Robert Coover: Pricksongs & Descants (1969)

In Pricksongs & Descants, Robert Coover shows off his mastery of postmodern fabulation. Coover’s primary component of construction is the paragraph, which he tends to treat as unit and isolate through extra spacing, numbers, or other typographic insertions. William Gass compares Coover’s paragraphs to playing cards, which can be dealt and redealt. Gass writes, “Sharply drawn and brightly painted paragraphs are arranged like pasteboards in ascending or descending scales of alternating colors to compose the story, and the impression that we might scoop them all up and reshuffle, altering not the elements but the order or the rules of the play, is deliberate.” Rather than weave a single narrative across these paragraphs, Coover often presents variations of one story, or recombinations of different story elements, so that one foundational scenario may end up with multiple, incompatible endings. Gass again is a useful commentator: “Just like the figures in old fairy tales and fables, we are constantly coming to forks in the road (always fateful), except here we take all of them, and our simultaneous journeys are simultaneous stories, yet in different genres, sometimes different styles, as if fantasy, romance and reality, nightmare and daydream, were fingers on the same hand.” For example, “The Elevator” describes a character’s daily elevator trip up to his office on the fourteenth floor of an office building. The seriality of the work week, the dull repetition of daily routines, as well as the seriality of the floors in the skyscraper, leads to a serial story in which the paragraphs don’t really advance but rather repeat the same journey with variations that range from the banal to the embarrassing to the fatal. This blatant disregard for the law of noncontradiction is even more dramatically displayed in “The Babysitter,” perhaps the most successful story in the collection. In the story, a babysitter’s night of work develops toward a series of parallel and incompatible climaxes (which include a threesome with her boyfriend and his best friend, sex with the child’s father, the accidental death of the infant, and, of course, a calm and unexceptional evening). The story works so well because it does not refuse the dramatic power of any possible plot development or conclusion; in Coover’s world, the author and his characters truly can have their cake and eat it too. Like the work of his metafictional contemporaries such as Barth and Barthelme, a number of Coover’s stories retell fairy tales, legends, or myths from a twisted perspective. “The Brother” narrates the story of Noah’s Ark from the viewpoint of Noah’s brother, who, skeptically criticizing his apparently insane sibling, ends up drowned by the flood. “The Gingerbread House” retells the story of Hansel and Gretel, but shifts the story’s subtext, the lurking menace and sexuality, into the foreground. Coover also shows a fondness for narrating stories from the perspective of power, law, or the State. In “The Wayfarer,” a lawman coolly describes his encounter with a mute wayfarer who seems unable or unwilling to acknowledge and respond to the lawman’s questions; in what he views as a righteous act, the lawman viciously murders the wayfarer for this failure to respond to commands. “Morris in Chains” also takes the viewpoint of oppressive power that remains outright antagonistic to anything that resists its totalizing systems of control. The story describes the capture of Morris, a nomadic goat herder, and is narrated by one of Morris’s captors, a member of the team of technicians that tracks Morris down by gathering data and using computers. The head of this team, Dr. Peloris, proudly asserts the power of systems analysis to deal with apparent chaos, claiming: “Even nonpattern eventually betrays a secret system.” When laying the preparations for the final trap, Peloris describes the predictive power of the team’s systems: “[I]t is now certain that Morris will camp here in this valley, beside this canal and that grove, within five days. The order of his disorder, as exposed by [our] charts and the processed data, forces him to do so no matter what operations his mind might undertake in order to arrive at what he would tend to think of as a decision. Unless, of course, it included the foreknowledge that we await him here. And who knows? perhaps even this knowledge would not suffice to break the power of pattern over mere mind-activity.” The group of tales collected in the section titled “Seven Exemplary Fictions” is preceded by a critical commentary that explains Coover’s aesthetic aims. Coover begins by praising the work of Cervantes as “exemplars of a revolution in narrative fiction,” and he presents his own stories as related “challenges to the assumptions of a dying age, exemplary adventures of the Poetic Imagination.” He writes, “The novelist uses familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms and to conduct the reader . . . to the real, away from mystification to revelation. And it is above all the need for new modes of perception and fictional forms able to encompass them that I . . . address the stories.” The collection’s final piece, “The Hat Act,” functions as an allegory of Coover’s literary practice. In front of a demanding and punishing audience, a magician performs a show that involves the transmutation of objects and bodies. His technical virtuosity initially receives the audience’s applause, but as he proceeds the results become disturbing, grotesque, and absurd. Like Coover’s fiction, the performance is a spectacle that is hard to look away from, though the bloodless formality of the proceedings (despite the story's bloody ending) leaves a tinge of disappointment to the experience. Fittingly, the story prematurely ends with: “THIS ACT IS CONCLUDED THE MANAGEMENT REGRETS THERE WILL BE NO REFUND”