PARTISAN REVIEW
133
heavily in his title which, at one point, he spells out : "death-cunt and
prick-songs." Meaning is served up with vengeance. There is no descant
above that line, though much discourse in the text. Coover's porten–
tous epigraphs (John Cleland and Paul Valery), for all their promise
of some elaborate metaphysical conceit, have finally little to do with
the experimental twists of technique and reversals of convention that
ensue. Opposites - male/female, mind / body, the writer on one side
of his language, the world on the other - are not joined. The title,
a<; Coover construes it, exists as a theorem, a fragmented sentence, not
as a piece of wit, and what it states, crudely put, is this: the cunt's
death makes possible the prick's song. Coover's manipulative cleverness,
the
via media
of the modern writer, is the source and center of a
lamentation.
In effect, the venerable romantic metaphors for the poetic process
are no longer relevant. Just as the poker has ceased to function as a
seminal symbolic wand, the deft touch of which will drop the woman"'s
confining drawers and make copulation possible, writing no longer
marries the writer to Nature. "Espouse me," Helen demands in Barth's
"Menelaiad," "without more carp! " What Menelaus learns is that he
must put an end to his circling discourse, "frig understanding," and
simply act, espouse instead of espouse. But the lovers in Coover's fic–
tion typically do not make it. Narrators are unable to break through
their rhetoric. At the critical moment the magician loses his magic.
Endlessly projecting his image, the metafictive artist works in the hot–
house of the masturbatory fantasy where no resolutions are reached,
where the word is never incarnate. In "The Magic Poker" the nar–
rator plays incessantly with his symbol - trying, he relates, to die
procreatively into the body of his fiction - but is everywhere balked
by his awareness of writing as performance, of words as wards, caught
in that infinite regress Barth mordantly describes in
Lost in the Fun–
house:
"I see I see myself as a halt narrative: first person, tiresome."
If
Barth's metaphor for the condition of the modern writer is confusion
and dismay in the mirrored labyrinth of writing, Coover's is the
island, the enclosed self wandering through the space of its isolation,
a self that finds in language only the evidence of itself. The island is
contrived, the poker "put there."
Yet where Barth in some sense emerges from his maze, surviving
his metaphor in the fashion of Borges's Pierre Menard, wresting origin–
ality from imitation, Coover has still to make such a move in his .art.
Where Barth accepts the neoclassical compromise implicit in Borges's
work and in effect has been rewriting (in good faith) classical narra–
tives, Coover remains an elegist, a romantic modernist decrying his
