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NEIL SCHMITZ
unavoidable betrayal of the tradition he can no longer possess. Although
he has written a long essay on the heroism of Beckett ("The Last
Quixote,"
NAR II,
1971 ), it is not Beckett's austerity that is reflected
in his subsequent work, but rather the extravagant despair of Melville's
Pierre Glendinning, the
young
artist who maims himself (so John Logan
has argued ) in order to write. Such is the case in Coover's "Begin–
nings," a story that appeared early last year in
Harpers.
It begins: "In
order to get started, he went to live alone on an island and shot him–
self." In 1972, as in 1852, the consequence of that act is not certain:
"This, then, was his problem, beginning. And having begun: avoiding
resolutions." Like Pierre, who is assuredly the archetypal self-reflexive
writer in American literature, Coover's narrator loses control of his
fiction which, even in its multifarious fragments, keeps doubling back
upon him. "Beginnings" synopsizes the tales and fables Coover pre–
sents in
Pricksongs;
the same ideas occur to this writer, but are here
rejected. A figurative Eve, a wife, is used, abused, and left apart. At
the end Coover pulls the plug and the island disappears. The writer
returns to the issue of his blood on the cabin wall. That is, of course,
one form of silence, one way of getting off the island.
With the exception of "The Kid," the plays or "acts," as Coover
calls them, in
A Theological Position
re-present the scene of this crisis.
The director in "Love Scene" punishes his actors with cliches. A kind
of maniacal Lee Strasberg, he is all method, constrained by his pre–
conceptions, yet nonetheless demanding the vivid life of spontaneity,
a life his bullied actors cannot give him. Self-consciousness allegorized,
he is the voice that brutally represses and finally extinguishes the possi–
bility of love. Like "Rip Awake," the act is a dramatic monologue, an
exposition so arch in its ironies that Coover's resort is ultimately to
boldface, the scream in large print: "IMAGINATION RULES THE
WORLD, SHITHEAD!" Similarly conceived and constructed episodes
occur elsewhere in Coover's fiction, notably in
Pricksongs,
but there
they have a depth of language, a supple and witty prose not manifest
in the plays. "Love Scene" is merely shrill. The Sisyphean Rip in "Rip
Awake" lacks distinguished lines, rambles tediously, and then departs.
Coover may well have intended these acts to be failed acts, to sound
precisely the fatigue of his existential Van Winkle shouldering the
absurd, but the rewards of enduring Beckett in his bleak extensions
of speech are simply not here. "Rip Awake" fails as a disguised fiction
and not within the scope of linguistic and dramaturgical failure meta–
theater has adopted as its legitimate province. What these experimental
plays reveal is a desperation that has become banal, tempered and
stressed into the dull track of the complaint.
