Robert Coover died two weeks ago. My dear wife took the opportunity to pick up an early anniversary/consolation gift for me, courtesy of Lorne Bair: a copy of The Water Pourer, an excised chapter from Coover’s first novel The Origin of the Brunists published on its own in a highly limited edition of 350 copies.
Coover was one of the last of a generation which included Gaddis and Gass, Barthelme and Barth (who also just died in April), leaving Pynchon (if he’s still alive — or ever existed) upholding the old guard of literary postmodernism. The abiding sense of playfulness characterizing Coover’s bibliography made manifest his lifelong curiosity about the limitless possibilities he perceived in the forms and functions of fiction, a curiosity he indulged from the start of his writing career to his early engagement with hypertext and electronic literature to late-career experiments like 2021’s short story/comic book hybrid Street Cop, illustrated by Art Spiegelman.
Coover’s use of form in his writing offers the reader a unique window into its own creation, as new stories and styles draw themselves to life with each subsequent sentence. Yet Coover himself rarely wrote about his process. The preface to The Water Pourer contains perhaps the clearest aperture into his methods of creation, as Coover details how he decides on which of the many threads running through his deeply-interconnected narratives to follow:
The infinite is all we have. All narratives, like the universe, are explosive. Man’s weak vision is not suited for these infinite explosions. To avoid going blind, he attempts to focus on this or that vector, spark, trajectory. But there is too much in the corner of his eye. The eye is jittery, distractable. There is more and more to see on all sides. Into the center, out to the edgeless edge. But if he relaxes his eye altogether, he sees nothing at all. Art is a polarizing lens.
Imagine such an explosion. Imagine a survivor. Watch the survivor. But there are many survivors. Else, how could I tell you about it, for you and I are survivors? Yet how draw you to see what I see without losing you to the explosion itself? By design: I can make an attractive and curious shape and drive the narrative through it, absorbing part of your peripheral vision. By modulation: I can warp the trajectories of adjacent narratives through image clusters, and thereby draw your eye back to see what I think I want you to see. And by withholding from you most of what lies in my own peripheral vision.
Over at his Mining the Dalkey Archive newsletter, Chad W. Post has run an excerpt from Stéphane Vanderhaeghe’s Robert Coover & the Generosity of the Page, an “unconventional study” of Coover’s fiction from The Origin of the Brunists to 2010’s Noir. Vanderhaeghe’s book is new to me, but based on the extract below it’s immediately become mandatory reading for me:
If Coover’s writing can lay claim to some exemplarity, it is to the extent to which, cornering one rather uncomfortably, it highlights the fact that you still do not know how to read; it is as if the exemplary writer’s role were to conduct you away from your mystification to the revelation of what reading is or can be. This, you feel, does not imply that the writer knows something about reading that you still have not been made privy to, nor that he possesses the ultimate knowledge of both the text and reading. You, for one, cannot pretend to ignore that the “Author” died a while ago and that with him is buried any possible textual knowledge or truth. The text, as such, is not a box you can tear open to see what is inside, a ready-made veil behind which lies, more or less hidden, meaning or so-called truth; rather, you remember, it is a perpetual interweaving, pure process that keeps doing and undoing itself so that in the end the process never stops but starts again, over, constantly: it is then incumbent upon you to take heed — “Now, c’mon, let’s try that again! From the beginning!” — and prolong the texts’ movements, to let them run on and tip into oblivion: from its fake origin to its provisional stop, Robert Coover’s work has (un)built itself around a series of rewritings and rereadings; fresh starts and erasures.
One possible way of approaching Robert Coover’s work would be to see in it so many (parodistic) variations both of previous texts and itself: the texts’ exemplarity may thus reside in their refusal to close down on anything that would be definite, given and realized once and for all—on a “text,” that is, conceived as product: even if indirectly, often along forking bypaths or back alleys (the better to get you lost, dear, although, you are sure of it, you have been here before time and again), Coover’s stories often take you to lands of the once-upon-a-time, this one time that precisely cannot equal any other; there, again time comes to a standstill (Ghost Town), the textual geography shifts about (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre), boundaries collapse (The Public Burning), everything and nothing happens at the same time (“The Babysitter”), and you emerge from the narrative to be immediately swallowed back in (John’s Wife), retracing forgotten steps that reinvent the texts and, reinventing them and the way you look at them, recreate the world and the reading you make of it. You know that independently of your numbered readings, you still have not read those texts whose singularity lies in the free variation at play within each of them, destabilizing them (Briar Rose), exhausting them performatively (Gerald’s Party), even to a degree erasing them (Pinocchio in Venice), all the while getting them ready for other variations, for other freshened possibilities.
The process of learning how to read, started afresh with each new text, with each new reading of the text, is also the process of trying out and learning new modes of perception on the world: reading the world as it is, i.e., as it is not yet, i.e., as it has always been — in motion, in a state of perpetual becoming, of not-yet-being-no-longer. You ought not to stabilize the real in a definition, nor exhaust it in a description; you ought not to enclose the world in a book but, on the contrary, subtract it from the almightiness of signification, liberate it from the tyranny of the logos; build it anew in a reading you shall immediately deconstruct if you can, rereading it. Robert Coover’s work may be nothing but a radical attempt at disincarnating language, un-fleshing the word as it were — sex and pornography become the privileged tools, though not the only ones, of a writing whose movement is from the inside out, and in the course of which mystical depths are made to rise to the surface of the world and the materiality of language: no more mystery, then, no more secrets, no more reserve; only language bodies, emptied envelopes, mere deflated surfaces turned inside out. The writing itself disseminates, seems to exhaust itself and verges, spent, on its outside, breaching all boundaries until its internal and external sides are indistinguishable, leaving you speechless, with nothing else to say, unsure of where to ground the little you could add anyway.
On you read, then, and advance in the texts, casting your eyes on the words and the letters that compose and recompose them indefinitely; you wander about the pages, inventing them, reading through surfaces (a movie screen, the arid ground of a desert, a maid’s fundament, a golf course…), lusting for a breach to penetrate them with your gaze, invent a consciousness for yourself, impregnate them with your meaningful reading; yet something seems to stand in your way, diverts and forces you through other screens (the same again) to rub your face into your reading of them, and you suddenly see no difference between you and Richard Nixon, you and Lucky Pierre, you and Pinocchio— […] caught up as you are in the fictions of sense and purpose that entrapped you as you looked elsewhere for… for what? a pattern? some understanding?
One last bit: Coover’s “In anticipation of the question: ‘Why do you write?’,” from Conjunctions 12:
Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless.
Because art’s lie is preferable, in truth, to life’s beautiful terror.
Because, as time does not pass (nothing, as Beckett tells us, passes), it passes the time.
Because death, our mirthless master, is somehow amused by epitaphs.
Because epitaphs, well struck, give death, our voracious master, heartburn.
Because fiction imitates life’s beauty, thereby inventing the beauty life lacks.
Because fiction is the best position, at once exotic and familiar, for fucking the world.
Because fiction, mediating paradox, celebrates it.
Because fiction, mothered by love, loves love as a mother might her unloving child.
Because fiction speaks, hopelessly, beautifully, as the world speaks.
Because God, created in the storyteller’s image, can be destroyed only by His maker.
Because, in its perversity, art harmonizes the disharmonious.
RIP King Coov!
And while we’re mourning, RIP to Brownsville legend Ka, another titan of the pen who passed away just four days ago, only two months after releasing one of the year’s best albums, The Thief Next to Jesus.
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