ROBERT COOVER

Born: February 4, 1932

Birthplace: Charles City, Iowa

Other literary forms

Besides his collections of short fiction and novellas and many uncollected short stories, Robert Coover’s has written the novels The Origin of the Brunists (1966), The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), The Public Burning (1977), Gerald’s Party (1985), Pinocchio in Venice (1991), John’s Wife (1996), Ghost Town (1998), The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut (2002), and Noir (2010). His other works include a collection of plays entitled A Theological Position (1972), which contains The Kid, Love Scene, Rip Awake, and the title play; another play, Bridge Hound (pr. 1981); the screenplays On a Confrontation in Iowa City (1969) and After Lazarus (1980); several poems, reviews, and translations published in journals; and theater adaptations of “The Babysitter” and Spanking the Maid. Coover also has published a few essays on authors he admires, such as Samuel Beckett (“The Last Quixote,” in New American Review, 1970) and Gabriel García Márquez (“The Master’s Voice,” in New American Review, 1977).

Achievements

Robert Coover is one of the authors regularly mentioned in relation to that slippery term ”postmodernism.” As a result of the iconoclastic and experimental nature of his fiction, Coover’s work does not enjoy a widespread audience; his reputation among academics, however, is well established, and the reviews of his works have been consistently positive. Although in the beginning of his career he had to resort to teaching in order to support his family, he soon began to gain recognition, receiving several prizes and fellowships: a William Faulkner Award for Best First Novel (1966), a Rockefeller Foundation grant (1969), two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships (1971, 1974), an Academy of Arts and Letters award (1975), a National Book Award nomination for The Public Burning, a National Endowment for the Humanities Award (1985), a Rea Award (1987) for A Night at the Movies: Or, You Must Remember This, a Rhode Island Governor’s Arts Award (1988), and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship (1990). The publisher Alfred A. Knopf’s rejection of The Public Burning after initial acceptance brought some notoriety to Coover. Since the novel deals with the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and presents former president Richard M. Nixon as its central narrator, the publisher thought it would be too controversial. Eventually, The Public Burning was published by Viking Press and became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Critical studies of Coover’s work first appeared in the late 1970’s. Still, in spite of the critical acclaim and the considerable amount of scholarship about his work, Coover’s writing remains relatively unknown to the public, and some of his early novels are now out of print.

Biography

Robert Lowell Coover was born in Charles City, Iowa. His family soon moved to Indiana and then to Herrin, Illinois. His father managed the local newspaper, the Herrin Daily Journal, which prompted Coover’s interest in journalism. His college education began at Southern Illinois University (1949-1951), but he transferred to Indiana University, where he received a B.A., with a major in Slavic studies, in 1953. After graduation, Coover was drafted and joined the United States Naval Reserve.

While in Spain, he met Maria del Pilar Sans-Mallafré, who became his wife on June 13, 1959. During these years, his interest in fiction began. His first published story, “Blackdamp,” was the seed of his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists. He received an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1965. During the following years, Coover and his family alternated stays in Europe with periods in the United States. The several awards he received during the 1970’s made him financially secure and allowed him to continue writing.

Coover has held appointments at Bard College, the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the Virginia Military Institute, and since 1979, he has been a distinguished professor at Brown University. He has also been writer-in-residence at Wisconsin State University. In spite of a large amount of time spent abroad in Europe and in South America and his outspoken need to take distance from his own country, Coover’s production is very “American,” since he often bases his fiction on American events, persons, and national myths. Coover often manipulates historical events for artistic purposes, but he has a solid knowledge of the facts.

In the late 1980’s, Coover began teaching courses about electronic writing on computers. With the rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990’s, he made significant progress in the use of hyperfiction. Hyperfiction, also referred to as hypertext fiction, tree fiction, nonlinear fiction, or electronic fiction, is fiction written with the capabilities of hypertext. Hyperfiction is truly nonlinear since it cannot be represented on a printed page. The reader takes an active role in hyperfiction, choosing which links to click on and which paths to follow. Thus, the narrative may be very different from one reading to the next, depending on the choices made by the reader. Readers can follow different characters, or points of view, or skip back and forth between different time zones. By clicking on an interesting name, place, event, or idea, the reader can be taken to a new page connected to that name, place, event, or idea.

Coover reads, writes, and reviews hyperfiction, and he teaches courses on electronic writing and mixed media at Brown University. The Hypertext Hotel is a collaborative hyperfiction that grew out of Coover’s courses. During the 1990’s, students, authors, and scholars have added to the fictional hotel text. Coover developed a course at Brown that introduces students to the possibilities of hyperfiction. He has also been known to encourage the use of hyperfiction and the software that makes it possible. Coover is the author of the now classic “The End of the Book,” an article in which he explains hyperfiction and his general optimism that it will someday replace books.

Analysis

Robert Coover’s central concern is the human being’s need for fiction. Because of the complexity of human existence, people are constantly inventing patterns that give them an illusion of order in a chaotic world. For Coover, any effort to explain the world involves some kind of fiction-making process. History, religion, culture, and scientific explanations are fictional at their core; they are invented narratives through which human beings try to explain the world to themselves. The problem, Coover would say, is that people tend to forget the fictional nature of the fictional systems they create and become trapped by them, making dogmas out of the fictions. The artist’s function, then, is to reexamine these fictions, tear them down, and offer new perspectives on the same material, in order to make the reader aware of the arbitrariness of the construct.

Coover’s fiction often has been labeled “meta-fiction”—that is, fiction about fiction—and indeed most of his works are comments on previously existing fictional constructs. If in his longer works he examines the bigger metaphoric narratives, such as religion, history, or politics (which one of the theorists of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard, has called “metanarratives”), in his shorter works Coover turns to smaller constructs, usually literary fictions.

In the prologue to the “Seven Exemplary Fictions” contained in Pricksongs and Descants, Coover addresses Miguel de Cervantes as follows:

But, don Miguel, the optimism, the innocence, the aura of possibility you experienced have been largely drained away, and the universe is closing in on us again. Like you, we, too, seem to be standing at the end of one age and on the threshold of another.

Just as Cervantes stood at the end of a tradition and managed to open a door for a new type of fiction, contemporary authors confront a changing world in need of new fictional forms that can reflect this world’s nature better. Just as Cervantes tried to stress the difference between romance and the real world through the mishaps of Don Quixote, Coover wants to stress the fictionality and arbitrariness of some fictions that hold a tight grip on the reader’s consciousness. Like Cervantes, Coover wants to free readers from an uncritical acceptance of untrue or oversimplified ideas that limit and falsify their outlook on life. Fictions, Coover and Cervantes would say, are not there to provide an escape by creating fantasies for the reader. When they do so, Coover continues writing in his prologue, the artist “must conduct the reader to the real, away from mystification to clarification, away from magic to maturity, away from mystery to revelations.”

This quotation, coming from an author whose work is usually considered “difficult,” might seem somehow odd. How does Coover’s fiction clarify, or what does it reveal? His work often presents constantly metamorphosing worlds, which mimic the state of constant change in the real world. Just as the world is continuously changing, Coover’s fictions also refuse to present stable, easily describable characters or scenarios. Coover also calls attention to the fictionality of fiction by focusing on the process and the means of creation rather than on the product. As he states in the prologue, the novelist turns to the familiar material and “defamiliarizes” it in order to liberate readers’ imagination from arbitrary constraints and in order to make them reevaluate their reactions to those constraints. These are the main strategies of Coover’s two collections of stories, Pricksongs and Descants and A Night at the Movies: Or, You Must Remember This.

Pricksongs and Descants

The title of Coover’s first short-fiction collection refers to musical terms, variations played against a basic line (the basic line of the familiar narrative). As one character in one of the stories says, however, they are also “death-c— and prick-songs,” which prepares the reader for the sometimes shocking motifs of death and sex scattered throughout the stories. In Pricksongs and Descants, Coover turns to the familiar material of folktales and biblical stories. Using this material offers him the possibility of manipulating the reader’s expectations. One of the ways in which Coover forces the reader to look at familiar stories from new perspectives is by retelling them from an unfamiliar point of view. For example, the story “The Brother” is Coover’s version of the biblical flood told from the point of view of Noah’s brother, who, after helping Noah to build the ark, is left to drown. “J’s Marriage” describes how Joseph tries to come to terms with his marriage to the Virgin Mary and his alternating moods of amazement, frustration, and desperation. Some of the stories of the same collection are based on traditional fairy tales: “The Door” evokes “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Gingerbread House,” reminds one of “Hanzel and Gretel”; “The Milkmaid of Samaniego” is based on the Spanish folktale of the same title; and Hair o’ the Chine, a novella, mocks the tale of the “Three Little Pigs and the Wolf.” Coover subverts, however, the original narratives by stressing the cruelty and the motifs of sex, violence, and death underlying most folktales. Revealing the darker side of familiar stories is in fact one of Coover’s recurrent techniques.

In other stories in Pricksongs and Descants, Coover experiments with the formal aspects of fiction-making. He reminds the reader of the artificiality of fiction by presenting stories that are repertoires of narrative possibilities. Often, Coover juxtaposes several different beginnings, or potential stories, but leaves them undeveloped. He interweaves the different story lines, some of which are complementary and some of which might be contradictory, as is the case in “Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl” and in “The Magic Poker.” In the “Sentient Lens” section and in “Klee’s Dead,” Coover explores the possibilities and the limitations of the narrational voice: In the first set of stories, Coover denies the possibility of an objective narrative voice by portraying a camera that constantly interferes with the events of the story; in “Klee’s Dead,” the supposedly “omniscient” narrator is unable to explain the reasons for artist Paul Klee’s suicide.

In most of the stories of Pricksongs and Descants, the figures are types described with a flaunted lack of depth of characterization, which prevents the reader from identifying with them in any possible way. This contributes to the critical distance that Coover thinks is necessary to maintain toward fiction. As critic Cristina Bacchilega says in her article about Coover’s use of the Märchen (folktales) in this collection, while

the Märchen is symbolic of development, of a passage from immaturity to maturity, Coover’s fictions present rather static characters . . . the only dynamic process allowed is in the reader’s new awareness of the world as a construct of fictions.

The function of the artist in contemporary society is one of Coover’s recurring concerns, which surfaces in “Panel Game,” “Romance of Thin Man and Fat Lady,” and “The Hat Act,” all of which portray cruel and insatiable audiences who, in their thirst for entertainment, do not hesitate to exterminate the artists if their performance does not stand up to their expectations.

A Night at the Movies

In A Night at the Movies, Coover probes the nature of filmic fictions, which present a greater danger of being taken for “real” because of the immediacy of filmic images. He approaches film from three perspectives. In the stories “Shootout at Gentry’s Junction,” “Charlie in the House of Rue,” “Gilda’s Dream,” and “You Must Remember This,” Coover demythologizes specific films and offers his own version of the story, usually baring the ideology of the original version. In “After Lazarus” and “Inside the Frame,” he explores the conventions through which these fictions create an illusion of an independent world on the screen. In “The Phantom of the Movie Palace” and “Intermission,” he challenges the ontological status of reality and film by making the characters cross the boundaries that separate these two realms.

“Shootout at Gentry’s Junction” is a parody of the ideology and of the form of the Western film High Noon (1952). Coover parodies the narrative line and the easy identification of good and evil typical of most Westerns. The film celebrates the code of honor and personal integrity typical of the Western hero; abandoned by everybody, the sheriff of the film, played by Gary Cooper, has to fight alone with the villain and his gang. In the story, however, the protagonist is a fastidious, neurotic sheriff who is obsessed with fulfilling the role imposed on him. The villain is Don Pedro, the Mexican bandit, whose major talent is expressing himself by expelling intestinal gas. As in the film, the narrative progresses toward the confrontation of the villain and the sheriff. The tight structure of the film, however, is disrupted in the story by giving both characters a different kind of discourse. The sheriff’s discourse has a traditional narrative line. It is narrated in the past tense and refers to formulas taken directly from the visual tradition of the Western. The Mexican’s discourse is in the present tense and in broken English, influenced by Spanish. Furthermore, Coover makes the Mexican ubiquitous. Readers never really know where he is—he seems everywhere at the same time, raping the schoolmarm at the local school, cheating at cards in the saloon, and burning papers at the sheriff’s office. After shooting the sheriff, the Mexican sets the town on fire and rides into the sunset.

The irreverence of Coover’s version of the film Casablanca (1942) is even greater. Casablanca has become the epitome of the romantic melodrama, drawing like the Western upon codes of honor and heroic behavior. In “You Must Remember This,” Coover gives his version of what might have happened between frames. Quite literally, Rick and Ilsa fall between frames and make furious love several times. The love story becomes a pornographic film. The disruption of the moral code of the film creates an avalanche of disruptions in other categories: Rick and Ilsa begin to sense that their senses of time and place are fading, and their identities become increasingly diffused. At the end of the story, the characters melt into nothingness after several desperate attempts to return to the mythic film.

Other stories in the collection A Night at the Movies aim at exposing the artificiality of the technical conventions of film. Written in the form of a screenplay, “After Lazarus” parodies the notion of the camera as the ultimately objective narrator. In the story, the camera “hesitates,” “pauses,” “follows back at a discreet distance,” and rapidly moves back when frightened. “Inside the Frame” refers in its very title to film-related terms. If films construct a narrative through the sum of frames that all have a reason and a function in the global construct of the story, this story presents several possible beginnings of stories in one single frame. In “Inside the Frame,” the reader gets glimpses of what could be potential stories: a woman stepping off a bus, an Indian with a knife between his teeth, a man praying at a grave, a singing couple, a sleepwalker. There is no development, no explanation of the images. “Lap Dissolves” is a literary imitation of the film technique. The story fades from one film-related situation to the next, with the words giving the cues to the transformation of the scenario.

Coover disrupts the ontological boundaries between “reality” and fiction by making the protagonists of “The Phantom of the Movie Palace” and “Intermission” move between them. The mad projectionist of the first story lives in an abandoned motion-picture theater and plays with the reels of film, constructing films by cutting and pasting images of other films. Somehow, his experiments go awry, and he becomes trapped in the fictions he has been creating. The girl of “Intermission” enters a film-related fantasy when the film in the story ends and she steps into the lobby of the theater to buy a snack. Outside the theater, she is thrown into a series of situations directly drawn from Hollywood films: She moves from a car race with gangsters, to a tent with Rudolph Valentino, to the sea surrounded by sharks. In what is supposed to be “reality,” she becomes a dynamic individual, but back in the cinema she returns to the passivity that Hollywood fictions seem to invite.

Briar Rose

In Briar Rose, a novella and a retelling of the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, Coover travels deeply into the dreams of the sleeping princess and into the forest of briars and brambles that plague the prince as he tries to rescue her. The story centers on the powers of the human imagination and escalates to an erotic pace as sex and storytelling fuse together. As the prince fights his way to the princess’s bed chamber to awaken her from a deathly enchanted sleep, Coover involves the reader by dangling numerous interpretative possibilities just below the surface of this brief narrative.

Coover’s genius is displayed in his use of words, drifting back and forth between reality and dreams. His speculations about what makes a prince forge through the briars and what a princess dreams about while magically asleep for one hundred years are thought provoking, mysterious, compelling, and at times hilarious. As the tale unwinds, Coover exposes the masculine desire to prey on female beauty. In addition, he leads the reader to contemplate the necessity that women resist male yearnings that are projected onto them. The tale is a bit dull in places and lacks a definite ending with some culminating metaphor, but Coover constructs an intriguing story that is well known, turned in on itself, and explored to reveal different levels of human consciousness.

In his major collections of stories, Coover elaborates on his fundamental concern, —namely the necessity for the individual to distinguish between reality and fiction and to be liberated from dogmatic thinking. In order to do so, Coover emphasizes the self-reflexive, antirealistic elements of his fiction. The result is original, highly engaging, and energetic stories that probe human beings’ relationships to the myths that shape their lives.

Bibliography

Andersen, Richard. Robert Coover. Boston: Twayne, 1981. A useful and very accessible introduction to Coover’s production up to 1981. Andersen combines plot summary with commentary, helping the reader to make an initial acquaintance with Coover’s work. Includes notes, select bibliography, and index.

Benson, Stephen. “The Late Fairy Tales of Robert Coover.” In Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale, edited by Benson. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008. Examines Coover’s use of the fairy tale in his fiction.

Coover, Robert. “Interview.” Short Story, n.s. 1 (Fall, 1993): 89-94. Coover comments on the difference between the short story and the novel, the writing of Pricksongs and Descants, his use of sexuality in his fiction, his iconoclastic streak, postmodernism, and his use of the short story to test narrative forms.

_______. Interview by Amanda Smith. Publishers Weekly 230 (December 26, 1986): 44-45. Coover discusses the motivations that lie behind his experimental fiction. He says he believes that the artist finds his metaphors for the world in the most vulnerable areas of human outreach; he insists that he is in pursuit of the mainstream. What many people consider experimental, Coover argues, is actually traditional in the sense that it has gone back to old forms to find its new form.

_______. “Tale, Myth, Writer.” In Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Coover, who has written short fiction that subverts traditional fairy tales, explains his artistic and emotional relationship to this genre.

Cope, Jackson. Robert Coover’s Fictions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. More sophisticated than Richard Andersen’s book. Cope supposes that readers know Coover’s work and uses several approaches to it, analyzing his techniques, his subject matter, and the critical theories that cast light on his writings. Contains an index.

Evenson, Brian K. Understanding Robert Coover. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Evenson explains the particularly dense style of Coover’s metafiction in a comprehensive survey. He guides readers through Coover’s postmodern fiction, which deals with myth- and story making and their power to shape collective, community action, which oftentimes turns violent.

Gelfant, Blanche H., ed. The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Includes a chapter in which Coover’s short stories are analyzed.

Gordon, Lois. Robert Coover: The Universal FictionMaking Process. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Like Richard Andersen’s book, this volume provides a friendly introduction and overview of Coover’s work, placing him in the context of metafictional or postmodernist literature. Includes notes, select bibliography, and index.

Kennedy, Thomas E. Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. An introduction to Coover’s short fiction. Discusses the postmodernist trend in fiction in the 1960’s and Coover’s place in this movement. Provides summary analyses of Coover’s stories, as well as discussions of the critical reception of Coover’s fiction. Also includes interviews with Coover, as well as previously published criticism, including William H. Gass’s review of Pricksongs and Descants.

Maltby, Paul. Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. A comparative look at these three writers and their fictions. Includes a bibliography and an index.

McCaffery, Larry. The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. After describing what he considers a major current in contemporary American fiction, McCaffery discusses the metafictional traits of Coover’s work and relates him to other important contemporary American writers.

_______. “Robert Coover on His Own and Other Fictions.” Genre 14 (Spring, 1981): 45-84. A lively discussion in which Coover examines, among other things, the importance of stories about storytelling, the function of the writer in a world threatened by nuclear apocalypse, the fiction that has influenced his work, and popular culture.

“The Pleasures of the (Hyper)text.” The New Yorker 70 (June/July, 1994): 43-44. Discusses Coover’s Hypertext Hotel, the country’s first online writing space dedicated to the computer-generated mode of literature known as hypertext. Describes Coover’s writing class at Brown University and its use of hypertext.

Scholes, Robert. “Metafiction.” The Iowa Review 1, no. 3 (Fall, 1970): 100-115. Initially theoretical, then descriptive, this article discusses four major metafictional writers: Coover, William H. Gass, Donald Barthelme, and John Barth. Scholes categorizes the different types of metafictional writing and classifies Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants as “structural” metafiction, since it is concerned with the order of fiction rather than with the conditions of being.

Stengel, Wayne B. “Robert Coover.” In A Reader’s Companion to the Short Story in English, edited by Erin Fallon, et al., under the auspices of the Society for the Study of the Short Story. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Aimed at the general reader, this essay provides a brief biography of Coover followed by an analysis of his short fiction.

Carlota Larrea

Alvin K. Benson