610
PARTISAN REVIEW
decay. Or never reaches it. Out in the thorny hedge he wonders
if
there is a
castle or a princess at all, or,
if
she exists, whether she is not "more briar than
blossom," and whether winning her might not prove worse than failure. In
the castle, he wonders if he had ever really come through a hedge. Either
way, he is propelled by his desire to "fulfill his own emblematic destiny." But
what if he succeeds? "What is happily ever after, after all, but a fall into the
ordinary, into human weakness, gathering despair, a fall into death."
For a hundred years the princess sleeps, and her dreams repeat them–
selves, though always in new forms. Again and again she dreams she is
wakened by others than the designated prince-as by a gang of marauding
peasants or by a woolly monkey who tickles and pinches. The witch who
controls her fate recounts the Sleeping Beauty legend in horrid variations.
In one,
all
the many princes who sought the princess were successful, and
babies spilled from her as she lay in her bed-"a kind of wayside chapel for
royal hunting parties." The princes' wives (for, of course, they had wives)
boiled her babies in a hundred savory dishes and cooked up the princess
herself in a foul stew for the poor. The princess protests, "real stories aren't
like that." But what are real stories like? When the princess questions her
fate and asks who she is, the witch tells her-"a door, accessible only to the
adept ... a secret passageway to nowhere but itself." What is Coover's anti–
story about if not about story-telling and its insatiable desire for The End?
"Sleeping Beauty" is, of course, a primordial love story, one that shows
love's supposedly transformative power-but, in Coover's version, the story
also suggests the delusiveness of that emotion which sustains itself not on
ful–
fillment but on deferral-a theme which may lie coiled within the recesses
even of the original legend. This tale is still tellable, I realize, as I pick up
Anita Brookner's latest novel. Nothing could be more simple-almost like a
folk tale--than this biography of erotic obsession and frustration which could
have taken place any time, any where. Everything else besides his passion is
vague about Alan Sherwood. He may be English; he may be a solicitor by
profession; a thin scrim of middle-class
moeurs
hangs behind his foreground–
ed life. But this life has been shaped chiefly by his relations with three
women-Alice, his mother, Sarah, his father's granddaughter by a previous
wife, and Angela, whom he married. His mother betrays him by marrying
after many years of widowhood when he was her only sentimental focus. But
it is she alone whose affection, somewhat distanced, is at hand at the end
when it is all that is left to him. Angela, whom he never really loved, is dead.
And Sarah is gone out of his life, if not out of his mind, forever.
Sarah is the
classicJemmeJatale
whose indifference to everyone else's rights
or wishes is evident from the age of six when she throws a tantrum after
being asked to surrender the other children's portions of birthday cake. But
once she is a grown girl her cousin Alan finds that he has no choice at all.
