A CATHECTIC BRUSH WITH ETERNITY
(OR, THE INVENTION OF THE NOVEL)

ACT I

. . . something out of the past to revive the future . . .

The Public Burning

The Public Burning recounts more than just the three days leading up to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. For in those three days, it is all of American history that is being replayed, the traitors’ executions but one pretext to afford a little didactic spectacle in order to rededicate the dying faith of a Nation in itself. The Public Burning is, on a certain level, a dive into, an investigation of, America’s sense of epic destiny—and a derailment thereof. On a certain level, then, The Public Burning is or could be seen, in its encyclopedic complexity, the subtlety of its narrative apparatus, its adaptation of the epic model, the poetics of its writing, and its ontological and epistemological reflection, as one problematic avatar of the “Great American Novel,” problematic in the sense that it probably, partly, and parodically toys with the very idea, or mythic existence, of such a thing as the “Great American Novel.” But in that sense, too, The Public Burning might well consecrate the (provisional) invention of the novel as such.

What usually distinguishes the epic from the novel as a genre is the inadequacy of the novel’s hero to his fate or situation, while outside his destiny, the epic hero is nothing. On the contrary, popular, folkloric masquers who, influential on the historical development of the novel’s hero—from Rabelais to Cervantes—often parade on the pages of much of Coover’s fiction, most prominently in Pinocchio in Venice and its resuscitation of the Commedia dell’ Arte types, are able to assume any destiny and can figure into any situation, though without ever exhausting their possibilities; they always retain, in any situation or destiny, a happy surplus of their own, their own rudimentary but inexhaustible human face. Obviously, Richard Nixon in The Public Burning is such a masquer, a clown, his own popular mask there for comic relief, functioning and speaking independently of the greater historical plot he never fully comprehends; and it is in these excursions outside the plot proper—he narrates his own chapters in the past tense, which underscores his alienation or aloofness from the larger plot that not only can he never fully assimilate but, also, that he heretically endeavors to free himself from—that he best of all reveals a face of his own. Despite his wishes and ambitions, despite his eagerness to please and serve, he cannot be cast as America’s epic hero, nor its tragic one for that matter, who, unlike him, could never step out of the plot during a pause or an intermission for they have no face for it, no gesture, no language. In this of course lies the epic or tragic hero’s strength and limitation. The epic or tragic hero Nixon can never be is the hero who, by his very nature, must perish. Nixon, on the contrary, like Pinocchio, like Lucky Pierre, never perishes: his fictive comic mortifications, and eventually his fictive comic, metaphorical death at the end of The Public Burning, are all but signs of his immanent resurrections (Gloomy Gus, Nixon’s avatar in Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? may be dead, he nevertheless keeps haunting the pages of Meyer’s story): clownish Nixon is doomed to remain the hero of improvisation and not of tradition, the hero of a life process that is imperishable and forever renewing itself, forever contemporary; he is not, cannot be, the epic hero of the past, an absolute past, but, despite himself, the contemporary hero of a novel that his pratfalls contribute to shape and define.

Worn down, it is true, by several hundred years of existence, the novel’s hero—as paradigmatically embodied by Nixon—is inexhaustible and never dies: Justin Miller, who apparently has not much in common with all other Cooverian descendants of the popular masques of yore, strangely resurrects after his sacrificial execution at the end of The Origin of the Brunists, in the course of a carnivalesque uprising that echoes with the Rosenbergs’ ritual deaths in The Public Burning. There always remains in the novel’s hero unrealized potential and unrealized demands, and if he exceptionally happens to die, these will doubtless find their incarnation in a new avatar: Miller, Nixon, Gloomy Gus, Pinocchio, Lucky Pierre, the Kid, Noir . . . All, one of a kin; comic variations of one another, forever bereft of tragic and/or epic grandeur, fated never to die—Punch, in A Child Again, is one of them, too: roo-tee-too-it, nothing to it . . . —fated, that is, to have their fates elude them permanently; true, too, their bodies grow old, they grow weak and tired, painfully emaciate, often mere ghosts of their former selves, like this old, decrepit Sir John Paper returning (trying to) to the misty lands of Honah-Lee in A Child Again’s opening story. But in all of them, there always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness; there always remains a need for the future—the future of man, the future of the hero, the future of the novel—and the future inevitably has its roots in the novel’s hero; for he bears within himself other possibilities. Always. And this future that the hero bears within himself never lets him die but, on the contrary, forever puts him back in his saddle (Ghost Town), or back on stage where, like the puppet in Pinocchio in Venice, he can dive back into his own folkloric origins and renew his vital connection with the theatrical trappings of the public square, with the masque of the public spectacle—thus replaying, protracting, renewing, the invention of the novel.

The “novel”—the generic term, by now, is problematic; perhaps you should opt for one less restrictive (story, fiction, text, narrative . . . ?), if only to acknowledge that the boundary, at least in Coover’s practice, between novel, novella, or short story, for instance, has collapsed. But, come to think of it, you would rather have the “novel” stick to you as a generic “generic term,” as it were, in order to wear it down to the very last. Also, the appeal is undeniable, now that, when literature has started migrating towards the computer screen, the novel in its print output seems to refer to a quaint, all but obsolete, object from the past (as exemplified, perhaps, by both A Child Again and Stepmother’s beautiful bindings); but beyond that, the novel’s fate or destiny seems inevitably wedded to that of its hero: it does not have any in any proper sense; it is not headed, despite all predictions, towards a certain death. The novel, as a problematic genre, exhausted though it be, continues to develop and is as yet, will always be, uncompleted. Its skeleton—an old pile of bones, granted—is still far from having hardened, and it still appears impossible to foresee all its plastic possibilities. Now no more than before can anyone step back and gain the necessary distance to appraise the zone of maximal contact with the present, with contemporary reality, in all its open-endedness, that the novel establishes, in all of its developing stages, from metamorphosis to metamorphosis, from re-death to un-birth, which all makes of it this endless intermission with which Gerald’s Party, as a novel, can be confused: still another confirmation, with The Public Burning and Pinocchio in Venice, in their theatrical, performative aspects, that the novel as such has never strayed far from the “public square” where it might have taken its cue, once upon a stage—this plaza de nuestra república onto which Cervantes, for one, had the generosity to share his Novellas Ejemplares (Pricksongs & Descants).

As new avatars of medieval popular masques, Coover’s characters never realize themselves so fully, so clownishly, as when they are left to their own devices, extemporizing outside scripted plots, in what appears to them as endless intermissions indeed (literally so in the story “Intermission” from A Night at the Movies), in the uncued blanks or gaps of stories (“A Pedestrian Accident” from Pricksongs & Descants), like Gerald or Lucky Pierre, never knowing what next will happen; when, that is, the unrealized potential buried in them is freely released, with no holds barred—when the novelistic essence of the real is given free rein, as in The Public Burning, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, or stories like “Gilda’s Dream” and “You Must Remember This” in A Night at the Movies. To put it differently, most of Coover’s characters—and this aspect is all the more conspicuous when the character is based on a real, historical figure—appear in the texts as all too self-conscious “roles,” “masks,” or “personae” they are left to explore, forever divided within themselves, never coinciding with their situations or “destinies,” all too aware of the unbridgeable gap, the abyssal crack-up between the individual they think they might have been and the roles they are forever (re) playing. Lucky Pierre learns this at his own expense, never in sync with himself and/or the world around him, incapable anymore, if he ever were, of locating the boundary between his self and his persona, between the real and the reel it is inseparable from.

It is the same uncomfortable sensation that Julius Rosenberg feels in The Public Burning, turned spectator of himself as he is made to parade in the columns of The New York Times, the stage on which the historical drama is unfolding, providing him with a role and a destiny not his: Often enough, through his tears, [Julius] has discovered himself here on these slabs, or someone they said was himself (“the accused,” they call him, but the words keep melting and blurring on him, and what he sees there is “the accursed”), but he has not recognized his own image, grown gigantesque, eviscerated, unseeing: it’s like looking into some weird funhouse mirror that stretches one’s shape so thin you can see right through it. (192) What Julius is finding out is that the allegedly real world around him is one whose frontiers with fiction have utterly collapsed, that so-called History is no more than a cartoonish caricature forever deprived of what Time, turned Poet Laureate of the Nation for the nonce, calls “the dignity of fate”—“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 [ . . . ].” (322) And whatever traces of tragedy might remain—“the accursed” does point to the idea of a tragic “fate” Julius cannot escape—they are immediately folded back onto a carnivalesque world (some weird funhouse mirror).

For isn’t America this forever “New World” which, as such, will always be in want of an absolute past of national beginnings and peak times? This may be what Uncle Sam’s discourse, as a parody of the rhetorical discourse the United States developed and honed throughout the years to legitimize itself historically and politically as a nation, is trying to conceal and compensate for by peddling this epic soupçon whose purpose is to make believe (Uncle Sam is not fooled by his own rhetoric) in a world of beginnings and high deeds in the national history, a history indelibly marked by a national heroic past, the past of a world of “fathers” and “founders,” a world of “firsts” and “bests,” all notions hawked about in one form or another, the clues, always, of the nation’s “Manifest Destiny”—a prophetic vision opening, as some imagined, onto the grandeur of the “United States of America,” bounded on the north by the North Pole; on the south by the Antarctic Region; on the east by the first chapter of the Book of Genesis and on the west by the Day of Judgment—a destiny, though, in constant need for justification and rededication, which thus drags everything into a process of endless regression that paradoxically ends up canceling the very possibility of absolute origin, beginning, or founding moment, into a perpetual recommencement which can only make, ironically, of this long wished-for epic, a future, hence impossible, one . . .

Along such lines, it may not be irrelevant that the initial title for the book was The Public Burning of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: An Historical Romance. The generic subtitle—a romance—thus places the novel within a well-defined American literary tradition that, as such, invalidates all pretension to epic grandeur, for, truly, no author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a Romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with the vision of this stalwart American Republic puffed up by Uncle Sam—for, it is said, romance and poetry, like ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers, need ruin to make them grow . . . But despite the passing of time, ruins are nowhere visible that could point to the vestiges of a glorious past; the ruins on which The Public Burning, as a parodic romance, builds itself, might precisely be those, as suggested by the use of the adjective “historical,” of the romance itself as an exhausted literary tradition capable of affording a sort of poetic or fairy precinct where actualities are not so terribly insisted upon, where the real, in other words, is kept and forgotten somewhere in the darkened, mythical background. For the romance, needing, by definition, the ruins of the past to grow, is always historical in a sense that The Public Burning, directing the floodlights onto the real, is not—for if, true to the genre, the actual and the imaginary meet, each imbuing itself with the nature of the other, The Public Burning can no longer act as a neutral territory; in the complete absence of frontiers, there is no more need for an intermediate custom-house of any sorts to regulate transactions and passages. What the novel thus achieves is to face America with its own unreality, compelling it to acknowledge its inherent fictional dimension by uncovering the flimsy, mythic foundations—its manifest dustin-yer-eye (8)—on which it is grounded. Coover thus ironically revisits the romance to reveal the absence of any absolute past which the genre nevertheless postulates, and from which the epic vision of America could develop.

And so it is that history comes to be (grotesquely) replayed on the “public square”—Times Square: The nation’s dramas are enacted here, its truths tested and broadcast, its elections verified, its material virtues publicized— (166)—the “public square” where the novel, as a, by now, historical genre, too, once appeared (or so it was reported). At the exact opposite of Uncle Sam’s parodic glorification of the nation’s “peak times,” The Public Burning, envisioned by Coover as a three-ringed circus—this is my circus, you old coot! says Uncle Sam (77)—proceeds to the folklorization and carnivalization of American history. So doing, transiting via the ruins of the American romance, reenacting, reactualizing a watershed event of recent American history—barely twenty-five years separate the Rosenberg case from the novel’s publication—The Public Burning stages itself in all its novelistic splendor and questions its own capacity to last through time. (It probably is unavoidable—before long, new critical editions of The Public Burning will see the light of day, armed with copious erudite appendages, the effect of which, if not the purpose, will be to locate and reaffirm the boundary between historical reality and fantasy. Yet you have to consider the possibility, the necessity perhaps, to let the text tip completely into oblivion, if only to render history to the fiction it, at core, is. It, too, no less probably, is unavoidable: The Public Burning will, before long, no longer be the same text that you read—Uncle Sam knows this, who ironically and provocatively asks: Who’s going to remember Willi Goettling twenty years from now? [70] And who indeed would, if his name had not been consigned in the nook of a cybernetic archive? When, that is, all the resonances of its characters’ names have been obliterated from human memory, then, and only then, will the entire effect of a novel like The Public Burning be made manifest; fictions do become more valuable, more relevant as they recede in time . . . )

Oddly, dipping into its folkloric origins, the novel bears within itself a force of oblivion; this might be what, as narrative exercises, distinguishes fiction from historiography: if history seeks to inscribe the event durably into collective memory, in order to preserve from oblivion what men did, fiction rather aims, especially when, like The Public Burning, it takes its place into the tradition of the romance, at “ruining” it, so as to erase it from human memory, as such—in that sense, however, fiction (here, The Public Burning) does not aim at a callous shrugging off or repression of what happened: ruins endure, retain or regain visibility, modify the landscape. What may then, in fine, be targeted is the sense of monumentalization and untouchability, of piety and reverence, perhaps inherent in the historical approach. Hence the profoundly, subversively comic treatment of the Rosenberg case, Coover’s resort to laughter as a weapon of mass ruining, for in the comic world memory and tradition have nothing to do: one laughs and ridicules in order to forget. For laughter means abuse—this, you recall, is uncrowning, the removal of the object from the distanced plane, the destruction of epic distance, an assault on and destruction of all hierarchical distances.

In other words, The Public Burning does not strive to throw light on the past from the present—and least of all to get at a sense of (fictional) truth about the Rosenberg case—but, rather, to question the present, not so much by casting light on it from the authority of the historical past, as by viewing it from the future, and more specifically from the future as borne by and within the novel as a genre; the future, that is, that in advance condemns and obliterates it in its present form. And so you too ought to have begun backward, undoubtedly, supposing that you could read The Public Burning as a child of the twenty-first century, as you here, now, read Moby Dick; supposing, then, that you could conceive a novel not about Nixon and the Rosenbergs, but about ambition and doubt, about the author’s loss of character in authorizing these strange people to reenter fiction, the novel, the renewableness of the form from the limited planes of history. Seen this way, The Public Burning is of course a historical novel in an almost random sense: neither the author/narrator nor the historical narrator, not to speak of the main event, which is removed to pure metaphor—none of these have other than vehicular presence in the novel. The Rosenberg case is, as such, and so is through it history itself, but a pretext to The Public Burning—just as Ros’s death may be a pretext to Gerald’s Party—which may need it in order to become a novel, to renew the genre by paradoxically inventing it; in that sense, the novel, as text, may always be about the novel, as genre, a genre that is, has always been, both critical (of other genres and the relationship they bear to reality) and self-critical, one fated to revise the fundamental concepts and literariness and poeticalness dominant at the time of its renewable inception, thus continuously revising the grounds on which reality rests.

More than just, or “simply,” metafictional in the by-now usual, classic sense, Coover’s work as epitomized by The Public Burning might have extended the concept not just to reflect the texts’ artificiality so as to question and foreground the problematic nature of reality, but, also and beyond, to reflect (on) their inherent literariness; The Public Burning, if of course it can be read as a metafictional historiography, is also above all, and in the most literal sense, a novel—a text, that is, concerned with its own being and, beyond, with its own becoming; a text whose existence as such can only be outside all canons, all theories, and all “histories of the novel,” almost a contradiction in terms. Like Pinocchio in Venice, like Gerald’s Party, like The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, The Public Burning aims at the (impossible) invention of the novel, its own self-begetting performance: the novel here becomes the theater of itself, its characters flitting above its pages as actors would walk on a stage, casting their readers as witnesses of the acts they improvise in the slacks and gaps of history, laying bare, so doing, any sort of conventionality, and exposing all that is falsely stereotyped in human relationships.

To say that The Public Burning is primarily a novel about the novel does not however entail, quite the contrary, that its only concern is with purely aesthetic questions cut off from all socio-historical realities of the time, for you, for one, would say that in these “purely aesthetic questions” the whole of human relationships is implied. The novel, as novel, is thus put back onto the “public square” where it enters a zone of maximal, and as such even brutal contact, as made explicit with Nixon’s rape by Uncle Sam in place of “election,” with the present of all readers, readers turned audience, made to attend and witness the sacrificial deaths of the traitors on Times Square. Almost purely metaphorical, these executions serve as a death ritual—as such, it has always-already taken place and is forever bound to be repeated, mere rehearsal in the end—in the course of which the victim—for of course the victim never is him- or herself; what is being put to death is always something else the victim stands for—may be the conventional, ossified form of the novel itself. Many believe that such a communal pageant is just what the troubled nation needs right now to renew its sinking spirit. Something archetypal, tragic, exemplary. (3-4)

Back to archetypes, then—novelistic archetypes: there is an obvious, parodic sense of quixotic chivalry in this Nixon willing to rescue damsel Ethel from the fangs and claws of Uncle Sam—to renew the whole of human relationships, debunking the stilted heroizing, the narrow, unlifelike poeticalness of conventional writing, its monotony and abstractness, the pre-packaged and unchanging nature of its heroes . . . Yet the potential sense of underlying tragedy is, like the epic, short-circuited by a growing sense throughout of grotesqueness and absurdity, all ideas of grandeur and destiny being finally evacuated from the text. Julius Rosenberg may feel caught up by fate, his “curse” is, literally, but the result of a misreading (what he sees there as “the accursed”); whatever there may be of hubris in the Rosenbergs’ attitude, ironically shows after their downfall, as Nixon is prompt to note: But then came the death sentence, and what was striking about all their letters after that was the almost total absence in them of concrete reality, of real-life involvement—it was all hyperbole, indignation, political cliché, abstraction. [ . . . ] With such grandstanding, who would not find them guilty? (305-6)

What, then, The Public Burning indicts is indeed the closed and rigidified, codified nature of human relationships, where everyone has given way to pre-packaged, falsely conventional roles, starting with the Rosenbergs themselves: If they could say to hell with History, they’d be home free. (305) It is a world diseased by ideology that The Public Burning violates and subverts, a world closed down upon itself that needs to be reopened onto the virtualities and possibilities of an era of change and mutation (Nixon’s “Change Trains for the Future”). And it is precisely as a novel’s hero that Nixon can gain an accrued consciousness of the stereotyped, theatricalized world around him, thereby understanding that each “character”’s role can be changed, and that the play’s script is open-ended, its plot still unfolding: Applause, director, actors, script: yes, it was like—and this thought hit me now like a revelation—it was like a little morality play for our generation! During the Hiss case, I had felt like a brash kid among seasoned professionals; now my own generation was coming into its own—and this was [ . . . ] our initiation drama, our gateway into History! Or part of it anyway, for the plot was still unfolding. In the larger drama, of which the Rosenberg episode was a single act, I was a principal actor—if not, before the play is ended, the principal actor—but within this scene alone, I was more like a kind of stage manager, an assistant director or producer, a presence more felt than seen. (119-20) Yes, the plot keeps unfolding, its end not scripted yet, and if there is a moral to be extracted from it, it might be that there is no script, that there is no end that can be anticipated, predicted, or pre-scribed: the issue is open-ended, as in Night of January 16^th, the Ayn Rand play Nixon performed in, whose point, he thinks, was that there was no final conclusions to be drawn, no “right” or “wrong” judgment, the evidence was ambiguous, the testimony contradictory, and each night a jury selected from the audience was invited to render its own verdict. Depending on our various performances, the verdict changed from show to show. (120) The play, whose outcome is uncertain, forever unfolding before your eyes on the “public square” of the novel, a performance, unavoidably, in which you too have a role to play, is indeed what Nixon says it is: our initiation drama, our gateway into History—into the novel, that is, whose birth and development as a genre, a genre exhausted from the start, yet from the start left forever as yet uncompleted, takes place in the full light of the historical day, itself forever reenacted on the historical stage; in the pages of a novel, the novel, now sabotaged, now alive . . .

ACT I (REPETITA)

. . . to mark some turning, the completion of something, or the beginning, something perhaps not quite present yet nearby . . .

Gerald’s Party

To a certain extent at least (Pinocchio in Venice does it with the Commedia dell’ Arte tradition, John’s Wife, as revealed by its epigraphs, plays with Ovid’s Metamorphoses . . . ), Gerald’s Party may be doing with tragedy what The Public Burning does with the epic. For Gerald’s Party, as some have observed, compresses into one night the history of theater from the pre-Classical death of the Great Goddess to contemporary attempts, both theatrical and social, to revive lost cultural energies. In it can be found the same carnivalesque, sacrificial, and ritual dimension as in The Public Burning, and like The Public Burning too, it renews with the chronotope of the theater, which plunges actors and audience, characters and readers, into the same contemporary, if nebulous, time and space; among the innumerable guests at Gerald’s party, you then inevitably appear as one gatecrasher more, one, perhaps, too many . . .

As soon as the text opens, your attention is drawn onto the artificial and highly theatrical aspect of the party, whether through the garish light projected on the guests—I poured, glancing across the busy room at Alison, now profiled in a wash of light cast by the hanging globes behind her—like a halo, an aura (8)—or the color of the blood exuding from Ros’s wounds—I had forgotten that blood was that red, a primary red like the red in children’s paintboxes, brilliant and alive, yet stagy, cosmetic. (12) If this were not enough, Gerald’s similes keep hinting at the party’s definitional theatricality: I felt people crowding up behind me like mustered troops. Or a theatrical chorus. (18) [H]is white scarf [fell] over Ros’s breasts like theater curtains. (23) But is it, you wonder, the theater that is invading the proper territory of the novel, or is the novel, through theater and, more generally, through performance, renewing with its own novelistic essence?

When, towards the end of the text, Gerald recalls one of the numerous plays mentioned throughout Gerald’s Party, it appears that the theater has become the very metaphor (and the mise-enabyme) of the text itself: I remembered a play I’d seen, Ros wasn’t in it, in which the actors, once on stage—it was ostensibly some sort of conventional drawing-room comedy—couldn’t seem to get off again. The old pros in the cast had tried to carry on, but the stage had soon got jammed up with bit actors—messengers, butlers, maids and the like—who, trapped and without lines, had become increasingly panic-stricken. In the commotion, the principal actors had got pushed upstage and out of sight, only a few scattered lines coming through as testimony to their professionalism. Some had tried to save the show, some each other, most just themselves. It was intended to produce a kind of gathering terror, but though I hadn’t felt it then (a stage is finally just a stage), I was suddenly feeling it now. (221) “A stage is just a stage,” perhaps, but once the stage as such disappears and, with it, the boundary it stands for, when, that is, theatricality fully pervades (the narrator’s) life, panic and terror feel their way into it as existence is caught up by the trap of fiction, of the dream that turns into a nightmare from which it might be difficult, if not impossible, to awake: asleep and dreaming in the last pages of the text, Gerald remains all too aware that if it is all but a dream that he is having (is it?), it is one he cannot wake up from; the garish light that is spreading on the page, gnawing at the contours of Gerald’s dream, in turn seems to permeate the rest of the narrative, blurring its edges; for how can you be sure of what it is that you have just gone through when everything, facts, memories, dreams, fantasies, is sprawled all over a unique surface, with no hierarchies whatsoever, not unlike a cluttered, jammed-up stage? For you can barely ascertain the value and function of all those quotation marks, parentheses, italics, or dashes, which, if they apparently testify to the narrator’s willingness to differentiate and hierarchize, riddle the text.

Though he seems eager to grant every character’s words some space within his own narrative, though his narration endeavors to differentiate between levels of enunciation, Gerald paradoxically ends up getting himself lost, dragging you along with him, amid all this mundane talk (from cooking recipes to reminiscences of past holidays), these unending jokes—page 51: “Say, huh! yuh know the best way to find out if a girl’s ticklish?” Page 233: “[ . . . ] You give her a couple of test tickles.”—these dialogues embedded in others, giving way to bizarre, collage-like juxtapositions:

“There’s more underneath—”

“I want . . . lucidity . . . Authen—gasp!”

“Uh, huh! You seen sister?”

“What do you suppose this one could do?” Gudrun mused, looking Bob over.

“Ole Glad’s relaxin’, Earl! Don’ worry, you juss zip up there’n’n joy yourself.”

“Well, he sure as hell can’t dance,” muttered Scarborough, squatting.

“Yuh, I thought I’d leave it open so’s I don’t hafta—huh!—lose time!”

“Could you repeat that?” Gottfried asked, bending toward Vic. It was true, I saw it now: he did have a tape recorder.

“What I want . . . in art . . . is a knowing . . .”

“Everything’s . . . changed . . . ,” Mavis intoned gravely. [ . . . ] “I seem to remember . . . a statue . . . ”

“Say, yuh know what’s—yuh huh!—worse’n pecker tracks on your zipper?”

“ . . . A knowing moral center!”

“ . . . Of ice . . . with mirror for eyes . . .”

“Well, who doesn’t?” snapped Howard, glancing contemptuously down at Vic (“. . . And a little man where the heart should be . . .”), Gottfried sliding in-between the two with his mike.

(262-3)

Of course, says Gerald, as though to legitimate his text’s chaotic appearance, all conversations were encased in others, spoken and unspoken, I knew that. It was what gave them their true dimension, even as it made their referents recede. (103) In which case Gerald’s Party could be seen as an outrageously hyperrealistic novel whose language seems progressively to become autonomous; in a way, it is almost as if the diverse cues and lines started taking the actors, rather than the other way around—similarly, Gerald’s wife confesses: “It’s almost as though the parties have started giving us instead of us giving the parties . . . ” (305) A view that casts an ironical light on the novel’s title, placing Gerald in a position of object in relation to his own party . . . —on this invisible stage, invisible to you, invisible to Gerald, since it is made up of his own consciousness, assaulted on all sides: My head was like a sieve, everything just came rattling in. It was like a frequency scan. White noise. (239)

Nothing is filtered anymore, and the central, focalizing consciousness of the novel literally bursts at the seams. Gerald’s point of view diffracts into an exacerbated, aggressive dialogism, in the course of which multiple viewpoints and idiolects clash and collide, some characters’ thoughts echoing and interfering—Gerald: But later, on the bidet— (57); Tania: “What you need is a bidet in here,” Tania said [ . . . ]. “What—?! [ . . . ] [O]ddly I-I was just thinking about—” (58)—or lines swapping the characters delivering them—Pardew: I feel simply that I stand at a crossroads on this map of time—that I am a crossroads, that we all are—do you follow? (134) Alison: I feel as though I were standing at some crossroads—or, rather, that I am a crossroads in some odd way, through which the world is passing. (151) Similarly, Mavis’ description of a sexual experience—“—With her velvety tongue and with her—gasp!—fingers in me like the feet of—oh!—little birds, I felt my mind just explode and spread through my—whoof!—whole body, surrendering, ah—abjectly—an incredible—grunt!—radiance and—and truth—!” (190)—is told in terms “borrowed” from Gerald (themselves “borrowed” in turn from—or by: “what you might call”—Pardew: This is the secret of all great detective work, I might say, and the most important clues, therefore, are not facts, but rather what you might call ‘impressions of radiance’— [133]) to talk about theater: I had suggested that night that theater, like all art, was a kind of hallucination at the service of reality, and that full appreciation of it required total abject surrender—like religion. [ . . . ] [I]t was, yes, this incredible impression of wholeness, this impression of radiance, of universal truth, the seeming apprehension of it, that surrender made possible, I thought, almost unable to think at all, unable to breathe—what had I just said? (153)

To put it differently, words and languages (sex, art, detection . . . ) converse together and freely circulate through the text to the rhythm of variations—“Like variations on a theme or something,” [Tania] said (68)—like so many actors jostling each other on stage, building the clutter, as it were. Theater intervenes in the novel thematically, metaphorically, and theoretically too, in the characters’ conversations. However, these are always undercut by irony and parody (in John’s Wife, too, the artistic—and historically dated—debate between Ellsworth and Gordon appears as a parodic one), and any theory of theater and, more generally, of art emerging from the novel is bound to sound hollow and “quackish” in the end, as suggested by the name of the stage director, Zack Quagg. Yet for all that, if the theater seems to act as a prominent metafictional tool in the text, it might be because the novel, as a genre, literally comes to stage itself in Gerald’s Party. The text, somehow, in the performativity of its language, plays itself as an actor plays a role, rehearsing and giving its own textual performance, exhausting itself, exteriorizing itself, reaching beyond itself, on a stage that is none other than the novel.

Seen in this light, and beyond the inherent parody, what Quagg describes as his own artistic aspirations may not so much apply to theater as such, as to its repercussions onto the novelistic form: “So what we’re going for here is the transmutation of stuff from deep down in the inner life, see, into something out front that we can watch, something made outa language and movement, you dig, to show forth the—” (246) If, as some believe, the genre of the novel is one based almost exclusively on the representation of interior life, the character’s “psychology”—here, Gerald’s—is externalized in a language not only set in motion by the text (a motion already apparent in the modernist “stream of consciousness”), but also taken out-of-joint, pushed out of itself (outa language, in a literal sense), towards action and performance: “In theater, dialogue is action, man!” (246) No wonder, then, that Gerald, much like Pinocchio in Pinocchio in Venice, ends up not knowing anymore whether he can keep his thoughts to himself or, on the contrary, whether he unknowingly voices them out loud: “I know,” Cynthia said, patting my arm with a ring-laden hand. Had I been talking out loud? (181)

Although the stage has lost its edges, the microcosm peopling Gerald’s Party keeps acting and playing roles (for themselves, for others . . . ), always being in representation; but this theatrical representation progressively does away with any traditional, consensual form of mimesis—properly speaking, the novel imitates nothing, aside from generic forms it parodically borrows and sabotages while staging itself. The multiplicity of characters in Gerald’s Party’s cast tends to eliminate all conventional notions of “realism” as they appear, on this psychological stage with which the narrator’s consciousness is associated, as nothing but actors playing roles, as suggested, among other things, by the proliferation of dialogues throughout the text, in the course of which the characters come to be identified or identifiable thanks to their idiosyncratic languages or speech mannerisms, turning them into pure language masks deprived of interiority, of any “psychological depth” or reality. As often in Coover’s fiction, “masks” find their value in and for themselves more than in what they might be hiding, the “roles” being inseparable, as in The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, from the actors who play them, but who, beyond or outside of them, cease to exist. Even bare skin is a kind of mask . . . (105), Gerald’s wife answers, as Gerald wonders about the immediacy, depthlessness, and transparency which, paradoxically, turned Ros into an unfathomable enigma, always herself and, as such, forever incapable of embodying other identities, of playing other parts but her own, unchangeable one, entirely defined in and by her physique—Ros was just the same, whether as a nymph, a dragon, an old man or the Virgin Mary: in short, endlessly delicious. (78)

Coover’s actors thus appear indistinguishable from the roles they play, roles which, in their diversity, often end up subsumed by the role of the actor: the actor plays the actor, and whether in Gerald’s Party or elsewhere, the characters appear as life’s maskers whose being coincides with their role, and outside this role they simply do not exist: no matter what he may do to prove the contrary, Lucky Pierre has no other reality than in the fickle projection of his own shadow on screen. Mere appearance, pure reflection of another mode of being that they, like you watching them, do not have access to, relegated backstage somewhere, in the blank, silent margins of the texts. The masks hide nothing—no face, no being; they are pure surface, revealing the empty, clownish nature of their “characters.”

You find, then, in Gerald’s Party, the same exteriorizing force as the one some identified at the source of the novel as a genre. For not only is Gerald’s consciousness assaulted from all sides, turned into a “sieve,” exteriorized into a polyphonic language, but the house that furnishes Gerald’s Party with its setting, far from delimiting hermetic boundaries, irrevocably opens on the outside that inexorably leaks in: As though the house had not been emptying out so much as filling up. The windows, stripped bare and paneless, seemed to crowd in on us, letting the dark night at their edges leak in like some kind of deadly miasma. (309) Images of effusion crop up here and there in the text: “Your whole house looks like it’s suffering from violent nosebleed, Ger.” (38) The new arrivals were spreading recklessly through the house, as though the place itself were hemorrhaging. (295) As Tania, Gerald recalls, ambiguously put it: “What’s within’s without,” Tania would say, “without within . . . ” (20) This first occurrence of Tania’s words—its ulterior inversion momentarily lifts the ambiguity: “What was without’s within, within, without.” (163)—cancels the distinction between inside and outside, while potentially pointing to the radical absence of interiority (without within), superseded by a single, paradoxically empty outside. Thus exteriorizing itself, violently pushing out and beyond itself, Gerald’s Party, like Ginger’s own outfit—Fucking her’s like pulling a prick on over your condom, dixit Dickie (20)—writes on its outside; it, you feel, gives itself as its own performative rendering; erases itself in the exhaustion of its gesture; bares, ravages, sabotages its own stage, the house that constitutes its own fiction, and, so doing, reinvents it(self): I had the feeling my whole house was reinventing itself. (124)

Nothing remains, come the last, closing pages of the novel. Gerald plunges into dream and the novel forgets itself, much as a ghost town might recede both in time and space, leaving its momentary visitor with a mere figment and a haunting. Despite the numerous buried memories that resurface to Gerald’s forgetful consciousness throughout, it, or so it seems, is towards oblivion, as perhaps symbolized by the “lotus blossoms” Ros is running through in Gerald’s dream (316), that the narrator, you with him, and the novel (the text itself and the genre that it stages) are inexorably headed, bringing a temporary end to Gerald’s tip into oblivion . . . (91) For as it plays itself—everything, in one way or another, refers back to performance, whether in the prevalence of the theater, the occasional nods to the cinema (99), or the music that keeps playing on Gerald’s hi-fi: there was distant applause: the folk album was a recording from a live theatrical performance (107)—as it performatively stages itself, Gerald’s Party cannot not exhaust itself, obliterate itself in the process of its own enactment.

Ros’s murder, along with its ritual replay, much like the Ros-enbergs’ sacrificial executions, might be but a pretext to dip the genre of the novel back into its own folkloric source. As suggested by Zack Quagg, and as embodied in Ros, theater—and eminently, if parodically, tragedy: Ros cannot be anything but herself and, as such, she is condemned to die, like all tragic heroes, for such is their nature—is, at bottom, nothing if not the remanence of an immemorial rite: “At heart, theater doesn’t entertain or instruct, goddamn it—it’s an atavistic folk rite,” Quagg was explaining, somewhat irritably. (171) Cast as the sacrificial victim, Ros may metaphorically embody the dramatic, public execution of the novel form in all its stultified conventionality: There were too many lights on in here, Gerald tells himself. The wreckage, the debris, was all too visible. It was like a theater after the play is over, deserted and garish, its illusions exposed. (187) This “theater,” as a purely metaphorical one, may be the genre of the novel itself; this “wreckage” might be what remains of it once its artificiality and conventionality have been publicly, ritually exposed and abused. Following upon religion, as you seem to recall from beyond oblivion, literature may in fact be religion’s heir: a sacrifice is a novel, a story, illustrated in a bloody fashion. Or rather a rudimentary form of stage drama reduced to the final episode where the human or animal victim acts it out alone until death. It is, through Ros’s murder and its carnivalesque expiation, the end of the conventional novel—from the detective novel to the novel of manners—that Gerald’s Party in its saturnalian danse macabre may be celebrating, doing away with all that, aesthetically, ideologically, or politically, could have once been associated with it, and, thus in the process, reopening the form, in precisely all its novel aspects, to new, vital possibilities: “We’re not abusing Ros, baby, we’re abusing death itself through Ros—really, it’s an affirmation!” (226) And in this comedy, it seems incumbent upon Vic, the last of the night’s victims and a writer (mediocre though he seems to be in Gerald’s eyes), to point in the direction that might lead to the (perhaps, at last) invention of the novel: “You know, I’ve been thinking about that play Ros was in, the pillar of salt thing . . . [ . . . ] God saved Lot, you’ll remember, so Lot afterward could fuck his daughters, but he froze the wife for looking back. On the surface, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. But the radical message of that legend is that incest, sodomy, betrayal and all that are not crimes—only turning back is: rigidified memory, attachment to the past. That play was one attempt to subvert the legend, unfreeze the memory, reconnect to the here and now.” (187) Yes, you’ll remember. Forget it, now.

 

(EPILEPTILOGUE)

No turning back; tip into oblivion, obliterate—to try again, from the beginning, and forget, forget that the “novel,” in its aesthetic zone of maximal contact with the present, with contemporary reality, with the here and now, ever existed; to make it novel again—to invent the novel, and keep inventing it. Once and, on theatrical trappings, on a public square, the (expanding) time and space of a forgetful text, never for all. “Is it . . . over?” “Not yet,” I said and sneezed. “I haven’t even—” (Gerald’s Party, 189-90) At its most novelistic—in its radical contemporariness, absolute openness ; in its performativity, too—the novel, then, for all its endurance, might be an ephemeral genre which, from text to text, offers the ritual spectacle of its own sabotage or execution, necessary for its perpetual invention. In its attempt at finding a form for itself, in its definitional hybridization of forms and genres, in the parody that it keeps playing against itself, the novel is indeed an anti-genre, a non-genre perhaps, perhaps a genre that, as such, does not (yet) exist: forever inventing itself, the novel does not constitute a genre if by genre is meant a receptacle into which subsequent texts, built on the same codified, immutable pattern, would find their place one after the other, as on the dusty shelves of a dark library, and eventually make up a “history of the novel”—the novel has no history; it is history itself, and history, as defined by the novel, is not the past so much as the future, the becoming, the “freshening of possibility,” what the present, shaped by the novel, and for all its “speciousness,” introduces you to; the specious present . . . The mysterious spread toward futurity . . . (166) In that sense, the novel is not a matrix that would produce some text, always the same despite surface variations, according to a fixed set of resilient rules; nor is it, a posteriori, a taxonomic category consecrated by tradition, the sterile attachment to a paralyzing past—on Times Square, after the havoc wreaked by the Marxist specter, a slogan displays itself: THE TRADITION OF ALL PAST GENERATIONS WEIGHS LIKE A NIGHTMARE UPON THE BRAIN OF THE LIVING (The Public Burning, 170). Rather, the novel happens without taking place, on a page forever blank, coursed on by mere shadows, traces, sidebar remnants of a passing. And so, it might well be that what the novel, as such, invents, as it keeps inventing itself from text to text more than texts after texts reinvent it, is not a form of writing, or a genre proper, nor, for that matter, a foundational or programmatic text against which all subsequent ones could be gauged or referred back to; rather, what is being endlessly invented, as suggested by the encroachment of theater in Gerald’s Party, at least in Gerald’s understanding of the form, is reading itself—something the narrator of “The Magic Poker” in Pricksongs & Descants discovers too: Just as I have invented you, dear reader, while lying here in the afternoon sun, bedded deeply in the bluegreen grass like an old iron poker . . . (40)—is the reader, is you, whose image progressively takes shape, reflected on the vacancy of a blank page: [Pardew] lifted his gaze to the ceiling as though studying something there, and involuntarily, the rest of us looked up as well. Nothing to see: a plain white ceiling, overlapping circles of light cast on it by the various lamps in the room. In some odd way, in its blankness, it seemed to be looking down on us, dwarfing us. I wondered, staring at it, if Alison might not be thinking the same thing—or, knowing I’d be having such thoughts, refuting me: there is no audience, Gerald, that’s what makes it so sad. Hadn’t I said much the same thing the night we met: that the principle invention of playwrights was not plays or actors but audiences? (Gerald’s Party, 26) You read, then, and witness your own coming into being while the novel that gives you shape and (momentary) visibility is slowly disappearing, leaving this “you” to the fiction of its own existence. Hence, perhaps, this incredible difficulty you have been feeling of saying anything at all about a novel like Gerald’s Party, whose performativity, this exhaustion of language in speech-acts, of the text in the performance of its very writing, voids all of your critical aspirations. You may think or hope that you will be able to pull out of it like Vic, slowly dying, believing that, “Ah well, what the fuck, it’s all just a—farff! foo!—fiction anyway” (259); yet here (so to speak) is the rub for you, for barely born to yourself as reader, you immediately understand that, yes, indeed, the fiction, c’est toi!, and that as such this “you” then has no more durability than the novel that invented it. And so, knowing all too well that these pages might be the stage for your last spasms, you too, like Vic, have to find ways of coping with the absurdity and insignificance of (your) existence, with the world’s ephemerality (20) around you, so that one day, “death can find you alive.” (Pinocchio in Venice) To read, then, to try and learn, again, how to read, again—for you never knew how, never know how to read—is to grow up, and understand, in the novel’s profoundly, radically comic charge, that, for one thing, understanding is overrated, and that, yes, tragedy might be a kind of adolescent response to the universe—the higher truth, a comic one . . . Coover’s fiction makes you laugh, and you laugh, you recall, in order to forget. The “novel”—as exemplified whether by The Public Burning or Gerald’s Party—in its accrued performativity, produces through the laughter it arouses something not unlike a cathartic effect. But because of this accrued performativity, the novel also condemns itself to a form of erasure, it exhausts itself, that is, in the very comic effects it produces. Yes, thinks Gerald, it had been nagging at me since I left the kitchen—that peculiar sensation of barrenness, of erasure . . . (277) The novel can be novel in any authentic way at such a cost only: to forget itself with and in each text that invents it, willing itself, perhaps, to be ephemeral. This might be, paradoxically, the key to its endurance, like this fleeting though somehow infinite instant that Gerald relishes with Alison: I was wondering at the strange intense beauty of this charge between us, brief, sudden, even (we knew this, it lent poignancy, passion, to our furtive touches) ephemeral, yet at the same time somehow ageless: a cathectic brush, as it were, with eternity, numbing and profound . . . (116)

And all of a sudden, the novel closes—“We return to the origin [ . . . ], says Hoo-Sin, and remain where we have always been . . . ” (296)

Ros is dead, none having noticed her body at first. And so is the novel, to which, again, she generously gives its metaphorical cue. And so it can begin. Again. With this freshening of possibility (7), her death may not be final. It can be indefinitely replayed (most of the night’s events have been videotaped). But you, like Gerald, have forgotten everything already—[ . . . ] bed and unforgettable climax had been utterly forgotten (7)—and the few, still resounding harmonics of memory (8) that momentarily persist already testify to the disappearance and obliteration of all recollections.