“There are bad people who would be less dangerous
if they had no good in them.”
—La Rochefoucauld

From the beginning of his literary career, Robert Coover has been driven by the quite commendable ambition to make radical innovations in the forms and styles of contemporary fiction. Like John Barth, who once famously proclaimed the conventional novel obsolete, Coover has for years been burdened by a weary sense that the traditional narrative possibilities for fiction—in particular, the possibilities of classic realism—have passed into exhaustion, not only because they have grown overly familiar but be cause, since they are so familiar, the response of the reader to them has become habitual and imaginatively unproductive.

Coover is convinced that the first responsibility of the truly original writer is to discover new narrative arrangements that will have the effect of shocking the reader out of his habitual responses and forcing him to confront, however painfully, fresh and unorthodox ways of envisioning human experience. In his 20-year effort to fulfill this responsibility, Coover has produced eight works of fiction, comprising novels, plays, and collections of short stories, all of which are eccentric in form, often brutally unpleasant in content, and fueled by a savage determination to subvert the conventions of plausibility, not to say sanity, so completely that the reader is left stupefied and totally at the mercy of the imperious authority of the writer.

It is a process by which the old fashioned and usually benevolent relationship between writer and reader is altogether destroyed, The writer ceases to be the helpful mentor and tour guide leading the reader through the unfolding significances of his narrative and becomes an adversary disrupter of those significances, challenging the reader to find and understand them on his own if he can and will, and warning him also that if he does find them they are not to be understood according to the standard of values he may have inherited from the literature of the past.

In fact, the very idea that a narrative may have significance, at least in the usual sense of the word, is called into question because Coover’s method is to insist that his narratives are their own artistic subjects, that they are autotelic, wholly about themselves, and that as self-reflexive fictions their meanings are arbitrary and provision al, dependent not upon some crass imitative correspondence to empirical reality but rather upon whatever the writer chooses at the moment to make of them.

This approach is metaphysically very similar to Barth’s notion, so extensively elaborated and finally attenuated to the point of exhaustion in his later work, that since everything is relative, each of us can have only his version or versions of the truth; hence, it is possible to live one’s life by improvising and playing a seemingly limit less series of roles that may be external public expressions of the various versions of the truth one perceives. When applied in the fiction-making process, this idea translates into a belief (which in Barth’s case became paralyzing) that there is an infinite number of ways in which a given piece of fiction may be presented and interpreted, so that finally no one way can be considered better or more plausible than any other. The ultimate result, as Barth’s The Sotweed Factor and Giles Goat Boy make clear, is that the various possible approaches to, and interpretations of fictional events undercut and neutralize one another, and both novels self-destruct in a blaze of relativism.

Coover’s own version of the versional approach is best displayed in the stories collected in Pricksongs & Descants, the best-known of which, the story (or perhaps more accurately, the narrative exercise) called “The Baby sitter,” is an excellent case in point The action begins conventionally enough. A teenaged girl arrives at the home of the Tuckers to look after their children while they go to a party. The babysitter’s boyfriend, Jack, is wander ing around town and thinks he may drop in on her later in the evening, perhaps bringing along his friend, Mark, who may or may not join him in trying to seduce the girl. 

She wrestles with the two older children on the living room floor and may or may not succeed in giving the little boy a bath, then the little girl. The Tuckers arrive at the party. TI1e baby sitter wrestle s with the children per haps a second time, perhaps not. Jack and Mark arrive at the Tucker house. They ma y or may not rape the baby sitter. Mr. Tucker, still at the party, imagines that he returns home alone and rapes her himself or he returns home and finds her making love with Jack, whom he then sends home naked. Or Mr. and Mrs. Tucker arrive home, accompanied by Mark’s parents, the neighbors, and the police, and find Mark, Jack, and the babysitter huddled half-naked under a blanket. And so on, and so on. The narrative ends with the ultimate apocalyptic scenario. The Tucker baby is drowned by the babysitter in the bathtub. The two older children and perhaps the baby sitter are murdered by Jack and Mark. Mr. Tucker has disappeared. When told this appalling news, Mrs. Tucker, still at the party, responds by saying, “Let’s see what’s on the late late show.” On the other hand, it may be that nothing of the sort happens.

Coover has explored most of the imaginable versions of his narrative and revealed, in so doing, a certain technical cleverness. But his versions do not constitute a story but appear rather to be a series of virtuosic at tempts to conceal the fact that he does not have a story, if only because the materials of a story are not continued in merely alternative ways of describing an action but consist of a revelation of character and motive, elements Coover evidently lacks the capacity to penetrate. But it would seem that through his abdication of all responsibility to the requirement that narrative be reflective, however obliquely, of some recognizable human situation, he has arrived at a point of imaginative nullity that makes any technical move possible because none is necessary.

In Coover’s widely discussed novel The Public Burning, this abdication of responsibility results in a narrative that is ostensibly constructed on a basis of historical fact but is such a travesty of fact that it is not satirical but pointlessly surreal, not comically critical but vulgarly slapstick. Using as the occasion for his narrative what is obviously for him the most egregious miscarriage of justice in Jiving memory—the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing atomic secrets to the Russians-Coover composes a preposterous epic catalog of culprits responsible for it. They range from Cecil B. De Mille, who stages a massive Hollywood-style extravaganza in Times Square where the Rosenbergs are to be electrocuted before a cheering cast of thousands, to Betty Crocker, who presides over the festivities, and Gene Autry, who will provide vocal accompaniment, while Harry James and His Orchestra play overhead on the Astor roof. In the audience on Electrocution Night are to be found, in spirit or in flesh, such notables as Dale Carnegie, Ty Cobb, Admiral Halsey, Ezio Pinza, Cole Porter, and Shirley Temple. But, ultimately, just about every prominent national figure and political institution from J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI through the Presidential Cabinet, Supreme Court, and Congress is indicted as an accomplice in the gigantic conspiracy against the sainted Rosenbergs.

The obvious trouble with the novel—if in fact, it is a novel—is that in it Coover tells us absolutely nothing about the American political situation at the time of the Rosenberg executions. Instead, he makes an indictment, which is just as pathologically sweeping as my of Joseph McCarthy’s, of just about everything and everyone popularly associated with the American way of life, and he does so by adopting the kind of shrill sophomoric bombast with which activist leaders used to harangue street crowds during the more violent demonstrations of the 60’s. The sickness fur him as fur them is universal. It infects every fiber of the national character; it is endemic to our national history and our cultural and political life; and it has been intention ally spread through the secret conduits of the conspiracy engineered by the military-industrial complex, which is determined to brainwash an innocent citizenry and conscript it into the service of its nefarious aims. In short, the novel is not an indignant expose of the in justices behind the Rosenberg case but a mindless evacuation of spleen, as imaginatively impotent as any graffiti scrawl on the tunnel wall of a subway. Nothing in the novel really signifies or connotes because paranoid hallucination and blind fury have wholly disoriented whatever critical perspective Coover may once have had.

This same failure-which must finally be considered a failure of sensibility-gravely weakens Coover’s new novel, Gerald’s Party, a work that in other respects is technically daring and often fascinating as an example of sick brilliance employed in the service of a hostility so malignant that it shocks the reader with the force of an act of terrorism. 

The setting of the action is, as the title suggests, a cocktail party at which Coover assembles a gathering of ostensibly civilized, educated, and sensitive people and causes them to behave in spectacularly uncivilized ways, there by thoroughly frustrating all of the reader’s conventional expectations. His purpose in doing this is unclear. Obviously, it is not satirical, although the novel might superficially be read as a kind of demented burlesque of a British drawing room farce combined with the classic form of the murder mystery. What Coover actually seems to be saying is that if we were honest enough to follow our deepest impulses, we would do incredibly nasty things-on the order, for example, of the vicious act of anal rape perpetrated upon Richard Nixon by the wildly manic caricature-figure of Uncle Sam at the end of The Public Burning.

But the problem with this is that we long ago received such a message. The early naturalists spelled it out with banal clarity in their beast and blood imagery, and Freud educated us to know what our T€al motives are as we sip our tea with delicate decorum and speak politely of the weather. One can only conclude that this is yet another manifestation of Coover’s Betty Crocker syndrome, the derangement of taste and perspective that causes him to carry his point so fur beyond plausibility (Betty Crocker, after all, cannot by any standard of sanity be associated with the Rosenberg case) that it be comes aberration-symptomatic per haps of Coover’s complete contempt for all laws of justice and proportion.

But then he also seems contemptuous of the very act of novelistic composition. In fact, his book shows evidence on virtually every page of a kind of surly resistance to being written. The narrative continuity is constantly being interrupted by snatches of conversation that are themselves interrupted by physical descriptions and wisps of reverie, random happenings, and the chatter of other people, most of whom one finds it impossible to identify without searching back over the text to sort out their names. Everything in the novel is perceived out of recognizable context and focus, is defamiliarized to the point that the reader is forced into the most stressful contest with the withholding author in order to determine, however vaguely, just what is happening and who is saying or doing what to whom. 

This technical resistance is paralleled by the resistance set up by the action itself which proceeds to subvert all our assumptions about the conceivable limits of human conduct. The novel begins with the party given by Gerald and his unnamed wife well in progress. The guests are drinking heavily and crowding together in various parts of the house. Some are in the TV room watching a talk show. Others are in a downstairs room playing a game of darts. Still others are wandering around in the backyard. Gerald’s wife is in the kitchen preparing hors d’oeuvres. Several amatory explorations have been initiated.

The main attraction of the evening is a celebrated actress named Roz, the star of pornographic films and plays and sometime bed-partner of most of the male guests. It is a considerable while before Roz is discovered to be missing and is then found murdered on the living room Boor. Her husband, Roger, throws himself on his wife’s body and goes berserk with grief. While the police, who finally arrive, try to subdue him, he staggers and flails about, colliding with people, knocking them down, and smearing them with the victim’s blood. Later on, because Roger continues to be unmanageable, the police beat him to death with croquet mallets.

Following the discovery of the murdered Roz, the party quickly disintegrates into orgiastic chaos. The shock of the murder fades almost immediately. The guests resume their drinking, consume great quantities of food, laugh and joke quite as if nothing dreadful had happened, and proceed to involve themselves randomly and with a kind of sadistic lust in the sexual pursuit of one another. Only Gerald’s wife remains placid. She goes about her hostessly duties like a household robot or Stepford wife, preparing food, collecting empty glasses, being cheerful and hospitable.

Later in the evening she walks in on Gerald while he is copulating with a 16-year-old girl and courteously intro duces him to a couple who have just moved into the neighborhood and whom she is showing around the house. On another occasion after one of the guests, her husband’s best friend, is shot by a policeman and lies dying on the living room floor, she says, “I do wish people wouldn’t use guns in the house” and “Somehow parties don’t seem as much fun as they used to.” By the end of the evening something like eight people have been killed by various means, and their bodies are left lying about unattended. The house has been tom apart, windows have been broken out, debris is scattered everywhere, and when the last guests finally leave, Gerald and his wife, in the final scene of the novel, make Jove amid the wreckage, their “pubes crushing together like remote underwater collisions, as ineluctable as punchlines.” 

The profoundly frightening aspect of this incredible narrative is the total indifference of the guests to the violence and destruction occurring around them and the ease with which they subvert all normal expectations of compassion, horror, and outrage in a madly manic bacchanal. Only Cerakl’s wife pre.serves decorum through out. But hers is a meretricious deco rum, a mechanical conformity to social ritual made possible by complete lack of feeling, and not a deco rum based upon humane values which the actions of the others can be seen to violate and, in the violation, can be brought to moral judgment. 

If it was Coover’s intention to shock the reader into responding in new ways to a fictional rendering of human experience, he undoubtedly has succeeded. But it is not a response that creates an enlargement of conscious ness but rather its diminishment. There is quite simply no meaning to be found in the portrayal of human beings who act in accordance with none of the fundamental laws of humanity. If he is saying that this is the way we are or would like to be if we were freed from the authority of those laws, if he is saying that not so very deep down we are all sexually exploitative, murderous, and indifferent to the suffering of others, then he is offering no instruction that can be used be cause his premise is false. It may be that in our naked selves we are like that. But we are never that naked because, as Freud saw so clearly, we can never escape the moral and emotional conditions of civilization and would be nothing human if we could. 

 

[Gerald’s Party, by Robert Coover (New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster) $17.95]