PARTISAN REVIEW
131
A PRISONER OF WORDS
A THEOLOGICAL POSITION. By Robert Coover. E. P. Dutton
&
Co.
$2.95.
But be that as it may, between the
material operations of the game
on the ballfield, and the riotous
mythic celebrating of the victory,
there are some notable twists,
"symbol-wise."
- KENNETH BURKE
on the
New York Mets
The numerous and eminently notable twists, "symbol-wise,"
in Robert Coover's early fiction are at once the mark of his intelligence
as a novelist and a circumscription of his range as a writer. In
The
Origin of the Brunists)
which won the Faulkner Prize in 1966, and the
subsequent novella,
The Universal Baseball Association) Inc.
J.
Henry
Waugh) Prop.
(1968), Coover's sophisticated knowledge of his tradi–
tion - his expertise in storytelling and plot-spinning - is strikingly
manifest. So, too, is the latent predicament he confronts openly in his
most recent work, the four short plays that comprise
A Theological
Position.
When the players in Waugh's fictive world, the UBA, come
to their ultimate inning, they step forth from the frame tale and cri–
ticize, with Burkean ingenuity, their mythic roles, the symbolic nature
of the game in which they are played. They emerge, in short, not as
realized individuals speaking in the present tense of being (the tense
to which Coover moves in the final section) but as characters aware of
their characterization, fictional pawns trapped in a text that has failed
to give them life. Given the disappearance of Waugh, who has authored
them, they become narrators themselves: the fiction as fiction continues.
And it is precisely at this point in the
Universal Baseball Association
that Coover's narrative hardens in its formal devices, hardens into
allegory, presenting still another (as one critic sententiously puts it)
"bleak view of an America which has lost direction and has declined
into madness." In "Love Scene," one of the plays in
A Theological
Position )
a disembodied directorial voice cries out in pain to his stilted
actors: "I t's the whole goddam saga of the western world! I t's castles
of dreams, finding the grail, music of the spheres! There's magic in
the air, wizards, love potions, and Satan's ass ! Come on! I want tran–
scendence! immortal longings! I want inscrutable forces at work! Now,
move it!"
