Robert Coover (1932–2024)

R.I.P. to one of the greats

This past week, literary culture lost one of the greats in Robert Coover at the age of 92. He was one of the last of his cohort, which included Barthelme, Gaddis, Gass, Hawkes, Elkin, Barth, etc., so in some ways, this is the passing of an era in which “postmodern” (or “metafictional” or “experimental,” pick your favorite) writing and the academy were more closely in cahoots,¹ and in which there was still some debate as to what form of literary narrative would rule the marketplace. (Spoiler: Based on sales, it’s hard to claim a victory for the pyrotechnics of the Coover variety, although fans of this sort of literature are legion.)

Dalkey Archive and Coover go way back—see this line from a 1974 letter from Gilbert Sorrentino to John O’Brien that plants some of the seeds that were to become the Review of Contemporary Fiction:

It is impermissible to be “interested in” contemporary letters, so long as you are interested right kind. The “line” runs from Henry Miller through Lawrence Durrell and thence to Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon, down to our “peers”—Sukenick, Brautigan, Kozinski, et al.

Although Dalkey only published one Coover collection², the brilliant and innovative and playful A Night at the Movies, there is an issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction dedicated to Coover on the occasion of his 80th birthday, and, as is featured below, the Scholarly Series title, Robert Coover & The Generosity of the Page by Stèphane Vanderhaeghe.

Coover’s unending desire to play and experiment with the form of the novel (see this 1992 piece on “hypertext writing,” see his recent publications like Street Cop and Open House) kept his work vital right up until the end, which is admirable to say the least. And beyond his art, Coover as a human touched so many people. The outpouring of memories about him I’ve seen online the past few days have been incredibly heartwarming. 

I only interacted with him on a few occasions, mostly when John O’Brien was trying to get Brown interested in hosting Dalkey Archive, and the time Coover recommended Quim Monzó to me. (Open Letter has published four Monzó books to date as a result of this: Gasoline, Guadalajara, A Thousand Morons, and Why, Why, Why?) He also has a killer blurb we use on all of our Can Xue titles (“There's a new world master among us, and her name is Can Xue.”), but mostly I’ve just always admired him through his work. 

Like for many, Pricksongs & Descants was eye-opening and wonderfully dirty, but The Public Burning was the one I read in college that most turned me on to Coover’s writing. Then I consumed The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., an indisputable masterpiece, and The Origin of the Bruinists (which I want to reread before tackling the 1,000 page The Bruinist Day of Wrath) and Spanking the Maid and Noir—all which I’d highly recommend. (And I’m ordering Gerald’s Party, which I never got around to.) Coover was one of those rare authors who was already established when I first discovered him, but who kept delivering, providing options both to enjoy his backlist and experience, in real time, what he was up to now.

Anyway, there are a million other guides to Coover—along with obituaries and remembrances—out there and mine won’t really add to that. Instead, what I’d like to do is share a bit from Robert Coover & The Generosity of the Page, which is described thus:

Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page is an unconventional study of Robert Coover's work from his early masterpiece The Origin of the Brunists (1966) to the recent Noir (2010). Written in the second person, it offers a self-reflexive investigation into the ways in which Coover’s stories often challenge the reader to resist the conventions of sense-making and even literary criticism. By portraying characters lost in surroundings they often fail to grasp, Coover’s work playfully enacts a "(melo)drama of cognition" that mirrors the reader’s own desire to interpret and make sense of texts in unequivocal ways. This tendency in Coover’s writing is indicative of a larger refusal of the ready-made, of the once-and-for-all or the authoritative, celebrating instead, in its generosity, the widening of possibilities—thus inevitably forcing the reader-critic to acknowledge the arbitrariness and artificiality of her responses.

Enjoy!³

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—And the Bad Sport, you ask, who is he? fool! thou art! (Pricksongs & Descants, 80)—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? Understanding being overrated anyway, so you read somewhere, now the moral is “forced upon you: Got it in the ass! (“Dinner with the King of England”) . . .

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The gap from game to rape leaves you agape . . .

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. . . Again: read on, find your way back in the texts, amid those letters that indefinitely reconfigure language, while the words they decompose wander about on the surface, inventing it, the surface of your inner eye’s sentient lens, laying flat on the page: you are this surface (a movie screen, the arid desert ground, the fundament of a maid, a golf course . . . ), an impregnated writing grazes against you, pierces your gaze and dissolves, through layers of senselessness and purposelessness, this consciousness of yours; but you insist on standing in the way, somewhat erect, on the lookout for a breach in the system that entrapped you, for a way out of it somehow, only to realize that you are out already, having been left out and dropped like a cue from some ancient, forgotten script. As such, you sense you have miscued, playing your part in the wrong performance, not knowing where to look, nor what and how to reflect upon amid all those textual mirrors that surround you and reflect a grotesque image back at you which, though knowing full well it is yours, you fail to recognize, muted by its own vacancy. In the course of such mirror-mirror games, in which the texts keep doubling and redoubling every step you take, you come to an understanding of sorts that you have been cast for two roles at once, caught up as you are, lucky-pierre style, between stylistic mimicry and/or futile redundancy.

In a way, you wish you could go all the way and not be caught up in your own contradictions or constantly have to justify your every move. Again forestalled, reading should somehow be entitled to a corner of the text, freely left to play with and against it, rewriting it, parodying it, offering still new variations for fear it might otherwise, in its critical dimension, hinder the text’s movement, ossify it into indelible truths forever inked on a page which would rather go blank again and try a new thing now and then, a new new thing or a new thing thing if needed, were [your] unquenchable appetite for novelty [not] matched only by [your] unquenchable appetite for understanding (“The New Thing”) . . . Favoring as it does the transience of the gesture over the permanence of beginnings, Robert Coover’s writing appears to celebrate oblivion and erasure, maliciously leaving but few traces behind yet begging for those it unavoidably leaves to be traced and retraced, drawn and withdrawn to the sound of a single tune: lèzi, scrivi—read, write; ever ready to rewrite.

Yes, remember? You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins. Despite its inherent maculation, Robert Coover’s page remains paradoxically blank after all, like the oblivious wall of a cave which forgets the flitting shadows that have danced upon it, or a movie screen at the end of a showing which, its radiant figments dissipated, is restored to its lustrous whiteness before welcoming new performances, the same again certainly, in all their infinite variety.

This, then, as every written work, should be regarded as a mere prologue, the broken cast maybe, of a text that has not been and somehow cannot be penned. The absent text it introduces thereby constitutes this written work, as every written work, as a mere prolegomenon or paralipomenon of a non-existent text that must hence be forgotten, or a parergon which finds its true meaning only in the context of an illegible ergon. This, you are afraid, might be but the counterfeit of a book which as such could not and cannot be written, condemning you, again and again, to begin anew.

1. Not including Pynchon—still alive!—in here because he was never affiliated with academia.

2. There were plans to publish his uncollected stories, The Goldilocks Variations, alongside a new edition of A Night at the Movies and The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (one of my favorite books of all time), but Deep Vellum wasn’t able to get the contracts signed, sealed, and paid. So, alas . . . 

[NB: Although I’m involved with Dalkey editorial, all business actions—from scheduling pub dates to paying artists—is outside of my purview. Aside from selecting Essentials and sequencing them (more on that to come), and providing invaluable insights into the backlist and publishing trends (more on that to come, also), the day-to-day is handled by employees of Deep Vellum.]

3. Sometime soon I’ll write more about the vast range of fascinating Scholarly Series books. (Such as the forthcoming “reader’s guide” to The Making of Americans entitled As I Was Saying. But there are so many more to discuss: Barbara Wright: Translation As Art (post coming soon), Dumitru Tsepeneag and the Canon of Alternative Literature (my favorite Romanian writer) by Laura Pavel, Four Cold Chapters on the Possibility of Literature: Leading Mostly to Borges and the Oulipo by Pablo M. Ruiz, Approaching Disappearance and Stepping Off the Edge by Anne McConnell, all the Warren Motte books (part of a huge thing I have planned on the dozens of French books from Dalkey, many of which I was lucky enough to work on), Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel, 1940–1980 by Francis Booth, and many, many more. The Scholarly Series should be reactivated ASAP—there are few presses that can boast of such a list of scholarship about the “right” authors.