PARTISAN REVIEW
135
The concluding act, "A Theological Position," is appropriately
placed. In its Coover recasts and refigures all the major themes and
problems that have ruled his writing since the
Universal Baseball As–
sociation.
With her swollen and germinating belly, the Woman exists
simply as a Nature, a Language, a Force, the Great Womb in which
the Word is immaculately conceived. Around her luminous and in–
explicable immensity - she smiles Madonna-like, demurely silent - a
Man and a Priest anxiously circle, striving to explain and judge the
miracle so freely given. The rape of the body by the mind commences.
With words, turning himself into his own spectator, the Priest urges
himself to climax and in that profanation - fucking but
not-there–
the Woman's cunt is given voice: " I use your language, having failed
with my own." It speaks then polemically with the le<,.rning and viva–
city of Kate Millett. In that lurch into literature a morality play
emerges, its ideas shaped from Marcuse and Norman O. Brown and
talked forth with feminist
ressentiment.
To stop the cunt's remorseless
mouth, the Priest murders the Woman. The intercourse of the imagin–
ation with the other, Nature - the Romantic synthesis - is in effect
denied. At that point, infallibly, the Pricks begin to speak. It is the
prick that has the last word and not surprisingly it indicates that more
is to be said anon. Coover's position is thus dourly expressed. Having
warred with his narrative mode, metafiction, and then pushed the
conflict into allegorical drama, he admits at last his capture. The
lamentation breaks off: "After all, there's something to be said for
talking cunts. ... / Yes, there's something to be said.
" Coover
reverts to his mode. The act begins to discuss its act.
Neil Schmitz
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