Robert Coover: The Universal Fictionmaking Process

With works ranging thematically and stylis­tically from The Universal Baseball Association to The Public Burning, from Pricksongs and Descants to Spanking the Maid, Robert Coover emerges as one of the most vibrant writers from a remarkable avant-garde that in the mid­-1960s mounted serious assault on traditional ideas of form and content in world literature.

Lois Gordon here defines Coover’s novels, short stories, and plays in terms of his con­temporaries: among Americans, Donald Bar­thelme, William Gass, John Hawkes, and others; among Europeans, Julio Cortazar, Robert Pinget, and Italo Calvino, to name a few. These writers dismiss the conventions of traditional form—linear plot, character development, definable theme, Aristotle’s unities of time and space—as no longer ap­propriate in the modern world.

Coover writes in a dazzling variety of forms and styles; in each he demonstrates a diversity of the style and manipulates the trappings of every conventional form—from Old Comedy to theater of the absurd. He also translates or transposes techniques associated with other art forms, such as film montage or operatic interlude. In Coover’s hands, any of these forms are fair game for parody. Gordon notes: “Coover’s method, more specifically is this: at the same time that he maintains a strong narrative line he coun­terpoints it (his musical term is ‘descants’) with numerous mythic, legendary, or sym­bolic levels… which serve to explode any final meaning or resting point.” Nothing is static—personality, event, human values. Coover writes about a continual flux in which everything is constantly qualified and dramatically altered. He portrays the public and private rituals that man construes “to barter inner and outer disorder.”

Lois Gordon is Chair and Professor of En­glish and Comparative Literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her previous books include Stratagems to Uncover Nakedness: The Dramas of Harold Pinter and Donald Barthelme.