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NEIL SCHMITZ
Indeed the seemingly invincible rhetoric of fiction (Coover studied
at the University of Chicago where Wayne Booth is in residence) , with
all its attendant banality, has become to a large extent Coover's sub–
ject. In
Pricksongs
&
Descants,
his most impressive work to date, there
is a brief sketch, "Panel Game," which renders the
praxis
of textual
analysis in the terms of a monstrous TV quiz show, a Gothic version
of "Truth or Consequences." Called up from the audience, a stunned
contestant is thrown cryptic passages and exhorted to find in them
nothing less than the meaning ("much ado about nothing"). "You
must
have contrived some concrete conjunctions," the Moderator ex–
claims at one point, "from the incontrovertible commentary
qua
com–
mentary just so conspicuously constituted." Too late to be spared the
consequences, the contestant perceives the essential nonsense. The text
found is lost and the sketch slams to a quick close.
Pricksongs
opens
with a prologue tale, "The Door." What this door opens upon, how–
ever, is not the New World "beyond appearances, beyond randomly
perceived events, beyond mere history" that Coover, in a dedicatory
preface to Cervantes, argues is the brilliant space the creative imagina–
tion discovers. It opens instead upon a pillaged narrative landscape,
an Old World of familiar forms strewn with phallic implements and
ravished doves, the rubble of designated symbols. It opens upon a
woman who cannot extricate her body from her too-tight slacks, upon
a magician who can not extricate that same warm body, the body of
experience, from his hat, upon Hansel and Gretel struggling through
the Black Forest of Pubescence.
Coover, it must be said, regrets this punishment. Unlike Waugh
who loses himself in the sporting world of his creation, who is the most
responsible of authors, a veritable Balzac, the narrators in
Pricksongs
are intensely aware of their art as artifice, constructions, riddles to
which the clues (symbols) are readily apparent. Yet these alienated
and complaining writers, Coover maintains, are not entirely to be faulted
for their prolix self-consciousness.
If
they suffer from "overmuch pres–
ence" (to use John Barth's term) , it is in part because their language
has been overtaken by the analysts and critics, its mysteries coldly re–
solved by a relentless interpretation. In "The Magic Poker" a broken
piano is discovered and a random key struck. The sound it makes is
"thuck," the exaot sound of a literary symbol read anywhere in con–
temporary fiction. Nonetheless this particular piano sits in a vandalized
structure, an abandoned manor (on a
Tempest-like
isle) often visited
by wandering delinquents who have scrawled their names on its once–
elegant walls, who have in fact shat in the piano's box. Coover re–
peatedly plays that sour note ("thuck") in
Pricksongs,
striking it most
