AMERICAN FUNDAMENTALS; OR, HISTORICAL HUMBUGGERY

How he managed to pin her

And get it all in her

Remains an eternal league mystery;

But the crowd round the pit

All had to admit

That Long Lew Lydell had made history!

The Universal Baseball Association

With the rape of Fanny McCaffery—her first name says as much—Long Lew Lydell has “made history,” in deed . . . History as rape, or the story of a historic rape; history sung and glorified by all the players of an imaginary baseball association, a microcosmic replication of the macrocosmic, universal structures at large—structures of a real world homologized and holographically superseded: a hollow-graphed world, ultimately emptied of all historical substance. History: in the end, you can never prove a thing. (The Universal Baseball Association, 224) And this impossibility to prove a thing eventually leads to more history in the end, that is, to more “theories”—theories forged by the players, proliferating in the last chapter of the novel; theories contrived by the readers, proliferating out of the text, one, with The Public Burning, of Coover’s most commented novels; but theories ultimately held in check by the text’s self-interpretive, allegorical drive, as it playfully infringes on the turf of critics or literary historians, parodying their (your) obdurate, ingrained bias to fix “facts” and make them signify. Signify, no matter the cost; because, no, it cannot have “just happened.” Weirdly, independently, meaninglessly. Another accident in a chain of accidents: worse even than invention. Invention [ . . . ] implies a need and need implies purpose; accident implies nothing, nothing at all, and nothing is the one thing that scares Hardy Ingram. (224-5) Scares us all. And so, possible exegetical lines are sketched out in the last chapter of the novel, redrafting, as it were, the entire course of UBA history (222) after Damon Rutherford was killed by one of Jock Casey’s beanballs; hermeneutic lines that the story “McDuff on the Mound” playfully, and inter(re) ferentially, extend and/or short-circuit while reimagining another mythical, mythified duel, a duel sung and recited, glorified over the years—Coover’s take on “Casey at the Bat”—a duel between McDuff and “Mighty Casey” that, like the one ritualistically enacted in the last chapter of The Universal Baseball Association, literally is from another age. And Casey: who was Casey? A Hero, to be sure. A Giant. A figure of grace and power, yes, but wasn’t he more than that? He was tall and mighty (omnipotent, some claimed, though perhaps, like all fans, they’d got a bit carried away), with a great mustache and a merry knowing twinkle in his eye. Was he, as had been suggested, the One True Thing? McDuff shook to watch him. He was ageless, older than Mudville certainly, though Mudville claimed him as their own. Some believed that “Casey” was a transliteration of the initials “K. C.” and stood for King Christ. Others, of a similar but simpler school, opted for King Corn, while another group believed it to be a barbarism for Krishna. Some, rightly observing that “case” meant “event,” pursued this reasoning back to its primitive root, “to fall,” and thus saw in Casey (for a case was also a container) the whole history and condition of man, a history perhaps as yet incomplete. On the other hand, a case was also an oddity, was it not, and a medical patient, and maybe, said some, mighty Casey was the sickest of them all. Yet a case was an example, cried others, plight, the actual state of things, while a good many thought all such mystification was so much crap, and Casey was simply a good ballplayer. Certainly, it was true, he could belt the hell out of a baseball. All the way to Gehenny, as the umpire liked to put it. (A Child Again, 180-1)

Well, history in the making. So much, and more, has been said about The Universal Baseball Association; “Fraud!” the maddened thousands might as well cry out, as a long overdue echo reaches you from the past—call it all, if you will, humbuggery . . . The Universal Baseball Association, or the history of an interpretive rape.

Rapes abound in Robert Coover’s fiction, from The Origin of the Brunists to The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, through Gerald’s Party, Ghost Town, or John’s Wife, in which the whole plot seems to have been knotted, years before the main storyline, around the gang rape of Pauline, proxy for the unapproachable bride-to-be, John’s future wife. In The Origin of the Brunists, Lou Jones uses his knack for inimitable storytelling to relate the rape of Dinah Clemens. Lou, when not interrupted by Miller, skillfully paces his story, chooses his words carefully, to turn Dinah into some sacrificial victim; comparing her several times with a bird (bird, birdie, pigeon . . . ), Lou adorns her with a halo of religious connotations all the more pregnant, in a first part entitled The White Bird, as his story builds upon the Biblical account of “the Rape of Dinah” in Genesis—connotations that eventually take over other more slangy ones (Dinah is a whore). Because, give or take a few pages, Lou’s story concludes the first part of The Origin of the Brunists, Dinah’s parodic rape, which appears to be a mere anecdote when related to the overall economy of the text, seems here to acquire some symbolical weight, and becomes, in its metaphorical undertones—the sacrifice—a mise-en-abyme, spoof though it may be, of the novel itself. Subtly mirroring each other, embedded in one another, storytelling and the rape may have more in common than meets your eye. In Lou’s story, the rape comes as an unexpected narrative climax suddenly, violently flung at his audience, an outcome no one was prepared for: “Jesus Christ!” cried Castle, slamming the table, half out of his chair. (The Origin of the Brunists, 112) Stories, in their performativity, have ways of their own to penetrate the reality of an audience. Writing, it is true, is a violation of accepted norms, a transgression of limits, an experience of pain and of orgasmic pleasure. Writing, as exemplified by the epilogue of The Public Burning, may—fundamentally—be a form of rape.

After the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, traitors to the nation, burned by light as they, thieves of light, appropriately should (The Public Burning, 3), Uncle Sam is back to finish off what he started. Ethel’s death, though announced and described as no mere repeat performance after Julius’ execution but, rather, as the night’s true second act, a topper (511), is thus “untoppered”—the night’s, and the novel’s highlight, is still to come, far from public gaze, for your own personal, voyeuristic enjoyment. For, at bottom, the Rosenbergs’ deaths may be but a smokescreen, a recreational spectacle designed by the best of showbiz engineers America has yet spawned, no less than the greatest showman on earth himself, Cecil B. DeMille. But, like true history, what happens always happens behind the scenes . . . What The Public Burning is inexorably headed to is not, as you might have thought, the execution of the traitors, so much as the crowning of the buffoon, the rewarding of the clown, the initiation of the profane: Richard Nixon, licked by the grace of Uncle Sam who, forefinger aimed at his sweetheart—you been ee-LECK-ted!—only has to utter the sacred formula: I want YOU! (530)

And so it is that the myth, under Uncle Sam’s garb, comes to rape History, of which Nixon is the guarantor; unless it be fiction that unabashedly rapes the real. However it may be, not only is Coover’s writing a transgression, but it also destroys the very idea and possibility of limits or boundaries, including narrative and ontological ones: the novel’s epilogue, recounting Nixon’s mystical or mythical “election,” thus makes a twenty-some-year leap into historical reality and, were it not for a few dents in the script, including the infamous Watergate—clowns will be clowns . . . —and some publishers’ trepidation, The Public Burning would have achieved an almost-perfect, though fragile, contemporaneity, flinging itself into the present of a reader no longer safely protected behind the book’s cover. As Nixon observes: This . . . this is not happening to me alone, I thought desperately, or tried to think, as he pounded deeper and deeper, destroying everything, even my senses, my consciousness—but to the nation as well! (532) The rape leaves nothing intact; the integrity of both the narrator’s body and consciousness is violated, and, through his, and beyond the text, yours too, identified as you come to be, willy-nilly, with Nixon in his representative functions, both political and narrative.

At the end of an initiatory trajectory, The Public Burning is then in fine the story of a rape raping history. Yet the end thus aimed at remains an ambiguous one. For ultimately, as suggested by the comparison of Nixon’s rape with a form of weaning—“You’re forty years old, son: time you was weaned!” (531)—the end here is a new beginning, just as Nixon’s (metaphorical) death—Jesus, he was killing me! (533)—coincides with a rebirth of sorts—by now I was [ . . . ] bawling like a baby (534). Opposites thus cancel each other out—His words warmed me and chilled me at the same time. (534)—and in this “Beauty and the Beast” epilogue, Beauty is the Beast in constant role reversals between Nixon and Uncle Sam who both act in turn as one and the other:

 

Nixon as the Beast: “Hey, look, Pat! Rrowf! Snort! Gr-r-roww-ff! I’d squatted down and hunched my shoulders, roughed up my hair, bared my teeth, and gone lumbering about the room, barking and yelping and rolling my eyes up at Pat and Tricia. If I’d had a tail I would have wagged it. (523)		Uncle Sam as Beauty: Whatever else he was, he was beautiful (how had I ever thought him ugly?), the most beautiful thing in all the world. (534)
Nixon as Beauty: “But you . . . you can’t—!” “Can and will, my beauty, can and will! [ . . . ]” (532) He patted my bum affectionately. “You’re my everything, sunshine—you’re my boy!” (534)		Uncle Sam as the Beast: And when I opened [my eyes] again, sure enough, there he was: standing in front of me near the fluttering curtains, his eyes glittering with animal menace, a cold sneer on his lips (530).

 

Nixon’s rape thus appears in the text as the logical outcome of a writing which, for more than five hundred pages, furiously works at saying it all, everything and its contrary, blatantly toying with the forms of binary thought and a Manichean vision and understanding of the world and history, thus collapsing clear-cut boundaries, whether:

- geographical—The Public Burning opens on a prologue that turns the world into some sort of Monopoly game between the world’s two superpowers, as embodied in Uncle Sam and the Phantom. The world events which mark the beginning of the Cold War thus all too easily pervade the courthouse on Foley Square where the Rosenbergs are judged and sentenced to death, in a double movement of condensation and expansion that deliberately disregards all forms of hierarchy, including syntactic ones, as the colon opening on a newspaper headline displaces the clerk’s expected words: [The judge] mounts the steps to the bench, dragging his robes behind him, and stands there, peering over the top like Kilroy, while the court clerk announces that the court is now in session: IF SOVIETS START WAR, ATOMIC BOMB ATTACK EXPECTED ON NEW YORK FIRST, says the Journal-American. “All ye having business before this Court, come forward and ye shall be heard!” Julius and Ethel glance at each other, GIs lose another hill in Korea, and East Berlin policemen fire openly on U.S. Army sightseeing buses. The Russians are said to be massing troops on the Manchurian border. “God bless the United States of America!” cries the clerk. (22)

- generic—the novel’s three Intermezzi take the form of a poem, a dramatic dialogue, and an opera act; the text also often impinges on the theater (Chapter 7 is entitled A Little Morality Play for Our Generation), and is pervaded throughout with references to popular songs, cartoons, and movies (House of Wax and High Noon prominent among others), onto which is grafted more “historical” material, ranging from the Rosenberg letters, extracts from political speeches, newspapers, or magazines like Time—allegorized for the nonce as the nation’s Poet Laureate—often adapted as poems, like “Rebellion in the Rain” transcribed in the prologue (12-3).

- narrative—The Public Burning stages a two-fold, two-timed narration, one told in an anonymous, collective voice, the other by Richard Nixon; however, both narrative regimes are far from being impermeable.

- or ontological boundaries—mythic, fictional, or legendary characters blatantly appear next to historic figures.

Nixon’s rape, in this context, appears, then, as a logical outcome, all the more so as it is already filigreed into the text’s opening, in an irony that dawns on you with hindsight only, when Nixon, already thinking ahead to his own election, wonders: Maybe Uncle Sam needed vacuity for an easy passage (31); words that thus furnish the American Superhero with a legitimation of sorts for his elective act: You said it yourself: they’s a political axiom that wheresomever a vacuum exists, it will be filled by the nearest or strongest power. Well, you’re lookin’ at it, mister (532) . . . If to Uncle Sam his lover further appears clean as a hound’s tooth! (533), Nixon, for one, warned you never [to] trust any man who’s “clean as a hound’s tooth”: it’s clear he’s never been out in the real world when the shit’s hit the fan. (33) And so, yes, in a novel that multiplies prolepses as an ironical way of toying with American teleology and its spurious sense of typological prophecy, you are bound, inevitably, to come to the same conclusion as Nixon when discovering how Uncle Sam chooses his next Incarnations: I recalled Hoover’s glazed stare, Roosevelt’s anguished tics, Ike’s silly smile: I should have guessed . . . (533)

And yet, however logical the outcome, and however straightforward the narrative course leading you there—all those recurring notes of impending doo-oom that resonate throughout (237 / 242 / 490)—The Public Burning, although arguably one of Coover’s most linear texts, does not simply take you from a prologue to an epilogue, from a beginning to an end, but, like this Pinocchio being walked around the streets of Venice in endless circles, you are often brought back to the same point of departure. Ritualized, History does repeat indeed, and Nixon’s election, far from singling him out, turns him into a mere avatar in an endless series of reduplications. In other words, Nixon is initiated—though not quite . . . For his rape by Uncle Sam actually sanctions no real beginning properly speaking, but rather underscores America’s return to the status quo ante; I was ready at last, says Nixon, to do what I had never done before—perhaps, yet the novelty he aspires to is but a poor sentimental cliché: “I . . . I love you, Uncle Sam!” I confessed. (534)

Back to square one. The narrative of those three days that led to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg goes in circles. Nixon, despite what happens to him, scarcely evolves from beginning to end: I knew I still had much to learn. People still took me for a carnival barker, a used-car salesman, a fast buck lawyer—I was still too fluent, too intense, too logical. (30) And Nixon’s words still echo five hundred pages further on Uncle Sam’s lips, recalling him to his unchangeable, clownish nature: “I mean it, Gus! You’re my handsome carny barker, my wild Irish rocker-socker, my fellow travelin’ salesman, my little accident, my pretty sailorboy!” (534) Nothing has changed, nothing changes, as History, guest-starring on Times Square, would tend to show. The novel indulges in multiple allusions to (among other events) the diverse “witch hunts” that appear as a redherring motif throughout American history, the folkloric Groun’-Hog Hunt the Rosenbergs fell prey to, but one among many. From the start, a quote refers you back to the Divine Hawthorne and the whole background to his Scarlet Letter (9), as though programming Nixon’s later dream in the course of which Ethel, as a new version of Esther Prynne, materializes with the letter “A” on her chest (266). And, looping the loop towards the end of the novel, Arthur Miller watches, alone in an empty New York theater while the rest of the nation attends the executions on Times Square, a performance of his play The Crucible, based on the same Salem witch hunts as an allegory of McCarthyism.

Of course, from its (unlocatable) origins, American history has been writing teleologically; yet the end it strives to meet—unlike Marx’s vision, for whom COMMUNISM IS THE RIDDLE OF HISTORY SOLVED AND IT KNOWS ITSELF TO BE THIS SOLUTION! (64)—is not an end in itself, but would rather translate as a new start, a new, absolute fundament: there were and still are, after all, such names as the New World, New Jerusalem, New England, New Amsterdam, and New York; with Virgil in mind, what those Founding Fathers sought and hoped for was a Novus Ordo Seclorum, a “New Order of the Ages,” so that a new lineage could be sent down from high heaven at last, and a new revolution, a new cycle, begin . . . Nixon, in The Public Burning, is nowhere near done yet believing in such prophecies: the slogan that excited the imagination, he says, was the one attached to “Courage” over the doorway to the West, my part of the country: Novus Ordo Seclorum. Yes, this was what America was all about, I thought, this was the true revolution of our era—Change Trains for the Future!—and I was lucky enough to be alive just at the moment we were, for the first time, really getting up steam. It was our job now—it would be my job—to bring this new order of the ages to the whole world. (59) Ah, yes, for the first time, indeed, at last, at long last, this long-awaited Novus Ordo Seclorum is about, yes, just about to be ushered in, under the aegis of Nixon himself, of course, who else?, and the revolution will no doubt finally come to fruition, complete its cycle started since always. But the prophecy falls short, again, and not for the first time either, nor the last one; no, the founding gesture—the rape—founds nothing, for nothing fundamentally changes and America, this new, yet unapproachable America, clean as a hound’s tooth, still lies in wait somewhere, sometime . . .

For the question—one of them—the novel raises is, to be sure, albeit (again) parodically, a fundamental one, one of founding. For on what grounds does this “America” rest, on what is it buttressed, itself a fabulous fiction that grew in the minds of men like Columbus, Hudson, and John Smith before they found and founded it—and in the minds of other men as well, like Paine, Jefferson, and Franklin, who invented its political and social structures out of their ideals and hopes, and then sought as actors on the stage of history to make a real nation out of their fabulous dreams? With Uncle Sam’s last words ringing on in Nixon’s ears, The Public Burning closes, not on the hint of a possible beginning, but rather on images of flight and slippage: But he was already gone, I was alone. Only the last of his words remained, bursting tenderly now against my inner ear [ . . . ] . . . “Well, something attempted, something done, my boy, has earned a night’s repose, so let the tent be struck. I leave off as I began. Vaya con Dios, my darklin’, and remember: vote early and vote often, don’t take any wooden nickels, and [ . . . ] always leave ’em laughin’ as you say good-bye!” (534)

If his words linger on momentarily, Uncle Sam has faded away: the closure achieved is but provisional (the night’s repose of a Longfellow) and the act far from over yet. America’s spectacle—Listen, this is my circus, you old coot! (77)—is an itinerant one, and the show is bound to be taken over again, and again. All those repeat performances—mirrored in Uncle Sam’s parodic, intertextual discourse—suggest that no foundational, no fundamental origin can be enacted: after so many rehearsals, the “first” time has not occurred yet. Myth may, in America, have always been stronger than reality, romanticism stronger than realism; and what The Public Burning may generously offer is an atonement for the guilt of having created a fabulation and pretended it was real. It is perhaps in this sense that The Public Burning is a “realistic” novel, in its forceful penetration to the core of fabulous structures it vehemently brings down, in its renunciation of a spurious origin, as it clearly gives up looking for a primeval, absolutely original America, an America that, as such, never existed, if not as a specious myth. Hence the text’s recourse to the present tense in the anonymous chapters, in which what might at first sight appear as the use of the historical present, quickly turns into the ephemeral, simultaneous inscription in the text of flitting events having no more duration or substance than in the course of your reading as it instantiates them. The Public Burning thus makes of writing an ephemeral, performative gesture; writing, not as a foundational moment but, rather, as a constant departure—writing in flight; as if the “roots,” that is, the “origins,” were matters not of the past but precisely of the present, always, fatally. As if America could banish history, could make of the condition of departure, flight, or immigrancy, not something to escape from, a move both Nixon and the Rosenbergs alike embody, but something, like Uncle Sam at his most irreverent, to aspire to . . . The origin, the founding moment, is thus constantly displaced or translated, never fixed nor absolute, and the decision to break away with the old, or with History altogether, has to be made again, and again—in the end, all inquiry into the past, remote or not, may indeed be the desire to do away with this wild, savage, and preposterous “there” or “then,” and introduce in its place the here and now. And so history inescapably writes in the present tense, for, as Uncle Sam says, (mis)quoting Sandburg, the past is a bucket of cold ashes: rake through it and all you’ll get is dirty! (86) As a parody of “historical romance,” The Public Burning perhaps reads less as an investigation into the American past, than as a celebration of the present and the rupturing force it carries.

I did not come to tell you things that you know as well as I. With those words from Eisenhower as one of its epigraphs, The Public Burning overtly states its intentions to have history, though the narrative, give or take a few distortions, remains faithful to its “facts” with a vengeance, slip towards the fiction it, at core, is, if only etymologically, if only because history is never anything but historio-graphy—and such lack of transparence is often, in a pretense to objectivity, transparently ignored; though never by Uncle Sam who, to some extent at least, embodies the novel’s stance, its rupturing or raping force: “And so a trial in the midst of all this flux and a slippery past is just one set of bolloxeratin’ sophistries agin another—or call ’em mettyfours if you like, approximations, all the same desputt humbuggery [ . . . ].” (86)

History, lived and written in the present, whose books keep being rewritten, thus appears as a permanent rearranging, reshaping of “facts”—or, according to Uncle Sam’s word, their constant re-mettyfourization—the reading of which has to be relearnt everyday. It is thus no wonder that The New York Times has become the allegorical temple of History, for the newspaper, any newspaper for that matter, in its very layout, anticipates the disintegration of all models, undermines all preconceived systems: it is a montage, a series of juxtapositions, the syncopation of disjointed, discontinuous fragments—and each day you have to find your way through its maze again, learning again how to read through it . . . Yes: There are sequences but no causes, contiguities but no connections. [ . . . ] Design as a game. Randomness as design. Design ironically revealing randomness. Arbitrariness as a principle, allowing us to laugh at the tragic. As in dreams, there is an impressive amount of condensation on the one hand, elaboration on the other. Logical relationships are repressed, but reappear through displacement. (190) The historical “design” of America, its (for a while at least) “Manifest Destiny,” now nothing more than dust in the American eye blown by the irreverence of Uncle Sam—It is our manifest dust-in-yer-eye to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplyin’ millions (8)—is mystically revealed in the columns of The New York Times to be what it truly is, the product of chance (al-lot-ed), the result of an arbitrary draft. Thus “banished,” History is replaced with an incessant, endless present both devoid of purpose and edge, which is further highlighted by the paratactic linking of nominal sentences within which nouns freely, arbitrarily change positions in a potentially infinite game (Design as a game. Randomness as design. Design ironically revealing randomness. Etc.).

The better to expose History as a poetic construction, Coover reshapes the historical, “factual” materials at his disposal: extracts from Time magazine are thus craftily poeticized, sometimes achieving a purely formal aspect that somehow drains them of their “contents”—

it

was a

sickening and

to americans almost

incredible history of men

so fanatical that they would destroy

their own countries & col

leagues to serve a

treacherous

utopi

a

(24)

Several of Eisenhower’s speeches are compiled into a poem in the novel’s first Intermezzo (149-56), while Judge Kaufman’s verdict, sentencing the Rosenbergs to death, is arranged so as to reveal an acrostics—ISCARIOT (25)—that redoubles the motif of betrayal . . . Proof, if needs be, that historical materials are malleable, that “facts” do not exist per se, but become ones when taken up, or “shaped” in a story that “forges,” or manufact ures them as such, like most exhibits offered by Saypol in the Rosenberg case which, Nixon perceives, might well have come from [the FBI] factory. (123) For when faced with the mass of papers strewn on his office floor, Nixon becomes all too aware of the flimsiness of such “facts”: Which was real, I wondered, the paper or the people? In a few hours, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would be dead, their poor remains worth less than that horseshit I’d stepped in, and the paper too could be burnt, but what was on it would survive. Or could survive, it was a matter of luck. Luck and human need: the zeal for pattern. For story. (305) A story, that is, one among many, that eventually gets the better of History whose only veracity lies in the sampling, the cutting-up, or the projection—the patterning—of an ephemeral, dubious meaning.

Even Uncle Sam, the arch-defender of Temple America, is himself no exception, doo-oomed to disappear sooner or later: Oh, I ain’t immortal, son, I’d hate to think I was. Nothin’ goes on forever, Amber, not even History itself, so why should I? (94) Why should he, indeed, when [t]he great experience of the twentieth century has been to accept the objective reality of time and thus of process—history does not repeat, the universe is not changeless, masses dissolve and slide through the fingers, there are no precognitions—and out in that flow all such assertions may be true, false, inconsequential, or all at the same time. [ . . . ] But The New York Times transforms this time-process into something hard and—momentarily anyway—durable: it is as if these slabs, these great stone tablets, were being hurled out into the timestream, causing the river evermore to eddy and swirl around them. (195) The way events connect, the way “facts” follow from other “facts” that may or may not lead to them, is in fine a literary question, a matter of narrative. But the “script” that Nixon keeps taking his cue from is open-ended and in no way pre-scripted—the plot was still unfolding (120)—which leaves the ending unpredictable, un-scriptable; each stop in the process is an arbitrary one (being hurled out) vibrant with multiple possibilities, a transition rather than an end in itself, whose “durability” can only be “momentary.” There is no stopping the flux—first flow of the universe—and America’s founding again founders as whatever Law is enacted in the pages of The New York Times is bound to perish on a daily basis, for paper is no longer a debased surrogate for the stone tablets of old upon which one hammered out imperishable truths, but rather a ceaseless flow, fluttering through the printer like time itself, a medium for truth’s restless fluidity, as flesh is for the spirit, and endlessly recyclable. (Pinocchio in Venice, 31)

Yet for all that, the dream of a new America (you stick to this imperial designation on purpose), now transformed into a constrained nightmare, is a never-ending one. The founding acts of the country indeed consisted in removing the stains of Old World pollution, in “denying history,” or at least running away from it, in leaving it behind, inventing an elsewhere, entering—according to the Puritan or lay versions of a fundamentally identical vision—the canopied antechamber of eternity or a new, inaugural, foundational phase of time. Uncle Sam, in The Public Burning, for whom—on the surface—the Rosenberg executions are to be a consecration, a new charter of the moral and social order of the Western World, the precedint on which the future is to be carn-structed to ensure peace in our time! (91), knows all too well the violently sexual nature, inscribed in his very words (prece--dint / carn-structed), of all such founding acts performed as mere ritual. The apocalyptic orgy on Times Square thus finds echoes in A Political Fable, which enacts in its closing pages the same basic purifying ritual around the figure of the “Cat,” the text bouncing back on its sexual undertones—he’s got a lotta pussy-nality! (A Political Fable, 15)—to expose often repressed, fundamental taboos acting as indispensable buttresses of the received order.

As for Nixon, he is all too prompt to liken, thinking back on it, the free-for-all orgy during the black-out on Times Square with some form of rape: The momentum had carried me right off the edge of the stage and down with a bruising splat onto that sea of turbulent flesh below. [ . . . ] I’d pitched and rolled blindly through the turmoil, carried along by the tide. Everything was wet and slippery and violent, with high crests and deep troughs: like rape, I’d thought. I was afraid I was going to get seasick. (525) It is precisely Nixon’s retrospective stance that allows the comparison, surprising though it appears in the linear flow of your reading. You, retrospectively, of course understand this simile to be another of the text’s prolepses, one that also concomitantly betrays Nixon’s narrative posture, who knows full well, as he tells his story, what awaits him. But more than this, the simile itself, as such, already erupts in the text as a rape of sorts, one that blatantly disregards and annihilates the boundaries between the promiscuous and the intimate, the public and the private, the collective (what happens to everyone at the same time) and the personal (what only happens to one); which in turn allows Nixon to claim that his being buggered by Uncle Sam is not happening to him alone, but to the Nation as well . . . The image of the rape thus forces its way into the text, in a reversal of sorts since, perhaps more than a simple prolepsis, the simile may simultaneously be understood as a protracted analepsis, as it were, not unlike a missile you would hear approaching only after it explodes, like a piece of time neatly snipped out, thus reducing American teleology to nothing more than a temporal hoax. The Public Burning as a whole—or as a hole into the American fabric and temporality—may be such a rape that the epilogue merely reflects as a mise-en-abyme; a rape, that is, that may not be the novel’s logical conclusion so much as its starting point, as though the novel had been written backwards from the start, the better to deconstruct, “de-carn-struct” American teleology and, with it, the high opinion and clear conscience, or clean conscience America has of itself.

However, this imperturbably clear conscience seems to be able to get the better of everything eventually. Brown, the narrator of A Political Fable—aka “Soothsayer” (7) given the acuity of his political vision—cannot ever fully subscribe to Clark’s views, who propounds that Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat runs for the White House. The Cat, he says, breaks the rules of the house, even the laws of probability, but what is destroyed except nay-saying itself, authority, social habit, the law of the mother, who, through violence in the name of love, keeps order in this world, this household? Ah no, mess-making is a prerequisite to creation, Mr. Brown. All new worlds are built upon the ruins of the old. (37) But the “law of the mother,” the children’s mother, that is, in Dr. Seuss’ stories, is but momentarily transgressed by the Cat before everything goes back to normal; in a way, the Cat’s subversions will only reinforce the law, thus thwarting Clark’s hopes.

This is what happens, probably, when transgression is laden with a two-hundred year history: The whole hoopla of American history stormed through our exploded minds, all the massacres, motherings, couplings, and connivings, all the baseball games, PTA meetings, bloodbaths, old movies, and piracies. We lived through gold-digging, witch-burning, lumberjacking, tax-collecting, and barn-raising. Presidents and prophets fought for rostrums by the dozens. We saw everything, from George Washington reading the graffiti while straining over a constipated shit in Middlebrook, New Jersey, to Teddy Roosevelt whaling his kids, from Johnson and Kennedy shooting it out on a dry dusty street in a deserted cowtown to Ben Franklin getting struck by lightning while jacking off on a rooftop in Paris. It was all there, I can’t begin to tell it (83-4)—and the list gets even longer as American history, as in The Public Burning, is called upon to justify and legitimize transgression and subversion, thus inevitably and paradoxically normalizing them. Begin, nothing and no one can indeed . . . Strange though it may appear, and despite the taboos—political, ethical, sexual . . . —that he breaks, the Cat only ends up unleashing an all too conservative mayhem: But Clark was right, thinks Brown; I saw all the vectors again: it was indeed happening. And anyway, the Cat, I recalled, always cleaned up his own messes. After the liberating infractions, the old rules were restored—reinforced, in fact. Appreciated. (38) Everything has thus gone according to plan—The Cat in the Hat as candidate was a national calamity; as martyr, he took us to the White House. (85)—while Clark, on the contrary, lost his own wager: Ironically, one of my jobs as Attorney General is to keep under constant surveillance my old friend Clark, who is in effect, though he may not be aware of it, under a kind of permanent house arrest; well, that’s politics. (87-8)

Order is restored, the status quo ante prevails, and, with the return to “normalcy,” Clark’s new world has suddenly grown old and stale. However, A Political Fable satirically undermines the grounds this world safely rests upon, turning the floodlights onto the licentious versions of American history that right thinking and political correctness have allegedly occluded and repressed, from Washington’s constipation to Franklin’s onanism . . . Henry Waugh, in The Universal Baseball Association, similarly questions the processes that “make history,” reflecting on the arbitrariness of the decisions at the origin of the writing of history: “At 4:34 on a wet November afternoon, Lou Engel boarded a city bus and spilled water from his hat brim on a man’s newspaper. Is that history?” he asks Lou, before adding “Who’s writing it down?” (The Universal Baseball Association, 50) What Henry reveals is that there is no historical en-soi, “history” existing only in the process, that is, the writing, that founds it—processual writing, reading erasure.

The very structures supporting American thinking can thus be denounced by Clark for what they truly are in A Political Fable: “Any great liberation is always accompanied by a vague sense of loss,” he replied. “The structures we build to protect us from reality are insane, Mr. Brown, but they are also comforting. A false comfort, to be sure, but their loss is momentarily frightening. [ . . . ] I believe, simply, that we live in an age of darkness, that humanity, with all efficiency and presumed purpose, has gone mad. What we must do, Mr. Brown, is help all men once more to experience reality concretely, fully, wholly, without mystification, free from mirages, unencumbered by pseudo-systems. [ . . . ]” (46-7) History and politics—and so is, to a certain extent, literature itself—are such “pseudo-systems” that the writer, of whom Clark could be an embodiment, struggles against, using familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms and to conduct you to the real, away from mystification to clarification, away from magic to maturity, away from mystery to revelation . . .

Like other texts by Coover, A Political Fable thus fills in the gap that separates a rigid form—the “fable” or children’s book as exemplified by Dr. Seuss’ writings, here—borrowed parodically, from what the text makes it undergo, forcing upon it what, according to safe partitions or sanitary divisions, is usually deemed unfit or inappropriate, or, as it were, generically tabooed (from politics to pornography in the case of A Political Fable). The language of an all-pervading fiction, which takes pride in flouting, in a balmy flaunting of the rules of the game, all generic conventions, thus deftly and riotously deconstructs the so-called American Dream as a founding myth of the country: While the Cat burned, the throng fucked in a great conglobation of races, sexes, ages, and convictions; it was the Great American Dream in oily actuality, and magically, every time an orifice was newly probed, it uttered the MeYou! Cat-Call. (82) A Political Fable, in its exemplary dimension—exemplary in the sense that Coover defines the word in his address to Cervantes in Pricksongs & Descants, the example as such being attested here in the suggested shift over from Me to You—may then well succeed where both the Cat and Clark failed in the long run; for if everything seems back to the normal, or normative way it used to be when the text closes, the humor, the savage parody, and the satire have patiently unsettled the main, prevailing, ruling types of discourse, like Soothsayer Brown’s, now left utterly silent in front of a future he no longer can see/say through—Oh boy. And where will we go then, Sam, where’ll we go? (88)

The same move towards deconstruction presides over the narration of The Public Burning, in which Richard Nixon, this is no slight paradox, plays the part of the skeptic; for despite or because of his apparent naiveté, he is the one through whom the American dream, which he embodies, comes undone: I believe in the American dream, I believe in it because I have seen it come true in my own life. TIME has said that I’ve had “a Horatio Alger-like career,” but not even Horatio Alger could have dreamed up a life so American—in the best sense—as mine. (The Public Burning, 295) He may be quite unaware of this, but Nixon actually unravels what the other, anonymous narrative voice painstakingly stitches together, in what appears as a citational patchwork; the straightforward, linear, teleological flow of official events in the chapters told in the present tense—If 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. (131)—is countered by Nixon’s retrospective, unauthorized, inside narrative—But working backwards, like a lawyer, that is like Nixon, the narrative came unraveled. (131) Both visions are thus held in check, and The Public Burning fictionally erases American official history, debunking all forms of authoritative discourses to reveal the flitting, ambiguous nature of reality underneath. For despite all contrary evidence, the real does not translate and never yields to its transparent, or objective “recording”—as Tiger Miller realizes, such vision is, at best, a simulacrum: That its publisher and editor, Justin Miller, sometimes thought of himself as in the entertainment business and viewed his product, based as it was on the technicality of the recordable fact, as a kind of benevolent hoax, probably only helped to make the paper greater (The Origin of the Brunists, 151)—as, come what may, it unavoidably alters the coordinates of reality. Rather, the real—whatever, as Pinocchio feels, it is—exists in its perpetual reinvention, its open-endedness, its inconclusivity; its in(de)finition.

[B]ut can history be erased? Yes, yes, it always is, in fact that’s the first thing that happens to it . . . (Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, 93) There are of course several ways of going about it, though; one, deplored by Meyer, the narrator of Gloomy Gus, consists in “cleansing” history of all elements discordant with the ideological vision that underlies its writing: I heard at the hospital today from the sportswriter doing that retrospective piece on [Gloomy Gus] that because of his involvement in the Memorial Day riot, there’s a move underfoot now to erase his award from the books (93). But another way, similar to what The Public Burning does, or Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? as it reimagines the parallel life Nixon could have lived had he made different choices in the 1930s, would rather consist in a poetic exploration of possibilities, insofar as their very dissonance, Meyer’s term, with official versions enhances the understanding you can have of the world around you by creating other, more refined and complex ways of comprehending reality. As TIME says in The Public Burning, only through the frankly biased and distorting lens of art is any real grasp of the facts—not to mention Ultimate Truth—even remotely possible. (320)

Well, then, here you are: as a fundamental prerequisite, the only, truly inaugurative, original gesture is erasure . . . An eternal return to the blank page of history, history in the making, the unmaking of history, of all stories; in the hope that, as for master and maid alike in Spanking the Maid, perhaps today then . . . at last! Yes, the appeal of a clean start . . . To start again—but this time, cast as the faithful maid, Nixon, and Uncle Sam, as the master—but [is it] he who has given himself to a higher end, or that end which has chosen and in effect captured him? (Spanking the Maid, 54) Who knows? This, however, is all you need, the empty, clean, crisp surface of a fundament, so that a new page of American history can be re-/un-written . . . Again.

The pun, painful as it may sound in the maid’s ears—they are both dedicated to the fundamental proposition (she winces at the painful but unintended pun, while peering over her shoulder at herself in the wardrobe mirror, tracing the weals with her fingertips) that her daily tasks, however trivial, are perfectible (50)—elucidates Nixon’s own proposition when, in The Public Burning, he suddenly realizes that the whole Rosenberg case might be seen as a play of which he would be the author: I felt somehow the author of it—not of the words so much, for these were, in a sense, improvisations, but rather of the style of the performances, as though I had through my own public appearances created the audience expectations, set the standards, keyed the rhetoric, crystallized the roles, in order that my generation might witness in dramatic form the fundamental controversy of our time! (120) And judging from the novel’s concluding pages, the controversy is, indeed, quite fundamental . . .

Nixon’s ambition—his inauguration—might never be any clearer—he whose various nicknames include “Anus” in reference to his role as Aeneas in a high school play based on Virgil’s Aeneid (50), “Iron Butt” (117), or “the Farting Quacker,” a deformation of the “Fighting Quaker” celebrated by TIME (50)—than in his anal fantasies: Still, think of it like the last meal, a final . . . ah, well, that was an idea, no risk of pregnancy either. Something I’d always been curious to try. Not with Pat, though. I could imagine the chewing out I’d get if I even brought it up. (143) But there still is Ethel’s, given her connection with the Phantom, own spectral, phantasmatic fundament, luring him on and—And Ethel’s amazing bottom: we didn’t have any sisters. Only the hired girls (146)—on to Sing Sing for a last-minute visit before her execution, unless it be Nixon’s—I’d been right about it all along! It was my execution! (533)

The “fundament” of the American dream, in its crude reality, might be nowhere else: I grasped Ethel’s bottom and saw the face of a child. He seemed to live in a great city. I couldn’t tell if he was black or white, Mexican, Italian, or Polish, but it didn’t matter. I shared his dreams: he was a poet, a scientist, a great teacher, a proud craftsman. He was America itself, everything we’ve ever hoped to be, everything we’ve dared to dream to be. But he awoke—we both awoke—to the nightmare of poverty, neglect, and despair. He failed in school. He ended up on welfare. He was drafted and died in Korea. (438) A fundament, in an all too literal sense, Ethel’s, is at the origin of Nixon’s dream vision (Coover is here adapting and parodying Nixon’s 1968 acceptance speech), immediately to yield to another one, in another sense, flitting and inaccessible, America’s own founding myth; America as an allegorical child, a child eventually disappointed in what he can only become, though a child forever reborn to himself, to the new vision of America he keeps embodying, the same America, or, rather, the other half of it, translated elsewhere, into a fresh start forever feeding new, insatiable hopes: The child was reborn. There was peace. [ . . . ] I saw the villages rebuilt and the demeaned lives uplifted. And this new America, as it does away with its “great city,” as its former slum tenements [empty] their multitudes into sunny green meadows, is of course Nixon’s America (I smelled Mom’s hot pies . . . ), the America he embodies, the one he appropriates, the one and true America, true to itself, to its dreams, even if it comes, has to, with a cost: the initial child, the poet, the scientist, the great teacher and proud craftsman, in a word, America itself, must be gotten rid of; for this great city’s child is America’s part maudite, foreign and irreconcilable, inassimilable, albeit forcefully, like Ethel herself, who is part of this child—I jerked her hard into my body, trapping her hand between us: I wished to squeeze her heart and soul up into her mouth where I could get my tongue into them. (439)—swallowed whole, by Nixon, by the new, reborn child: I couldn’t even remember the woman who had entered the corridor. The real Ethel Greenglass, childlike and exquisitely lovely—like Audrey Hepburn, I thought, whom I’d just seen on the cover of a magazine, though Ethel’s bottom was softer—had come to the surface and absorbed all other emanations (was this what the dialectics of History was all about? I wondered), and it was I who had called her out, I, Richard Milhous Nixon, who had produced this miracle, my God, I was out of my mind with the ecstacy of it! My head was full of poems and justice and end runs. I saw millions of people running to embrace me. I thought: I am making history this evening, not for myself alone, but for all the ages! (438-9) The spurious “dialectics of History” Nixon feigns to apply when recalling the initial fundament (Ethel’s soft bottom), only serves to eradicate differences and shed a dull, unifying light over the shadowy, conflicting areas of a reality inescapably at odds with the primeval dream of a pure, virgin America from former, forgotten times—she had become extraordinarily beautiful, a vision almost medieval in its wholeness and purity—even her dress, wrinkling under my grip, had become soft and flowing like a Greek tunic. (439)—a literally miraculous America which, at bottom, has no more substance than the glossy page of a magazine that has “absorbed” the reality, discarded it in, as it were, the public hepburning of it . . . This, you are made aware, is how indeed history is, cynically, “made,” written and read from pre-formatted, slick scripts. Nixon’s rhetoric, resting as it does from beginning to end on the melodramatic plots of the plays he performed in, or the dime novels he read as a youth, may never have sounded, like the version of his America, a more hollow note than here . . .

Nixon’s allegorical vision, equating the initial child with “America itself,” never really takes though; the whole passage jars with the incompatible reality that you are constantly called back to by Nixon’s often sordidly precise, almost surgical comments: I saw all this as my tongue roamed behind Ethel’s incisors. [ . . . ] Ethel was clawing through the hair on my chest. [ . . . ] I was trying to get both of Ethel’s breasts into one hand. [ . . . ] (I had them both in my hand for a moment, soft and firm and full—One if by land, I thought, two if by sea—then let them slip away, reaching up for her face) [ . . . ]. I licked feverishly at Ethel’s bruised lips and tasted fresh hot breath, stroked her throat and smelled the fragrance of roses, explored the cleft between her buttocks and felt a peace and warmth and brotherhood I had not known since those mornings we all huddled around the kitchen stove in Yorba Linda and we were still all alive. (438-9) Ethel’s breasts appear, in Nixon’s imagination, as new tokens of his personal revolution, parodically superseding Paul Revere’s lanterns in Longfellow’s famous “The Landlord’s Tale: Paul Revere’s Ride,” thus making the text’s ir-revere-nce, its distrust in fixed origins, all the clearer. Placed on an equal footing, pornography and idealism, crudeness and dream cancel one another out, as the idyllic vision rubs out the real on which it rested, thus in turn betraying its phantasmatic nature, its insubstantiality—neither the dream nor the real can found one another.

With this all but improbable scene, The Public Burning refers American History back to the fundamental farce it has always been, as recalled to Nixon by Uncle Sam: Like history itself—all more or less bunk, as Henry Ford liked to say, as saintly and wise a pup as this nation’s seen since the Gold Rush (86). And so Nixon, although he thinks he has finally broken loose from the historical script he thought he had to follow so far, is caught unawares still playing a part—I realized she was waiting for me to say something. All I could think of were some lines from a play I was once in long ago (439)—a part Ethel, playing one too, albeit more subtly, no doubt, eventually sees through: Nixon will enter the fray on Times Square with his pants down, I AM A SCAMP lipsticked on his bare iron butt (469) . . . The Public Burning thus takes Marx’s saying to the letter and turns American history into an endless farce, as, conceived from the “start” as a repetition or a start-over, the “first” time as such never occurred, and, concomitantly, the tragedy that could have accompanied the first repetition of History, has thus always-already been banned; as Time says: “It is not even possible to call these years tragic, for tragedy implies at least the dignity of fate. And there was no dignity in these years, and nothing of fate that we did not bring upon ourselves. The epoch that is closing was much less tragic than it was shameful . . . ” (322)

Thus deprived of the nobility of tragedy, thus deprived of the origin, of the fundament it seeks to reveal and worship—this whimsical prophet with his face turned backwards (194)—American history is condemned to grotesque repetition. And to each farce its own clown: Nixon was made for the role, given his innate ability to rise promptly after each of his pratfalls, something that Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? renders literally, pushing the logic of repetition to its absurd end. From politics to football, theater to seduction, there is no role that cannot be mastered by the clown who is but one of life’s makers, and whose existence is always a reflection, an indirect reflection, of some other’s mode of being—the clown exclusively coincides with the role he plays; outside this role, he simply does not exist.

True to his clownish role, Nixon’s being is utterly on the surface and literally brings everything out on to the public square, forcing everyone, he whose function consists in externalizing things, to drop their pants . . . Although he is the part-time narrator of The Public Burning and even if, as such, you are granted a privileged access into his consciousness, he remains all externalized surface throughout. The narrative plunge into his psyche eventually makes more glaring the fact that Nixon has an accrued awareness of his own role-playing, thus never truly departing from his “persona”—You’re not born with “character,” you create this as you go along, and acting parts in plays helps you recognize some of the alternative options—most people don’t realize this, and that’s why they end up with such shabby characters. We’re all conscious of the audience from an early age—but we’re not always aware of the footlights between us. (295) The rest is mere rhetoric, as attested by his famous “Checkers Speech” whose mechanism is deconstructed by the text as Nixon exposes its origin: Lincoln had said something of the common man, and I got one of my old Whittier profs to look it up for me. Roosevelt had made good use of Fala, I decided to work Checkers in somehow. Use Pat’s cloth coat against the Truman mink-coat scandal. Lay out all the monies I’d ever earned: this gave me the opportunity of using a lot of attractive boyhood images. (309) But for Nixon, who has thus earned to become Uncle Sam’s boy, the “image,” the mask, the persona, is the “character” it rhetorically supplants: I could use a word like “liberation,” for example, and get read a thousand ways at once—I’m a rhetorician, not a general, and for me that’s power. But today, all those shades of meaning demanded a certain gloominess, my best face in fact, so no one at the table could be surprised I was wearing it. (224) Nixon disappears all too easily behind his rhetoric or the image he wants to convey: the words match the image, and his “gloomy” face is but a mask he is wearing, though he is unable to take it off, the mask ultimately covering nothing. Where Nixon sees power, Coover’s use of irony and ambiguity inexorably undermines the vision he has of himself: the rhetoric proves empty in the end and backfires on the character, turning him into the mere caricature of a caricature, thus erasing all different shades of meaning, or the complexity he thinks he is displaying.

In other words, the whole text, plot and characters alike, is built as a trompe-l’œil. Of course, Nixon, in The Public Burning, paradoxically is and is not the historical “Richard M. Nixon.” It might be, indeed, one of the profound ironies of Coover’s achievement that his Nixon is a rich and beautifully rendered fictional character while the “real” Richard Nixon is a caricature . . . Be that as it may, hiding behind his rhetoric in The Public Burning, Nixon’s only existence is in the language he manipulates. His narrative, told in the past tense, places him, ipso facto, after the narrated events, though he remains difficult to locate both in narrative and historical time; his text thus provides him with a textual mask of sorts which substantiates him, as it were, yet behind which there is nothing or no one. Nixon then literally “appears” in the text as a simulacrum, that is as a product of the text’s language, an effect of the rhetoric deployed throughout; Coover’s “Nixon,” as such, thus invalidates the difference between the copy and the original, superimposing himself on top of the real Nixon he thus eliminates: If I was going to do this thing at all, Nixon realizes, I had to do it as Richard Nixon—and not even as Richard Nixon, which was already, even in my own mind, something other than myself, but just as . . . me. (367) The Public Burning thus somehow recreates the whole of American history in the same way that Pierre Ménard managed to rewrite the Quixote, turning it into a castle of cards built on thin air. Perpetual, the rape has always already taken place and will nevertheless never have been perpetrated. For it will always have been caught in the foldings of the text, the margins of a page, where any and all truth comes undone—Nothing has really happened, they’re still okay! It’s like coming out of a scary movie—nothing but camera tricks, the illusory marvels and disasters of Cinerama and 3-D, th-th-that’s all, f-folks! Lights up and laugh! (496)

It is no wonder if each of Uncle Sam’s interventions is punctuated with a reference to the ones who made the glory of America, of an America which, as far as it goes, may still, always, remain to come. But all those “prophets” providing Uncle Sam with the fundamental grounds for his discourse—whether their names be Adams, Emerson, Ford, Hawthorne, Jefferson, Longfellow, Thoreau, Whitman, et al . . . —literally turn it into a bottomless one. For it might be America’s voice speaking through Uncle Sam, a patchwork of voices coming up from the bottom of the ages, immemorial, ephemeral voices from nowhere—nowhere, or the absence of place, no-place (ou-topos) perhaps more than a good one (eu-topos), to be perpetually reinvented, no-time, always now, always here, now-here, the no-place–no-time of the transitory, of the flitting, of the ephemeral—voices that restore America to its founding un-originality; or as much, at least, is suggested by the revolutionary second-hand nature of Uncle Sam’s profoundly unoriginal discourse, a discourse which, in its quoting frenzy, thus presupposes the eradication of copy rights, as though all books, all voices, were compressed to one. And to the privative appropriation of the text is thus substituted an anonymous, indivisible actualization, some form of, yes, intellectual communism, a collective enunciation, unbounded, unfounded. Echoes of such enunciation reverberate in half the novel, in those chapters told anonymously, collectively, communistically—phantomatically—in the present, chapters made of tiny fragments of voices and texts painstakingly stitched together; America might eventually be found, and founded nowhere if not now-here, in this singular patchwork of voices constituting America’s only reality—“America” as a reservoir of possibilities, the blank page forever generously offered to erasure and rewriting, on which nothing, fundamentally, ever originates, and everything always goes astray, leaks away—America’s richness and mutability. As Nixon realizes when alone after the damage is done, it was strange his voice, almost as though he were no longer speaking aloud. His words seemed to fall silently from his lips, curl in silence down the channels of my ears, blossoming finally in a kind of audible puff against my inner ear like flowers, like seed pods . . . (534) Words, when you reach the bottom of it, that leave no traces behind, that found nothing, institute nothing, but rather unfound, destitute, collapse everything, every ground on which to build something durable and permanent—obliteration, as a positive and joyous event—“always leave ’em laughin’ as you say good-bye!” (534)—the crowning up of the anarchist, of the clown through whom disorder and disruption happened; well, words, ultimately, fatally, fundamentally, that impregnate . . . —I felt like a woman in hard labor . . . — . . . nothing whatsoever, if not some wind here—. . . bloated, sewn up, stuffed with some enormous bag of gas I couldn’t release. (533)—or a few flowers out there, perhaps—blossoming finally in a kind of audible puff against my inner ear like flowers—though ephemeral ones, blossoming according to passing whims, or—like seed pods—passing winds . . . The loop, again, is looped, the revolution has achieved its cycle—another one can by now, hereby, recommence . . .