Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 8 (1995): 123-37

Fictional Self-Consciousness in
Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descernís

Ricardo Miguel Alfonso

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

ABSTRACT
This essay reads Robert Coover's novel Pricksongs and Descants as an instance of the
interchange between mimetic representation and literary self-reflexivity characteristic of
postmodern novelists such as Vladimir Nabokov or John Barth. It analyses some of the
short stories collected in this volume as examples of Coover's ongoing concern with the
interchange between (1) our perception of the real, (2) the systems of thought by means
of which we account for the flux of reality, and (3) the epistemological nature and
function of literature as a vehicle for modern self-understanding. The result is not only a
(literary) experiment in which the structures of the traditional, linear novel are relentlessly
questioned, but also an inquiry into the possibility of tracing a clear-cut distinction
between fiction and reality and, subsequently, between art and life.

Besides dealing with mimetic forms of various kinds in earlier fictions, notably in The
Origin of the Brunists (1966) and The Universal Baseball Association (1968), Robert
Coover has also explored the implications of mimetic representation in the specific context
of literary texts. The short stories collected in Pricksongs and Descants (1969), most of
them written and published in American journals and magazines before the appearance of
his first novel, explicitly examine fundamental aesthetic categories by throwing them into
question. Pricksongs and Descants is in fact a collection of experimental short stories
whose concern is the very limits of literary representation. The role of the author, the
narrative line, the boundary between reality and fantasy, and other concepts and paradigms
are examined in a set of short fictions that deals with the question of meaning- and fiction-
making in the universe of literary production. In his third published book, then, Coover
plunges into the field of storytelling and thereby narrows the exploratory breadth of his
earlier works. And although in fact some of the issues he delves into could be meta-
phorically expanded in order to embrace other non-fictional representational processes,
here I prefer to limit my analysis to the strictly literary concerns of the anthology.
124 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses

The scope of Coover's collection is, however, larger than the examination of the
categories of the literary text. The stories collected in Pricksongs and Descants seem to
thematize not only an interest in issues of literary practice. In a frequently-quoted passage
taken from the "Prólogo y dedicatoria a don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra," the
introduction to the "Seven Exemplary Fictions," Coover clearly explains what his
collection is meant to reflect. The general aim of this anthology, as put forward in this
summary of his concerns, is not only to delve into the narrowly textual level of literary
narrative. As in other works, Coover is especially interested in disclosing the parallel
relationship between the literary practice and the broadly sociocultural scene of a given
era—that is, how certain forms of writing fiction embody the cultural changes of a period.
In Pricksongs and Descants, this relation is examined through the médium of fiction
itself—largely in terms of the crisis of the traditional notions of mimetic representation and
realism. The sense of exhaustion so characteristic of post-World War II society is clearly
reproduced, in Coover's view, in literature—especially as reflected in such features as
fragmentation and self-consciousness or the attacks on realism and linearity. To begin
with, in the following passage from the "Dedicatoria," Coover implicitly sees Barth's
notion of the "literature of exhaustion" as a reflection of the crisis of contemporary culture
and a sign of a radical change in our conceptions of reality and nature:

[T]he optimism, the innocence, the aura of possibility you [Miguel de Cervantes]
experienced have been largely draincd away, and the universe is closing in on us again.
Like you, we, too, seem to be standing at the end of one age and on the threshold of
another. We, too, have been brought into a blind alley by the critics and analysts; we,
too, suffer from a "literature of exhaustion," though ironically our nonheros are no longer
tireléss and tiresome Amadises, but hopelessly defeated and bed-ridden Quixotes. (78)

While the characterization of contemporary fiction as an appropriate indicator of the

crisis of post-industrial societies has become a widely agreed-upon conception, the
question whether this crisis has led us—or seems to be leading us—to a new conception of
man, society and the sciences at large is more than disputable. The partial success of the
postmodern novel as a "sign of the times," is understood by many critics exclusively in
terms of formal innovation, in the sense that the novel is taken to represent (in itself, in its
own theme and structures) not only the impasse of mimesis and extraliterary reference in
literature but also, broadly speaking, the collapse of the whole philosophical and
humanistic tradition. However radical, the possibility any such change in our received
cultural paradigms turns out to be a purely formal reconfiguration of what we already
know.
These are, basically, the similarities in the motives for fiction in Cervantes's and
Coover's eras—despite the obvious differenees between other aspeets of their fiction-
making techniques. The radical transformation of worldviews is the tacit theme of this
anthology of short fictions—the most explicit concern being, of course, the exploration of
the form of the genre itself. Cervantes's work in many senses reflects the transition from
the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and, in the literary field, from romance to the novel,
whereas for many critics Coover's represents the replacement of the modernist dream of
Fictional Self-Consciousness in Coover's Pricksongs and Descants 125

universal history by the postmodern "imperative" of eventuality and anti-essentialism. The

object oí Pricksongs and Descants is, in the light of the implicit argument of this passage,
an examination of how changes in cultural patterns are reflected in the cultivation of
certain contemporary fictional forms. "We seem to have moved," Coover continúes,

from an open-ended, anthropocentric, humanistic, naturalistic, even—to the extent that

man may be thought of as making his own universe—optimistic starting point, to one that
is closed, cosmic, eternal, supernatural (in its soberest sense), and pessimistic. The return
to Being has returned us to Design, to microcosmic images of the macrocosm, to the
creation of Beauty within the confines of cosmic and human necessity, to the use of the
fabulous to probé beyond the phenomenological, beyond appearances, beyond randomly
perceived events, beyond mere history. (78)

The change in the ways of knowledge that Cervantes and Coover seem to share is
made clear in this passage. Contemporary fiction rejects traditional humanism and
subscribes to the exploration of how we confront the randomness of phenomenological
reality. In so doing, the novel refuses to accept its conventional fundamentáis beforehand
by choosing, in turn, to examine how these fundamentáis work. What Coover here
identifies as "the return to Being"—an expression with Heideggerian resonances, also used
by Robbe-Grillet in For a New Novel—is the postmodern fictionist's tendency to explore,
and cali into question, the essence and organization of things provided by culture and
society through what is frequently referred to as "humanistic knowledge."
There is also in this passage a suggestion of the mimetic character of contemporary
literature. By focusing on the "microcosmic image of the macrocosm," the novel gives up
the representation of universal truths and examines the particularity and contingency of our
views of reality. Postmodern fiction thematizes the inadequacies between the all-
comprehending import of universal truth-claims, on the one hand, and the uniqueness of
specific cultural situations, on the other—which is, in my view, what Coover seems to
convey in this passage. The result is a variety of fiction that inevitably casts doubt on
almost every kind of truth-claims, whether aesthetic, historical or philosophical. In the
context of fictional representation, and this is probably more prominent in Pricksongs and
Descants than in other works by Coover, this contrast is embodied by the sort of critical
interchange between the creative and representative facets of mimesis, whereby the
essentials of mimetic representation—straight referentiality, authorial detachment,
characters unaware of their fictional status—are ceaselessly unsettled.
The stories collected in Pricksongs and Descants definitely ratify the return to Design
(in the sense of formal exploration) brought about by postmodern narrative fiction—as
reflected, for instance, in the works of Federman, Barth, Sukenick or Nabokov. Coover's
short fictions engage the various possibilities of anti-realism and non-linear narration, as
well as the interplay between reality and imagination. The subject of the collection is, in
this sense, the relation, conceived of in terms of dissimilarity, between the devices
displayed by the stories themselves and other traditional, already-established fictional
codes (Durand 134). These devices—such as texts with no punctuation, narratives canceled
by the author's commentaries, and so on—are so removed from the conventionally accepted
126 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses

forms of the genre, from 19th-century realism to the modernist novel, that they not only
cali into question the text's referential quality or play with different possible structures, but
also dismantle the reading experience itself. By offering not only alternative perspectives
but also mutually contradictory accounts of the same events, Coover undermines any
expectation of closure. In this sense, Pricksongs and Descants, probably better than any
other of Coover's novéis, constitutes a brilliant example of the crisis that realism has
undergone with the advent of postmodern fiction (see Kuehl and Nash).
In exploring the possibilities of realism and literary creation, some of these short
fictions also become, as many critics put it, "self-conscious of their status." One of the
purposes of Coover's Pricksongs and Descants is the dismantling of the basic conventions
of linear narrative and fictional coherence. Each fiction thematizes, and criticizes, one or
several organizing principies of the realist novel—from authorial non-intervention to
profound psychological characterization (see Schmitz). The beginning of "The Magic
Poker," one of the most celebrated of the stories included in the collection, illustrates this
tendency:

I wander the island, inventing it. I make a sun for it, and trees—pines and birch and
dogwood andfirs—andcause the water to lap the pebbles of its abandoned shores. This,
and more: I deposit shadows and dampness, spin webs, and scatter ruins. Yes: ruins. A
mansión and guest cabins and boat houses and docks. Terraces, too, and bath houses and
even an observation tower. All gutted and window-busted and autographed and shat
upon. I impose a hot midday silence, a profound and heavy stillness. But anything can
happen. (20)

Few passages in the entire field of contemporary fiction exemplify so brilliantly the
self-conscious thrust of the novel in recent decades. The self-referential direction (or
inward turn) of the story is here relentlessly disclosed. In other words, creative mimesis
(mimesis3) lays bare the very working of representative mimesis (mimesis2) by making
both activities appear the same: as we give ñames to things in order to apprehend the
world, so Coover brings objects into (fictional) existence by naming them. But the passage
not only effectively flaunts the fictional character of the narrative but also, as we will see,
presents the narrator-creator not as the master of his creation but as just another formal
component, as Hable to variations and hesitations as are the plot or the characters.1 With
these introductory remarks, Coover makes it clear from the beginning of "The Magic
Poker" that the creator's self-conscious grasp of his very creation falters at various points.
The influence of this strategy on the text's configuration and narrative coherence is
obvious. The reader's expectations of closure, consistency or progress in the plot are
invariably disrupted—strictly, there seems to be no plot at all. Sometimes, for instance, the
author is dissatisfied with the development of the story. Then, he stops and changes the
course of the narrative:

Wait a minute, this is getting out of hand! What happened to that poker, I was doing
much better with the poker, I had something going there, archetypal and even maybe
Fictional Self-Consciousness in Coover's Pricksongs and Descants 127

beautiful, a blend of eros and wisdom, sex and sensibility, music and myth . . . Back to
the poker. (#29)

At times, he also distrusts his own command over the characters. Unlike the players
of Henry's Universal Baseball Association, who basically remain under their author's
control throughout the novel, the characters of this story seem to enjoy a life of their own.
They seem to appear and disappear at will. Sometimes the narrator loses sight, as it were,
of some of his characters. Reversing the relation of authority between the creator and
his/her creation, he even wonders who actually invented whom:

But where is the caretaker's son? I don't know . . . Didn't I invent him myself, along
with the girls and the man in the turtleneck shirt? Didn't I round his back and stunt his
legs and cause the hair to hang between his buttocks? I don't know. The girls, yes, and
the tall man in the shirt—to be sure, he's one of the first of my inventions. But the
caretaker's son? To tell the truth, I sometimes wonder if it was not him who invented me.
(#22)

In many ways, "The Magic Poker" casts doubt on almost any possible notion of
fictional representation—to such an extent that its all-pervasive authorial self-awareness and
ceaseless flaunting of its composition contribute to articúlate Coover's most overtly self-
referential fiction. Certainly, it stands out among his works as the one which most
drastically carries self-consciousness to the extreme. But "The Magic Poker" not only
exposes its own compositional artífices. Among the various self-conscious devices it
displays, it thematizes the figure of the narrator as another textual artífice (in #1, #3, #7,
#11, #22, and many more), it plays with analepsis and prolepsis only to revoke the
narrative it has previously articulated (#8), and finally transforms the story into a legend
focusing on múltiple elements and characters (the poker in #48, the caretaker in #49, the
two girls in #50, and Karen's gold pants in #52). These devices crucially contribute to the
radical indeterminacy of the story, in which the pervasive self-reference makes it
impossible for the reader to find any stable structure of meaning or narrative coherence
(Stengel 103).
By enhancing and exposing its own artificiality, the fictions collected in Pricksongs
and Descants—notably "The Magic Poker," the "Seven Exemplary Fictions" and "The
Babysitter"—constitute a challenge even to the most comprehensive theories of mimesis.2
As the standards of representation are exclusively limited to self-representation, so the
text's relation to the extraliterary world diminishes. The mimetic aspect of "The Magic
Poker" is to be taken in terms of the "artistic impulse" of aesthetic world-making that
Coover's novéis often explore. Unlike in The Universal Baseball Association, in which we
can study narrative changes without necessarily resorting to the figure of Henry Waugh,
Coover makes it very difficult to approach "The Magic Poker" without taking the narrator -
creator into consideration. It is in fact his voice that self-consciously dismantles his own
construction, changes the narrative perspective at will, and forces the reader to choose
between more than one possible explanation of the same (random) sequence of
occurrences. In this sense, Coover's exploratory excursión into mimesis in "The Magic
128 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses

Poker" must be regarded as an inquiry into the limits of the relationship between literary
representation and the author's control over this representation. In this short story, this
relationship is undermined, as the original total mastery ultimately leads the narrator
himself to distrust of the power to intervene in his own text.
The absence of mediation by a fictional narrator between the reader and the characters
in "The Magic Poker" not only reinforces the self-referential direction of the story's
narrative line, which makes it fold up on itself at numerous points. It also contributes to
the recurring obliteration of mimesis and realism I have already pointed out.3 The story's
most self-conscious moments are in fact provided by the narrator's direct observations and
suggestions to the reader, who, in turn, cannot but surrender to Coover's playful designs.
In this short fiction, ironically, Coover plays the same god-author role that Henry Waugh
played in the Universal Basketball Association, the only difference between the two being
the textual and structural function of their respective authorial commentaries. Henry leads
us through the construction and growth of a fictional system which is already within
another fictional system (the mise-en-abyme effect is clear here) whereas Coover's self-
referential comments not only expose the story's artificiality but in fact articúlate the story
itself. As narrator, Coover introduces us, via Henry Waugh, into the Universal Basketball
Association as a second-order fictional world, while in "The Magic Poker" he directly
introduces us into a first-order one. It is in this sense that many of the stories collected in
Pricksongs andDescants—not only "The Magic Poker"—constitute an outstanding variation
in Coover's reflexive works, not so much in the scope of his explorations but rather in the
degree of reflexiveness and textuality to which he carries them.
Coover's exploration of literary representation, of which the question of the narrative
voice is an element, is nevertheless carried out in ways different from those he employed
in other works. What in previous fictions were basically thematical and formal
explorations—in The Origin of the Brunists and The Universal Basketball Association,
respectively—now emerge as structural (also grammatical) inquiry into fictional forms.
Coover's strategies in his 1969 collection momentarily give up the critical thematization
of a fictional system clearly detached, as a mimetic construction to be explored, from his
novel's own constitution as such. Until Pricksongs andDescants, as well as in his later
works, Coover keeps his thematic concerns aside from the novéis' own structures and the
representational designs employed, allegorical readings and would-be mise-en-abyme
effects being more critical contrivances than actual characteristics of his novéis.
The mimetic features of Pricksongs andDescants are rather infrequent, although some
of Coover's concerns in other fictions can be found. His overtly self-conscious references
to the problems of representation in "The Magic Poker" do not for the most part point at
the problems in the relation between words and things, an interest shared by American
metafictionists.4 Rather, it probes into the problems that arise when a mimetic
structure—fictional-literary, in this case—is articulated by its author and is taken to
represent a set of characters and events. (In The Origin ofthe Brunists and The Universal
Basketball Association we see how mimetic constructions tend to grow self-conscious and
thereby do without their creators. Here we seem to be aware of their inner self-canceling
thrust.)5
Fictional Self-Consciousness in Coover's Pricksongs and Descants 129

As in other Coover's novéis, notably The Origin ofthe Brunists, here mimesis again
appears as a struggle against chaos. The unnamed tall man who intermittently shows up
in the story in many senses voices the view of mimesis Coovet -wvll sel fotvíaxd m tt\e
Universal Basketball Association:

The tall man stands, one foot up on the stone parapet, gazing out on the blue sunlit lake,
drawing meditatively on his pipe. He has been deeply moved by the desolation of this
island. And yet, it is only the desolation of artifact, is it not, the ruin of man's civilized
arrogance, nature reclaiming her own. Even the willful mutilations: a kind of instinctive
response to the futile artífices of imposed order, after all. But such reasoning does not
appease him. Leaning against his raised knee, staring out upon the vast wilderness,
hoping indeed he has heard a boat come here, he puffs vigorously on his pipe and affirms
reason, man, order. Are we merely blind brutes loosed in a system of mindless energy,
impotent, misdirected, and insolent? "No," he says aloud, "we are not." (#25)

Again Coover's interest is the confrontation between phenomenological randomness

and human order. The desolation of the island the narrator has invented appears as the
result of the fiction-making process that generates it. It is, paradoxically, the same process
of formad on that ultimately dries up, as it were, the reality at which it (mimetically) points.
The development of a fictional structure entails, in his view, the inevitable destruction of
the immediacy of the reality that surrounds it. Basically, as in so many of his novéis, the
purpose of this destruction is the imposition of the categories of abstract thinking
—symbolized by the working of "order" and "reason"—on our understanding of reality, a
meaning-making process turning us from brutes into human beings.
A significant effect of this loss of immediacy is the narrator's anxiety that what began
as an imaginative construction may end up as a substantial, tangible truth. (This clearly
anticipates a central theme of Coover's entire career as a novelist.) Whether or not it is he
who has created the characters (#26) increasingly becomes a radical questioning of the
narrator's authority over the whole text:

At times I forget that this arrangement is my own invention. I begin to think of the island
as somehow real, its object solid and intractable, its condition of ruin not so much an
aesthetic design as an historical denouement. I find myself peering into blue teakettles,
batting at spiderwebs, and contemplating a greenish-gray growth on the side of a stone
parapet. I wonder if others might wander here without my knowing it; I wonder if I
might die and the teakettle remain. "I have brought two sisters to this invented island,"
I say. This is no extravagance. It is indeed I who burdens them with curiosity and
history, appetite and rhetoric. If they have ñames and griefs, I have provided them. (#37)

The intractability of things seems to be the outcome of their use as signifieds instead
of signifiers in literary representation. In ascribing meaning to beings and events—by
representing them, whether referentially or metaphorically—we are trying, Coover implies,
to impose a structure on referents. In so doing, the words ultimately replace the objects
themselves. It is this process, also found in the rhetoric of ideological structures, that many
contemporary metafictionists want to unveil. In this case, Coover discloses this complicity
130 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses

by having his narrator reflect on the possibility that the text not only outlives its own
author but even that some other characters he has not invented—and who, therefore, have
nothing to do with it—can also wander the island. In so doing, the opposition between
fiction and reality disintegrates, the idea of the author detached from his creation collapses
as his own sense of reality vanishes (Siegle 206).
Toward the end of "The Magic Poker," the materialization of the text seems to come
true, and Coover's construction is becoming alive. Like the characters in the Universal
Basketball Association, the created figures can eventually free themselves from their
author's command. But this freedom does not last long. After having disappeared
momentarily to let the narrative flow by itself, he returns to remind us readers that the text
is still in his grasp. Despite the irregularity of the narrative line, which in traditional terms
might suggest a total loss of authorial control, the figure of the narrator reappears, not only
to demónstrate his power and control over the text, but also to claim that everything we
take to be real is a figment of the imagination:

I am disappearing. You have no doubt noticed. Yes, and by some no doubt calculable
formula of event and pagination. But before we drift apart to a distance beyond the reach
of confessions (though I wara you: like Zeno's turtle, I am with you always), listen: it's
just as I feared, my invented island is really taking its place in world geography . . . I
look on a map: yes, there's Rainy Lake, there's Jackfish Island. Who invented this map?
Well, I must have, surely . . . Yes, and perhaps tomorrow I will invent Chicago and Jesús
Christ and the history of the moon. Just as I have invented you, dear reader, while lying
here in the afternoon sun, bedded deeply in the bluegreen grass like an iron poker. (#46)

The parallels between all these passages and some of the reflexive concerns I have
studied in the Universal Basketball Association story are striking. The process of
materialization of an aesthetic construction that the narrator explains here in many senses
anticipates the Universal Basketball Association reflexive explorations (the fictions
collected in Pricksongs andDescants were written before the publication of Coover 's first
novel). The position and narrative role of Henry Waugh and the narrator of "The Magic
Poker" are almost the same. The process of "becoming alive" that the island increasingly
undergoes in fact bears a strong resemblance to the development of Henry Waugh's
Universal Basketball Association in his 1968 novel. In probing into mimesis, both "The
Magic Poker" and the Universal Basketball Association—ana also, though to a lesser
extent, The Origin of the Brunists and The Public Burning—engage the problems of the
referential transparency and, more importantly, epistemological validity of fictional
representation that have become the widely discussed topics of literary theory and criticism
in recent decades. In so doing, they can be well regarded as typically
postmodern—although, for Coover, not anti-realist—works of fiction that share some of the
central concerns of contemporary American literature.
The relevance of myth in Coover's short stories also greatly differs from that of his
other novéis. In "The Magic Poker," the legend that the story of the magic poker becomes
(especially from #48 onwards) constitutes just one more possible explanation of the story
told, as valid and ultimately self-canceling as any other. In Pricksongs and Descants,
Fictional Self-Consciousness in Coover's Pricksongs and Descants 131

textual representad orí lacks the substantial meaning and "epistemological reliance" of
other fictional-mythical constructions, such as the Brunist meeting at the Mount of
Redemption, the Rosenbergs' execution, or the recreation of the Great Confrontation at the
Universal Basketball Association stadium. The fictionalized worlds do not finally
materialize for the reader to recognize, and reconstruct, them in mimetic-hermeneutic
terms.6 So it is that the reader is ultimately left with the experience of having read a text
that is a complex net of events and characters, often mutually exclusive, which does not
Iead him/her anywhere but to mere contemplation. (To what extend this constitutes a
valuable exercise would require extended discussion.)
Among the fictions collected in Pricksongs and Descants, "The Babysitter" is a good
instance of this unsettling tendency.7 This short story merges reality and dream in such a
way that it is impossible to discern one from the other. The story is as follows: an unnamed
babysitter comes to watch Dolly and Harry Tucker's three children while they go to a
party. The babysitter's boyfriend Jack and his friend Mark are trying to take advantage of
her, so they decide to go and pay her a visit. While Harry Tucker gets drunk at the party
and fantasizes about seducing the babysitter, Jack and Mark also imagine themselves
raping her, spanking her, or even spying on her in the bath (#48, #58, #76). Here the set
of plot-variations is similar to that of "The Magic Poker": Mr. Tucker returns home and
catches the babysitter half undressed, throws Jack out and takes advantage of her (#59);
or he catches her in the tub and joins her (61); or she is just watching TV peacefully (#71);
or Jack and Mark catch her in the tub and accidentally drown her (#97). (These are just a
few possibilities Coover provides the reader with.) In the last scenes, we see a report on
the TV that a babysitter has been killed. There are, however, two contradictory versions:
(1) that the victim has been another babysitter, so that the evening ends normally at the
Tuckers' house, on the one hand, and (2) that everything is true, the children have been
murdered, the husband disappears leaving her corpse in the bathtub, on the other. (For a
complete list, see Kennedy 63-64.) All these possible denouements take place in the same
text, but none of them prevails over the others. Equally valid as they are, none can be
thought of as the true account of the story of the babysitter. As in "The Magic Poker," the
fictional world of this story contains antithetical endings, none of which seems reliable at
all. The closure we may expect from a short story is frustrated. The changing TV reports,
which is what the reader is left with at the end of the story, do not resolve the interpretive
problems the text poses throughout.
The "innovative" devices Coover displays in "The Babysitter" are various, all of them
conveying, again, an exploration into mimetic representation. Among them, we have the
text's unique anti-structure, the sectioned-off narrative line, and the psychological
abnormality of its characters (see Weinstock). The latter feature, but not the former, is here
more prominent than in "The Magic Poker." The blocking off of the scenes precludes the
smooth narrative transition. The temporal reconstruction of the plot becomes increasingly
problematic due to the endless analepses and prolepses Coover employs—although the
common links between the different paragraphs help the reader to reconstruct the story in
its full complexity. The disparity of points of view also contributes to disrupt the reader's
expectations of causality and continuity by constantly changing the reader's perception of
132 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses

the story—although, until the multiple-choice end, this does not ultimately cancel out
his/her reconstruction of the narrative.
Even though the mimetic-hermeneutic actualizaron is not completely destroyed in any
of these short fictions, the logic of mimetic representadon is indeed radically questioned.
Coover's intention is not, however, to start the institution of literature anew, but rather to
read the background of tradition (myths, genres, codes) through postmodern experimental
forms—pop-culture, cinematic techniques, etc. (Wilczynski 514). This is another parallel
in the art of fiction between Cervantes's and Coover's eras. As he puts it in the
"Dedicatoria,"

[Y]our stories [Cervantes's] also exemplified the dual nature of all good narrative art:
they struggled against the unconscious mythic residue in human life and sought to
synthesize the unsynthesizable, sallied forth against adolescent thought-modes and
exhausted art forms, and returned home with new complexities. In fact, your creation of
a synthesis between poetic analogy and literal history (not to mention reality and illusion,
sanity and madness, the erotic and the ludicrous, the visionary and the scatological) gave
birth to the Novel—perhaps above all else your works were exemplars of a revolution in
narrative fiction, a revolution which governs us—not unlike the way you found yourself
abused by the conventions of Romance—to this very day. (P&D 77)

The first step in this adaptation of the tradition is, he thinks, to disrupt the basic
reading expectations of the novel genre— linearity, chronological consistency, etc. To this
purpose, "[t]he reader is continually made aware that the pattern set before him is arbitrary
and can be broken, that other perspectives are possible, and that the reader and Coover are
engaged in a game of choices" (McCaffery, Metafictional 61). (The notion of the literary
text as a game, a recurrent idea in contemporary fiction and theory, is an appropriate
metaphor for experimental fiction-making, as demonstrated by Coover's or Barth's short
stories.) The ímaginative and perceptive faculties of the implied author and the implied
reader often overlap to the extent of becoming almost indistinguishable—that is why both
Coover and his readers enjoy the same narrative status when we see his various imaginary
constructions enjoy a life of their own. With this strategy, Coover tends to identify himself
with the reader—whom he has, at least in "The Magic Poker," invented for the purposes of
the story—and therefore consciously blurs the boundaries between his creative experience
and the reader's reconstructive task. (This playful transformation and enlargement of the
reader's response to the fictional work is much more powerful in many of the stories
collected in Pricksongs and Descants than in Coover's later works, in which the
detachment of the reader is, despite open endings, consistently preserved.) In so doing, he
levéis out the activities of both, suggesting a notion of literary interpretation as an
interactive exercise.
Finally, "Morris in Chains," another of the short fictions collected in Pricksongs and
Descants, also thematizes Coover's interest in pattern and order, this time in the form of
a conflict between the influence of science and technology on the designs of nature. Much
more accessible than others in this anthology, this story deals with the topic of the simple
countryman—shepherd Morris, in this case—dehumanized by the powers of modern
Fictional Self-Consciousness in Coover's Pricksongs and Descants 133

machinery. In this story, Morris, unaware of his importance as a remnant of the innocence
and purity in which human beings lived before the advent of technological progress, is
chased by a group of all-seeing and omnipotent scientists led by Dr. Doris Peloris—who
controls the weather and the course of rivers, among other things, from their Expedition
Headquarters. "Morris in Chains" also thematizes the reduction of unexplained, or
misunderstood, phenomena to the patterns of formulation and knowledge of the scientific
community, and so the story can be regarded as a parody of the scientists' pattern-making
imagination, whose aim is to adapt whatever remains unknown to our understanding. The
overriding importance attached to this activity (inevitably reductive, as Coover sees it) is
revealed by the crisis within the scientific perfectly ordered world brought about the failure
of earlier attempts to apprehend Morris:

[PJerhaps due to an underestimation of the adversary's perverse vitality, those early

expeditions were all too often subverted by disorder, what we can now see as undeniable
disorder, were little more than a random series of spontaneous incursions of the sort that
most suited Morris' own patternless and irresponsible life. (48)

The failure of these expeditions is now seen, as this passage makes clear, in terms of
the precariousness of their preparation, that is, their inability to cope with the randomness
of the world's phenomena. It is obvious that their predecessors could not chase Morris
because they did not have the ability to schematize, and thus predict, every aspect of
Morris 's life. Like a 20th-century car-driver watching a 19th-century carriage, Dr. Peloris's
group can only see their predecessors' attempts in the light of their lack of technological
advancement.
However, when the story begins Dr. Peloris and her set of well-equipped colleagues
have already managed to lócate the shepherd because of his patterned life. After an easy,
patterned reasoning, they have achieved what the others could not. They have been able
to adjust Morris's unreflecting movements to their own predictions—which is,
metaphorically, a "sign of the times," a proof of the "blind alley" to which, according to
Coover's "Dedicatoria," we have been led by critics and analysts (78). Gathered to arrange
Morris's capture, Dr. Peloris acquaints the group with the process they will follow in order
to capture the shepherd:

Our strategy is divided into two parts . . . the pursuit and the trap. The second of course
depends on the first, which is essentially a fact-finding mission, but which at the same
time may serve the complementary function of harassing and exhausting the adversary,
forcing predictable pattern-reliance: the wearier, the unwearier. (50, my emphasis)

The pursuit of Morris appears as another pattern-making activity, a "fact-finding" task,

by virtue of which the scientists have to make Morris rely on certain patterned behavior.
The result of the overall process is, besides their overwhelming control of nature, the
scientists' omniscient knowledge of Morris's life, yet always within their own patterns, of
course:
134 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses

"You see, N a n . . . it is now certain that Morris will camp here in this valley, beside this
canal and that grove, within fíve days. The order of his disorder.. .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 decisión. 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." (55)

This amazing ability to foresee the movements of Morris is simply the scientists'
reduction of disorder to order. Unable to transcend their own patterned methodology, they
diminish Morris's life to a sort of entropy, the "order of disorder" that serves their research
and ideology. By mediating between the scientists' view and the reader's, Coover
rehearses the basicstructure oí The UniversalBasketballAssociation, inasmuch as he does
not intervene in the text to undermine its most basic representational processes.
Written before the publication of his most celebrated novéis, the short fictions
anthologized in Pricksongs and Descants anticípate some of their author's reflexive
interests. The difference between these short stories and Coover 's other works studied here
is, as I have pointed out, the degree of textualization enjoyed by the narrative devices
through which he examines mimetic representation. The identification between author-
narrator and reader, many undecidable endings, and the authorial commentaries which
substantially alter the course of the narrative are but a few tricks Coover uses to
defamiliarize readers in their interpretive task and carry us away from the conventions of
the mimetic-realist novel. In so doing, Coover aligns himself with a group of contemporary
authors—Beckett, Nabokov, Barth, Hawkes, Gass, Sukenick—whose central interest is the
dismantling of the assumptions of the novel genre, notably as it was formulated and
accepted throughout the 19th century. In a review oí Pricksongs and Descants, William H.
Gass identifies Coover's play with scenes in his short fiction as a card-game, and
summarizes the reflexive concerns of the collection as follows:

[T]he experimental methods which interest Coover, and which he chooses to exploit so
skillfully, are those which have to do with the orderly, objective depiction of scenes and
events, those which imply a world with a single public point of view, solid and enduring
things, long strings of unambiguous action joined by tight knots, even when the material
itself is improbable and fantastic; and the consequence of his play with these techniques
is the scrambling of everything, the dissolution of that simple legendary world we'dlike
to Uve in, in order that new valúes may be voiced; and, as Coover intends them, these
stories become "exemplary adventures of the Poetic Imagination." (Gass 108)

This passage is relevant because it brings together two different sides of a substantial
part of Coover's fiction. Although it does not distinguish the narrative from the critical
explorations of his work, it summarizes some of the featuress I have discussed so far.
In the first place, Gass points at the antirealist devices displayed throughout Pricksongs
and Descants—"those which have to do with the ordered, objective depiction of scenes and
events"—which also appears in other works, and can be seen as a prominent feature of
reflexivity in Coover's narrative. From the unrealistic experiences of Henry Waugh and
Richard Nixon to the unreliable narrators and characters of his 1969 collection, the reading
Fictional Self-Consciousness in Coover's Pricksongs and Descants 135

conventions of the novel genre in the 19th century and the psychological profundity of
modernist fiction are explored, and sometimes mocked. His fiction approaches what can
be called a "fictionalized versión of literary criticism." To put it another way, using
Scholes's formulation, Coover's self-conscious fiction "assimilates all the perspectives of
criticism in the fictional process itself' (Scholes 106). This focus on the purely narrative
strategies corresponds to the view of a novelist who, like Gass, has been writing
metafiction since the early 1960s. According to him, the central interest of Coover's
Pricksongs and Descants lies in the anticonventional approach to narrative it proposes.
However, and this is rather unusual in Coover critics and reviewers, this is not the only
reason why this collection appears interesting. For Gass, and I agree with him, there is
something else beyond the fireworks of textual artífice and myth-play.
Although much more disputable, however, the second important point in this passage
is Gass's notion oí Pricksongs and Descants as an attempt to "scramble everything" in the
world, whether literary or real-life. Typical of postmodern formalism, this conception
features the textual-deconstructive side of Coover's work, neglects the relation between
his fictions and the surrounding cultural situation, and thus does little justice either to its
narrative exploration or to its overt critical aims. Though his view is also that of a
metafictionist, more concerned with literary artífice than with mimetic and referential
matters, Gass nevertheless recognizes the existence of new valúes in Coover's criticism
of mimesis, causality and narrative—something that, in my view, many Coover critics miss
in their assessments of his works. Although he does not delve into what the nature or
function of these valúes can be, at least he seems to perceive them. Given the brevity of
Gass's overview—the passage is cited from a review of the collection—I will finish with
what the grounds for distinguishing these valúes can be.
In a career like Coover's, whose narrative works may be characterized not only by
their critique of mimetic representation but by other equally broad concerns, the use of
openly self-conscious strategies is often regarded as the dominant feature of his oeuvre.
Many critics, in fact, have reduced the more or less covert representational interests to the
formal disposition of the thematized materials. In so doing, they inevitably tend to
disregard what is, in my opinión, the core of Coover's narrative work as a whole. The use
of self-referential devices helps to enhance reflexivity—which must be already present in
the text—and often also contributes to make the critical interests more visible or
understandable, as it were. But these are formal and compositional choices the author
makes, all of which largely constitute what is frequently referred to as "style." The new
valúes at which Gass points in his review oí Pricksongs and Descants are, especially for
the non-formalist critic, significantly sepárate from literary experiments of the kind
cultivated by so many postmodern novelists throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In the
context of Coover's fiction, this separation between formal playfulness and reflexive
concerns is more easily discernible than in the narrowly textual compositions of other
contemporary authors—Markson, Acker, Federman, Sukenick—for whom the latter facet
does not seem to exist at all. This suggests that we can conceive of Coover's narrative as
an example of postmodern fictional experiment, but not without taking into account that
(1) his works almost invariably invite a reflection on the powers and limits of
representation, whether or not strictly literary, and (2) that his overtly self-referential
136 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses

fictions are in fact the most radical stage of reflexiveness. In other words, there is, as I see
it, no way to approach Coover's metafictional and self-conscious fictions without
considering how these are one step further in the more general phenomenon of fictional
reflexivity. These two features make up the "new" valué of Coover's narrative.
(Obviously, this is not an entirely new merit, although it is sometimes difficult to find in
contemporary fiction.) The refusal to acknowledge how both metafiction and self-
consciousness constitute a thematic concentration—and, eventually, a formal and structural
radicalization—of mimesis will inevitably neglect the representational qualities that, despite
efforts to demónstrate otherwise, the postmodern novel deploys.

Notes

1. "The Magic Poker" is a collage of fifty-five unnumbered, juxtaposed fragments. In order

to simplify my analysis, passages will be identified and numbered in the order Coover arranges
them, and quoted preceded by #.
2. The challenge this text poses is to be understood, in my view, in terms of its anti-realist
devices and its flaunting of mimetic representation. Its examination of fiction-making and, in
general, writing is, as in other novéis by Coover, fundamentally formal and structural—neither
ontological ñor epistemological. For an analysis opposite to mine, see Siegle, for whom Coover's
story uncovers "the pretense of mimetic fiction to bridge this gap [between language and reality],
to make the fictional world essentially equivalent to that of reality-at-large" (203). In taking for
granted that mimesis attempts to level out the cognitive forcé of words and things, this textualist
approach fails to acknowledge the exploratory import of contemporary fiction in terms of the
interchange between the representative and the broadly creative sides of mimesis.
3. I assume that it is Coover himself who is, through the first person used by fictional
narrator's voice, directly addressing the reader in his abundant self-conscious remarks. I
intentionally do so because no hint of any mediating figure between Coover and us is given
throughout this story. There is absolutely no trace of a surrogate fictional narrator clearly distinct
from the author—such as, for instance, Sterne's Tristam Shandy. For an argument parallel to my
own, see Andersen 97ff; for the opposite view, see Kennedy 18-19. On the other hand, the idea
of a narrative line in "The Magic Poker," as well as in so much contemporary fiction, certainly
poses certain problems; however, by this term I intend to desígnate the progress or development
of the narrated events.
4. Coover withdraws himself from metafictional writers in the following terms: "I know
there's a way of looking at fiction as being made up of words and that therefore what you do with
words becomes the central concern, but I'm much more interested in the way that fiction, for all
its weaknesses, reflects something else—gesture, connections, paradox, story" (McCaffery, "Robert
Coover" 52).
5. With this parenthetical commentary, I do not intend to trace a sort of "evolution" within
Coover's work, an idea he has insistently denied. Rather, I try to delimítate two sides of mimetic
representation that Coover explores in his fiction, both of which always appear intermingled.
6. For the concept of mimetic-hermeneutic actualization, I rely on Paul Ricoeur's formulation
of mimesis3, in the first volume of his Time and Narrative. Here actualization is "the final
indicator of the refiguring of the world of action under the sign of the plot" (77). For Ricoeur, even
Fictional Self-Consciousness in Coover's Pricksongs and Descants 137

so-called antinovels "satisfy both the tradition they leave behind and the disorganized experiences
they finally end up imitating by dint of not imitating the received paradigms" (73).
7. For my brief discussion of "The Babysitter," I will also use the sign # to refer to the 107
unnumbered passages in the order in which Coover presents them.

Works Cited

Andersen, Richard. Robert Coover. Boston: Hall, 1981.

Coover, Robert. Pricksongs and Descants. New York: Dutton, 1969.
Durand, Régis. "The Exemplary Fictions of Robert Coover." Les Américanistes: New French
Criticism on Modera American Fiction. Ed. Ira Johnson and Christiane Johnson. Port
Washington: Kennikat Press, 1978.130-37.
Gass, William H. Fiction and the Figures ofLife. New York: Knopf, 1970.
Kennedy, Thomas E. Robert Coover: A Study ofthe Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Kuehl, John. Altérnate Worlds: A Study ofPostmodernAntirealistic American Fiction. New York:
New York UP, 1989.
McCaffery, Larry. The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, DonaldBarthelme, and
William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1982.
. "Robert Coover on His Own and Other Fictions: An Interview." Novel vs. Fiction: The
Contemporary Reformation. Ed. Jackson I. Cope and Geoffrey Green. Norman: Pilgrim
Books, 1981. 45-63.
Nash, Christopher. World-Games: The Tradition of Antirealist Revolt. London: Methuen, 1987.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time andNarrative. Vol. 1. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1984.
Schmitz, Neil. "Robert Coover and the Hazards of Metafiction." Novel 1 (1974): 210-19.
Scholes, Robert. "Metafiction." IowaReview 1.4 (1970): 100-15.
Siegle, Robert. "Coover's 'The Magic Poker' and the Techniques of Fiction." Essays in Literature
8 (1981): 203-17.
Stengel, Wayne B. "Robert Coover's 'Writing Degree Zero': 'The Magic Poker.'" Arizona
Quarterly 45.2 (1989): 101-10.
Weinstock, E. W. "Robert Coover—'The Babysitter': An Observation on Experimental Writing."
Style 9 (1975): 378-87.
Wilczynski, Marek. "The Game of Response in Robert Coover's Fictions." Kwartalnik
Neofilologizny 33 (1986): 513-23.