Robert Coover's Dirty Stories: Allegories of Reading in

23 Pages·2015·2.08 MB·English

by  Louis Mackey

The Iowa Review
Volume 17
Article 36
Issue 2Spring-Summer
1987
Robert Coover's Dirty Stories: Allegories of
Reading in "Seven Exemplary Fictions"
Louis Mackey
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Recommended Citation
Mackey, Louis. "Robert Coover's Dirty Stories: Allegories of Reading in "Seven Exemplary Fictions"."The Iowa Review17.2 (1987):
100-121. Web.
Available at:https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.3523
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Robert Coover's Stories: of
Dirty Allegories
in "Seven Fictions"
Reading Exemplary
Louis
Mackey
Nothing is gained by continuing to idealize
reading, as though reading were not an art of de
fensive warfare.
?Harold Bloom
Allegorical narrativest ell the story of thfea ilure
to read. . . .
?Paul deM an
I have called them dirty stories. And so they are, not by reason of filthy
matter, but essentially. Whatever their theme, the stories dirty them
selves. Think of them as narratives.
self-polluting
The author's intentions may or may not be honorable: in the "Dedicatoria
y Pr?logo"1 to "Seven Exemplary Fictions," Coover associates his art with
Cervantes' and casts himself as Don Quixote. Tilting his pen at the wind
mills of he redeems a tradition its forms. But in
myth, by deconstructing
the "Prologue of Sorts" that is our "Door" (13) into the book as aw hole,
we are shown a different picture: the writer as Big Bad Wolf lusting un
for the beauties of tale.
naturally pubescent fairy
Consider the title. and Descants has a
Pricksongs perfectly respectable
meaning. A pricksong is a song performed from "pricked"?i.e., writ
ten?notes. A descant is a a
secondary melody counterpointing primary
melody or "burden." Coover's fictions draw their matter from folklore,
the Bible, popular culture, and quotidian clich?. His "magic poker" (20)
commits these raw materials to writing and converts them into art. Trans
formed in the become descants: counternotations to
transcription, they
stories whose burden is old and well-known. and Descants re
Pricksongs
duces a tradition to an institution and it with a bit of dissonant
provides
counterpoint, so that itm ay be rendered by note men. You, "lector amantx
simo" and?of course?I.
(79),
All this a church musician might understand and approve. But Granny
takes a darker view. of the wolf-author and her but innocent
Thinking silly
granddaughter, the "old Beauty" says:
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I know who's got her giddy ear with his old death-cunt-and-prick
songs haven't I heard them allm y god and smelt his hot breath in the
singin? yes I know him can see him now lickin his hairy black chops
and composin his polyphonies outa dread and appetite whisperin his
eclogues sprung from disaster croonin his sacral entertainments yes I
know him well. . . .
(16)
Where my reading identifies a high-minded narrative purpose, Granny
finds a dirty pun. "Death-cunt-and-prick songs" indeed. To her mind,
made wise by experience of the "Beast," the writer is not redeeming a tra
dition. He's corrupting the young. Composing polyphonies out of dread
and appetite (he's still am usician), whispering eclogues sprung from disas
ter (and a kind of poet), crooning sacral entertainments (is that "sacred" or
"sacroiliac"?), the writer turns foolish virgins (you, lector amantisimo, and
into withered old full of bittersweet memories.2
I?) hags
Introducing his own "exemplary" narratives, Robert Coover appeals to
don de Cervantes Saavedra:
Miguel
The novelist uses familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the
content of those forms and to conduct the reader
(lector amanttsimo!)
to the real, away from mystification to clarification, away from magic
to maturity, away from mystery to revelation. And it is above all to
the need for new modes of perception and fictional forms able to en
compass them that I, barber's basin on my head, address these stories.
(79)
In the same paragraph, and in Cervantes' words, the author hints at a "hid
den mystery" contained in these stories, by which they are lifted above
their vulgar occasions. He could hardly assure us, as Cervantes does,
that the amorous episodes you will find in some of them are so re
spectable and restrained, so within the bounds of reason and con
formable to Christian conduct, that no one who reads them, either
carefully or carelessly, can possibly be moved to evil thoughts.3
Neither writers nor readers are capable?shall I say "any longer" ?? of such
a pure regard. Without irony?and despite the fact that he has twice as
many hands as his "Maestro"?he might "venture to say":
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if I believed that the reading of these [fictions] would in any way
arouse an evil thought or desire, Iw ould sooner cut off the hand that
wrote them than see them
published.4
And he does, appropriating the Master's prologue, promise that "there is
not one of that does not afford a useful
[these stories] example."5
Pricksongs and Descants, morally and musically expounded, agrees with
the figure of the writer as Don Quixote, decreating the narrative past and
the future of fiction. But ex
announcing "death-cunt-and-prick songs"
poses him as a dirty young man who feeds on the tradition he has ruined.
The within the book the reaffirms behalf of the
prologue (by author) (on
author) a claim that has already been discredited (by one of his characters)
in the to the book. a title and
prologue Brandishing two-edged prefaces
that clash, this book proclaims itself unreadable from the beginning.
The readable text with Cervantes. Cervantes' novelas are ex
began
because "tell stories and tell them well" Cer
emplary they good they (77).
vantes opens aw ay for the writer into the modern age. Deconstructing and
displacing romance, his stories demonstrate, by exemplifying it, the
possibility of the novel. Of what do Coover's seven fictions, whose very
title echoes the Master's, serve as useful examples? What story does he tell?
As the accompanying table indicates, each of the "Seven Exemplary Fic
tions" a of the text and a of the reader.
incorporates metaphor metaphor
The stories themselves enact of and must therefore be
metaphors reading
taken, in the second degree, as allegories that narrate the impossibility of
In each of them save one the reader is defeated his
reading. (possibly) by
text. In the post-modern age, when naturalism seems to have exhausted its
powers, just as romance had become effete in Cervantes' day, Coover's ex
ercises, relentlessly troping their own unreadability as conventional fic
tions, deconstruct low-mimetic narration and displace it in the direction of
the illegible text. So doing, they open the way for "new modes of percep
tion and fictional forms able to encompass them" (79).6
The way is strewn with difficulties and mined with occasions of disaster.
The failure to read, which these stories both narrate and exemplify, is
bound to contaminate?in the third own
degree?my (or anyone's)
reading. If in reading them anyway I seem to court catastrophe, the en
suing debacle will demonstrate better than any success the (inevitably ques
tionable) legitimacy of my approach. Of the seven I select four, supposing
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them so exemplary of the rest that repeated deployment of the same strate
gies of reading would yield the same results.
Story Text Reader
1. Panel Game The game: enigmatic and You (Bad Sport, Unwilling
perverse Participant): hanged.
2. The Marker Jason's wife: dead, maybe Jason: emasculated,
murdered.
3. The Brother The Ark: silent and The narrator: marked for
mysterious. death.
4. In aT rain Station The story itself: a script Alfred: condemned to
enacted by the characters: endless repetition of
a repetition compulsion. the text
5. Klee Dead The scrap of paper: the The person addressed by
story itself: illegible, the story: you:
maybe blank, maybe a cheated and fobbed off
forgery, maybe a handbill. with circus tickets.
6. J's Marriage J's wife: an impenetrable J: unmanned and dead.
Virgin.
7. The Wayfarer The wayfarer and his The police officer: kills
speech: silent or the text in order to
incoherent. produce his own report.
"Panel Game" is just what it says it is: a TV game show. The cast includes,
besides Moderator and Audience, the panel: Aged Clown, Lovely Lady,
Mr. America Mr. and alias Bad
(later Amentia), Unwilling Participant,
Sport, aka . . . You. You, the reader, are written into the story and re
quired to answer "THE BIG QUESTION!" (80). The question is never
asked. You have to figure out what it is. Question and answer alike wait
upon the reader, who, enlisted as an Unwilling Participant in the fiction, is
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expected to guess the name and nature of the fiction. Bad Sport, charged to
identify and interpret the narrative in which his life is trapped, resigns
himself "to pass the test in peace" (80). Before Moderator formally declares
the show begun, Sport scrambles desperately to interpret the hints broadly
(and often lewdly) provided by the other panelists. His hermeneutic,
which proceeds through a chain of metonymies, puns, rhymes, allitera
tions, and sexual allusions, is vaguely literary and (though frequently
distracted) pointed in the general direction of Shakespeare (80, 81, 82,
83-4, 84-5). As he frantically tries to follow the clues and find the mean
ing, he is constantly, tauntingly observed by the Eye of theW orld: some
times the television camera and sometimes navel.
Lovely Lady's
"And the Bad Sport, you ask,w ho is he? fool! thou art!" (80).W hen,
well into the proceedings, You speak for the first time?to protest that
You don't know how to play the game?You are answered with hostile
silence or cruel mockery. Eventually You stumble on the answer, but You
don't understand it.
The dog rose and?what? Rose and scrupled? Rose: rows: stichs:
stickleback. Going in circles. "Depends?!" gasps America. Can't
last long now. Own cells against him. Flesh dogbane pink. "De
pends?!"
Depends: hangs. But what hangs or hangs on what? (84)
You do know that "it's your mind they're after. Humor, passion, sobriety,
and truth. On you, then, it depends, they depend, they all depend. They all
hang. It may be so" (84). With everyone and everything "depending" on
?
You?"what does it mean? what does it mean?"(84) You try to start a
game of Twenty Questions: '"I think? . . . ?That, if the subject is
animal?'" (85). But Mr. America announces that it's Too Late, breaks
wind, and dies. Dead (85).
That should have told You:
"Come, come, sir!" cries the Moderator, much amused, but rising
now and pressing forward. "You must have contrived some concrete
conjunctions from the incontrovertible commentary qua commen
tary just so conspicuously constituted!" Deafening applause.
Dig in! Tie it up! The truth is: "The truth is?"
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"The truth is," shouts the Moderator, jabbing at him with an
angry finger, "you have lost!"
"But I haven't even-!"
"Why are you here," the Moderator explodes, losing all patience, "if
not to endeavor to this
disentangle entanglement?" (85)
You have failed to tell the truth, and You must therefore "PAY THE
CONSEQUENCES!" "But the truth is-," You object. "The truth is,"
says the Clown (86), and goes into a dirty song-and-dance with Lovely
at the end of which the fakes death. once
Lady, Lady obscenely Echoing
more the old refrain, Moderator gives it all away. "The truth is" that
"... the frame is the same
In fame or in shame
?
And the name of the game
-is LaM ort!"
(87)
A Noose descends.
The name of the the of the life embedded in the
game?and meaning
game ?is: Death. But You, still hung on Shakespearian titles, got it all
wrong.
? "
"I thought But the Audience drowns you out. Well, they are
think about that. The noose is fitted.
happy,
"You asks the Moderator and the crowd subsides.
thought??"
"I it was all for fun."
thought
"That is to smiles the Moderator "much ado about
say," wearily,
nothing."
"That's it! that's it! Yes! that's what Iw as to-!"
trying
The Moderator shakes his head. . . .
"Sorry." (87)
Aged Clown makes a joke, Audience laughs, Lovely Lady whispers sweet
nothings in your ear and gooses you good-bye. "Off you go!" As you
dangle, you get?in a way ?the answer to the BIG QUESTION: "The
rose and there But the answer to the is the end of
dog depended." question
the game. "So long, Sport" (88).
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Your ordinary television game show (the "real" thing) is generically
senseless and more often than not?with its accoutrements of
phony
camaraderie, gross humor, and snickering sexuality?downright emetic.
But even that makes more sense than this "Panel Game." There at least you
have determinate with answers. Whereas here
questions straightforward
. . w. here? Coover's game show is am etaphorical text. A text both under
determined and overdetermined, as obviously meaningful as it is hopelessly
without meaning. Unwilling Participant?Bad Sport and eventually bad
the reader to whom is the task of inter
loser?figures assigned impossible
the But of course is also You: at once the
preting uninterpretable. Sport
reader in the text and the reader the text. Like an oldtime Calvinist
of
scrounging in his diaries among the random leavings of his life, looking for
signs of election, You (in the text) anxiously try to guess the question and
the answer while you, with text in hand, try to dope out its meaning. The
hermeneutic of life. For the panel game, a metaphor of the text, is tran
sumptively a metaphor of life. Unwilling Participant is "dragged pro
testing" (79) into the game just as you (with text in hand) are inscribed,
without a by-your-leave, in your own life. In both cases (oldtime Calvin
ism again) the outcome is assured in advance. The game is an allegory of
is an of life. The is: what does itm ean? And the
reading allegory question
answer is: Yours.
nothing.
2
"The Marker." Jason and his wife discovered alone in their bedroom. (But
there are five outside the Of the wife we are told that she
policemen door.)
is nude, that she is lovely and affectionate, and that she "has a direct and
manner of ifw e were to hear her We don't.
charming speaking, speak."
Always at ease, neither pretentious nor shy, she moves about the room,
and "whatever meaning there might be in her motion exists within the
motion itself and not in her deliberations" (88). An autotelic text, not to be
interpreted but loved. Jason, deeply in love with his wife, sits in an arm
chair reading a book and watching her. As soon as she gets into bed, he
puts a marker in his book, undresses, and turns out the light.
His wife's image fades from his mind and is replaced by an image of
Beauty "indistinct and untextured" (89). Ever the reader, and now com
pletely in the dark, Jason undertakes a project of interpretation. Groping
more or less methodically about the room, he tries in vain to find the bed
106
where Beauty and Love await him. The failure of the quest extinguishes his
libido. But his wife laughs gently and, turning, he finds the bed where he
wasn't for it. . behind him. At the sound of her and
looking .right laugh
the touch of her cool thighs Jason recovers his appetite.
In fact, the experience, the anxiety of it and its riddles, seems to have
created a new urgency, an almost brutal wish to swallow, for am o
ment, reason and its inadequacies, and to let passion, noble or not,
have its hungry way. He is surprised to find her dry, but the entry it
self is relaxed and gives way to his determined penetration. (90)
Is this really his wife? But who else could it be? As he leans to kiss her, he
notices a bad smell.
Suddenly the lights go on and the police enter. (They've been waiting
for this moment ever since the of the beneath
beginning story.) Looking
him, Jason finds his wife threew eeks dead and decaying. And himself cap
tivus. nude the freshness of the
Converting reality ("her body crackling
laundered into abstract that contains
sheets") meaning ("an Beauty
somehow his wife's ravaging smile and musical eyes") (89), and presuming
to take it by force, Jason's hermeneutic is captivated by its own fixation.
Which is death: interpretation kills, and once you're into it you're stuck
with it.
As the policemen wrench Jason away from his wife's corpse, it clings
like a sheet of paper. They carry him to the table "where his book still lies
with its marker in it," and the officer, drawing out his genitals?his organs
of and his means of ?on the
penetration interpretation tabletop, pounds
them to a pulp (another paperw ord) with the butt of his gun (91). Before
he leaves, the police officer picks up Jason's book, now stained with his
own blood, and flips through it. The marker falls to the floor. Jason cries
out for his marker, but the officer, replacing the book, "does not hear him,
nor does he want to"
(92).
Jason isb oth literally and figuratively a reader.T he marker in the bloody
book tropes the penis in the dead wife. In the agony of his emasculation,
his sole concern is that he has lost his All his his text and
place. places?in
in his wife ?are lost for But the violence he suffers is
(equivalently) good.
the violence he offers. When his wife beckons him to the act of
prepared by
love he darkens the room, exchanges her image for an idea, and in the
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obscurity ofthat abstraction seeks the object of his desire. When he tries to
rekindle the lamp it is too late and his desire has gone limp. His wife's mo
tion has am eaning of its own independent of deliberation: Jason looks for
meaning through deliberation. Small wonder that when he does find her he
finds her desiccated. He has reduced her to a sheet of paper, and he
himself?his hermeneutic vigor?is finally reduced to the stuff of paper.
Jason's text is dead, and he (at least) an accomplice in her death. You can
almost understand the vehemence of the officer's revulsion. For al
police
though he observes, with "a flicker of compassion" (91) and scarcely more
than a flicker of relevance, that neither tradition nor innovation is to be
preferred at the expense of the other, since they are mutually originary,
nevertheless "some still make me is a
things puke!" (91). Reading necrophiliac
violence that brings the living spirit to the dead letter in order to penetrate
it. Masquerading as an act of love, it inspires the counter-violence by which
it isw renched away from its desire and bereft of its power. Interpretation
In all of Coover's fictions the act and the art of are
interruptus. interpretation
lethal. In "Panel Game" the reader is finally snuffed by the text that mocks
his efforts to comprehend it. In this (perhaps)m ost shocking of the lot he is
am urderous exegete who disseminates death and begs his own castration.
3
At 9:27 Alfred buys a ticket and sits down to wait for the 10:18 Express
that will take him home to Winchester. Banal conversation between
Alfred and the Stationmaster. Enter the stranger, drunk, raving, begging
for help. Alfred draws his jackknife, approaches the intruder, weakens, and
drops the knife. The Stationmaster picks up the knife, decapitates the
stranger, disposes of the remains, and (as the 10:18 pulls out of the station),
resets the clock at 9:26. Alfred approaches the ticket window. . . .
"In a Train Station" is an infinite narrative a scenario that is
loop, going
to be played again and again in a never-ending cycle. "But to return ..."
(99). Apparently the cause of this eternal recurrence of the same isA lfred's
failure to kill the stranger. Were he to seize the moment (it's his cue) and
behead the intruder himself, that (it is ambiguously implied) is the one
decisive act that might end the cycle and allow him to go home. Assuming,
of course, that all this is real (99). But the assumption may not be war
ranted. It is clear that Alfred and the Stationmaster and the
boozy prophet
are acting out a familiar script. The clich?s they utter are lines in an oft
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