Robert Coover and the Hazards of Metafiction
TL;DR: The situation of the narrator in Robert Coover's first volume of short fiction, Pricksongs & Descants, is as comically dire as that of L. Frank Baum's defrocked wizard in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The situation of the narrator in Robert Coover's first volume of short fiction, Pricksongs & Descants, is as comically dire as that of L. Frank Baum's defrocked wizard in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Near the end of Baum's book the wizard is caught backstage in the act of operating the devices that make him so falsely awesome, a rude unveiling that forces him to explain to a chagrined Dorothy that he is not the expected deus ex machina. He is instead a mere ventriloquist from prosaic Omaha whose self-created legends and myths are little more than defensive strategies, barriers of artifice set forth to confound the real terrors of his existence. Coover similarly strips away the surface of character and event in his stories to reveal the generative discourse of harried narrators, the writer as wizard pumping away on his pedals, pulling switches, turning words into symbols; but in Coover's fiction there is no genial restoration of the wizard/writer's raison d'etre, no subsequent conferral of the real thing, veritable hearts and brains. The narrator is relentlessly manifest. His voice, throwing other voices, even the wind in the trees, is all that remains, and what he stresses in his narrative is primarily its contrivance. "I wander the island, inventing it," the narrator of "The Magic Poker" begins. "I make a sun for it, and trees-pines and birch and dogwood and firs-and cause the water to lap the pebbles of its abandoned shores" (p. 20).1 There is no exit from the world he predicates. The island becomes a metaphor that envelops him: he is that surrounded self, this nature in which Caliban (the Caretaker's Son) lurks and a pipe-smoking Prince Prospero meditates. For Coover the presence of this demystified narrator (I invent, I make, I cause) is invariably comic; he is Prospero in a blazer and ascot, a fumbling magician, the tyrannical moderator of a TV panel show. He is also Coover's fate and that recognition often makes the comedy desperate. In Pricksongs & Descants, his most representative work to date, he writes variously in both moods and reveals at every turn the paradoxical nature of this particular approach to fiction. In such metafictive art, Fredric Jameson notes, "it is wrong to want to decide, to want to resolve a difficulty." What is exhibited is not objective content but a "mental procedure which suddenly shifts gears, which throws everything in an inextricable tangle one floor higher, and turns the very problem itself (the obscurity of this sentence) into its own solution (the
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Cites background from "Robert Coover and the Hazards of Me..."
...In this respect, Gass’s sentence seems to be most appropriate: ‘metafiction is the discipline of the elect’ (Cited in Schmitz, 1974, p. 212), and White (1975) speaks of an audience that is ‘programmed to receive innovative messages’; an audience ‘which is itself self-conscious about its linguistic practices’ (p....
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...In this respect, Gass’s sentence seems to be most appropriate: ‘metafiction is the discipline of the elect’ (Cited in Schmitz, 1974, p. 212), and White (1975) speaks of an audience that is ‘programmed to receive innovative messages’; an audience ‘which is itself self-conscious about its linguistic…...
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