EXTRAVAGANCE

. . . in the beginning was the gesture, and in the end to come as well: in-between what we have are words . . .

 

 

He is our creation, an embodied trajectory that we have seen through from beginning to end. Or almost the end. (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 386) “Almost”: for two reasons at least. The first, because the question of the end in The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is endlessly protracted, from reel to reel, thus denying the text its due final period; then, because the trajectory in itself probably ends up veering out of the control of those who tried to define and direct it in the first place, those nine muses/directors of this collective movie.

A bit like this trajectory which, embodied in and by Lucky Pierre, the text eventually becomes inseparable from, what Robert Coover’s writing comes to celebrate may be the very image of a text in motion-s, in the course of the diverse variations it plays and replays relentlessly. Yes: motion-s, plural; for despite the impulse they are given, setting them inexorably off towards the ultimate point to which they converge, the linearity and chronology underlying the initial thrust of narrative are constantly challenged and resisted by countermoves which, far from slowing the texts down, on the contrary often speed them up; so much so that most of the time the target the writing aims at—a parodic Apocalypse in The Origin of the Brunists, the Rosenbergs’ executions in The Public Burning . . . —never in itself, once reached, puts an end to the text, often propelled beyond it by its own unstoppable momentum: the writing, as though unpredictably revving up, overreaches its mark: if the Rosenbergs’ deaths earn Nixon his election, the text thus jumping forward into the readers’ present in order to recall them to their historical reality, Justin Miller comes back from the dead, somehow providing the text with a new line of flight, and the Brunists with a second breath that will ineluctably get them closer to the imminent day of wrath awaiting them. The limit the texts assign to themselves is then often transgressed, as in their ends are new beginnings to be found—as suggested, in John’s Wife, by Imogen and Garth’s moving in the neighborhood after all is apparently over, so that a new cycle, or looping of the loop, a bit like another round of golf (410), can start over—which perpetuate the writing’s inexorable thrust forwards.

With its opening line—None of us noticed the body at first—Gerald’s Party engages in the tracks of the detective novel: there was murder, there will be investigation; the mystery will be cleared up, the case solved. As it is for Noir, the story’s familiar and you know the ending (Noir, 52) . . . The novel will meet its conclusion when all doubts and their shadows are finally dissipated, the knots of the plot unknotted, the guilty-looking cleared, and the masks dropped from those you thought beyond reproach: it is a story you have read before, in which, undoubtedly, the last word, as Gerald guesses, [is], artistically, the inevitable consequence of the first. (256) Everything is cued, in an implacable march forward, from the text’s very first words whose function is to set the terms according to which the enigma can and will, you have no doubt, be solved, when the inspector investigating the case puts the final touches to his work and, hence, to the text. If you choose to follow this narrative logic, the first word of Gerald’s Party (None) predicts the last (Now—!). Both are simultaneously separated and reunited by the motion of a writing proceeding from the negation and nothingness of death, ineluctably to return to it; for the last, stuttering words, contaminated by such negativity (No! No-w—!), somehow resound with the echo of the first words (No-ne of us no-ticed the body . . . ), the better, somehow, to put the text back on track: “Now c’mon, let’s try that again! From the beginning!” For when finally the party seemingly draws to an end, you realize that the mystery remains, that the enigma has somehow been brushed aside, as though rejected like a bad line from a cheap novel; Ros is dead but death is no end in itself and, if it launches the text, it launches it again at its other end, from beyond and across impossible abyss[es] (316), summoning up discarded options in its new freshening of possibility (7). Nothing has yet taken place and anything can still happen (again); for in the reversibility of the writing motion, or in its pendular rhythm allowing for the reversal of perspective, it [is] the first word that [is] the consequence of the last. (257) Ah . . .

With its opening line—None of us noticed the body at first—Gerald’s Party re-engages in the tracks of the detective novel: there was murder, there will be investigation; the crime will patiently be traced back to its source, back in time from the consequence to an elusive cause. As Inspector Pardew says: It’s a little like sorting the grammar of a sentence [ . . . ]. You have the object there before you and evidence at least of the verb. [ . . . ] But you have to reach back in time to locate the subject. (130-1) Thus will the novel end before it all started, when it has finally, impossibly, stepped out of the frame it ascribed to itself, folding back onto its creative gesture, a gesture here assimilated, were you to give credit to Gerald’s uneasy, confused feelings of guilt throughout, to no less than murder. The text, in its very motions, thus quests for what started it: death, Ros’s death, and, through it, the death of writing, of the poetic that Ros, as a ros-e as a ros-e as a ros-e, might be the symbol of, and/or the death of desire that Ros, as e-Ros, the rose and the sore, qui prend son essor, might at the same time embody. Yet if both writing and desire are quests of sorts, their viability lies, more perhaps than in their transitivity or fulfillment, in the very motion that animates them, a motion that their death or sabotage in the text may well put a stop to; Gerald’s Party, or the paradox of a text motioning towards the motion that launched it but that no longer is.

Gerald’s Party is thus traversed by two antagonistic movements—so is John’s Wife, albeit differently: you read the text, page after page, left to right, top to bottom, thinking of course you are moving on, only to realize, too late, that you had been reading backwards for more than two hundred pages when the text’s palindromic loop caught up with you and imperceptibly turned you around, leaving you no option (you are inescapably carried along), when you reach what you thought was the ultimate lexia of the text, but to read it all again . . . —one, inexorable, which is the motion that, reading, you imprint on the text, moving it forward to its conclusion, for it is a good story, after all, and, like Noir, you want to know more: gotta know, gotta know (Noir, 77); the other, countering it, which keeps undermining the linearity and chronology of the sentence, pushing its impossible subject, as it were, further back in time, out of your reach, of your read.

As such, and this is what The Public Burning may partly toy with, each new sentence in the text is a new sentence to death, killing off possibilities in its inexorable move forwards, for words; each new word in the voracious sentence, competing with them, eliminates others, moving the sentence itself to its termination and, with it, the text to its inevitable ending, often echoed by the programmatic deaths, averred or metaphorical, of its characters (whether Lucky Pierre, Pinocchio, Nixon, or Aesop and/or the Lion in “Aesop’s Forest” . . . ). The Public Burning, much like all other texts by Coover, somehow dramatizes, while resisting it, this basic need for closure in its take on History, this whimsical prophet with his face turned backwards (194), as the novel makes it appear for what it truly is: a mere rhetorical, teleological artifact which owes much of its credibility or verisimilitude to the conviction(s) and sentences it enacts, thus mak[ing] what might later seem like nothing more than a series of overlapping fictions cohere into a convincing semblance of historical continuity and logical truth. (122) However, as Nixon perceives, [i]f you walked forward through all this data, like the journalists, like the FBI invited everybody to do, the story was cohesive and seemed as simple and true as an epigram. [ . . . ] But working backwards, like a lawyer, the narrative came unraveled. (131) It might be just that, in the end: a specific outlook and take on language, whether you choose to abide by the fictions of continuity and cohesiveness, or whether you decide to focus on the discontinuous gaps in the unfolding story, or stories rather, since with such gaps you are constantly awakened to still other possibilities. As Blanche has found out in Noir, if you make a story with gaps in it, people just step up, they can’t help themselves. (188) Noir, standing for you, indeed could not.

With its two-timed narration, The Public Burning enables such gaps to become conspicuous as Nixon’s private, unauthorized narrative keeps out of sync, as it were, and never really matches the public, authoritative version given in the other chapters. And it is precisely because Coover’s writing, as in The Public Burning or, differently, in Noir, builds and thrives upon gaps it never seeks to close down, that the texts, in their very discontinuities, can actually set off and start moving. Much as in any film, the texts’ seeming motions are permitted by such gaps and cuts in their montages. If The Adventures of Lucky Pierre literally appears as a nine-reeler, “reels” having replaced “chapters,” your whole attention is focused on the motion taking place in the course of, and in-between, each reel: first and last words are not so much juxtaposed in dry strings, from afar, word after word after word, as they progressively merge and dissolve in the fluid motion that reunites them. In a sense, you are the projector as you read, thus linking the words together, giving life and rhythm to the movement of the text as you unspool its syntax, sometimes resorting to different speeds, cranking it up or down, flashing it forward or back; in Gerald’s Party, which thus substitutes the cinematic logic for one more akin to video, the various interpolated clauses encased in other expanding lines somehow force you to keep moving to and fro in the text, as though you were constantly caught rewinding after fast-forwarding, not to lose the thread of your (th-)reading.

Sometimes, you even come to think that, were you able to, reading a text like Spanking the Maid with sufficient speed would create, as you would turn the pages, the illusion of a text literally in motion, achieving a sort of stroboscopic effect in its permanent recombination of words and letters, a bit like the sparring match between Uncle Sam and the Phantom in The Public Burning: the initial wording, AMERICA THE HOPE OF THE WORLD, gets to be animated one letter at a time, page after page, until Uncle Sam finally manages to put a stop to this linguistic hemorrhage and immobilize it onto its initial form again, proof if need be that his version of America gave way long ago to the status quo it always sought to evade: AMERICA THE DOPE/ROPE/RAPE/RAKE/FAKE/FATE/HATE [etc.] OF THE WORLD (36-7) . . .

Read again as you might, you are still struck by this image of a text literally in motion, and in perpetual motion, too, a text animated by the movement of the language on the page, language as pure gesture; which is the only faith this fallguy in A Child Again can still believe in, given his condition: in the beginning was the gesture, and that gesture was: he opened his mouth to say it aloud (to prove some point or other?), but too late—his face cracked into a crooked smile and the words died on his lips . . . (A Child Again, 140) For the gesture is precisely this: a gesture, the gesture of language, language made gesture, its very motion, ungraspable, unstoppable, as, falling, it rebounds from word to word (cracked / crooked), ricocheting on letters and sounds, and from text to text (not only is the fallguy a variation on the Humpty Dumpty figure, “The Fallguy’s Faith” [re]appears in In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters and A Child Again); a gesture, a fall in and of language, that no word, and especially no Word—for the word-s died on his lips, thus displacing or usurping in this fleeting, ineffable “gesture,” the absolute originality and unicity of this long-dead Word—will ever be capable of putting a stop to, nor of launching it in the first place, for he had always been falling, had he not? (139) In the beginning of all, the gesture is thus deprived of originality, as Gerald, too, comes to realize: what fascinates us is not ritualized gestures themselves—for in a sense, no gesture is original, or can be—but rather that strange secondary phenomenon which repetition, the overt stylization of gesture, creates: namely, those mysterious spaces in-between. (Gerald’s Party, 269) In that sense, the very motion of language on the page, its gesturality, owes as much to the syntactic juxtaposition of words as to the blanks in-between that hold them both apart and together, blanks that may further account, at some pages’ intervals, for the regular reappearance of some words, lines, or even entire portions of text as in The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, a novel that does not so much “repeat” as it keeps moving and shifting about, enacting or embodying its hero’s looped, crossed, and dotted trajectory through the snowy streets of Cinecity. And when the page seems overwritten, the blanks almost non-existent, as in Gerald’s Party or John’s Wife in which, both being devoid of chapters, narrative pauses are scarce and brief, the text unspools all the quicker: if Gerald has trouble keeping track of all that is happening around him, most characters in John’s Wife literally end up lagging behind the narrative tempo, as emphasized by Lorraine overhear[ing] others marveling to themselves about how time flies and the way the day ha[s] sort of rushed up on them, as though it couldn’t wait to get started . . . (300)

John’s Wife may be the perfect embodiment of writing as motion, as the text ebbs and flows, comes and goes, between here and there, past ( . . . Once, there was a man named John . . . ) and future ( . . . John lived happily ever after) as seen through the eyes of a whole community (minus one); John’s Wife may be made up of pure gestural language unfurling along its pages, as suggested by the symmetrical structure of the text, stressed, in its opening and closing lines, by the figure of the palindrome ( . . . Once there was a man named John / a man was there, once . . . ). Yet, as The Adventures of Lucky Pierre shows, the palindrome here, as such, is not a mere to-and-fro movement along a single line but, rather, the invention of various lines of flight indistinguishable from the motion that sets them off (the palindrome, in John’s Wife, is of course an imperfect one, thus further creating some play): It is quiet Cassie, still in her Madame Totem Adam costume, her breast now crossed with sashes clipped fresh from her palindromic loops spool that read in any direction: AS DEEDS ARE RARER AS DEEDS ARE RARER, DROWN WORDS DROWN WORDS, and LOVERS REVOLT LOVERS REVOLT. (173) Cassie’s palindromes can only be grasped belatedly, as it were, for they do not read simply, i.e. successively, from left to right to left; rather, they work simultaneously, polyphonously, as the lines are animated by different movements that run counter to each other, starting from and ending at different points, contrary to classic palindromes like loops spool or Madame Totem Adam, in which the initial and last letters in the phrase are in turn the starting and arrival points, always the same ones spread out on a unique line read from left to right and right to left. Cassie’s loops, on the other hand—AS DEEDS ARE RARER AS DEEDS ARE RARER, for instance—have several starting points from which the motion is launched, creating simultaneous lines that cross and recross each other before the initial one, already redoubled (the palindrome would work without the repetition), is itself completed, thus creating different moves and countermoves at the same time, different lines that keep generating their own proliferating motions or “loop spools” in ways that are no longer linear but multilinear.

Stasis and repetition are but only apparent; if the texts keep rehashing and rehearsing the same plots, metaphors, and genres, if the texts seemingly repeat themselves to start over again and again, as suggested by the palindrome structuring John’s Wife or the cinematic reels and musical loop (C to C and F again) structuring The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, they nevertheless remain hard to pin down. Traversed by multiple motions, the texts irrevocably remain, when their writing seems over, in or at play, never really stabilized once and for all. A same story, scene, or sentence can always, in(de)finitely be rewritten, replayed, in the same fashion as Henry Waugh, in The Universal Baseball Association, keeps throwing his three dice, reinventing his game and the text while exploring the two hundred and sixteen combinations of his exponential alphabet. In A Child Again, playing cards come to replace Henry’s dice but the result remains the same: played cards will never annul chance, and the text of “Heart Suit” keeps replaying forever, as each reading instantiates one of its 6, 227, 020, 800 combinations. At any rate, the text, when your reading is done, is still to be rewritten and reread, being devoid of any final, or authoritative version, its print output but a parody, somehow, in the musical sense of the word: always-already a mere variation on another version that both preexists and remains indefinitely to come . . . Bidding farewell from the scaffold, the condemned man complains that he has not been given a fair deal, the cards were clearly stacked against him, he feels like the butt of a bad joke. Bad or not, the joke reaches its punchline with the well-named Joker card, played last, the wild card relevantly standing for any other in a game which, consequently, can only be replayed: “Round up the suspects and send them shuffling through here again! says the King. This is not over! Justice must be done!” But, as his Queen wonders, what will he find that he, like you, cast as Alice, does not know already? For of course the enigma raised by those stolen tarts is one that, much like the cases investigated in Gerald’s Party or Noir, cannot be solved along conventional lines, one that is bound to leave you in the end with a bunch of unanswered questions. Like Noir himself, [y]ou still don’t know who did what, but [ . . . ] that’s not really the point. Integrity is. Style. As Fingers liked to say, you can’t escape the melody, man, but you can make it your own. (Noir, 191) Whatever “meaning” there might be to those texts eventually is in—“It’s not the joke,” remember?, “but . . . ”—the telling of them, their very motion that you in turn, reading them, are asked, not just to follow, but somehow to embody as you dissolve in the texts’ very process, letting yourself be carried by and moving along the lines they offer you. For you know that you still have to learn and, once learnt, unlearn to learn again, and again, how to read, how to make the melody your own. For all those texts require that you consider them in their infinite variety and variability, that you tread all their forking paths, not one after another, stringing their various versions in time, but rather simultaneously, threading their various lines together, displaying them or storying them in space, mapping them, as it were, to see how all those narrative lines converge and diverge, knot and unknot constantly as they animate the texts.

Reread then, again to celebrat[e], not the line, dull as death itself, but the motion that has made it. (Pinocchio in Venice, 258) Not the traces left on a page, but their relentless tracing and retracing, not the wakes but the perpetual waking of discarded possibilities . . . Do not wait until the ink dries up, or until the writing freezes. If, often, the page aspires to turn into a screen, as in A Night at the Movies or The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, you in turn should read all those letters and words coursing over it as immaterial projections of sorts. For, in a way, the relation between text and page may be much the same as the one between film and screen; quite a “superficial” one—in the sense that [s]urface is only surface and infinitely restorable. (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 274)—rather than a material, or substantial one. This is something the projectionist in “The Phantom of the Movie Palace” becomes all too aware of, when launching in pursuit of an enigmatic ingenue who, all of a sudden, somehow like John’s anonymous wife in John’s Wife, disappears both from his screen and your page. If, in both cases—in fact, most, if not all the texts, somehow repeat and toy with the same pattern: Gerald’s Party with Alison, who focuses much of Gerald’s, hence your attention, Pinocchio in Venice with the Blue-Haired Fairy, Ghost Town with the widowed schoolmistress; each time, these characters, acting as a literal will-o’-the-wisp or ignis fatuus (Fat Agnes, in Noir, is one), arousing, driving, and playing with the desires of male characters, turning them, like Lucky Pierre, and you among them, into fatuous idiots (359), have and/or metamorphose into negative counterparts, like Sally-Ann (anagrammatically close to Alison), Bluebell, Belle, or Pauline and Sweet Abandon, aka Sassy Buns, in John’s Wife—if, then, female characters like “John’s wife” or the ingenue can be seen (more than truly “grasped”) as a metaphor of the real, which both sets off and polarizes the writing of the text, the quest such characters preside over nevertheless remains an intransitive one, the metaphor they may embody itself being displaced from text to text and reaching no resting place, as exemplified in such characters’ elusiveness. The metaphor that, in Pinocchio in Venice, the Professor needs to complete his magnum opus, a metaphor that prompted him to fly to Venice in the first place, will eventually elude him to the very end, his Mamma condemned to remain forever in the (un)making; if Pinocchio’s ultimate metaphor remains ungraspable, the transfer the figure stands for proves only too literal, transporting the Professor from his American university to Italy, and Collodi’s “Adventures of Pinocchio” from a village in Tuscany to Venice . . . Similarly, the enigma presented to the projectionist in A Night at the Movies, will not be fathomed as the ingenue, a personification of sorts of the writing’s motion, flits through the projectionist’s grasp. Whether the holes on his screen belong to the referential world depicted by the movie (holes in her underwear) or to the abrasion of a film too often projected (just water spots—it’s an old film), unless, still, they are holes in his screen, they are the only thing he will ever know at each of the ingenue’s furtive (dis)appearances: he is not surprised when [ . . . ] he spies dimly, far across the columned and chandeliered pit into which he’s been thrown, what appears to be a rustic wooden ladder, leaning radiantly against a shadowed wall. Only the vicious gnawing at his ankles surprises him as he struggles toward it, the Mercurians’ mildewed breath, the glimpse of water-spotted underwear on the ladder above him as he starts to climb. Or are these holes? He clambers upward, reaching for them, devoted as always to his passionate seizure of reality, only to have them vanish in his grasp, the ladder as well (33). Later, as he now finds himself on the “other” side after boundaries have collapsed, projected as he now is, a literal ignis fatuus of his own, lost somewhere in the light coursing on his own screen, or in the blanks between the words streaming on your own page; later, the projectionist will find out that the “real,” if at all, can only be understood in its own elusiveness or ungraspability, and that, consequently, to go in quest of the real is to accept, in turn, to dissolve and melt one’s own contours, never to put a stop to the quest, which, like Ros, would annihilate it: Spots appear on his clothing, then get left behind as he’s shoved along, as though the air itself might be threadbare and discolored, and there are blinding flashes at his feet like punctures where bright light is leaking through. (36)

“It’s, I dunno, like the place has sprung a goddamn leak or something!” Rick realizes in “You Must Remember This,” in conclusion to A Night at the Movies (183). What might be leaking in the end, is the myth(s) spread by Hollywood. At the same time, the house of fiction, which used to open its many windows on the outside, now seems to be collapsing; or if not, at least the perspective has been shifted around with the intrusion of the camera eye, whose “sentient lens” signals that the ways the text now opens onto the world have changed and that the “outside” gaze has always-already penetrated the fiction in one form or another. “They’re all down there,” [Rick] says. [ . . . ] “Yes, everybody! Strasser, those goddamn Bulgarians, Sasha, Louis—” (182-3) Boundaries are not what they used to be. The desire to pass from the writing of “transparent” texts to an exploration of filters and lenses of all kinds through fiction itself, by becoming ever stronger, inevitably entails that the lens as such, not merely “sentient,” proves to be ever more stubborn and invasive; your perception, and the integrity of your gaze, presiding over the way you see, and hence understand the world and yourself, are radically questioned.

As a possible new paradigm for fiction, the story “Milford Junction, 1939: A Brief Encounter” turns the window pane of a train into a screen, a moving screen, onto which various images are projected that superimpose on top of the outside scenery, thus modifying it. Such a motif suggests that the writer might no longer be interested in what lies beyond the “transparent” window, so much as in the window, not necessarily in itself, but at least in the way that, adding to it, it “screens” an “outside” that consequently no longer is one: . . . the accelerating landscape, framed by the train window, gradually receding into a kind of distant panoramic backdrop for one’s own dreams and memories, projected onto the strange blurry space in-between, which is more or less where the window is, but is not the window itself, a rather peculiar space perhaps, somehow there and not there at the same time, but no less real, my dear, for all that and, at the very least, a fascinating place in which to lose oneself for just a little while, just a little while, on the way home to Churley or Ketchworth . . . (A Night at the Movies, 147) The “transparency” of the window has been relegated to the background, while fiction and reality intermingle since one, becoming the other, loses its own substance, only to “realize” the other. If the illusion operates, it is mainly thanks to the fading, the dissolution of frontiers—this collapsing of boundaries announced in “The Phantom of the Movie Palace” (23)—and the concomitant stylistics of absence (33) it gives rise to, rather than in any referential presence. In other words, fiction’s purpose might not be to make you believe in the apparition of an illusory world on the screen/page, but, rather, to make the screen itself vanish, that is as screen, this ultimate rampart holding fiction and reality apart, thus comforting you in your expectations, keeping you safe from your own desires and fantasies: “Wake up! We’re here!” someone says, meaning to be kind, and somehow, all those silly dreams disappear . . . (147) Or do they? For, it seems, fiction’s true power precisely lies elsewhere, beyond such easy, reassuring partitions between “fiction” and “reality,” where the forced union between both is achieved to conduct you away from mystification to reality (Pricksongs & Descants).

The Adventures of Lucky Pierre collapses all such partitions and shatters the frame blocking its eponymous character’s vision, bestowing upon him a purely novelistic conscience. Like him, you’re now incapable of determining with any certainty when and where the film starts and stops, when the performance ceases, or even where the screen begins . . . Probably there, yet not quite there, at the same time; somewhere, sometime in-between, where and when the “novel,” without yet quite being something else, is no longer quite what it used to be. A bit like Gerald’s Party in its generic indeterminacy, whose plot, contaminated by Gerald’s memories—Maybe memory itself is a kind of trick, Ilsa muses in “You Must Remember This,” something that turns illusion into reality and makes the real world vanish before everyone’s eyes like magic. (A Night at the Movies, 179)—displaces the text somewhere into the blanks between words, between its very lines: all these violent displacements, this strange light, these shocked and bloodied faces—it was as though we’d all been dislodged somehow, pushed out of the frame, dropped into some kind of empty dimensionless gap like that between film cuts, between acts . . . (Gerald’s Party, 99) Between words.

Between text and film—incidentally, it also is the title of a 1961 movie by Herschell Gordon Lewis—The Adventures of Lucky Pierre and its porn star, himself a go-between of sorts as suggested by the slang origin of his nom de plume or, rather, de penne, both travel in uncharted, virgin space, a terra incognita forever blank under the snow that progressively recovers the streets of Cinecity, the City of Sin, the beautiful princess become an unclean widow (1), sporting her filthiness in her skirts, innocent though she is and remains, as each new course upon her and the text, but the echo of a course, could still be the first.

For the city that slowly uncovers itself on the screen of your page is also a woman whose silhouette enticingly shifts about, now clear, now blurry, a mysterious and impenetrable body, albeit inviting in its proximity and vulnerability. But like the hero, you stumble upon it and the minute description offered in the opening pages of the text, placing you both in a voyeuristic and listening position; the language of the body gives way to the body of the language on the page as the letters flaunt their own visual and audible materiality: the writing displays capital letters to define each part of the body, toying with secret acrostics (2) and, thus, the possibility that you could read, no longer simply left to right, but also concomitantly top to bottom, adding onto the horizontal linearity a vertical amplitude to the text’s development, a text also peppered with other letters detached in bold—O’s (28, 183, 397), D’s (120), U’s (235) that perforate it; X’s (28, 119, 142, 196), Z’s (187, 250), V’s (66, 132, 147, 335, 337), F’s (133, 240, 371) that lacerate it, all of them, in one way or another, drawing your attention to, redoubling it, the pornographic aspect of The Adventures of Lucky Pierre. The film, the text, and the body with which they fuse, are to be seen, watched, read, but also listened to, as implied by the cantus firmus the novel opens onto: A whisper becoming a tone, the echo of a tone. Doleful, a soft incipient lament blowing in the night like a wind, like the echo of a wind, a plainsong wafting distantly through the windy chambers of the night, wafting unisonously through the spaced chambers of the bitter night, alas, the solitary city, she that was full of people, thus a distant and hollow epiodion laced with sibilants bewailing the solitary city. (1) As the plainsong explor[es] its mode (1), the evolution and involution of the syntax, folding back upon itself in echoes and repetitions stressed by the musicality of foreign idioms (affanato, piangevole, epicedial, sospirante, gravis, innig, con amarezza, angoscioso, disperato), not only underscore that the text and the body it is giving shape to are “in the making,” or literally being processed, but also point to their ephemeral quality, the echoes in and of the text appearing as indications of the fragile persistence of immaterial, insubstantial traces of what has already vanished and no longer provides any durable grip to the language that seeks to grasp it.

For the body as such, in the end, might precisely be what eludes language and challenges any attempt at symbolization. Undoubtedly, you have already learnt all there was to learn about the body, yet even though you acknowledge the meaningless mortality of it, you, following in LP’s tracks, continue to celebrate and emblazon the body while you are still alive. The body has been banalized, demystified, displayed to the point that there might be no more to learn about it—at least, about its exterior. Like Lucky Pierre, too, you have listened to its talk, in an effort to penetrate to its most reticent messages. But despite everything, you still do not know the body. Its otherness from yourself, as well as its intimacy, make it the inevitable object of your ever-renewed reading project. The language that means to grasp the body, in what remains an ever-renewed writing project, can then only return to it again and, oh! yes! again, in an endless melody that keeps being replayed.

C to C and F again (1): beyond euphemisms—Cock to Cunt and Fuck Again (367)—music is a structuring device of The Adventures of Lucky Pierre whose movement goes up the C scale without though closing it down. The text delves back in its middle while verging on its (un)ending or, perhaps, climax, as Reel 9 opens on a double F—Film Festival (363)—thus following the pattern started, or continuing, with Reel 1, which moves from Cantus (1) to discant (43) while Reel 2 keeps climbing the scale—Documentary (44) and End (90)—and so on. The text thus potentially reads as a complex, infinitely varied melody written and played on a musical alphabet, of which Cissy’s anagrammatic phrases, setting the tone, are one example among many other possible variations: A BAD DADDEE! AGED CAD! A DECADE ABED! FAGGED BAGGAGE! (41)

To read The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, but also to read just any text, always involves a bit more than just complying with the surface linearity of the book format; of course, as you read, you link letters together, words, phrases, sentences; lines, paragraphs, chapters, parts, tomes, following what appears to be a necessary progression as you leave behind you page after page of text, piling them on top of others, patiently stacking the past on your receding left . . . But as you grapple with the signs on the page, trying to elaborate and map the meaning of the text, you realize, with others before you, that the text more and more resembles a musical score on which both tempo and key establish the rule you will play by. While opening, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre already emphasizes this sense of performance: musical words jostle on the page to specify the elegiac, melancholic (postcoital) tone the text should be played in. More generally, you suspect that words and letters are notes written out on the text’s score, offered for your own performance or rendering of it: Black bars radiate from this turbulent arena, laid on the surrounding hills like the stripes of a rod in the day of wrath, and at the end of the black bars, like whipstocks for the maimed, letters. Flickering neumes: VAGINAL ORIFICE, LABIA MAJORA. (2) The text’s inherent, though comic, violence, may lie in the way it compels you to play a major part in it, its “pornography” consisting, more than in what it displays, in destroying all boundaries so that the text can, almost literally, be embodied in you who sing it.

For with it, Coover may assert one of the goals of literature as play, turning you, a consumer no more, into a performer of the text, in order to try and check the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the writer as producer, owner, or “author” of the text, and you, regarded as its passive user, its appraising customer, or “reader.” Gerald’s Party and Noir also emphasize this, as they both blatantly invalidate the hermeneutic code exemplified by the detective novel, irreverently discarding the enigma they have shaped in their opening pages as ultimately irrelevant. For if the point to any enigma is to write “the end,” giving form to a tension which naturally requires a resolution that is merely protracted as the plot moves on, the mystery as such behind Gerald’s Party and Noir can only thrive as a parodic or residual one, as they both do away, albeit differently, with the chrono-logical order that underlies it. If Noir himself, from flashback to flashback, gets lost in a temporal maze, on Pardew’s request in Gerald’s Party, Draper (again, almost the former’s anagrammatic double as observed by some) symbolically collects every character’s watch, the better to dissolve time’s conventional chronology. In both cases, the classic move of the text towards empiricism and truth is irrevocably impeded and your reading habits are radically challenged as you are asked to step away from any hermeneutic approach to the text; the score offered you can no longer simply be read or deciphered, at a distance, so that you can comfortably appreciate what plurality or polyphony constitutes it; rather, to interpret now is to perform, that is, to play the texts by their own writerly rules, for—and you, for one, should know—they demolish any criticism which, once produced, inevitably mixes with the texts, texts that all anticipate their critical response in one way or another . . . If, then, some texts like John’s Wife, Ghost Town, or The Adventures of Lucky Pierre might be seen as the embodiment or actualization of the reading process, others, being presented as scripts, like Hair O’ the Chine or “After Lazarus,” rather suggest that your role still is to instantiate the work. In both cases, what is highlighted is, as in the “cubistic” stories of Pricksongs & Descants, that the text exists in its irreducible plurality, being a text

 

in which the networks are many and interact, without anyone of them being able to surpass the rest;		Gerald’s Party
composed of a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds;		Spanking the Maid
with no beginning; it is reversible;		John’s Wife
to which we gain access by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one;		Briar Rose/The Adventures of Lucky Pierre
in which the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, being indeterminable (meaning here is never subject to a principle of determination, unless by throwing dice);		The Universal Baseball Association
which the systems of meaning can take over, but their number is never closed, based as the text is on the infinity of language.		The Origin of the Brunists/The Public Burning

 

What the plurality of the text, as diversely manifested in Coover’s writing, thus exemplifies is that reading the text no longer is or can be an ancillary activity apart from what you deliberately select and/or create as your ob-ject, that is the text as a finished product that you maintain at a safe, “critical” distance. Whether you like it or not, reading is a writing of sorts and, as such, distance is critical, indeed, undoubtedly the best way for you to see the traces left in the text, yet as sure a way for you unavoidably to miss the motion that made them: for somehow what these texts require—when, like Gerald’s Party, they do not demand it (Now—!)—is that you keep playing (with) them again, inventing for yourself new reading paths through them, thus prolonging their own creative motion, extending their lines, expanding their gestural language; writing and reading might not simply be the two sides of a same coin, or two distinct, even if close, poles held inexorably apart. Instead of looking at them in their contiguity, you feel, then, that you might perhaps do better to consider them in their continuity.

For Coover’s texts often, if not always, invade your own turf, staging characters whom, for the most part, you cannot help but recognize as somewhat parodic images of yourself as you, like them, grapple with a morphing text which baffles your understanding as their environment does theirs (think of Noir, the Kid in Ghost Town, Gerald, Pinocchio, Lucky Pierre, or Nixon . . . ). Metafiction, in this regard, might relate to the text’s ability to fold back upon itself, upon its writing, that is, while it simultaneously peruses itself, inscribing its own reading in its midst, hence challenging it at the same time. If, once upon a time, you could have prospered by starring the texts, that is isolating bits of text into lexias or units of reading, hoping to grasp the smooth surface (if only) of blocks of signification soldered by the flowing discourse of narration, you’re now facing another game altogether, since such texts as “The Babysitter,” “The Magic Poker,” “The Gingerbread House,” “The Elevator,” or “Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl” in Pricksongs & Descants, or Ghost Town and Noir on a quite larger scale, along with scripts like Hair O’ the Chine or “After Lazarus,” have already been cut up into lexias prior to your reading. Similarly, Spanking the Maid or Briar Rose, in their variational impetus, read (or write: same thing) in networks or plateaus, in which blocks of signification momentarily and parodically crystallize. Others like Gerald’s Party or John’s Wife, being on the contrary almost devoid of any visible structuring partition in the form of conventional chapters or parts—John’s Wife comprises twenty compact blocks of text, while Gerald’s Party seems to have been arranged as a montage of cinematic frames spliced together, in which each new section or cut in the text is determined by Gerald’s walking into another room, as though his movements entailed new narrative angles or shifts in perspective—present their stories as virtually one continuous, unrolling chunk of text cut up into a discontinuous fabric: in such cases, the texts open and expand according to what resembles a computational, hypertextual process that also extends to more classically divided texts like Pinocchio in Venice or The Adventures of Lucky Pierre which, like John’s Wife or Ghost Town somehow, might be seen (as suggested by The Adventures Lucky Pierre’s subtitle: Directors’ Cut) as a pre-instantiated reading, but one output among many others, as though a code had already been run prior to your reading of the text. Yet each time, the text resists, all the while often complying with it, its own linear progression towards a predetermined, fixed ending. Instead, such “endings”—There are always endings, but there are not always conclusions. (Pinocchio in Venice, 45)—though inscribed in the text, are destabilized by a writing whose momentum generates multiple reading paths, alternate routes in the midst of a “text” that consequently reads like one provisional version of a potential “other” or “double,” or, less reductively, like one “multiple” among many lying dormant, like bed-ridden princesses awaiting your awakening of them and your instantiation of their own stories.

In other words, if the multivalence of Coover’s texts makes it difficult for you to read them and comment upon them in any conventional sense, it might partly be because what they induce you to acknowledge is that there is no such thing as a text proper to start with, that is an object indelibly fixed in print, endowed with an organic unity, the property of an author laying claims on it as on a well-guarded field. Try as he might, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., will eventually be unable to retain his own rights on his universal creation: ousted from it in the closing chapter of The Universal Baseball Association, Henry is now absent from a text that writes in a multiplicity of duplicitous voices that can no longer be classically attributed to one “character” or another, now free from domination by their author, quite like what Ghost Town does by emancipating figures from the western who end up talking in what sounds like a unique, though plural, unidentifiable voice that no quotation marks enclose anymore, in conspicuous flouting of all respect for origin, paternity, or propriety (as it turns out, the Kid irreverently shoots Daddy Dunne dead in the opening pages of the text). No, if the text is in some way “owned” by its writer, it might only be in the sense that a hotel can be said to be the property of its architect; a hotel—the Grand Hotel de l’Univers Imaginaire—on which, being composed of empty, impersonal rooms (or boxes) that you can still make yours for just a little while, just a little while, dear, there eventually are no definite claims ever to be laid . . .

The wall of all those voices must then be passed through to reach the writing, and through it too, your reading. Unbolt the language of the text, make it leak, open it up on its infinity, transgress the narrow bonds of propriety. You can only attain and achieve the text’s multivalence, plurality, or true polyphony if you read wanderingly, adventurously, or probingly: for such probes are above all [ . . . ] challenges to the assumptions of a dying age, exemplary adventures of the Poetic Imagination, high-minded journeys toward the New World and never mind that the nag’s a pile of bones. (Pricksongs & Descants, 78) Never mind, no, that the nag is in a poor condition and that no one would take chances with it after what a Joyce or a Beckett, among others, put it through; no one, but Coover that is, alone on his island somewhere—the same island that possibly provided him with the setting of “Beginnings”—at the dawn of a new age sometime after his European peregrinations, sallying forth on exemplary adventures of his own, undoubtedly fearing lest his expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of his experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which he has been convinced. Extra-vagance, indeed! it depends on how you are yarded . . . Coover’s America, nothing more, nor less, than a promised land of fiction(s) from its forgotten origins, if not quite an unbounded territory, at least one whose poetic frontiers have been wandering far into imagination, may find its existence in the “extravagant” language that constitutes it, persistently pointing to the volatile truth of its words as it continually betrays the inadequacy of the residual statements. For such “truth” is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains.

Coover’s work, in its all too generous pages, thus offers you the ever-renewed possibility of mapping and remapping a territory forever to be explored, reinvented anew with every passage through it, of drawing out a road in the heart of the heart of this virgin country, whether covered in snow (“Scene for ‘Winter’,” Pinocchio in Venice, or The Adventures of Lucky Pierre) or arid like a desert (“The Leper’s Helix,” Ghost Town), by making it continuously branch into multiple, unexpected directions. So doing, Coover’s work indomitably sketches the shifting topography of one unique text in motion-s, infinitely varied by your readings through it, readings whose significance is achieved only when you feel the “pile of bones” suddenly, if momentarily, animate and rouse from beneath you, or when the remaining “literal monument” suddenly, if again momentarily, comes back to life and is immediately translated in and by the extra-vagance of the text, a text-forever-in-progress, forever reaching beyond itself, extending out of its narrow frame to supplement what lies outside it.

Such extravagance is total at the end of The Universal Baseball Association, which progressively moves beyond its own boundaries as the players invented by Henry Waugh become more autonomous, eventually to gain—unless, of course, their Creator has utterly forsaken them—their independence in the last chapter of the novel; in any case, God exists and he is a nut, or so at least is Professor Costen Migod McCamish’s conclusion (233). A “nut,” the origin of all things, of their world (J. H. W. h), yet at the same time, a crazy, if sweet nothing: the creature (Migod) here impiously swallows up his Creator (God), condemned merely to ex-ist, expelled from the world he created, imaginary though it may be or have been. Amid all the spurious theories circulating about the mythic origin of the “Parable of the Duel” now ritualistically enacted by the players, a whole new regime of fiction develops and thrives, casting an ironical light on the events narrated in the rest of the book, and incidentally turning your own possible critical notions into mere shallow caricatures; time, you realize, has gone out of joint, as you suddenly jump from season LVI to season CLVII, a gap that forces you to abandon your own hermeneutic depths and resurface with the players by flattening out your own perspective on theirs—as they, now, are freely carousing on a kitchen table—in order to discover that, in the lost meantime, symbols and, like God, all other tokens of signification, have lost much of their luster:

“Look up, good man, cast your eye on the Ineffable Name,” intones Cuss, “and give praise!”

Gringo stares gapemouthed upward. “Oh yeah!”

“Do you see it?”

“Yeah!”

“What does it say?”

“100 Watt.” (231-2)

Like the players, it might be time for you too to look up or out, rather than down into possible interpretations and meanings, those flimsy, reductive ones that the narrator may have mischievously led you after, causing you to chase mere phantoms, when from the very start plunging you, a fatuous idiot all along, deep into the BOTTOM half of the seventh (3). With Chapter 8 and Henry’s withdrawal from the text, the writing substitutes its translational drive for its initial profound dive into the possible meanings of the game it has been playing. It thus reasserts the essentially ludic dimension of its own dynamic—McCamish is Doctor of Nostology and Research Specialist in the Etiology of Homo Ludens (233)—notably, but not only, in the recombinant games it plays with the characters’ names. Words are thus divested of their latent meanings as the many puns again and again draw your attention to the excessive, volatile, extravagant nature of the letter. Other playful linguistic combinations and semantic contaminations still remain possible and, when the novel closes, the game as such is not over but, always, to be continued: the novel’s ultimate chapter, in the form of this ninth inning still to be (re)played, remains forever to be (re)written, out of a text which, opening on its outside, extra-vagating, all but merges into a thin, moving line that no longer separates inside from outside that both fold back upon one another. The ontological differentiation the novel has been fraudulently postulating and holding onto so far has now collapsed, while the diverse fictional layerings—the initial, secure distinction between yours, Henry’s, and the players’ levels—are all flattened out onto a same, unique plane of ex-istence.

The movement of The Universal Baseball Association thus progressively raises the text to its own surface—The idea excites him. A rising above. Yes, why not? (241)—opening it up onto an outside that, so doing, it cancels out, much like The Public Burning, whose epilogue dramatically propels the text out of its fictional frame both in space and time, as Nixon’s mystic “election” by Uncle Sam echoes and prophetically announces Nixon’s “real” election by the American people. From the very midst of fiction, then, the text opens and adds onto the real, doing away with its frame, to remind you that, no, indeed, Nixon is not Uncle Sam’s only “victim”—This . . . this is not happening to me alone, I thought desperately, or tried to think [ . . . ]—but to the nation as well! (The Public Burning, 532)—and that, consequently, as far as History, that is, as far as fiction goes, [t]he worst ones may indeed be the ones who just let it happen (Pricksongs & Descants, 39). Which, in turn, may prompt Uncle Sam’s ironical reminder to vote early and vote often (534).

The text, any text for that matter, whether seen through its writerly or readerly lens, thus unavoidably carries a political dimension, as its language gesture inescapably leads to other language gestures; there might be no such thing in the end as innocent play and when it comes down to it, you too are as guilty as the rest of them. Not just in more overly political texts such as The Public Burning, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, or A Political Fable, Coover’s work may be working towards a redefinition or reassertion of literature as political action, undoubtedly lacking (you have few illusions) in any direct, immediate influence—Ah well: art . . . not as lethal as one might hope . . . (The Public Burning, 490)—yet perhaps not so devoid of durable consequences as, engaging and challenging you on your own turf, thus inducing you to find new means of going about the text, it directly acts on the way you perceive the world, enhancing it somehow (you hope); action in and through language insofar as it may be the only common property you have at your disposal at all times. For if, ultimately, literature is a game, the stakes it raises might be poner en la plaza de nuestra república una mesa de trucos donde cada uno pueda llegar a entretenerse sin daño de barras [ . . . ], sin daño del alma ni del cuerpo, porque los ejercicios honestos y agradables antes aprovechan que dañan (Priksongs & Descants, 78). The text—a space of and in transit, a playground of sorts in which you can feel a child again—might be no other than this res publica whose outline gets redefined each time you again are playing . . .