freely, lovingly, rearranging and cutting through them, trying out new combinations as you make them yours for a while. True, you can always fall short, to coin a phrase, or, another, never really be up to their demands, but Gelvin, whose “shoes,” you know, you will eventually have to step into, is right about one thing: this is the only way you can ever come to some sort of understanding, or “knowledge” of sorts . . .

Are you scared?

To entice you, perhaps, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre eases your way into the text with its opening (CANTUS) which progressively takes the shape, arching before your penetrating eye slowly adjusting to the dark, blurry light, of a kneeling woman who welcomes you through the spreading intrados of [her] massive thighs (2) . . . To read the novel, you understand, is to cover the body of text that offers itself to you and into which, having unwittingly passed through the opening parentheses, you have already set foot, and perhaps more; and to understand, you realize as you read on, is to come to terms with all those bodies the text tantalizingly puts in your way, a bit like Lucky Pierre himself, fucking his way through the snowy streets of Cinecity . . .

The body, in all its manifestations, whether in overly pornographic texts or not, is already somehow an embodiment of sorts, often acting as a metaphor of both writing and reading practices. The body, that is, is the text or, at least, redoubles it, for on the body somehow, literary practices come to be embodied that mirror the text and the (im-)possible ways you can now approach it. Michiko’s own body in Noir, tattooed from crown to toes with layers of exotic overwritten graffiti, a veritable yakuza textbook, slang dictionary, and art gallery (25), may well serve as a metaphor of a text itself saturated or overwritten with the codes and motifs of its genre. However, if Michiko’s body first get[s] passed back and forth between the two yakuza bosses as a kind of message board (24), thus mirroring the genre’s cognitive bias—each new tattoo on Michiko’s skin at first means something, invit[ing] interpolations each time, like clues disseminated through a text that add up towards the resolution of its enigma—the gangsters’ rivalry soon becomes purely an artistic epistolary [art] carried on for aesthetic reasons only. In its playfully parodic dimension, Noir ends up destabilizing the genre’s “readability,” turning it into one which, like Michiko’s by now suffocatingly perfumed bag of old painted bones (22), has los[t] its contours, its clarity, the colors muddying, wrinkles disturbing the continuities, obscuring the detail. (25)

None of us noticed the body at first. Not until Roger came through asking if we’d seen Ros. Thus opens Gerald’s Party, again stressing that without the body, Ros’s body as a given, given at first before anyone gets to notice it, there could not be or have been any text. A bit like Michiko in Noir, Ros’s dead body, appealing as it used to be and, somehow, remains for some, may also metaphorically stand for the exhausted genre Gerald’s Party takes on, with her body’s fluidity nevertheless pointing to the possibility of the genre’s metamorphosis. Ros’s body, much like “John’s wife,” there and not quite there at the same time, unnoticed yet inscribed in the text, launches the whole narration and provides it with a landmark of sorts as Gerald’s focus is redirected to it at regular intervals, haunted, fascinated, obsessed with it as he, much like anybody else, is. True, unlike Ros who in Gerald’s Party is all body, the anonymous heroine in John’s Wife is perhaps all but body, indescribable, elusive, unreadable as she is, elicit[ing] opinions and emotions as varied and numerous as the townsfolk themselves, her unknowability being finally all they could agree upon, and even then with reservations, for some said she was so much herself that she was simply unapproachable (“unreadable,” as Lorraine liked to put it) . . . (73) Yet, as though to compensate for her conspicuous lack of bodily presence, or possibly to draw your focus away from her disappearance from the text, Pauline’s body, Alice-like, grows to outrageous (dis)proportions, almost stretching the text which, it seems, in the process all but bursts at its seams.

No text, then, without a female body, real or fantasized, to launch and drive you on, in all those male characters’ footsteps, who—Nixon, Pinocchio, Lucky Pierre, Gerald, a prince or a master, a Kid or a P.I . . . —like you, all try to come to an understanding of sorts which, do what they might, somehow resists them and you. Ros’s murder, you feel, might be akin to the very sabotaging of Gerald’s text, the sacrificial death of the novel as a genre and all it may have embodied, while the tricky disappearance and reappearance of “John’s wife” might stand for its remediation. Meanwhile, aging, exhausted male figures verging on impotence, mere puppets often played and tricked by appealingly radiant women—Ethel Rosenberg, “John’s wife,” Alison, Bluebell, a Schoolmarm, an ingenue . . . —come to embody the obsolescence of a medium that remains foreign to the new one that holds them hostages: all more or less self-parodically unhappy character[s] in postmodern novel[s], like Rick in “Suburban Jigsaw,” condemned to live forever inside a form [they] cannot escape. (A Child Again, 210)

Or like Charlie, too, somehow, in A Night at the Movies. “Charlie in the House of Rue,” an homage to Chaplin’s art as the night’s announced comic feature, recalls that the cinema, silent though it used to be, also had its language, its rhetoric, and its writing, often embodied in the actor’s performance: Chaplin’s body language thus had its recognizable signature and the story builds on this, investigating, on the one hand, the gap between the excess and saturation of meaning in Chaplin’s burlesque comedy—in the course of which each gesture or expression, to make up somehow for the absence of dialogues, is coded and, here, overcoded into its own caricature—and, on the other, the silences, or the body’s hesitations or hushed-up moments, its suggestiveness and erotic power.

“Charlie in the House of Rue” seems to move between the two opposite poles of excess and absence, which end up joining together as the laughter promised by the genre of the COMEDY! the story comes under is replaced by the “rue” antagonistically inscribed in its title; progressively, the body’s rhetoric goes berserk and nothing communicates anymore, except the house’s different rooms in an ineluctable montage of paragraphs which renders the actor/character’s trajectory uncontrollable. The bodies disseminated through the story remain silent, unaffected and unaffectable, except at times for the mechanically repeated, gratuitous violence of blows raining down—not so much separate blows, as a single blow repeated over and over as though on an endless loop (108). You remember that the mechanical encrusted upon the living used to trigger off laughter, but what happens, you wonder, when the very mechanics of the text are jammed? [The policeman] steps on a bar of soap, his feet fly up in the air, and he falls—splat!—to his backside on the bathroom floor (103); the last part of the sentence recurs five times in the space of a few lines and even contaminates the text a few pages down, looping its endless loop as it were: the head rolls, the body’s feet fly up in the air, and it falls—splat!—on its backside on the Oriental carpet. (110) Thus redoubled, carried to its own parodic extreme, the text’s humor may not be invalidated, but the writing, as writing, somehow questions and disturbs its comic efficiency and the very source of all comedy; the laughter that resounds in the concluding lines, which might be your own nervous one as Charlie now wonders why is everybody laughing? (111), seems in turn rather mechanical and contrived when related to the tragic events that prompted it.

The rhetoric of Charlie’s body—its rhetoric in a literal sense, for Charlie’s role is to make the inhabitants of the “House of Rue” laugh, to persuade them of the comic essence of their situation—no longer is operative, incapable as Charlie now is of giving his body its former visibility or readability: Charlie’s clownish acts remain unnoticed by the other characters, none of them really watching him anymore. It is as though Charlie remained in the text as his own faded image, deprived of its former substance: She gazes past him, unseeing . . . The man continues to stare sullenly . . . She is bent over still, ignoring him . . . The maid pays him no heed . . . She has noticed nothing. She stares off into the distance (88-91) . . . Even when Charlie apparently manages to catch someone’s eye, nothing happens, nothing is exchanged; if the old man gazes down at Charlie through his pince-nez, his old eyes adroop with rheum and misery, eventually his eyes [end up] slowly filming over like clouded lenses. (93) When some emotion is conveyed at last, it literally costs the old man both his eyes: he gazes imploringly at Charlie [ . . . ], the lenses fogged with a thousand tiny fractures. Charlie, dabbing still at the old man’s eyes as though unable to stop himself, knocks one of the eyeballs loose. Slowly it oozes out of its socket, squirts free, and slides down his withered cheek, hanging there by a slippery thread. [ . . . ] And then the other one begins to ooze from its socket. (98-9) Similarly, when the young lady about to hang herself seems to turn her attention to Charlie’s comic pantomime—yes, “seems to”: her melancholy expression seems to soften . . . [She] seems more and more caught up in his act . . . The woman [ . . . ] seems to have forgotten the rope around her neck . . . The lady seems fascinated now . . . (100-1), as though everything, indeed, was but a matter of reading; the body may seek to transcend and replace its somatic essence with a semiotic presence, its readability nevertheless remains problematic—Charlie’s performance inevitably drives her to her certain death as, encouraged somehow by the gaze she rests on him, perhaps failing to read her reactions accurately, he steps up his own endeavor to make her laugh; so doing, his own body races out of control and knocks the lady over the balustrade: the comic choreography has turned into a danse macabre in the course of which bodies come apart and dis-locate—and first to go, significantly, are the eyes—worn-out, obsolete, phantom remnants in a house and a medium deserted long ago . . .

Coover’s Charlie is indeed but a literary recreation, a mere product of language; if his body bears the brunt of this failing of sight staged by the text and programmatically announced as early as the second paragraph—like the spectral haze of failing sight (88)—it might be because it is entirely made up of words and, as such, much like this fallguy falling from text to text, everything that happens to him happens in language, [a]lmost as though, without words for it, it might not have happened at all! (A Child Again, 140) In other words, what Charlie may have had to offer was probably aimed, without his knowing, at another audience altogether, as hinted by the echo of permeating laughter in the story’s last lines: if the body’s rhetoric no longer works in the text, it does all too well out of it. For somehow superseding the gothic terror it has overly been toying with, with comic terror of sorts in an ironical reversal, “Charlie in the House of Rue” again raises the question of the text’s outside.

For you in turn wonder: does the laughter heard by Charlie really come from outside the text? Is Charlie, then, really a char-actor in this comedy gone sour and awry? Or is he not rather, or also, somehow, an unfortunate spect-actor, spectr-actor, a spectral double of this other intruder in the text—you, of course—grappling with diverse conflicting codes that somehow stretch the narrative in opposite directions? From burlesque comedy to pornography, from gothic horror to ineluctable tragedy, “Charlie in the House of Rue” passes codes and genres in review, as though Charlie himself had fallen prey to the projectionist’s experimentations in “The Phantom of the Movie Palace,” A Night at the Movies’ opening story: One night he’s playing with a collage of stacked-up disaster movies, for example, when the layering gets so dense the images get stuck together. [ . . . ] This leads him to the idea [ . . . ] of sliding two or more projected images across each other like brushstrokes, painting each with the other, so to speak, such that a galloping cowboy gets in the way of some slapstick comedians and, as the films separate out, arrives at the shootout with custard on his face . . . (23)

As the story opens, Charlie, as though kicked in from behind, is hurled into the text, into a space that is not his. If at first his surprise seems feigned—: For a moment he stands there as though amazed (87)—it is only too real by the end of the text: He clings to her, pants adroop, tears in his eyes, shadows creeping over his face like bruises, gazing out into the encircling gloom with a look of anguish and bewilderment, as though to ask: What kind of place is this? Who took the light away? And why is everybody laughing? (111) The Charlie you used to know as an actor now appears as the spectator of a comedy that, no longer comprehending him, he no longer comprehends or even finds funny; perhaps, in all the cackle of fiction, if memory serves, the comedy, superior and sublime, of the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs—silence please—at that which is unhappy . . . A bit like a story told in the dark while “playing house,” such comedy may in itself be meaningless, teaching [you] nothing. Except to laugh at [yourself]. Which is to say, it has taught [you] everything. (A Child Again, 80)

For, again, ever the hopeless romantic, you cannot help but recognize something of your reading self in Charlie, and if the text somehow stages “the onset of blindness,” it also challenges, through this, the failure of all your reading modes, as exemplified by the profusion of phrases or expressions indicating uncertainty and doubt: as he fails to read all those characters, Charlie’s trajectory through the text holds out a mirror to you in which to gauge your own reading of his performance. Of course, such an impasto of film and text requires that you in turn modify your approach, for the words you read refer you back to previous images which in turn refer you back to still other images and words . . . Nothing but text, A Night at the Movies—like The Adventures of Lucky Pierre or “The Sentient Lens” triptych—posits itself on/as an interface between the cinematic and the literary, the screen and the page, that it intermingles, remediating, or un-differentiating them on a unique surface.

In a way, you feel you ought to take in the words in their visual, immediate impact, as pure images or “signifiers” without “signified,” as pure surfaces in their own right; the text’s syntax, the linking of words, acts here as a linguistic montage or translation that sets the text in motion: nothing, no sense behind or underneath the words; instead, mere words coursing after, following other words, threads of words forever linking onto others, projected on the page and flickering by almost mechanically. Hence, comparisons and metaphors throughout the text, rather than the conventional substitution of one image for another that they would under-line, somehow act as a linking, projecting mechanism of sorts, trailing the text onwards, unwinding or unspooling it like a reel of film: like a policeman’s billy rattled on a wooden fence (91), for instance, at first refers you back to Charlie’s universe and the Keystone Kops routine, but the comparison prefigures the scene in which Charlie faces a policeman in the house’s bathroom, thus propelling the text onwards; similarly, like bowls of soup (92) mutates in the kitchen episode, while his moustaches hang lifelessly as though from a gibbet (97) is a proleptic inscription of the text’s tragic ending. On the other hand, an atmosphere as thick as custard pie (109), also an obvious reference to Chaplin’s burlesque, repeats a former episode of the text whose mechanism thus momentarily seems to freeze or seize up. The same somehow applies to other filmic comparisons or metaphors—like camera shutters (87), spooling him downward (91), like clouded lenses (93)—which do not so much offer an interpretation of one term by another, as they redouble the uncertain nature of the narrative in almost tautological fashion, by drawing your attention onto its filmic antecedent thanks to purely rhetorical devices: like all texts in A Night at the Movies, like The Adventures of Lucky Pierre too, also impinging on the cinema, “Charlie in the House of Rue” is a text-film or film-text, in or on which the visual and cinematic feed back upon language and the literary, already feeding back upon themselves self-referentially, in the text’s endless loop.

Driven by the motion of words on the page, Charlie willy-nilly provides you with an image of yourself, clutching the text’s “slippery thread,” reading it glissando, as it were, gliding over its surface without ever being capable of delving into it. No wonder: for you, like Charlie, already are, have always been, in the text, and this finally dawns on you as you are suddenly caught hearing yourself laughing before the darkness closes in on Charlie. For despite the paradigmatic stylistics of absence (33) that A Night at the Movies resorts to, “Charlie in the House of Rue” functions a bit like “After Lazarus,” translating this absence into all there is and a bit more to boot: in a series of potentially endless (re-) duplications—as the night’s Weekly Serial, the text is bound to play back, and back again, and again—“After Lazarus,” itself structurally redoubled, keeps introducing an extra-character, always playing as it were with one pawn too many on its board; meanwhile, an open grave on the outskirts of a town remains irrevocably empty.

Charlie might be such an extra-pawn on the text’s brightly waxed checkerboard of black and white marble squares (87). The colon that opens the story may even represent a door slamming shut on Charlie’s heels rather than one ushering him (and you) into the narrative, thus projecting him into a linguistic and, to some degree, even a novelistic world foreign to him (the “House of Rue,” you guess, may have been erected as an ironical echo to the “House of Mirth” and, in something like a ricochet, then, from specter to specter, to the “House of Fiction” itself and its famous architect . . . ). For Charlie’s only substance is to be found in all those words racing on the page, imprisoning him in a medium that is not his, and turning him into Lucky Pierre’s mirror image, as you suspect L.P. to be but a purely novelistic character trapped in a cinematic world, even if he claims the contrary—which need not be false for that matter—as he understands certain things being said about him, as if he’d fallen off the screen onto a printed page. (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 159)

As such, Charlie’s apparition or intrusion into this “house of rue,” which you recognize as also yours into the text, has always-already occurred and thus constitutes an irreversible premise to the text itself: for once engaged in the projector’s gate (the opening :), the story keeps unspooling and nothing can stop it but the end of the reel. With Charlie, then, you never really enter the text—you already are inside by the text’s opening—nor do you ever really exit from it—the text has no outside anymore; it thus paradoxically remains both manifestly open and inescapably closed, like this endless intermission envisaged by Gerald in Gerald’s Party. If “Charlie in the House of Rue” playfully revisits a famous literary topos, that of the house whence the hero tries to break away, the text here literally has the ground vanish beneath Charlie’s feet: A chair leg wobbles to the edge of the plant stand, tips over. Charlie grabs the woman, his pants falling to his ankles. The chair falls away into nothingness, the plant stand following after. (111) There is no possible escape for Charlie, swallowed whole by the house and the text irising in on him. This impossibility is stressed by the absence of windows in this house where [t]he floor, the surfaces of the paintings, the mirrors, the polished balustrade and the crystal chandelier, all glitter with a bright sourceless light. (87) Everything seems to have been done and polished so that Charlie, reflected everywhere in mirrors and their likes that, often turned around and facing themselves, both encircle and expand the text’s space, can be referred back to his own image and gaze. From then on, the ghost-like figures Charlie grapples with might be no other than mere shadows, faded reflections, or exhausted avatars of himself, disappearing one after the other. He, as suggested by the disappearing light and the ultimate absence of any reflection as the page is about to go dark, remains somehow in surfeit when related to the overcoded, stereotyped image that the text has been circulating—The mirrors reflect nothing, there is no sheen on the broad balustrade (110)—a phantom, too, kin of the projectionist in “The Phantom of the Movie Palace.” An image having maybe outlived itself too long, a sole remainder once everything else has disappeared . . .

An image finally with no mirror reflection; a body with no more shadow of its own, eaten away by shadows too many, Charlie the intruder, Charlie the specter, sends the body back to its original dust and forsakes the silver screen. The myth has been deflated, the American dream he may have once embodied has crumbled down, flaking away like pie crust. Charlie awaits what end he might still meet, tears in his eyes, now aware that mere blinking will dislodge, displace, or translate him still further away, threatening to make him disappear yet also, somehow, vouching for the persistence of (his) vision when, surreptitiously, the light goes momentarily dark: Then he blinks, his eyelids flicking shut and open under his black derby like camera shutters. (87) The human eye has been replaced by the camera eye, or a sentient lens. Assaulted by an overload of images, the eye goes blind: you are warned, it seems, against all those clichés and predetermined images that pollute your vision and threaten to blind it, that riddle the page still, while they belong to another time, and another place. Has so much time passed? (110), wonders Charlie, somehow echoing you: yes, and it is now time for a clean screen, a bare page, as blank as, illusively perhaps, can be. Each new image on the screen, shortly supplanted, supplants another and draws you inexorably to the end of the reel. Well, what is so funny about it? Why does everybody keep laughing when the darkness sets in, a metaphor, maybe, for another more radical? You know that when the text has unfolded its thread to its very last word, there will be no way for you to go back—Charlie himself [may be] back where he began (110), but time has passed; the house is a total wreck and death is everywhere around: No, it’s useless, Richard. Belief me, says Ilsa in “You Must Remember This,” the concluding act of A Night at the Movies. Time goes by. (186) Yet, you also know that somehow, sometime, somewhere, there will still be someone to change reels, and dust the actor’s body, which, assuredly, findeth no rest, ever ready for a new performance; the same, no doubt, but as time goes by, with a difference too; with a vengeance:

One Moment While the Operator Changes Reels (113)

Charlie’s machinic body underscores the aporia of your reading modes: the text is flitting and fleeting both, the very motion of the sentences spells out its permanent erasure and if A Night at the Movies is subtitled “You Must Remember This,” thus placing the whole collection under the sign of memory, you feel that the texts are, as for them, deprived of memory, or, at least, that their memory is specious, as Ilsa, haunted by her own childhood recollections, observes in the concluding story: Maybe memory itself is a kind of trick, something that turns illusion into reality and makes the real world vanish before everyone’s eyes like magic. (179) And yet, so you are told, you must remember this somehow, undoubtedly . . . But here, you suspect, is the rub: for how to read this, you wonder? Is it something you have to remember, thus making your own mental note to be able to retrieve it some time in the future? Or is it rather something that surely should remind you of something else, situated in a past to which the stories would generously give you access? This uncertainty of yours, whether warranted or not, already implies that the object of memory, here undecidably posited both in the past and the future, in a paradoxical time, out of linear chronology—as though lodged in a tiny, infinitesimally small gap between film frames—is ungraspable; and all the more so, perhaps, as this fleeting memory is in a way canceled out in the ever-present instantiation of the deictic this, always simultaneous with its enunciation, forever reopened by the eternal present of your resumed reading.

A bit like the texts, then, your reading remains “in the making,” each new one effacing the one before, thus condemning it, and itself too, to oblivion. Yes: you must forget this, always . . . Forcefully splicing this forgotten pornographic spree with Michael Curtiz’s film, saturating the blanks or gaps left untold in its initial montage, Coover’s “You Must Remember This” makes it impossible for you not to watch Casablanca now from a different perspective forever altering and obliterating your own memory of it. Rewritten, the story now begs to be reread; reread so its mythic residues can be forgotten. It’s almost like I’m remembering this, Rick says, desperately attempting to provide Ilsa with another cue, while she, on the contrary, think[s][she’s] already forgetting . . . (187) Whether the original screening or their latest pornographic escapade, who can tell? Well, probably both, you feel, so that reading, a reading, to the exclusion of none, again remains possible . . . “And then . . . ? Ilsa . . . ? And then . . . ?”

Well . . . “Perhaps today then . . . at last!”, both master and maid are left hoping when Spanking the Maid seemingly reaches its end. The novella’s title, you recall, hasn’t always been as titillating as it now is: initially published as “A Working Day” in The Iowa Review, this short text radically altered your reading position and redrafted its reading contract with this change of title, thus substituting the social dimension of everyday labor with the fantasy of S&M pleasures, inscribed in the text as just that: pure fantasy, spectrally redoubled in the title’s initials. Judging by a number of reviews, many readers’ expectations were somehow tricked by this mere change of title, placing them as it were in the same position as the text’s protagonists who keep waiting in vain for something significant to happen, something they both were somehow promised. Yet, on the surface of it, there is nothing kinetic in Spanking the Maid, only pornography simplified into its written essence as repetition, as the text keeps rewriting an only scene which refuses to unfold, thus prompting the master’s weary chastisements.

This is pleasure as boredom, indeed, as far as the protagonists are concerned, incapable of ever stepping out of the ritual they perform in. Though you are not the one who would make such a claim, repetition as repetition may yet pertain, in itself, to some kind of bliss (boredom, after all, may not be that far from bliss, and could even be bliss seen from the shores of pleasure): for if memory still serves a little, to repeat excessively is to enter into loss, into the zero of the signified; but in order for repetition to be erotic, it must be formal, literal, and in your culture this flaunted (excessive) repetition reverts to eccentricity and is usually thrust toward various marginal regions of music and writing, especially when it, too, like Coover’s, is already in itself musical, building upon variations ad infinitum since repetition is what there is no reason to stop: WHAT?! IS THERE TO BE NO END TO THIS—?! (81), impatiently grunts the master throughout Spanking the Maid. As a matter of fact, this might be, very precisely, all the pleasure, even the bliss, that he, incapable of it, will never feel. The master may thus come to embody, in some form or another, the plight of all readers accustomed to the humiliated repetition that mass culture forces upon them, leaving them thus forlornly frustrated by what is, in its literal and formal aspect, an erotic repetition they fail to perceive as such: for if forms appear to be varied superficially, content, ideological schema, and the blurring of contradictions are uncritically repeated ad nauseam; yes, always “new” books, “new” films, “new” stories; yet, always the same, enduring, though unendurable “meaning” . . . Useless to say, the (excessively) repetitive writing of both Spanking the Maid and, albeit on a different, more radical scale, of The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, with their virtually endless series of variations intrinsic to the genre of pornography, overturns this comfortable practice of superficial repetition to denounce what remains an old illusion: one takes in similarity first, difference only later. (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 354) But it is in this repeated difference that another sort of meaning, ungraspable as it is, is asserted; meaning as a superior game . . .

What Spanking the Maid thus stages and toys with, repeating it again and again, is a “reading scene” of sorts. You are not the first to stress the metafictional dimension of the novella, as the relationship between master and maid, as has often been noted, is persistently described in terms of writing and reading. The master’s conduct is dictated to him by his “manuals,” the interpretation of which is incumbent upon him: Is there something missing in the manuals? No, more likely, he has failed somehow to read them rightly. (71) But beyond the (playfully) sado-masochistic relation that could unite writer and reader, the text progressively blends both characters’ roles, now turning the master, now the maid, into avatars of the writer and the reader. For if the man and his maid are supposed to represent the relationship, among others, between artist and society, or artist and critic, the temptation is indeed great to read Spanking the Maid as some allegory: no matter how well the artist does some things, so the fable might go, the critic will spank him for not doing others. And, you might wish to add, conversely . . .

Maybe it’s some kind of failure of communication. A mutual failure. Is that possible? A loss of syntax between stroke and weal? (65) This faulty syntax targeted by the master might be the one presiding over desire and bringing bodies together, or, in this case, failing to. This would account for the text’s apparent stuttering: Maybe it’s some kind of communication problem he thinks, staring gloomily at her soul’s ingress, which confronts him like blank paper, laundered tiffany, a perversely empty ledger. (81) Something, indeed, from repetition to repetition, seems to get irretrievably lost, and despite the blows that keep falling on the maid, her body will not gain access to any form of semiosis, signification, or symbolization. Sometimes, especially late in the day like this, watching the weals emerge from the blank page of her soul’s ingress like secret writing, he finds himself searching it for something, he doesn’t know what exactly, a message of sorts, the revelation of a mystery in the spreading flush, in the pout and quiver of her cheeks, the repressed stutter of the little explosions of wind, the—whush-SMACK!—dew-bejeweled hieroglyphs of crosshatched stripes. But no, the futility of his labors, that’s all there is to read there. (86-7)

A potential alter ego of the writer facing the blankness of his page, the master concomitantly turns into a reader of sorts: the metafictional metaphors—the text’s ability to step aside and take some distance from itself—are inscribed in the text at the very moment when it declares them null and void, having lost all relevance: the body has paradoxically stopped signifying anything but insignificance, that is both the absence of meaning and the futility of all hermeneutic approaches. The blank “page,” if not obstinately mute—her brightly striped but seemingly unimpressionable hinder parts (42)—at least remains undecipherable, because irreducible to clear, articulated language of any sorts (what onomatopoeias, repeated throughout the text—whush-SMACK!—along with the verb stutter here would tend to suggest), or to any symbolic inscription. The movement of bodily in-scription or penetration, from the outside in, has ironically been turned around in the repressed stutter of the little ex-plosions of wind . . . The maid’s body, like her “soul” it is indistinguishable from, remains impenetrable in the end, her soul’s ingress rather a cul-de-sac allowing for no deeper entry, since only the codes of pornography, mainly Victorian, are mobilized, the protagonists’ bodies thus never touching: each spanking is always mediated and administered by the book—There are manuals for this. Different preparations and positions to be assumed, the number and the severity of the strokes generally prescribed to fit the offense (45-6)—without ever leading to anything remotely sexual. So much, then, for (your) titillation . . .

The master’s writing—he thinks of it as a blank ledger on which to write (54)—may scrape his maid’s flesh, but it never really scribes it. The body, in Spanking the Maid, folded onto its own futilities, fails again and again to be semiotized, just as the text, in its stammering fragmentation, or disrupting reiteration, conversely never comes to be embodied, failing again and again to be somatized. If the body supposedly furnishes the building blocks of symbolization, and eventually of language itself, Spanking the Maid, thriving on and toying with the bankruptcy of semiotization and symbolization, seems to hold in check all psychoanalytical readings subsequently derived from this, which could, for instance, interrogate the inscribing of the law upon the body, concerns of this kind being what the text declares, as it were, fundamentally illegitimate.

Pinocchio in Venice indulges in the same kind of undermining process, parodically staging concepts that made the heyday of psychoanalytical reading, literally taking, for instance, the signifier’s priority in relation to the signified at face value. Hence, Count Agnello Ziani-Ziani Orseolo may be parading in the streets of Venice equipped with his giant phallus and escorted by the Madonna of the Organs (New Acquisition), a potentially parodic literalizing of Lacanian concepts; yet what symbolic meanings could have been attached to such concepts systematically collapse onto the literal, as exemplified by both characters’ improbable names whose initials spell out Italian acronyms (cazzo and mona, prick and pussy) that literally redouble, thus canceling them, possible symbolic interpretations. For if the phallus, for instance, can play its role only when veiled, Coover’s carnivalesque writing here gives it a literal, redoubled presence, unveiling it in the very letter of the text; as such, Coover’s parodic use of the phallus as a psychoanalytical concept—which conventionally comes to stand in for the object of desire which everyone feels as necessarily missing—contrarily turns it into an a-signifying surfeit, or an excessive dissemination of spurious meaning that keeps immediately redoubling itself endlessly, thus canceling out, in its immediate folding back upon itself, all signs of the latency with which any signifiable is struck when it is raised, or erected, to the function of signifier . . .

Pinocchio in Venice thus short-circuits the aesthetics of embodiment some have identified with narrative literature, since the latter is often prompt to dramatize the recovery of the letter for “spirit,” or of the body for “signification.” You even suspect that what Pinocchio in Venice or Spanking the Maid dramatize in the end, might precisely be this tendency to dramatize the body’s story through the trials of desire, trials that Pinocchio’s Nobelized work somehow tries to come to terms with. That meaning and truth are made carnal is however what Pinocchio’s painful lignification ironically contradicts, as what “meaning and truth” he has laboriously achieved throughout his virtuous life finally disintegrate as the professor is being literally disembodied. The text, so doing, writes off all significations ascribed to the letter and the body, stripping them bare as it were, at the same time as the professor, to his utmost dismay, sees all exterior signs of social gratification evaporate in thin air: his body “signifies” nothing anymore, and the character he has become, or forged in the course of his various autobiographical projects, chiefly through the constant (re-)definition and (re-)negotiation of his so-called I-ness—Character counts! (33)—is snatched back by the materiality of the letter on the page, i.e. of the character, without which, a pure product of language—I am a household word. I am the ornament of metaphors, the pith of aphorisms, what’s liked in similes—in some languages, Alidoro, a very verb! (68)—he is nothing.

For who is he, Pinocchio, to pretend to the immutability and consistency of his I-ness? Is it not a fact that, in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis? Consequently, if the acutest sage be often at his wits’ end to understand living character, shall he, you wonder, who is not quite the sage he often claims to be, expect to run and read character, even his own, in those mere phantoms which flit along a page, like shadows along a wall, to which he has no access? Somehow, Pinocchio will have to admit this, the real withstands all attempts at seizing it: Rising up out of the demented frenzy of the Piazza astraddle the Lion’s slippery back [ . . . ], he had seen in one vertiginous glimpse how small it all was, how illusory the fantasy of “Being.” [ . . . ] And yet, he knew, too, that in thousands of hidden corners of thousands hidden artworks in all the hidden churches and museums in all the hidden alleyways throughout that disintegrating but multilaminous island down there, there were whole discreet worlds to be found like DNA clusters or nested microchips, belying their material limits. Ah well, the “real.” He is coming to the end of a long life devoted intransigently to a pursuit of it, and, truth to tell, he still doesn’t know what it is. All he knows is that, whatever it is, he is in it. And soon won’t be . . . (295) Well, puppets, it seems, will be puppets, as Pinocchio cannot resist the temptation to uncover what masks may be hiding: the anaphoric rhythm of the lines, rebounding on the ironical repetition of “hidden,” mimics Pinocchio’s frantic quest, going from mask to mask eventually to uncover still further masks, and discover that the most hidden is yet another hiding place, and so on to infinity . . . For, as the good Platonist that he is, he can’t help but go beyond flitting appearances, only to find (not so) whole discreet worlds like DNA clusters or nested microchips, belying their material limits and, with them, the imperviousness of his I-ness, more fragmented, perhaps, than ever on this disintegrating but multilaminous I-land on which Identities and Ideas are mere shadows, ungraspable characters flitting along a page; for, as lascivious Eugenio says, posing in the novel as a new avatar of the confidence-man—Whatever you want, dear boy [ . . . ] I can arrange it. Trust me.” (200)—“Everything is exactly what it seems to be. That’s the sadness of it. Now, come and sit here on my knee, my child, and let us explore reality together while we still share in it!” (213)

Everything, then, in Pinocchio in Venice, is displaced by mere appearances hiding nothing. The letter wins over the spirit, the (typographic) character over the (realistic) character; that is, also, over the body which is thus referred back to its own a-signifying materiality (“what does this mean—?!”, the master cries out several times throughout Spanking the Maid). The letter progressively plays against all attempts at making words signify, and thus gains an excessive autonomy that deflates or disincarnates the meanings of words, as epitomized by the Count’s alliterative propensity—“My fulcrum! My feedbag! My fetish! My fenny fount and fungous funiculus! Floating fleshpot of my fancy! My foolscap, my fizgig, flophouse, and fantod! My foreskin! My fistulae!”—a propensity that reverberates and finds its counterpart in Melampetta’s Italian response: “Ma, fammi il favore! Va’ a farti fottere, faccia de culo!” (238) Here, the sound and letter f somehow makes up for and saturates the assumed lack symbolized by the phallus doubly exhibited by the Count while its raison d’être precisely is to disappear or remain “veiled,” in the same alliterative way as Pinocchio’s nose might first compensate for, then saturate, in its propensity to “misrule,” his lack of a penis, thus somehow turning his lofty aspirations into mere tautological reduplication: The boy who had to wear on his face what other people hid in their pants. Watch it misbehave. Watch it get punished. I always felt insulted by the names you called me in school, not recognizing at the time that it was not much worse than calling me ‘Faceface’ or ‘Footfoot.’ (211) In other words, the writing, in its literal dimension, keeps referring back to itself, giving the letter as such an excess presence in the text that will not be integrated into any symbolical order; which, again, is rendered all too literally in Melampetta’s new version of the alphabet: Those aren’t arguments, buttbrain, those are the a priori and assumptive conditions—axiomatic, absolute, and apodictical—of the argument, which hasn’t even heated up yet to make your piss sizzle, so before you open your yap to answer back, just keep in mind I’ve only started on the As, there’s at least twenty-seven or twenty-eight more letters to go, if I remember rightly, and the soup’s not on yet.” (59-60)

Spanking the Maid, though different in both content and scope, somehow plays the same kind of game, building upon, whether deliberately or not, the bankruptcy of all signifying aspirations through its figures, its chronic and playful slips, its rhythms, and the constant struggle of its characters with words. If, from a psychoanalytical perspective, the gap remains unbridgeable between desire and its object, or, which may amount to the same thing, between what one wants to say and what one really says, the true object of one’s discourse being forever unreachable—which is, somehow, what Pinocchio in Venice also parodically enacts in having Pinocchio quest for one last metaphor that, reflected in Bluebell’s tricky evanescence, happens to be ungraspable—Coover’s writing on the other hand celebrates the literalness of language as, contrary to the characters it stages, whether in Pinocchio in Venice or Spanking the Maid, it radically turns away from any tendency to have or want to say anything, or aim at any given “signified”; instead, it playfully asserts displacements and slippages. No wonder, then, that Spanking the Maid sanctions and stages the “failure of communication” between its two protagonists and, metaphorically, between writer and reader, simply because this is not the object of the text, as it does not aim at any deliberate signification or meaning—yet again, here you are beaten on your own turf as, saying so, you realize all too well that, like the maid somehow, and despite, no doubt, your good intentions and circumspection, you do, like it or not, provide the text with a “signification” . . . If, like the voice-over in Hair O’ the Chine, you, too, seem to have failed to heed [your] own warnings, you try to find a sense of reassurance in your belief that such, to be sure, is the paradox of all serious investigation (Hair O’ the Chine, 47 / 9)—nor does the text wish to convey any particular “message,” as Pinocchio or the master are all too prompt to believe. Instead, lexias in Spanking the Maid proliferate, yet never add up to any unified plot, but are laterally juxtaposed to keep track of this improbable “working day” spanning from early morning to late afternoon, superimposing the sense of linearity onto its repetitive circularity. Meanwhile metaphors and images get to be permuted from lexia to lexia, as letters or sounds are substituted for others in the same words they rewrite permanently: Spanking the Maid thus celebrates writing in its literalness, that is, in its literariness.

Such a literal approach as that found exemplarily in both Spanking the Maid and Pinocchio in Venice, in advance condemns any analytical conception of the text, to stress the irreducible, excessive nature of what the writing produces, i.e. a form of Carrollian nonsense not so much defined by the absence of sense as by the ever-renewed possibility of it: some indeterminate sense produced in excess, as in the story “Heart Suit” from A Child Again, in which each lexia, in the form of a card, mirrors the indeterminacy the story of those “stolen tarts” is built upon. Playfully and self-consciously toying with the uncertainty thus generated—the King of Hearts, for instance, finally discovers that his kingdom is a house of cards, utterly without foundations, infested with duplicity and indeterminacy, where nothing can be known and everything that happens seems to be happening under the table. (2)—the story again offers an all too literal reading of an episode from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, parodically redoubling all futile attempts at resolution, closure, or, more generally, sense-making, much like—and, you feel, this is no coincidence—the Reader’s in “Riddle.” Coover’s art thus inevitably debunks all exegetical biases—yours, no exception—like those attempts to seek the deliverance of the text’s imprisoned meaning, from the revelation of the palimpsest to the given word of the mystery, discourses that forever postulate the existence of a specific meaning to fix and be fixed, while Coover’s fiction destabilizes, displaces, and doggedly distorts it.

The letter, then, perhaps as a body of sorts despite everything, albeit a disarticulated body, is a mobile, nomadic one, as, somehow, all literal readings are also lateral ones, as suggested by Spanking the Maid whose words keep being linked together, all the while changing places, impinging on others as others in turn impinge on them. Contrary to what the title announces in reactivating the codes of pornography, what reading pleasure or bliss can be found in Spanking the Maid will not be in its “narrative”—here deliberately stripped to its bare essentials—narrative, that is, in the sense of the text’s represented content, some signified embodied in the letter of the text; rather, your gratification is to be derived from the letter as such, that is for itself and in itself only, insofar as it “plays” in the text to move, motion it onwards or laterally as pages and lexias follow upon others. True, the refusal to move the plot forward towards an expected (so-called) climax is made clear as early as the opening lexia when the narrator and/or the maid—No. Again. She enters. (9)—bluntly stop and start again in what might be a parody of the methods of the nouveau roman. Yet, the narrative or narrated stasis created by the various repetitions, variations, structural loops, or abrupt shifts in perspective, is quickly supplanted by the literal/lateral dynamic of a text in which the (parody of the) Freudian logic of dreams ends up fleshing out, as it were, the displacements and slippages from one lexia to the next: sounds and letters are traded for others and the text starts moving on if not necessarily forward, from page to page, the same always, that it keeps rewriting and erasing at the same time; though endlessly diversified, virtually if not materially, words, sentences, paragraphs, lexias and the diverse accounts they keep retelling, are all but a unique one adrift, with blurry, ever-shifting contours. The accounts of the master’s dream(s) are each time punctuated by a same word that keeps being redefined, letter after letter (utility, futility, humility, tumidity, cupidity, humidity, hymnody, humanity, homonymity): the list, if it arbitrarily stops here, could yet go on and on, and, going against possible Freudian interpretations, highlights the text’s paronomastic, hence superficial play on words, as opposed to any conception—parodically embodied in the master’s unflagging willingness to get to the “bottom” of things—according to which the text might be hiding some “profound,” “fundamental” meaning or message. Instead, words seem to beget themselves autonomously or automatically, as suggested by the cycle of repetitions and variations all along this “working day” which, in its mechanical reproduction, somehow manages to make you forget about the presence of any possible narrator. Words are left alone, unsupervised, now free to flirt and caress, lovingly rub against each other, carried along by the rhythm and erotic motion of a syntax coming and going, ebbing and flowing between words that no longer imply the absence of the things they stand for; for, willy-nilly (remember?), narration is that part of the art of fiction concerned with the coming on and passing off of words—not the familiar arrangement of words in dry strings like so many shriveled worms, but their formal direction and rapidity. This is not, alas, what is usually meant, but while the protagonists’ relationship may be going nowhere, merely marking time, the text, as for itself, races imperturbably along . . .

To avoid what the master feels is a loss of syntax between stroke and weal (65), that is between cause and consequence, writing as gesture and text as outcome—or, also, the reading of it, already inscribed in the text: Her responses are assumed in the texts [ . . . ] but not specified (61)—all such binary poles or roles might be spread out on a unique surface, precisely to be taken, “arranged together,” or syntaxed. As such, there could be, you feel, a syntax of the text that not only could shape it, arrange its parts together and give the text its direction and impetus; but also an overall syntax that would create a pragmatic plane—una mesa de trucos, possibly, as quoted from Cervantes in Pricksongs & Descants—on which, placed together, writer and reader, writing and reading, would blend and exchange roles, like master and maid, maid and master. As the two poles which frame the text merge, they intertwine and clasp in fond embrace, yielding to a textual intercourse of sorts; an intercourse that, defining it, the text thus need never stage. Writing and reading are but two operations that, in their very difference, might actually meet; perhaps, then, at last, you will have read, truly, when, and only when, you have rewritten the text, moved it onwards, prolonging its variations.

It might not be too late; this can still be done if you engage with the text as you would, bodily, with a lover. For is this not what Gelvin and, somehow Coover through him, propose in “On Mrs. Willie Masters”—of course, it may be ironical but is there a difference between doing something ironically and just doing it in the end, you wonder?—indulging in a very pragmatic literal rereading, hence rewriting, of William Gass’ Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife? Like it or not, reading involves the body: the writer’s, yours, the text’s. Yes, it might be after all but a matter of “manuals,” that is of manipulation. You do not read, it seems, with your eyes—“Charlie in the House of Rue” provides you with a good illustration of the obsolescence of such a view of reading—so much as with your hand; pornography, to which the texts often return, even if obliquely, may act as a reminder that, indeed, such texts can only be read with one hand . . . While one is holding the book and turning pages, the other, to take full pleasure of what it reads, handles the text so as to rewrite it, still furthering it; putting or getting it off, thus prolonging the motion of the texts, writing them on, turning them on . . . And on. Again.

So everything, as Lucky Pierre intuits, is interruptus. Anyway, these are mere preliminaries. (402)

Text to text, read again: she findeth no rest;

nor doth he, nor

you . . .

.

.

.