CRITIQUE CRITICAL

“Much remains, of course, for the concern of future scholars.”

Hair O’ the Chine

Critics who have tried to comment upon Robert Coover’s work have frequently expressed, in some way or other, their misgivings as to their enterprise, often feeling that they were engaged in some critical dead end when faced with texts highly conscious of what they are doing and how. It is not only that Coover’s work says everything that need be said about it; but also that among contemporary writers of fiction, Coover is often regarded as one of the most lucid and articulate in his own comments upon his work. In other words, the eternally undecidable border between form and content has taken, in his case, a new twist and activated your present critical predicament: intellectual props and sensuous experiences are mutually indispensable and reading is knowing all that need be known about reading. You, as critic, with others, are thus defeated on your own turf and are mockingly invited to turn into a mere pedagogue of rules and notions infinitely better expounded in the creative act itself. One might finally be tempted to quit and Coover has never hidden his—no doubt provocative—qualms as to the validity of criticism per se, writing in his “The Public Burning Log, 1966-77” that literature is demeaned by the study of it. These pages, you fear, might do very little to change his mind, encroaching as they do, their very ball and chain, upon texts thus condemned to drag them behind, texts inevitably polluted, even cannibalized in the process, by your peripheral, conquering vision.

So be it.

To quit—albeit appealing for some, the temptation has already been inscribed in the very texts, as found, for instance, in a character like Lucky Pierre, or revealed by the end of Gerald’s Party. Gerald falls asleep and starts dreaming about Ros (murdered, first in a series, in the course of this interminable party) who appears to him in one of her most memorable performances: But then suddenly she grabbed my testicles and seemed to want to rip them out by their roots! I screamed with pain and terror, fell writhing to the ground. “No, no, Ros!” I heard someone shout. I couldn’t see who it was. I couldn’t even open my eyes. “That’s ‘Grab up the bells and ring them,’ goddamn it—!” Oh my god! Get up! I told myself. (But I couldn’t even move.) Turn it off. “Gee, I’m sorry . . . ” (But I had to!) “Now c’mon, let’s try that again! From the beginning!” No! Now—! (316) The error of interpretation or reading, authoritatively corrected by the intruding director, bounces back throughout the text from one character’s reminiscence to another’s: “No, no, Ros!” the director had shouted. “You’re supposed to grab up the clock and wind it!” Or such at least was the legend. One of them . . . (132) “The way I heard it, she was—ah ah—supposed to pick up the jewels and run . . . ” (237) “Anyway, I thought it was a pecker for a pucker . . . ” (256) “Say, did you hear about that play Ros was in where she was supposed to pick up this deck of cards and cut it?” (289) The regular repetition of the joke may show how much, eventually, such mistakes in the way one is bound to read, interpret, or understand, have always been programmed in and by the texts, thus compelling readers to read and read again, to try it all again from the beginning, in an undying hope to pierce at last whatever mystery the texts are staging and toying with (in the form of a murder in Gerald’s Party). As seen through Pinocchio’s eyes—himself a university professor—rereading is a curse for it testifies to the inexorable fleetingness and ungraspability of “meaning” that condemns one to a perpetual recommencement: Up on the Nuns’ Choir, there are representations of saints holding what he takes to be the instruments of their martyrdom. Some of them are holding books. He can appreciate this. A kind of plague, reading them maybe even worse than writing them and no end to it. (Pinocchio in Venice, 120)

It might be from such a curse—the horrors of it all all over again—that Gerald eventually flinches as he opposes his fear and refusal (No!) to the director’s injunction (Now—!). For it might be argued that, from Gerald’s perspective, that is what counts, in the end, to be done, to have done . . . What, precisely, Gerald might not really be able to do, carried on and away by the very course of his narration, without end nor respite. Like others before him Gerald starts things moving without a thought of how to stop them. In order to speak. And like him, you in turn have started speaking, writing, as if it were possible to stop at will, and perhaps it is better so, but the search for the means to put an end to things, to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue ad infinitum, were it not, in the absence of end proper (in a logical sense), for an abrupt stop. As Pinocchio intuits, decrepit and old, older by the minute, for whom, though, death remains but a distant promise, [t]here are always endings, but there are not always conclusions (Pinocchio in Venice, 45): when you, like him, come to the end of it, whatever “it” is, it is to realize in turn that “it” goes on and, again, you must go on, can’t, will . . .

Will. To quit is not, never was, an option. Somehow you must go on, go back, start over, reread, rewrite, just as the texts themselves keep rewriting, interfering with, echoing one another, starting it all over again from beyond the bounds or frames they seem to impose upon themselves. The way Gerald’s Party ends, or is interrupted rather, leaves you no choice really, for its last words are also addressed to you somehow. More, perhaps, than an authoritative command, it might be a textual necessity in the sense that not “to try again from the beginning now” might finally boil down to not having read the novel; in its very theatrics, Gerald’s Party is of course a performative novel, one, that is, that needs to be performed, embodying itself in you as it were, thus—literally—exhausting you as it exhausts itself. Gerald’s Party, to put it differently, seems to plead for a suspensive reading, a reading that cannot end—you know you will never see the end of it—but only suspend itself. The better to start again. The same way a play can be said never to “end,” existing, or subsisting in its constant re-play—incidentally, the TV replays much of what happens (or not) in Gerald’s Party . . . —from performance to performance. As it deliberately saturates its pages, as each word seems to rush and almost literally cram into the syntax of the developing sentence, thus reducing blanks to a minimum—a mere line jumped here or there each time Gerald changes rooms—the novel unstoppably links sentence onto sentence, fills in the slightest gap from parenthesis to embedded clause, precisely as though what counted, in the end, was never to be done, never to have done—Not yet! characters in turn interject throughout the text—to prevent silence from taking over, for in the silence you don’t know . . .

Yet silence already pierces as Gerald’s house empties out. Back to silence, then, to what you do not know, cannot know; some unknown, some unnamable, perhaps, in front of which “meaning” is deflated—how many victims, in the end, strewn on the floor of Gerald’s house, or in the garden outside? “But Ros, Vic, Tania . . . ” “Roger, Noble . . . ” “Yes, that’s right, Roger . . . ” “Fiona . . . ” “Fiona—?” (310-11) Back to nothingness, then, to those infinitesimal gaps—it was the gaps [in the story] I seemed to remember, Gerald says early on (20)—gaps that never completely disappear, that not only (un)hinge words and sentences, but also the texts, together. Each text thus comes to be suspended, the writing plunges back into the silence, waiting for, begging for, yet also challenging another text to come up and link onto it, to proceed from this nothingness that separates one text from the “following,” left in abeyance. Of course, the following text, the one that follows, will immediately be the next one in Coover’s bibliography; but consecution is not consequence, and the “following text,” a mere chronological accident, thus never really follows, logically speaking. Then of course, this “following text” is also yours, insofar as yours, precisely, does not follow, never does; hence linking the critical text onto the texts it comments upon always involves a form of violence, of transgression, of appropriation which, if this goes unnoticed or ignored, may indeed “demean” literature, that is, de-meaning it by endeavoring at all costs to make it signify, denying or displacing the silence—yes, the same surrounds every other work of art: empty space and silence—that surrounds the texts, thus denying or displacing this other text left in abeyance, which the written work would be a prologue to, a broken cast, a sketch, or a death mask in this unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into words cannot yet be; and so you try.

And so Gerald’s Party closes on another version, another “cast,” another “sketch” in all senses of the words, of this miscued, misread, miswritten, missing line, thus pointing you, even if parodically, in the direction of all that it has left unsaid, all that remains to be read still. To try again, as you are enjoined to by the voice, would consist in “freshening possibilities” (7), not stopping at the words inked on the page—probably masking others in the same way that all those guests, fictional (played) characters, may well be masks covering their fictional (absent) actors—a page generous enough to give you more (Gerald’s wife, changing aprons, sees to it that there is more food all the time . . . ), but the question is: can you take more? As soon as you begin to speak about what you read, as soon as you compare what you have read with what, prompting you to read in the first place, you have requested or thought you requested from the text, do you not, reader now turned commentator, turned critic, inevitably turn into the persecutor of the work? From the sole fact that you think you know what you requested and suppose the text’s responsibility—its ability to respond to and satisfy your demand—to be commensurable to the nature of your request, is it not necessary that you then place yourself, while commenting, under the temptation of knowledge, this genetic malignancy, forever re-enacting what Blanche calls the melodrama of cognition (Noir, 159-60)? As some have wondered, how can your commentary not be a persecution of what is commented upon, bringing forth the proof (from the sole fact that you speak up) that in formulating your request, you suppose that you know it or at least suppose it to be knowable, and that this request—the same way the mysterious, unknown “widow” seems much more desirable to Noir than Blanche, his secretary, and loses much of her appeal when both are revealed to be but one and the same in the end, Noir’s appetite for this backstreet knowledge racket [ . . . ] fading suddenly (186)—ceases to be a marvel to which writing makes itself accessible? Is your request then no more than a prescription provided with a content, a sense—much as a chalked outline on the ground seems to demand a body to fill it in—to which the text is held, as a hostage is held for the observance of a promise?

For indeed, as soon as you start speaking about those texts, you have to say something, to make a point, thus ignoring, violating, their intrinsic silence as you submit them to some sense, some content; what is thus belied is none other than your mad faith, as firm as it is burlesque, in the prevalence of secret passages. (A Night at the Movies, 33) When it comes to Coover’s work, you appear to be acting as a puppet whose strings are often pulled by the texts, not unlike this Pinocchio who will succumb to the promise of any “message”—He’s a sucker for words, he’ll read anything, afraid of missing something if he doesn’t. Might be a message, a final message (all my life, he thinks, I’ve been waiting for a message). (Pinocchio in Venice, 46) And, like him, you too fall prey, no matter what you do or try to do to escape it, to what the texts, playing their interpretive games, often denounce; though differently, they all warn you, as early as The Origin of the Brunists and the (almost) complete, obtuse silence of Giovanni Bruno, against the futility and sterility of finding, of forging meaning in what is, by definition—a mine accident—utterly devoid of any. The persecutor of the text, you in turn (fair enough) are persecuted by it . . .

Most Cooverian figures, whether willingly or not, often enact the reader’s role, hence providing you with quite a grotesque, distorted perhaps, mirror image of yourself. For you recognize your reading self all too well in this Richard Nixon who, at sea in a mass of papers strewn on his office floor, tries hard to make sense of the Rosenberg case; or in the projectionist from “The Phantom of the Movie Palace” in A Night at the Movies, whose every attempt to free himself from the semantic logic of his films inexorably takes him back to those meanings he initially aimed at eschewing: They seem then, no matter how randomly he’s thrown the clips together, to be caught up in some terrible enchantment of continuity, as though meaning itself were pursuing them (and him! and him!), lunging and snorting at the edge of the frame, fangs bared and dripping gore. (18) And you, of course, for whatever the approach, the question of meaning haunts your (any) reading: like the projectionist—Perhaps it’s this, he thinks, stringing up a pair of projectors at the same time, that accounts for his own stubborn romanticism—not a search for meaning, just a wistful toying with the idea of it (22)—you may initially rest content with merely saying that the texts, devoid of any, only toy with the idea of meaning, yet you shortly understand that, doing so, you again are caught turning, or reducing the texts’ non-sense into some signification; you again succumb, Pinocchio-like, to the temptation of the “message,” as the lonesome hero of Ghost Town himself admits: the stars began to slide about, to realign themselves upon the black canvas of the sky as though to spell out some message for him. A warning maybe. But it was all just a sluggish scramble, like the shuffling of dominoes, nothing he could make any sense of, and he grasped thereby some small portion of his fate: that anything the universe might have to say would remain forever incomprehensible to him. So, well, maybe he could read what they had to say after all. (83) And so, yes, like him too, what you read, what you can read in the end, is your own incapacity to read, the futility or vanity of your own interpretive efforts . . .

Whatever you may be up to in the end, “meaning” pursues you and there is no steering clear of the hermeneutic traps the texts are setting; and not playing by the rules is, again, falling prey to the metaphors the writing feeds on, as illustrated by “Riddle” in A Child Again which literalizes what other texts might be doing by staging Lázaro Luján—known to his comrades as the Reader (90)—who, about to be executed along with four other men, is offered the chance to choose in what order they will be shot. For once, it is up to the “Reader” to create some meaning as Luján seizes the opportunity to turn his death into some meaningful event, only to botch it in the end. His last chance to raise a word against the gun, and he has, yet again, written, not for his audience, but for himself. Trapped as always in his own ego, just as his mentors and peers have so often said. [ . . . ] In the distance, he sees a lone black bird, scribbling its riddles on the white sky. Its message is obscure but, Lázaro Luján realizes with a sudden flash of insight, it is not completely illegible. If only . . . (94) But too late. The riddle announced by the title is left unanswered by the end of the story and can only bounce back from reader to reader, from the Lieutenant in charge of the executions to his lover—From what I have told you, can you tell me who were each of the condemned and in what order they were standing? And what was the message the student wished to leave behind? (95)—back to the Lieutenant—I have already solved it, his lover said with a smile, and told him the names and occupations of each and where in the line they stood. And as for the message, she added, spreading the oils between his thighs, perhaps you yourself have not entirely puzzled out the riddle left you. (95)—to you, eventually, who are thus quite explicitly encouraged in turn to try and figure it all out; though fearful, all too aware of what happened to Nixon in The Public Burning or to the Bad Sport of “Panel Game” in Pricksongs & Descants, of what you might find, you cannot say you are surprised to discover that the ambiguous answer you think you have found out only says again, in an acrostic, how vain and futile it is to hope for an enlightening, or useful “message” . . .

Yet for all that, how not to play such games when the texts, like “Panel Game,” have already included you in their apparatuses? There is an empty chair between Lady and Mr. A, which is now filled, to the delighted squeals of all, by a spectator dragged protesting from the Audience, nondescript introduced as Unwilling Participant, or more simply, Bad Sport. Audience: same as ever, docile, responsive, good-natured, terrifying. And the Bad Sport, you ask, who is he? fool! thou art! (Pricksongs & Descants, 79-80) You then have no choice but to endeavor to find an answer to this big question (80) that, you realize, has nowhere been put into words. And so the story taunts you with, and playfully deconstructs, your every critical move, impregnating each character’s words with potential meaning: Stickleback. Freshwater fish. Freshwater fish: green seaman. Seaman: semen. Yes, but green: raw? spoiled? vigorous? Stickle: stubble. Or maybe scruple. Back: Bach: Bacchus: baccate: berry. Raw berry? Strawberry? Maybe. Sticky berry in the raw? In the raw: bare. Bare berry: beriberi. Also bearberry, the dog rose, dogberry. Dogberry: the constable, yes, right, the constable in . . . what? Comedy of Errors! Yes! No. (80) Well, actually yes, given that the story reads throughout as a literalized “comedy of errors” that bespeaks an irrevocable leakage of meaning—But what does it mean? what does it mean? (84)—meaning that, however, is not absent so much as superfluous; for all clues point to the same direction and loop constantly back to the unplaceable Dogberry: And Dogberry from—? (81) Aha! the headborough with Dogberry in—? The Merry Wives! No. (82) Pink as dog rose. As dogberry. All’s Well That Ends Well? Hardly. (84) Once disclosed—too late—the big answer you pined for to this big question, again as in “Riddle” points to the irrelevance and pointlessness of the hermeneutics you are used to displaying: “I thought it was all for fun.” “That is to say,” smiles the Moderator wearily, “much ado about nothing.” “That’s it! that’s it! Yes! that’s what I was trying to—!” (87)

Of course it is all for fun, but beyond the sheer fun and laughter—Always the laughter. A second constant. (87)—what, you think, is being sketched, or re-drawn throughout, might be a new, antagonistic relationship to the text, not devoid of a certain form of violence, metaphorical though it be: both the Bad Sport from “Panel Game” and the Reader from “Riddle” end up dead, killed by the systems they played by. Jason, from “The Marker” in Pricksongs & Descants, another avatar of the reader in the text, ends up castrated, Nixon in The Public Burning will be buggered, the projectionist in A Night at the Movies beheaded, Pinocchio cooked alive and, though in dream, crucified . . . Just rewards for engaging on the path to meaning? As such, Coover’s work may be an endless investigation, started anew with each new text and constantly reflecting the question—which is a poethical question—back to you in its finely polished looking-glass, of what reading is (not) or can(not) be, what kind of relationship unites you to the literary text in these your post-you-name-it times . . . What is at stake, as exemplified by “Panel Game” in its multiplying puns, may not be meaning as such so much as its inevitable reduction or simplification as soon as you aim at writing about it, thus selecting, isolating, separating textual threads—in a word, acting as a critic [krinein]—to make them converge and re-knot them onto the right or correct “answer,” exclusive or ignorant of all possible others, while “meaning” is always offered in excess, a superfluity beyond all critical frames.

In The Origin of the Brunists, Justin Miller comes to deplore all those choices imposed upon one facing forking paths, in a garden or elsewhere: Though it was what he lived by, he regretted the one-track specificity of all action, of all choice, what time made you do when you came to a fork in the path . . . or two forks at once. (251) Daphne, in John’s Wife, also regrets this “one-track specificity” which, metafictionally, also applies to the way the text comes to be read in successive, linear, compartmentalized threads (like any text undoubtedly, but John’s Wife perhaps more specifically as its hypertextual design almost requires a volume that the flatness and linearity of the book format compromises): She was at heart a good woman who wished everyone could live forever. She didn’t want one story to cancel another. [ . . . ] It was a pity one had to live all these stories in tandem instead of all at the same time. Why couldn’t life be spread out like memory was, with past and present all interwoven and dissolving into one another, so you could drift from story to story whenever the mood struck and no one really hurt by it? Instead: out of the old and into the new. (352) After Winnie, Stu, an encumbrance in the linear sequence of Daphne’s life or story, has to be done away with . . .

To some extent, John’s Wife only radicalizes what the other texts do, storying themselves spatially, volumetrically as it were—offering themselves up in their constitutive, inexhaustible plural, thus singularizing themselves constantly in the sense that the version you read (linearly) is marked as one instantiation, one actualization, one trajectory, or one variation among others ( . . . Once, there was . . . ), in the texts’ very performativity and, hence, ephemerality ( . . . was there. Once . . . ). When faced with this textual plurality or, perhaps, virtuality, you barely have a choice and inexorably reduce and simplify when commenting upon the text, not unlike what Gloomy Gus is doing: Apparently, the critical turning point in Gloomy Gus’s life came during his freshman year at Whittier College out in southern California. At that moment, he did what sooner or later we all do: he began to simplify himself. I can understand this: my sculpting is not something that was added to an expanding life, but that which remains after all the other things have been peeled away, things that, who knows, I might have been better at. (Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, 96) If Meyer, the narrator, sees this as a “critical turning point,” you, for one, can barely overlook the irony of the adjective as, indeed, this oversimplification might again be but a reflection of the critical tendency, as Gordon, the town photographer in John’s Wife, clearly perceives: this [is], as Gordon himself would say, the fate of all art, even of the amateur backyard variety: to become, stripped of nuance, a caricature of itself. (John’s Wife, 36) And so, reading, then trying to account for or recount it, you simplify, strip the work of its nuance, choose one directional path among the many mapped out by the texts, one perspective, an angle, momentarily—at best—oblivious of all the others that the moving tableau depicted by the texts simultaneously provide you with: these errant insights always fled, or so Nixon tries to reassure himself, and something more solid, more legal, sooner or later took over. I’d find the right question, take a side, and feel on top of things again. Gain perspective. Courage, Confidence, and Perspective: the Rosenberg formula. (The Public Burning, 136)

Everything in Nixon’s mind seems to call attention to the latent antagonism underlying the relationship to the text, starting with his appeal to the Rosenbergs, designated at the time as the enemy par excellence; Nixon here enacts the reader’s stance, forced to “take a side”—Justin Miller, in The Origin of the Brunists, ironically toys with the same idea when he covers the new Brunist cult: Miller’s stories were essentially objective—meaning, he left it up to the reader to decide if the end might really be coming or not. (300)—“decide” or “take a side” in order to “feel on top of things,” thus achieving mastery and control, that is, knowledge, through a secure(d) “perspective,” no matter how shrunken it might be (the right question, singular), a side that finally “takes over” the plurality of wandering, adventurous, proliferating, but unnamed meanings (errant insights, plural). And so, you wonder, is this not what a critic usually does—krinein: decide, take a side or aside, separate—and what generally you can no longer afford to do when dealing with such texts as Coover’s? Unless, of course, like Nixon, you are endowed with a cynicism nothing can really curb. For everything, in The Public Burning as elsewhere, stages what might first and foremost be a defective, because reductive, “reading” of the real, flattening it out onto mere binary, Manichean caricatures (the Phantom vs. Uncle Sam). If the texts often metaphorically reflect an unflattering image of your reading self, they may not, for that matter, stress the aporia of all forms of criticism, so much as anatomize it to refer criticism back to its inherent, constitutional, not to say institutional, crisis, thus turning it back on and against itself [krisis].

Such a crisis may never be so conspicuous as in texts like Spanking the Maid or Hair O’ the Chine, both more or less explicitly questioning the relationship between writing and reading. Spanking the Maid has thus often been interpreted as a metafictional allegory or fable of sorts which, for some, emphasizes that, no matter how well the artist does some things, the critic will always spank him for not doing others in a scenario not unlike the one presiding over “The Marker” in Pricksongs & Descants. Of course the positions in the text never really settle down and the ambiguity or twisting of metaphors all too quickly shifts them around, thus rendering the relationship between master and maid and, beyond, everything they may stand for, all too brittle. What is then being investigated is the gap between them, the gap between “writer” and “reader”—a distinction, incidentally, not so stable as it might have been in pre-hypertextual times—a gap eventually filled in by the text as such which might in fine act as a “screen,” in all the ambiguity of the word, between them both. In other words, the metaphor of master and maid used to illustrate the relationship between writer and reader or, more generally, the way the reader interacts with the text, already is distorted by the very dynamics of the text insofar as what is depicted in it does not seem to apply in such terms: do what you might or will, you cannot, in the proper sense, “respond” to the text or interact with it, nor bend its premises, the same way a maid would comply (try to) with the demands exerted upon her by her master or the master adjust (try to) to the blunders of his maid . . . And so it seems that what Spanking the Maid finally draws your attention to is the sterility, the unproductiveness of what you can only refer to as a non-relationship between its protagonists, perhaps simply because their would-be relationship is based on false premises. No wonder then that the various lapses and blunders of the maid give way to the same punishment over and over again, nor is it any wonder either that no “dialogue” or “communication” proper ever passes between her and her master, the few words exchanged between them no more than the mere mechanical recitation of fragments learnt by heart—among which literalized verses from George Herbert’s “The Elixir” (A servant with this clause / Makes drudgerie divine: / Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, / Makes that and th’ action fine) or John Keble’s “Morning” (The trivial round, the common task, / Would furnish all we ought to ask; / Room to deny ourselves; a road / To bring us, daily, nearer God)—while the rare attempts at authentic conversation are systematically defused: “It’s a beautiful day,” she remarks hopefully. He sits up with an ambiguous grunt, rubs his eyes, yawns, shudders. “You may speak when spoken to [ . . . ] unless it be to deliver a message or ask a necessary question.” “Yes, sir.” (35-6)

What the example of Spanking the Maid thus tends to show is that you never really are in a position to provide an answer to the text, since your every move has been anticipated one way or another, leaving you with the mere possibility of coming up with mechanical “responses” instead already “assumed” by the text: Her responses are assumed in the texts (the writhing, sobbing, convulsive quivering, blushing, moaning, etc.) (61). As such, the only “question” the text may be raising—the big question, perhaps, of “Panel Game,” a story that reads partly as a deconstruction of all reading gambits—is one addressed to itself alone that provides it with a reflective mode of writing in the sense that the stakes of most, if not all of Coover’s texts, are in discovering their own rules rather than in supposing their knowledge as a principle. Hence their metafictional streak; yet if what is now known as metafiction, a concept usually defined as a text’s tendency to fold back upon itself in order to explore and question its creative process, is as such located on the side of the creative act—the text (un-)writing itself—the metafictional process, as a specific mode of writing, extends further to include in its investigation the way the text comes to be read—the text (un-)reading itself—as reflected or mirrored by the characters’ every move in an ever-shifting textual universe they, for the most part, like Gerald, Pinocchio, the Kid in Ghost Town, or Lucky Pierre, no longer, provided they ever did, really understand.

For even the world of fairy tales, now in the claws of old crones and stepmothers whose ingenerate ambivalence (Briar Rose, 7) makes it difficult, if not impossible, to say whether they are malignant or not, has ended up losing its apparent simplicity: Indeed, just who or what anything or anyone here is—animals, trees and flowers, people, insects, birds, even aromas and clouds of dust—is always open to question, so infested with enchanted beings is the forest. It is an eerie domain of profound uncertainties and dark subterranean forces, as if possessed of an arbitrary will all its own, deep-rooted, yet manifestly unstable. Not even stones or sewing needles here can be trusted to be what they seem to be. (Stepmother, 8-9) In Briar Rose, the more the prince advances into the briars, the tighter the narrative strands woven by the old crone encloses him in: He hacks desperately at the brambles and, as the hedge closes round him like the grasping flesh-raking claws of an old crone, imagines instead her dreams . . . (39) The crone’s guiding “ambivalence” eventually obscures the prince’s quest and blurs his motivations, even, and especially, to himself: could it be that, in struggling against the briars, he might in fact be struggling only against something in himself, and that therefore, if he could come to understand and accept the real terms of this quest, the briars might simply fade away? Or is that what all these other clattering heroes thought? (59) As the narrator of “The Dead Queen,” in A Child Again, says: We’ve all been reduced to jesters, fools; tragedy [the Queen] reserved for herself alone. This seemed true, but so profoundly true, it seemed false. [ . . . ] She had commissioned a child’s death and eaten what she’d hoped was its heart. She’d reduced a princess to a menial of menials, then sought to destroy her, body, mind, and soul. And, I thought, poisoned us all with pattern. (54) Yes, somehow, the poison is in the pattern, all those arbitrary coincidences debunked in The Origin of the Brunists, all those projected surface regularities or sequential recurrences Henry falls prey to in The Universal Baseball Association; and with this zeal for pattern or, as lucid Nixon perceives, [f]or story (The Public Burning, 305), differences are erased or smoothed over to put a stop to the leakage, the draining away of meaning and memory (55) that the prince, in Briar Rose, already feels is underway . . .

To remedy all those leakages, one tendency is, as parodically enacted in the anonymous voice that, in Hair O’ the Chine, comments upon the diverse tableaux framed by the eye of the camera, to ignore the constitutive ambiguity of the texts. And eventually the texts come to be sacralized—all such sacred texts (Hair O’ the Chine, 10)—as they receive a fixed, univocal meaning disclosed, revealed by a minute, thorough exegesis . . . How could you not acknowledge, again, in this voice’s mannerisms, a pointed satire of all hermeneutic approaches, all the more comical and convincing as the “sacred text” it purports to elucidate is the enigmatic refrain from the “Three Little Pigs” that gives the text its title:

 

Nay,

Not By the Hair

O’ My Chinny Chin Chin! (8)

 

The voice proceeds to appeal to familiar interpretations of the tale—whether sociological, philosophical, theological . . . —in order to challenge them, quoting from diverse “authorities.” Of course, what is thus being mimicked and derided are the scholarly pretensions and various procedures of the critical discourse, the latter being again given a rough ride in Pinocchio in Venice, a novel that turns Collodi’s former puppet into an emeritus Ivy League university professor, twice Nobelized to boot, to make all the sharper the dig at him and all his profession: for this kind of stupidity it takes a Ph.D. (Pinocchio in Venice, 43). Fair enough.

For all its gibes and jeers, Hair O’ the Chine nevertheless, or so it seems, offers in negative the vision of an authentic criticism or reading. In its cinematic dimension, the text substitutes another kinetic reading for all the voice’s attempts at arresting or stabilizing meaning as exemplified by its etymological probes—Why straw? we must ask. Why twigs? “Straw,” we of course know to be derived from the Anglo-Saxon “streowian,” meaning “to strew” or “to scatter,” and ultimately related to the Sanskrit “str,” “to spread.” The sexual connotations leap instantly to— (29). The text thus literalizes what the voice says here, at the same time as the voice embodies the exact opposite: what is stressed or enacted by the text’s dynamics, in opposition to what is being said, is the possibility of the “scattering” of meaning, its dissemination and lateral, translational slippage (to sp-read), over against futile, immobilizing plunges into hermeneutic depths. For presented as a “documentary film script,” Hair O’ the Chine already appears, further, as a mere draft or sketch pointing forward to a future ripening, as though the text itself were only given as a preliminary stage to be transcended into its own performative rendering. Beyond the limitations of the anonymous voice can thus be glimpsed the affirmative prospect of a reading that would abide by the text’s programmatic dimension, a text whose meaning, whatever it, necessarily unpredictable, may be, would not be implemented in the text so much as it would or could emerge from its “realization,” be invented through its translation into another text, its setting off into motion. In other words, Hair O’ the Chine deflates all attempts at hermeneutics, to redefine interpretation in terms of a performative rendering of the text, thus rehearsing, as it were, new modes of reading while perpetually deferring and differing its own “meaning.”

Of course, the universe has always appeared to the inquisitive mind as a kind of enigma—Coover’s work has been toying with this idea ever since The Origin of the Brunists—of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word, once defined or discovered, will name, so it is hoped, the universe’s principle, and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. “God,” “Truth,” “Reason,” “Knowledge,” “the Absolute,” “Meaning,” “Beauty,” etc., are so many solving names, and you can rest when you have them for with them you know you are at the end of what eventually is both a metaphysical and epistemological quest, a quest variously enacted throughout Coover’s work, whether by the prince in Briar Rose, for instance, or Nixon, Pinocchio, and Noir . . . But what most texts tend to illustrate in their very praxis, is that any such word can never close the quest: rather, it is almost as if the practical “cash-value” of each word, as it were, had to be brought out of it, each word thus set at work within the stream of your own singular experience of it. As such, meaning or truth, or any other related word, appears less as a solution than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities, including those of the text—never really stable to start with, as illustrated by John’s Wife whose apparent realistic, not to say almost naturalistic initial aspect abruptly veers toward something more grotesque and surrealistic halfway through—may still be changed.

In its own way, focusing on a scholarly search for meaning, Hair O’ the Chine epitomizes the vanity of all such quests, not only pointing to their ludicrousness, but also underlying their potential destructiveness: Dr. Neugeklimper’s interesting position, says the voice, [ . . . ] is that truth is destructive (two pigs have already perished) [ . . . ] and that the salvation of the species rests in the “final solution,” an unfortunate phrase, to be sure, but then we are all, willy-nilly, children of our own time and space. In Neugeklimper’s “final solution,” truth is admitted into the mind, but in effect, under false pretenses, and there it is converted into something no longer threatening: that is to say, as this tale would have it, into soup. The thesis is brilliantly sustained, and has given rise to a distinguished new school of modern speculative thought, the Suppenköchin. (25-6) Here, no doubt, lies the long-lasting renown of all such meaning-seekers devoted to their “final solutions”—to have their ever new interpretive, hollow “jingles” (Neugeklimper) turned into insipid “soup” as they fraudulently (under false pretenses) aim at taming, making it digestible, “milling” a “truth,” here in the guise of the tale’s big bad wolf, otherwise perceived as threatening or ulcerous. But this “conversion” being done—or stomached, as it were—no real profit is to be gotten out of it, the quest eventually finding no rest: But one might justifiably ask:— (26)

Meaning, though, is not absent altogether and might actually be there, in its very leakage, its own perpetual pursuit, relaunching, or reflation—always concomitant with its own perpetual deflation—in its unstoppable, irresolvable circulation, its restlessness, as exemplified by the instability of the roles played by the man and the maid in the margins of the voice’s hermeneutic discourse, at least until interferences and overlappings between the imaged action on-screen and what the voice is saying off-screen become ever more tangible; for the voice, initially thought to be at a safe remove from the action—merely commenting upon it—eventually appears to be in control of the camera before being in turn controlled by it and the actors with whom, come the end of the text, the voice apparently merges. The last hypotheses of the would-be critic finish off the collapsing of all boundaries as they mainly read as a summary, hence a mise-en-abyme, of the (r)evolving relationship so far staged on-screen between the man and the maid: And though ambiguity remains, let us nevertheless turn back now to the whole narrative, where a pattern seems to be emerging. In the Prologue, the wolf [ . . . ] establishes a primitive courtship ritual, not too removed from those of many inferior species, but like most of them, it terminates in assault. A period, then, of total male dominance, female submission and fear, a memory of some prehistoric condition no doubt buried in the unknown author’s chromosomes and released centuries later in this unforgettable imagery. But in the central Conflict, the female . . . (48) The constant movement of cross-references from the description of the image on-screen to the voice-over soundtrack commenting upon a static “tableau” which recomposes with each new frame, concurrently compels you to proceed to new adjustments and assessments in the course of your experience of the text as you try to synchronize all of it; but when finally both narrative lines seem to meet and combine, you discover, with the voice, that the film’s (the text’s) “meaning” as such, that is as object or objective of the reading, remains unreachable, and unanswerable: “Much remains, of course, for the concern of future scholars. [ . . . ] Even with such an interpretation, [ . . . ] one can still ask meaningful questions within its context about free will and—” (54) And so it might well be, indeed, that “meaning”—in its volatility—is to be sensed in the questions more than found in the vain answers that you might be eager to bring forth . . .

The hesitations of the voice, incapable as it is to eliminate the ambiguity of the text it purports to elucidate—ambiguity remains (48)—progressively acquire some pragmatistic value as, through their unsettling aspect, they keep the issue of meaning open to question and constant challenge, forever feeding back (onto) other plausible hypotheses, without ever really favoring one over the others. Hair O’ the Chine, in other words, plays a duplicitous game, and the caricatural, self-conceited image of the reader/critic it reflects on one level of the text—trapped as always in his own ego (A Child Again, 94)—is eventually positivized, catching you lucky-pierre style when the text closes or, rather, loops back upon itself, between two versions of yourself that overlap and blur their outlines: Precision eludes us. (55) For if you are inevitably bound to acknowledge and identify something of your own critical reading self in this hermeneutic voice ultimately confessing to critical impotence, you are also simultaneously invited to take your distance from its assumptions and the paradigm it offers. In looping its loop—the voice’s speech is framed by the same sentence—the text encourages you to start on a new reading quest, this time an intransitive one, to give (of) it a new performative interpretation: In short, given these limited materials here before us, the range of possible interpretations is almost infinite (6); what, at the beginning of the text, may have proved to be a downbeat observation, may progressively signal the very pleasure of a persistent reading that, giving up on all pretenses to meaning as object, keeps translating the text, preserving and continuing the motion or gesture of its writing it otherwise threatened with exhaustion.

Like Hair O’ the Chine, most texts by Coover can be defined by their intrinsic, constitutive motions; as texts, they never settle down, never stabilize, writing themselves while simultaneously and conversely deconstructing their own reading. Given this, you realize that you will never upgrade to the status of “critic.” For this would imply your capacity to arrest the texts—consider them as products rather than processes—and hold yourself apart from them, take some objective distance, objectify them. This, you feel, is precisely what the texts’ dynamics prevent you from doing, taking and carrying you along with them: the mimetism of your lines is not something you affect—or so you staunchly believe—so much as the sign of a continuation, a medium through which the texts’ motions and moves perpetuate themselves. The motion is the message; as variously exemplified by the looping of Hair O’ the Chine, the resonances or “harmonics” framing Gerald’s Party, the palindromic structure of John’s Wife, or the frantic course of the “last” sentence in The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, which, deprived of any final period, races down the lines, gaining climactic momentum never to end . . . You too, inevitably, get carried away following them, never knowing where the texts, in their unpredictability—anything can happen is one of the texts’ leitmotive—will take you. Each new rereading only refreshes or enhances the motion, a motion thus each time singularized: you have never read this text before, not only because (it has become a commonplace over the years) you never read the exact same text twice, but also because, perhaps more importantly, Coover’s texts have specific ways of their own—from the frequent use of the present tense in order to graft the text’s temporality onto the temporality of your reading, thereby achieving an effect of simultaneity reinforced, for instance, by the use of onomatopoeias (as in Spanking the Maid or The Public Burning), to the hypertextualized layering-out of the narrative into multiple variations blurring its chronology, thus turning the “first” time (or page) into a deceptive construct, an arbitrary illusion, as shown in Ghost Town by the use of the indefinite article, or by repeat scenes throughout The Adventures of Lucky Pierre—to implement always one reading: not only do you reread all the time, but what you paradoxically reread is, always, from the outset, what you have not read before and/or what you will not read again, the texts always yielding the illusion of a “first” reading they contest, if only in their eminently intertextual dimension, yet all the while inscribing it at their core, a paradox hinted at in John’s Wife: Opal exclaimed: All this has happened before! Kate smiled and said, Yes, no doubt, probably everything has. Harriet smiled her ironic smile and said that the one thing she had no doubts about was that nothing ever happened twice. (415-6)

To criticism, often beaten on its own turf, Coover then seems to oppose—an opposition that eventually reverses into a proposition—the possibility, to be continuously reinvented, of a reading; a reading, molded on the texts themselves, in motion—reading-in-progress, never to be done, literally forgetting itself the way the texts seem to forget themselves (Gerald, Pinocchio, the Kid, Lucky Pierre, etc., have all this in common—their forgetfulness), as though going blank and erasing themselves, starting from scratch, from stretch, with each new lexia—the inked text, as such, might be but the fragile remnant of the writing motion, mere traces pointing elsewhere. Starting from scratch, yes, a self-canceling reading that would not quest for meaning, nor purport to “fix” it, but would rather stress its own provisional nature, its own artificial construct (what is this “you” but a mere artifice of language—a persona you affect?), not waiting for better, or more accurate readings, but for still other ones. In the meantime, you are left to “tinker” with meanings and watch them deviate, get out of hand as a ball might rebound, a dog stray or a horse swerve from its direct course; for when it comes down to it, forced out of the beaten paths of criticism, you are much like this “tinkerer” from In Bed One Night & Other Brief Encounters who, watching his latest invention, “mind,” [run] at the walls [charge] the traffic and [leap] off the precipices dropping without so much as an endearing whistle, cannot let go of this beautiful, albeit crazy dream of a steadfast world free of slapdash and stumble and the menace of misbegotten thingamajigs . . . (23/25)

Coover’s writing may then well claim, even if sometimes parodically, some “exemplarity,” an exemplarity inherited from Cervantes whose tales, Coover boldly writes in Pricksongs & Descants, are ejemplares, too, because [Cervantes’] intention was “poner en la plaza de nuestra república una mesa de trucos, donde cada uno pueda llegar a entretenerse sin daño de barras [ . . . ]” (79). In other words, the exemplary text becomes so as soon as it freely extends beyond its bounds onto the “public square” (la plaza de nuestra república), collapsing all boundaries in the process to let you in and let you take your cue, a full-time player in this “game of billiards” (una mesa de trucos) whose rules, refreshed with each new text, you have to learn again and again. For in their exemplarity, the texts elaborate and tinker with innovative reading apparatuses as much as writing models, as it is above all to answer the need for new modes of perception and fictional forms able to encompass them (79) that Coover sallied forth as an apprentice novelist, thus putting side by side reading and writing, in the end, but one and the same art.

What may be at stake, though, is not just an aesthetic question, but also an ethical and eventually a political one; for the breadth of the problem as such is great, in the sense that the writer, the “poet” is representative. Banished from the “Republic,” you remember, because of his deceptive “representations” of the world, the poet is also a representative man, that is, as Time (beyond his no doubt self-parodic import) has it, appearing as the new Poet Laureate of America: The poet is not merely an entertainer, though this would be the easy way out, not merely a celebrator of his age—he is also a prophet of religious truth, the recreator of deep tribal realities (The Public Burning, 328). The poet writes in the name of the “tribe,” speaks and stands up for the reader, for you, turning the very act of writing, independently of what the writing might be about, into a political gesture.

So of course when the text closes down, you in turn have to play your (counter-)moves, cueing them on those exemplified in the text—your reading thus extends, has to, into a writing of sorts: “Lèzi, scrivi e tiente a mente, chi no sgrifa no ga gnente!” the puppets sing along in Pinocchio in Venice—“Read, write, and never doubt it: If you don’t steal it, you’ll do without it!” (147) Read, write—without any coordination, virtually in the same breath, in the same movement, same gesture. When the text closes down, you thus realize how necessary it is, how urgent, to revive, to retrace its movements, and link, or graft your own commentary on to it, all the while conscious of the impediment it might create. It is a risk you—and the texts, which all demand it somehow—have to take. Like Gerald’s Party, insisting that linkage must happen Now—!, most texts in one way or another converge on the present moment, now, the suspended nowness of their impending closure and of their necessary reopening: Perhaps today then . . . at last! (Spanking the Maid) The page, a blank, generous page, is now yours . . .

For what choice, other than doing like them, do the texts leave you after having patiently deconstructed and invalidated all your usual critical moves one after the other? Write about them, you cannot really, for no matter what angle you choose, what point you wish to make, you will still be giving way to some dull transitivity when the texts, resisting it for the most part, favor transit instead. Do like Coover, then, who does like Cervantes—placing himself within a tradition the better to contest it, test its contours and conventions, even if this, in turn, means to (re)instate others as arbitrary and artificial. For the game, as Justin Miller, enlightened by “Happy Bottom,” comes to note in The Origin of the Brunists, can only be a double game, one of ultimate betrayal: Judas stood. He looked up toward where the prophet knelt, saw that the man was watching him. [ . . . ] He stared out on the hard dry hills, stared ahead at the days succeeding days, the endless wearisome motions, all prospects sickened to habit, stared out on the hopeless generative and digestive processes of unnumbered generations, and thought: Well, anyway, it’s something different. And he went down into the town. (433) Miller needed nothing more really than this “sickness to habit” to get himself started on the new Brunist attraction in town, seeing in it the germ of a salable story, his own everlastingly perverse amusement with eccentricity, and so on, but mostly, he supposed, it was a kind of sudden gamy wish to raise a little hell. West Condon was going stale on him, needed a spectacle. (191) Perceiving from afar his own sacrifice as soon as he joins the Brunists—Golgotha: that timeless ubiquitous image! (191)—Miller thus casts himself into an ambiguous, duplicitous role, both savior and traitor, and the novel—The Universal Baseball Association (or The Public Burning, or Noir . . . ) also toys with the same ambiguity and irony undercutting and invalidating all binary, Manichean oppositions, like that between the “good” guy belied by his name, Damon Rutherford, and the supposedly “bad” guy, Jock Casey, betrayed by misleading initials . . . —never quite relinquishes or disentangles the thick tangle of endless ambiguities that were the one true thing of this world (The Origin of the Brunists, 385): Jesus, dying, disconnected, was shocked to find Judas at his feet. “Which . . . one of us,” Jesus gasped, “is really He: I or . . . or thou?” Judas offered up a hallowing omniscient smile, shrugged, and went his way, never to be seen in these parts again. Probably best, all right. (The Origin of the Brunists, 437) The traitor, with a “hallowing” gesture, would rather not reply, walks away smiling, a smile that knows (omniscient) but does not disclose, thus reflecting the question back to the one who asked it—thwarting all attempts at knowledge and understanding.

And so are your own questions reflected back at you, your own demands, too, your own queries, your own desires. For you who read are the one who requests, the one who calls, and the texts, as you read them, originate from this request that they merely refresh more than they reply to it. “What is it that you desire from me?”—this, as some have suggested, might be the question of literature, the question raised by/to literature; a question that, no more than the texts themselves, you—the critic—can ever answer. Rehearse your attempts, repeat them, alter your thematic or theoretical approaches; mimic all you can, imprint what movement you may onto your reading—you cannot force nor bend an omniscient, omnisilent smile. Probably best.

All right. Especially if, as argued by some, to write, in its intransigence, is perhaps to form, where no forms hold sway, something like absent meaning, to bring to the surface an absent meaning that would maintain the affirmation of a thrust thrusting beyond loss—a lost loss, as it were, which reaches you, if, only as expired meaning. Whence the difficulty, your difficulty, of a commentary on writing: for a commentary signifies and produces signification, unable as it is to sustain an absent meaning—not the absence of meaning, though, i.e., a potential or latent sense which would ultimately be lacking, but something perhaps more akin to what happens in novels like Gerald’s Party or John’s Wife which, when they reach you, have already expired, exhausted by their very motion, their inner dynamics momentarily revived, remembered, retraced when you read through them, though always with the intuition that, as in Ghost Town, where nothing seems to have happened yet and yet everything seems already over, done before begun (4), something irretrievable has already occurred, the text’s incipit, more an excipit for that matter: In spite of all that happened to his wife and friends, John lived happily ever after, as though this were somehow his destiny and his due. (7) What you are about to (re)read are mere vestiges, self-effacing hints at, or traces of, what, probably lost somewhere in the ellipses (un)framing the text, you (will/can) never read. It is as though something were missing from the text—“John’s wife” herself; or a script, a cast, stage directions in Gerald’s Party—though what is missing is itself eventually missed, like an erased erasure, for read all you might, everything is there, and everywhere, not unlike a purloined letter left in conspicuous sight, and there is, as such, nothing more to it: the vanished body Noir goes in search of may have gone missing from the outset of Noir, yet it was always-already there (where?), albeit deprived, like “John’s wife,” of “thereness”; like “John’s wife,” too, the very fabric of the text, perhaps, much as white paper, though it goes usually unnoticed (Blanche), or an invisible screen, is indispensible so that the text or the film (Phil-M.) imprinted on it (Noir) might detach itself and become visible: antithetical as they seem—Noir and Blanche, the black ink and the white page—do the letters have meaning in the end, or the space around them? Or is it, rather and also, their difference you read . . . ?

Puzzling over such questions and the notion of “absent meaning,” or the possible existence (sub-sistence?) of a differential, you more and more wonder whether Coover’s could be referred to as a gnomonic writing of sorts; or, rather, an inverted gnomon in the sense that the text you read is never quite what you think it is and, as (none-)such, not so much what remains when some other part has been subtracted from it or the index pointing to a revelation, as, on the contrary, the subtracted part itself, or the superficial, “revealed” shadow cast by another text you do not and will not have access to—the text’s “missing” part, in other words, is what you read, disconnected from its generative “source”: a revealed without revelator, a sign without indicator; a caption without a picture, a footnote without the main body of text . . . The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, as film, for instance, reaches you already filmed, on-screen—as would any film—though through Lucky Pierre’s superfluous consciousness, the film you are watching, the text you are reading, keeps pointing elsewhere or, gnomon-reversed, keeps being pointed to from elsewhere, from another dimension both prior to and beyond it: [LP] understands certain things being said about him, as if he’d fallen off the screen onto a printed page. (169) To put it again in terms borrowed from John’s Wife, you feel that the text you are reading often suggests that there is another picture [another text], incompatible with this one, lying outside the one being seen; it suggests that there is always another picture lying outside the one being seen, that the incompatibility is irresolvable. (126)

As such, it might well be that, like one of your predecessors, you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery . . . Indeed, you would do better, perhaps, to leave the texts go back unimpeded towards the blankness they originate from, the secrecies that inhabit them—WHERE NOTHING IS CONCEALED, NO REVELATION IS EXPECTED. (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, 58)—and prolong, if and as far as you can, the motion that constitutes them, drawing lines erased as soon as drawn (Pinocchio in Venice, 258); the motion or motioning of all of literature—of lit-erasure. You would, perhaps, do better indeed to leave “meaning,” the absent meaning of the texts—their ab-sense—to its own inefficacious, impassive, and sterile splendor referring you constantly back to the crisis constitutional of criticism as such; not content to render critique critical, such crisis also reinvents and awakens reading to itself and to the spurious fictions of sense it projects. And so, yes, read again, read on, and on . . . For if criticism could have been defined at some point as a structure of thought and knowledge in its own right, with some measure of independence from the art it deals with, along with the belief in the possibility of a synoptic view of criticism as such that would elevate it to a systematic study and, eventually, a totally intelligible body of knowledge, such knowledge, it seems, can now only be derived (as you might derive some pleasure from something else) not at a distance from, or from an objective perspective onto the text but, as Phil Gelvin says in “On Mrs. Willie Masters”—a text, fiction-cum-critique, exemplarily with a certain generic instability—directly, immediately on the text, in the very act of reading: I knew Willie Masters’ missus before becoming acquainted with the gentleman himself, knew her, that is, in the Biblical sense, which is the only way any of us knew her or can know her, and as I am knowing her now. (10) For what Coover’s work exemplifies, again and again, is that in place of a hermeneutics, what is needed—more than ever perhaps—is an erotics of art, of writing, of reading. Because a consciousness electrified by beauty—is that not the aim and emblem and the ending of all finely made love? Ah—!

(And as your heart is going like mad—yes—you must say words, you must go on—yes—it will be the silence and in the silence you don’t know—and yes—you must go on—and yes you said yes—you can’t—you will

Yes.)