VILNIUS PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY
ELINGA ŠIMK ŪNAIT Ė
THE COLLISION OF HIGH AND POPULAR CULTURE IN ROBERT COOVER’S COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES “PRICKSONGS AND DESCANTS”
MA Paper
Academic Advisor: Dr. Daina Miniotait ė
Vilnius, 2007
CONTENTS
ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………...3
INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………..4
I. Postmodern Context...... 6
II. High and Popular Culture in Literature...... 9
III. Intertextuality...... 12
IV. Metafiction...... 16
V. Postmodern Elements in “Pricksongs and Descants”...... 19
1. High and Popular Culture...... 20
a) High Culture...... 20
b) Popular Culture...... 21
c) High-Pop Culture Collision...... 24
d) The Theme of Sexuality...... 29
e) The Theme of Violence...... 33
VI. The Role of Intertextuality in Coover’s Stories...... 35
VII. Metafiction in Coover’s Stories...... 45
CONCLUSIONS...... ….51
SUMMARY…...... 53
BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 54
2 ABSTRACT
The paper focuses on the collision of high and popular culture in Robert Coover’s collection of short stories “Pricksongs and Descants”. The methods chosen for the study are close reading and textual analysis by interpreting every short story, defining its genre, noticing the features of high and popular culture and ways of presenting them, grasping the hot point where high and popular cultures collide, analyzing the aim and message of the collision. The paper emphasizes the blend of high-popular culture collision and discloses it with the help of postmodernism, high and popular culture instances, intertextuality, metafiction and genres transformation techniques through the themes of sexuality, violence and television. The research has revealed the message of the author hidden in the collision of high and low culture to satirize the image of 1960s America society and help the readers better understand the present reality.
3 INTRODUCTION
The aim of this paper is to determine the line between high and low culture in an American postmodern writer’s Robert Lowell Coover’s (b. 1932) collection of short stories “Pricksongs and Descants”. While modern literature includes only high culture, in postmodernism the line between these two kinds of culture becomes obscure. Such a collision helps to disclose some invisible parts of the text; it denudes the human psyche, the force of human subconsciousness, and the dark corridors of human behavior. The objectives of this paper are to determine the role of postmodernism, intertextuality, metafiction, and define the bridge of the two above-mentioned cultures. Postmodernism in Coover’s “Pricksongs and Descants” is well presented through the collision of high and popular culture. We may say that the author wanted to convey a strong message to satirize the society of 1960s America by intertwining these two cultures and colliding them in the sense of very well known patterns. In my work I analyze high and popular culture as literary terms, posmodernism, intertextuality and metafiction because Coover used them very widely in his writing. The body of the work is based on the collection of short stories “Pricksongs and Descants”. I use the methods of close reading and textual analysis by interpreting the short stories, defining their genre, grasping the aspects of high and popular culture, finding the hot point where high and popular cultures collide, analyzing the aim and message of the collision. The scope of my work is determined by the theme. The research deals with theoretical and practical data needed to support and solve the research problem. The scope ranges from literary knowledge of postmodernism, high and popular culture, intertextuality, metafiction, genres transformation, and Coover’s writing style to practical understanding of high and popular culture collision and the author’s message to such extent that is needed to determine the line between high and low culture in Coover’s “Pricksongs and Descants”. Coover is a postmodern writer as he employs intertextuality, metafiction and high-popular culture collision techniques in his works. He is an experimentalist whose work offers insight into the nature of literary creation, narrative forms, and cultural myths. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. Convinced early in his career that traditional fictional modes were exhausted, Coover has pioneered a variety of inventive narrative techniques, complex metafictional structures
4 and lucid pastiches of various genres to satirize contemporary American society and the role of the author. In this way, he has attempted to subvert and revitalize older, cliché- ridden literary forms. Coover regards himself a realist though not a traditional one. He is a writer whose works elude easy categorization. His writing includes the genres of fairy tales, historiographic metafiction, the fantastic, magic realism, and postmodernism. While most of his writings belong to all these genres, they, nevertheless, fall subject to none. Where he experiments with formal archetypes, like fairy tales and biblical parables, he also exposes the metafictional fissures in terms of narration, sexuality, and structure. He mimics the postmodern quest for some sort of placement in this world by layering fairy tales, nursery rhymes, allegories, parables, and mythology upon his own outspoken and incredibly human heroes. This humanist edge also aids Coover in his treatment of sexuality and violence within his texts.
5 I. Postmodern Context
In order to understand Coover’s writing better, it is necessary to define literary postmodernism itself, review its political, historical and social context, and determine the role of high and popular culture collision in postmodern literature. Postmodernism as a literary trend was formed in the 6 th decade of the 20th century in the United States of America because of people’s disappointment with the changed life caused by Civil Rights movement, president Kennedy’s assassination, feminism, Vietnam and Cold Wars. Postmodernism was a reaction against the western humanist tradition of the 18th century. It rejected the concept of man’s omnipotence, his ability to understand the outer reality. An American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work, John Barth in his essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1997, 62-76) claimed that the conventional modes of literary representation had been “used up”, their possibilities consumed through over use. By exhaustion he does not mean “anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities…” Barth holds up the figure of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges as an exemplar of an artist who “doesn’t merely exemplify an ultimacy; he employs it…” in his story entitled, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote ” in which a turn-of-the-century French Symbolist produces, not copies or imitates, but actually composes several chapters of Cervantes’ novel (1997, 66). What impresses Barth is that Borges thus (re)uses Cervantes’ novel in order to produce a “remarkable and original work of literature, the theme of which is the difficulty, perhaps the unnecessity, of writing original works of literature. His artistic victory is that he confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work” (1997, 69) . So, changing the medium may help writers find new messages, or at least new ways of re-using the old ones. In his other essay called “The Literature of Replenishment”, Barth tries to define literary postmodernism. There is no clear definition for the term “postmodernism” and for the characteristics of “postmodernist fiction” in this era, and some scholars claim that postmodernism is the extension or the opposition of modernism in a way. In this essay, Barth shows his disagreement with this notion, and at the same time he also points out his liking of some qualities of the literature of the last century. According to Barth, it is not literature
6 that is exhausted, but its forms, genres, styles. He states that authors have to combine these old forms in new ways and methods and that in such a way literature becomes replenished. Postmodern fiction is marked by parody, irony, metafiction, grotesquery, black humor and absurd fantasy. By using these means, postmodern authors try to convey their disapproval, dissatisfaction with, and rebellion against the seeming ugly world of those days. Due to the nasty historical events and emergence of mass society, man has lost his self-confidence and developed a feeling of fear: he is at a loss, does not know what or whom to believe. He can no longer understand his own feelings and wishes. Among the modernist devices which postmodernism pushes to a new extreme are: the rejection of mimetic representation in favor of a self-referential “playing” with the forms, conventions and icons of “high art” and literature; the rejection of the cult of originality in recognition of the inevitable loss of origin in the age of mass production; the rejection of plot and character as meaningful artistic conventions; and the rejection of meaning itself as delusory ( see Keep et al, 2000, 1 ). An important concept in postmodernism’s view of language is the idea of “play” text. In the context of postmodernism, play means changing the framework, which connects ideas, and thus allows the turning of a metaphor or word from one context to another, or from one frame of reference to another. Since, in postmodern thought, the “text” is a series of “markings” whose meaning is imputed by the reader, and not by the author, this play is the means by which the reader constructs or interprets the text, and the means by which the author gains a presence in the reader’s mind. The exhortation to break down the boundaries between high art and popular culture became a rallying cry of the new postmodern attitude. As described by Lye (29, 1 ) postmodernism is a broad range of responses to modernism, especially refusals of some of its totalizing premises and effects, and of its implicit or explicit distinction between “high” culture and commonly lived life, parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and master-code elements, including genre and literary form, an attempt to integrate art and life – the inclusion of popular forms, popular culture, everyday reality; a crossing or dissolving of borders – between fiction and non-fiction, between literary genres, between high and low culture. The use of the bits and pieces of older artefacts to produce a new, if not “original”, work of art, a work which blurs the traditional distinctions between the old and the new even as it blurs those between high and low art.
7 There are two groups of the critics of postmodernism. The first group states that postmodernism is a follow-up of modernism. It is easy to think about postmodernism thinking about modernism, the movement from which postmodernism seems to grow or emerge. Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of the same ideas, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, irony, and playfulness. Some critics believe the world has changed so profoundly that the term applies to nearly everything, and use postmodernism in a broad cultural sense. People who believe postmodernism is really just an aspect of the modern period may instead use terms such as “late modernism”. Barth argues in “The Literature of Replenishment” that “postmodernist fiction merely emphasizes the “performing” self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness of modernism, in a spirit of cultural subversiveness and anarchy…and that postmodern writers write a fiction that is more and more about itself and its process, less and less about objective reality and life in the world”( 1980, 200 ). The second group of critics claims that postmodernism is a gap from modernism. It is generally characterized as a reaction to modernism, which emphasizes grand and absolute values and establishments. It is also the belief that no communication is devoid of myth, metaphor, cultural bias and political content. On the whole, postmodernism is a general and wide-ranging term, which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, cultural and literary criticism. It is a phenomenon which denies the opportunity of only one absolute truth. Tony Cliff states that postmodernism is “the theory of rejecting theories”. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific or objective efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. Postmodernism is “post” because it denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody or a characteristic of the so-called “modern” mind.
8 II. High and Popular Culture In Literature
Postmodern literature integrates both high and popular culture and a very frequent feature in postmodern works is that the line between these two cultures becomes obscure. At first, it is important to define high and popular culture in literature. In the course of the past decades popular culture has undergone a process of decisive reformation closely related to the emergence and evolution of new electronic media. At the same moment, the term “pop” has been redefined and established anew in contemporary critical thought and artistic expression. Postmodern theory and practice recognize popular culture as a legitimate sphere of study and inquiry that has to be addressed thoroughly and in a serious manner. Andrew Ross ( 2003, 9 ) defines popular culture as “a vast range of technologically advanced cultural products, industrially produced for profit, and consumed and used for a variety of purposes by a broad range of audiences”. We should also pay attention to Dana Polan’s ( 2003, 9 ) argumentation:
“More than ever, the realm of everyday consciousness becomes one whose significations are indistinguishable from the images, spectacles and messages that circulate through mass media and mass culture. We can only evolve a theory and practice of the materiality of our world only if we look in detail at the ways that cultural capital becomes a central part of that materiality”.
While modernism eschewed popular forms, postmodernism plays with and mixes forms and styles of what were perceived as ‘high culture’ and ‘popular culture’. High culture was highly adored in modernism. It is a term referring to the cultural milieu and culture consumption of a western society’s upper class. Here it is a term referring to the ‘best of breed’ cultural products. What falls in this category is defined by the most powerful sections of society, its social, political, economic and intellectual elite. High culture is traditionally understood as the milieu of arts and sciences fostered under the European Renaissance. Its ideal is the Renaissance man, whose knowledge leads him to a broad and deep understanding of life. Such fields of experience and study were considered parts of high culture: appreciation for good design whether decorative or minimalist, etiquette, fine arts and patronage of museums, government,
9 especially public speaking and informed debate, haute cuisine and fine wine, international travel, especially the Grand Tour of Europe, life sciences such as botany, literature, and the ability to write elegantly as learned from Classical literature and poetry, military service (as an officer) was once a central part of high culture. As war has become more impersonal and technology-driven since World War I, this aspect has waned. The more financially expensive sports, such as equestrianism, fencing, sailing, and sculling, musical discipline, especially in classical music such as grand opera, philosophy especially of the European tradition, refined grooming and haute couture, religion specifically the more early modern forms of Christianity, theatre, especially ballet were also taken as high culture forms. Popular culture has been defined as everything from ‘common culture’, to ‘folk culture’, or ‘mass culture’. While it has been all of these things at various points in history, in post-war America, popular culture is undeniably associated with commercial culture and all its trappings: movies, television, radio, cyberspace, advertising, toys, nearly any commodity available for purchase, forms of art (iconography, comic-strip drawing), photography, games, and even group ‘experiences’ like collective comet- watching or rave dancing on ecstasy. Following the social upheavals of the mentioned before, popular culture has come to be taken more seriously as a terrain of academic enquiry and has also helped to change the outlooks of more established disciplines. Conceptual barriers between so- called high and low culture have broken down, accompanying an explosion in scholarly interest in popular culture, which encompasses such diverse mediums as comic books, television and the Internet. Reevaluation of mass culture in the 1970s and 1980s has revealed significant problems with the traditional view of mass culture as degraded and elite culture as uplifting. Divisions between high and low culture have been increasingly seen as political distinctions rather than defensible aesthetic or intellectual ones. Many critics easily read popular fiction and film as ‘attacks against the system’, neglecting both the exact ways in which the so-called revolutionary message is enacted, and the capacities of dominant doctrines to recuperate critical messages. Popular culture, or pop culture, the vernacular people’s culture that prevails in any given society, results from the daily interactions, needs and desires, and cultural ‘moments’ that make up the everyday lives of the mainstream. Some people talk about mass culture, which suggests an interest in the culture of the ordinary man. Popular culture has a broader scope than the popular arts. It comprises the whole culture of the people –
10 their behavior, values, and in particular their entertainments – not just certain art forms that appeal to large numbers of people. The development of industrial mass production, the introduction of new technologies of sound and image broadcasting and recording, and the growth of mass media industries – the film, broadcast radio and television, and the book-publishing industries, as well as the print and electronic news media have played a major role in shaping popular culture in modern urban mass societies. Popular literature was not considered in any way literary, indeed it was perceived as a threat to great literature and the moral values associated with it. An influential British literary critic Leavis (1996, 13 ) saw popular literature as a form of cultural pollution and argued for the value of high culture. The themes of sexuality, violence and television as inseparable features of today’s society could be considered popular culture instances in Coover’s “Pricksongs and Descants”. Sex, almost erotic, permeates Coover’s works. Sexual undertones are found in most fairy tales. He makes things all the more human by showcasing the sexual undertones. Coover’s usage of eroticism is not a technical device. He says:
“As a widely shared communicative experience, of course, sex can be used fictionally in a variety of ways as an exploratory mechanism: any concern can be deflected into it, ideas, as it were, fleshed out. But at heart I believe, along with Hesiod and Ovid, that Eros powers the universe…” (see Keezing, 24, 1).
By integrating popular culture, Coover criticizes mass society. He wants to show how the signs and codes form human consciousness. A human being seems to melt in the mass; he loses his identity or contours and turns into a faceless and inauthentic imitator. Pop icons are the official creators of the norm, the status, the very predicament of the present moment. Rather, their mutated nature authorizes the erasure of such categories as “meaning”, “origin”, “real”, “history”, “authenticity”. Such icons also recognize no boundaries beyond which they would not be allowed to exercise their influence. In postmodernity, pop imagery serves as a point of departure, a source of inspiration but also as recyclable material that can be refabricated, reinvested, revalued as well as parodied, satirized and ridiculed for the purposes and needs of all art forms.
11 III. Intertextuality
Intertextuality is not new in postmodernism, but it is foregrounded here. The notion of intertextuality problematizes the idea of a text having boundaries and questions the dichotomy of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Intertextuality is a relationship between two or more texts that quote from one another, allude to one another, or otherwise connect. New Testament passages that quote from the Old Testament are one example of intertextuality. The theoretical concept of intertextuality is associated with postmodernism though not necessarily only with it. Intertextuality occurs frequently in popular media such as television shows, movies, novels and even interactive video games. In such a way, intertextuality is the collision of high and popular culture. It is often used to provide depth to the fictional reality portrayed in the medium, such as characters in one television show mentioning characters from another. Essentially, every text is informed by other texts, which the reader has read, and the reader’s own cultural context. The simplest articulation of intertextuality can be seen in the footnotes that indicate source materials to which a given text is alluding, or which are known to have influenced the author. Each media text exists in relation to others. Texts are framed by other texts and are constructed more by their intertextuality than by their authors. The fundamental concept of intertextuality is that no text, much as it might like to appear so, is original and unique-in-itself; rather it is a tissue of inevitable, and to an extent unwitting, references to and quotations from other texts. The text is an intervention in a cultural system. Intertextuality is therefore a very useful concept for literary study, as it concerns the study of cultural sign systems generally. The concept of the intertext arises in France in the late 1960s, and has become increasingly significant as a way of thinking about how a literary text is produced and comes to acquire meanings. A French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician Roland Barthes (1999, 99 ) views the text as a network. It helps partly to explain what is meant by the term. He claims that the author has been decentred in the interpretive process. Instead, a text consists of multiple writings, which are drawn from a range of discourses, already in circulation in some form or other. The writer is not thought of as great originator, the creative genius, but rather a synthesizer: someone who draws together and orchestrates linguistic raw material. Literature
12 becomes a form of repetition. An example would be the ways in which certain narratives, those that we call myths especially, keep recurring in modified forms. For example, the repeated use of the ‘Grail’ indicate the ways in which a particular story or myth can be repeated in different ways. More specific instances would be the way in which “Jane Eyre” is rewritten from the point of view of the first Mrs Rochester in Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea”. ( see Webster 1996, 99-100 ). Literary textuality then can be seen as a kind of discursive recycling, although the new relations that come to exist between the discourses appropriated and incorporated into a text ensure that literary writing is never the same, never completely repeated. While the theoretical concept of intertextuality is associated with postmodernism, the thing itself is not new and not connected only with postmodernism. The semiotic notion of intertextuality introduced by a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist Julia Kristeva is associated primarily with poststructuralist theorists. Kristeva (1980, 69) referred to texts in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author and reader of a text, and a vertical axis, which connects the text to other texts. Uniting these two axes are shared codes: every text and every reading depends on prior codes. Kristeva declared, “…every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it”. She argued that rather than confining our attention to the structure of a text we should study its ‘structuration’ (how the structure came into being). This involved citing it ‘within the totality of previous or synchronic texts’ of which it was a ‘transformation’. In 1968 Roland Barthes (1977, 148) announced ‘the death of the author’ and ‘the birth of the reader’, declaring: “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination”. In his essay Barthes criticizes the reader’s tendency to consider aspects of the author’s identity – his political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes – to distill meaning from his work. For him “to give a text an author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that text” (1992, 117). Readers must separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate it from interpretive tyranny, for each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. According to Barthes ( 1977, 146 ):
13 “A text is... a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations... The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them”.
In this case, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a “text is a tissue of quotations,” drawn from “innumerable centers of culture,” rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the “passions” or “tastes” of the writer; “a text’s unity lies not in its origins,” or its creator, “but in its destination,” or its audience. Every work is “eternally written here and now,” with each re-reading, because the “origin” of meaning lies exclusively in “language itself” and its impressions on the reader. The framing of texts by other texts has implications not only for their writers but also for their readers. Fredric Jameson (24, 1) argued that “texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through the sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or - if the text is brand-new - through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions”. The concept of intertextuality reminds us that each text exists in relation to others. In fact, texts owe more to other texts than to their own makers. But intertextuality is also reflected in the fluidity of genre boundaries and in the blurring of genres and their functions, which is reflected in such recent coinages as ‘advertorials’, ‘infomercials’, ‘edutainment’, ‘docudrama’ and ‘faction’. By alluding to other texts and other media this practice reminds us that we are in a mediated reality, so it can also be seen as an ‘alienatory’ mode which runs counter to the dominant ‘realist’ tradition which focuses on persuading the audience to believe in the on-going reality of the narrative. It appeals to the pleasures of critical detachment rather than of emotional involvement. Claude Lévi-Strauss claims (Wiseman & Groves 2000, 173):
“I don't have the feeling that I write my books, I have the feeling that my books get written through me... I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no "I", no "me"”.
14 It sounds a bit strange, but it is true. All the forms to create a piece of writing have already been used. In such a way, writers unconsciously use other writer’s ideas, similar techniques and modes only in different ways. According to an English literary critic and philosopher Terry Eagleton , all literary works are “rewritten”, if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them. No one today even for the first time can read a famous novel or poem, look at a famous painting, drawing or sculpture, listen to a famous piece of music or watch a famous play or film without being conscious of the contexts in which the text had been reproduced, drawn upon, alluded to, parodied and so on. ( see Eagleton, 1983, 12 ). In fact, texts owe more to other texts than to their own makers. I like the idea of a French philosopher Michel Foucault (1974, 23) who argues that:
“The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network... The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands... Its unity is variable and relative”.
The boundaries of texts are permeable. Each text exists within a vast ‘society of texts’ in various genres and media: no text is an island entire of itself. A French literary theorist Gerard Genette (1977, 1) proposed the term ‘transtextuality’ as a more inclusive term than ‘intertextuality’. He listed five subtypes: intertextuality : quotation, plagiarism, allusion; paratextuality : the relation between a text and its ‘paratext’ - that which surrounds the main body of the text - such as titles, headings, prefaces, epigraphs, dedications, acknowledgements, footnotes, illustrations, dust jackets, etc.; architextuality : designation of a text as part of a genre or genres; metatextuality : explicit or implicit critical commentary of one text on another text; and hypotextuality : the relation between a text and a preceding ‘hypotext’ - a text or genre on which it is based but which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends (including parody, spoof, sequel, translation). To such a list, computer-based hypertextuality should be added: text, which can take the reader directly to other texts (regardless of authorship or location). This kind of intertextuality disrupts the conventional ‘linearity’ of texts. Reading such texts is seldom a question of following standard sequences predetermined by their authors.
15 Some defining features of intertextuality might include reflexivity, alteration, explicitness, criticality to comprehension, scale of adoption and structural unboundedness. Texts are instrumental not only in the construction of other texts but also in the construction of experiences. Much of what we know about the world is derived from what we have read in books, newspapers and magazines, from what we have seen in the cinema and on television and from what we have heard on the radio. Life is thus lived through texts and framed by texts to a greater extent than we are normally aware of. Intertextuality blurs the boundaries not only between texts but also between texts and the world of lived experience. Indeed, we may argue that we know no pre-textual experience. The world as we know it is merely its current representation.
IV. Metafiction
Metafiction is not the invention of postmodernism. As a literary term it was known already in the 18th century, but like intertextuality in postmodernism it is foregrounded. Metafiction often employs intertextual references and allusions by examining fictional systems, incorporating aspects of both theory and criticism, creating biographies of imaginary writers and presenting and discussing fictional works of an imaginary character. Authors of metafiction often violate narrative levels by intruding to comment on writing, involving fictional characters, directly addressing the reader, openly questioning how narrative assumptions and conventions transform and filter reality, or trying to ultimately prove that no singular truths or meanings exist. Metafiction also uses unconventional and experimental techniques by rejecting conventional plot, refusing to attempt to become “real life”, subverting conventions to transform ‘reality’ into a highly suspect concept, flaunting and exaggerating foundations of their instability and displaying reflexivity. Some common metafictive devices include: a novel about a person writing a novel, a novel about a person reading a novel, a story that addresses the specific conventions of story, such as title, paragraphing or plots, a non-linear novel, which can be read in some order other than beginning to end, narrative footnotes, which continue
16 the story while commenting on it, a novel in which the author (not merely the narrator) is a character, a movie in which a character reads a fictional story, a story that anticipates the reader’s reaction to the story, characters who do things because those actions are what they would expect from characters in a story, characters who express awareness that they are in a work of fiction, a work of fiction within a fiction, a real pre-existing piece of fiction, being used within a new piece of fiction, to give the illusion that the new fiction is “our world”. Mark Currie posits that metafiction allows its readers a better understanding of the fundamental structures of narrative while providing an accurate model for understanding the contemporary experience of the world as a series of constructed systems. In reflecting on the significance of metafiction, he goes so far as to say that it provides an “unlimited vitality: which was once thought introspective and self- referential is in fact outward looking” (1995, 2). Patricia Waugh further states that:
“Far from 'dying', the novel has reached a mature recognition of its existence as writing, which can only ensure its continued viability in and relevance to a contemporary world which is similarly beginning to gain awareness of precisely how its values and practices are constructed and legitimised” (1984, 19).
Metafiction is fiction which is in the first instance aware of itself as fiction and which may dramatize the false or constructed nature of fiction, on the one hand, or the inevitable fictionality of all experience, on the other. José María Guelbenzu describes the use of metafiction as “a transformation of reality”. In critical theory, and particularly postmodernism, a metanarrative “is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience”. The prefix meta is used to mean about, a narrative is a story, so a metanarrative is a story about a story ( see Stephens 1998, 6 ). The term is also used to discuss the works of Coover. The most familiar definition of metafiction, and the most simple of the definitions is that metafiction is fiction that is about fiction. This explains why metafiction is placed in a complete opposite position than the realist tradition, because the whole purpose of metafiction is to disrupt the fictive reality. One of the major ways that metafictionists undermine the fictive reality is to work with the archetypes of the stories. Archetypes, by definition, are very comfortable for readers. When an author undermines the reader’s
17 comfortability, the reader then takes notice of the ideas that the author wants the reader to notice. Archetypes are one of the most powerful of the fictional processes to be used in metafiction. Dr Kenneth Millard ( 1984, 2 ) writes:
“Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text”.
Metafiction thus covers a wide range of fictions. There are those novels at one end of the spectrum, which take fictionality as a theme to be explored whose formal self-consciousness is limited. At the center of this spectrum are those texts that manifest the symptoms of formal and ontological insecurity but allow their deconstructions to be finally recontextualized or ‘naturalized’ and given a total interpretation. According to Currie (1995, 1-15) , metafiction is
“… a borderline discourse, a kind of writing that places itself on the border between fiction and literary criticism and which takes that border as its subject; the assimilation of critical perspectives within fictional narrative, a self-consciousness of the artificiality of its constructions and a fixation on the relationship between language and the world … texts which subvert their own referential illusion … internalizes the relationship between authors and readers”.
Coover’s fiction indulges in these sorts of diversions as well, although his work is perhaps more likely to explore the ways in which fiction and fiction-making incorporate, perhaps inevitably, elements of ritual and myth and to explode the conventions of realism and traditional narrative from within, to produce a kind of kaleidoscopic surrealism. “Postmodernism extends modernist uncertainty, often by assuming that reality, if it exists at all, is unknowable or inaccessible through a language grown detached from it”. ( see Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 1993 ). Postmodernist writing
18 often mocks this pretension to pursue order through language and shows language breaking down. Metafiction is also laying bare “the process of world-construction” – “reframing”, and generating “a plurality of worlds”.
V. Postmodern Elements in “Pricksongs and Descants”
Coover’s “Pricksongs and Descants”, originally published in 1969, began his “play” on fairy tales and bedtime stories. It is a collection of short stories, some of which were written early in his career. The book contains more than twenty short stories. In “Pricksongs and Descants” Coover takes stories from the Bible (“The Brother”, “J’s Marriage”), fairy tales (“The Gingerbread House”, “The Door”), and familiar everyday events (“Panel Game”, “The Babysitter”) and twists them into original, unexpected shapes. “The Brother”, for example, relates the story of Noah’s brother, who helps build the ark and then is left by Noah to drown. In other stories (“The Door”, “The Gingerbread House”, “The Marker”, “The Babysitter”, “J’s Marriage”) two children follow an old man into the woods, trailing breadcrumbs behind and edging helplessly toward a sinister end that never comes. A husband walks toward the bed where his wife awaits his caresses, but by the time he arrives she’s been dead three weeks and detectives are pounding down the door. A teenaged babysitter’s evening becomes a kaleidoscope of dangerous erotic fantasies – her employer’s, her boyfriend’s, her own. An aging, humble carpenter marries a beautiful but frigid woman, and after he’s waited weeks to consummate their union she announces that God has made her pregnant. The author names his collection of short stories by using two terms “pricksong” and “descant” borrowed from music. The book invites the reader to look at “pricksongs” and “descants,” two terms that convey the basic polyphony characterized by multiplication of perspectives, point of view changing, and circular structure of narrative. These strategies render the narrative open-ended, indeterminate, polyvocal and interesting. It is very important to point out the postmodern features in Coover’s stories in order to better understand the collision of high and popular culture and grasp the hidden message, which is meant by the author.
19 Coover in “Pricksongs and Descants” as a postmodern writer uses new forms and methods in order to reflect the present-day reality. He rewrites literary genres and “plays” with a text changing the framework, emphasizing parody, irony and playfulness. While writing the author rejects originality, meaning, plot and character as meaningful artistic devices. Moreover, he crosses the line between fiction and non- fiction, between genres, between high and low culture.
1. High and Popular Culture
a) High Culture
In Coover’s fiction we find a lot of elements of high culture. High culture details show the aristocratic background of the characters who stand in opposition to the present-day society, emphasizing its decay by deforming and even losing values. For instance, “The Magic Poker” presents us with many high-culture details: “…a tall slender man, handsome, dressed in dark slacks, white turtleneck shirt, and jacket, smoking a pipe.” ( 9, 24), “He bows to kiss her cheek and take her hand.” (9, 25 ), “…he apologizes, and kisses her gently on the cheek.” ( 9, 30 ), or “…a handsome Knight in shining armor of white and navy blue stood before her.” ( 9, 43 ). Man’s behavior with a woman shows his ‘high manners’. “The Gingerbread House” also speaks about ‘high behavior’: “Two children follow an old man, dropping breadcrumbs, singing nursery tunes”, “Their song tells of God’s care for little ones.” ( 9, 61 ), “The old man tells them a story about a good fairy who granted a poor man three wishes.” ( 9, 69 ), “The good fairy has sparkling blue eyes and golden hair, a soft sweet mouth and gentle hands that caress and soothe.” ( 9, 71 ). Here again, the behavior of obedient and innocent children speaks about the valued manners of those times. The image of the fairy brings appreciable sweet and gentle feelings. “J’s Marriage” is full of high culture instances as well: “…he could not imagine life without her…” ( 9, 113 ), “…J nevertheless enjoyed for several months an incredible happiness.” ( 9, 114 ), “The bed he made for her with his own hands, the table as well which never lacked her gifts to him…”( 9, 114-115 ). The whole paragraph draws a wonderful scene: “Their wedding night was in all truth a thing of beauty: the splendor of the celebration, the hushed intimacy of a private walk together under the cryptic light
20 of a large moon, the unexpected delight discovered in the reflection of a candle’s flicker in a decanter of aged wine, finally the silent weeping in each other’s arms through a night that seemed infinite in its innumerable dimensions. Toward dawn, J, sitting on the side of the bed (both of them still dressed, of course; it would take some while yet to learn that first art of nakedness), overflowing with profound affection, began to caress her temples, and with the first thin light of the new day, she fell asleep beside him, and J wept again to realize the meaning and the importance of her sleep” ( 9, 114 ). The actions of a man, highly valued in the past, are so emphasized and exaggerated in the story as if to parody the absence of them nowadays. Such an abundance of examples showing ideal treatment of a woman seems abnormal in the life of present-day society. This story could be considered a parody of the romantic novel. Martin’s manners and thoughts in “The Elevator” are also typical to high culture and very often forgotten today: “Martin greets her in his usual friendly manner and she returns his greeting with a smile.” ( 9, 127 ), “…if this elevator crashed, I would sacrifice my life to save her.”( 9, 128 ).
b) Popular Culture
Although there are many elements of high culture, there are more popular culture icons in “Pricksongs and Descants”. In some stories looks and clothes suggest pop culture: “The girl standing forward – fashionbook-trim in tight gold pants, ruffled blouse, silk neckscarf …” ( 9, 21 ), “…she wears a light yellow dress with a beige cardigan over it…” ( 9, 22 ), “…her soft maidenly breasts under the ruffled blouse, her firm haunches gleaming golden over the shadowed grass.” ( 9, 31 ) – “The Magic Poker”; “Her butt’s too plump…” ( 9, 50 ), “…her plump white body splayed out in a bed of plastic nasturtiums, eyes glazed over, simpering smile on her flushed red lips.”( 9, 52 ) – “Morris in Chains”; “The girl’s apron is a bright orange, the gay color of freshly picked tangerines, and is stitched happily with blues and reds and greens…” ( 9, 62 ), “… her blonde curls flowing freely.” ( 9, 64 ) – “The Gingerbread House”; “Moderator, bag shape corseted and black suited, behind desk…” ( 9, 79 ), “She is self- absorbed, powdering her nose and her bosom, using camera lens for a mirror.” ( 9, 83 ) – “Panel Game”; “Nude now, she moves lightly about the room…” , “…fluffs her short blonde hair…” ( 9, 88 ) – “The Marker”; “He is tall and thin with uncombed dark hair, a
21 couple days’ growth of beard. Khaki pants, gray undershirt, tennis shoes, the laces broken and reknotted. He introduces with him a large odor of stale alcohol, and his eyes, though blue and as if thoughtful, focus on no fixed thing.” ( 9, 101 ) – “In a Train Station”; “Her back is straight and subtle. Her orchid uniform skirt is tight, tucks tautly under her blossoming hips, describes a kind of cavity there. Her calves are muscular and strong.” ( 9, 128 ) – “The Elevator”; “Only her flowering breasts under the orange skirt, her young hips packed snugly in last year’s bright white shorts, her soft girlish thighs, slender calves: these were not Swede’s.” ( 9, 152 ), “Quenby wears pants, those relaxed faded bluejeans probably, and a soft leather jacket.” ( 9, 154 ) – “Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl”; “The man wears an open leather jacket, short, over his chest and strong shoulders, swings his broad leathery hands in wide rhythmic arcs, strides vigorously through the snow, his legs wrapped tightly in coarse gray leggings.” ( 9, 171 ), “…the kerchief knotted about her neck, her starched white blouse and brightly flowered skirt…”, “…his tattered black hat, the hair curling about his ears and around his sun-blackened neck, his torn yellow shirt open down the front, his fixed and swollen right eye…” ( 9, 175 ), “…the tattered black hat and uncut hair, the dark bearded face with its bulging bloodshot eye, the sweat-stained shirt open down to the belt.”, “…his torn yellow shirt and muddy shoes…” ( 9, 178 ) – “The Sentient Lens”. The types of clothes in these extracts could hardly be attributed to high culture. These are the clothes of today; the people of today are fond of tight pants, ruffled blouses, leather jackets, shorts, jeans, other brightly colored or khaki clothes, sexually revealing their bodies, showcasting breasts under blouses. Such pop icons as blonde curls, powdered noses, red lips or corseted bodies (because to look slim is fashionable) disclose the cult of beauty adored so much by our society. On the other hand, such examples as uncombed and uncut hair, couple days’ growth of beard, broken and reknotted laces, tattered hats, muddy shoes, sweat-stained shirt and the odor of alcohol may imply the negligence of present people or their “pop” living style. Popular culture serves as a mirror wherein society can better see itself. The characters’ language and behavior speak about popular culture even more loudly: “…I could make out the unsubtle arc of her big mounded belly … damn! ( 9, 52 ), “… old Rameses stages him an insurrection the sonuvabitch!” ( 9, 53 ) – “Morris in Chains”. “The old man stoops down, lifts her bright orange apron, her skirt, her petticoats.” ( 9, 66 ) - “The Gingerbread House”; “Now get rid of that fucking corpse!” (9, 91 ) – “The Marker”; “Fuck it!” ( 9, 102 ) – “In a Train Station”; “…little fuckers!”
22 (9, 105 ) – “Klee Dead”; “I unstrapped my rifle from my back and poked the barrel under his nose.” ( 9, 121 ) – “The Wayfarer”; “Carruther fucks his mother”… Carruther hit him full in the face…” ( 9, 132 ), “Carruther tells this as the goddamn truth I mean he respects that bastard…” ( 9, 135 ), “…and even one day ignites a goddamn volcano and jeezuss!”, “Carruther jeezuss he really breaks you up sometimes that crazy bastard…” (9, 136 ) – “The Elevator”; “A passerby playfully punches his thumb into her thigh, an innocent commonplace event, and she spits in his eye.” ( 9, 139 ), “But what the fuck else do you think a circus is all about?” ( 9, 140 ), “The Fat Lady, all aglow, switches calory charts with the Thin Man…” ( 9, 142 ) – “Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady”; “Those goddamn squirrels sure make a lot of noise, don’t they?”, “Sure, hell, why not?” ( 9, 153 ), “What the hell, the house is dark…” ( 9, 165 ) – “Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl”. The use of swearwords got so deeply ingrained in peoples’ life today that no communication can manage without them. Such words are used without any consideration of the context or situation (either during a car accident, in an office or at home). The author wanted to show that it is a well presenting feature of our society; people say “goddamn”, “fucker”, “bastard”, “hell” and other curses without noticing that they pronounce them. There is a whole tirade of swear-words in the story called “The Brother”: “…that red-eyed brother of yours wingin around like a damn cloud…”, “…you’re a damn fool I tell you…” ( 9, 92 ), “…God for that and it ain’t no goddamn fishin boat…the biggest damn thing I ever heard…”, “…I am really crazy r-e-a-l-y crazy…”, “…to finish this idiot thing yourself…”, “…eat this goddamn boat…” ( 9, 93 ), “…I just sleep the whole damn day…” ( 9, 94 ), “…but she’s madder than hell…”, “…all kindsa damn animals and birds…” ( 9, 95 ), “…they’re all crazy he’s finally got them all crazy…” ( 9, 96 ), “…don’t say nothing that bastard…”, “…hey you stupid sonuvabitch I’m soakin wet goddamn it and my house…”, “GODdamn YOU…” ( 9, 97 ), “…that bastard and yet I gotta hand it to him it’s not hard to see who’s crazy around here…”( 9, 98 ). We find a very similar situation in “A Pedestrian Accident”: “Mrs. Grundy curtsied and stooped to unzip the officer’s fly. “Hello! Anybody home!” ( 9, 189 ), “All right, gosh damn it all!” ( 9, 190 ), “Cut the shit, mac.”, “You wanna know who this poor clown is, right?” ( 9, 191 ), “Crazy goddamn fool he just walk right out in fronta me no respect just burstin for a bustin.” ( 9, 193 ), “I’ll responsible your ass!” ( 9, 194 ), “Damn it!…you idiot…” ( 9, 198 ), “This goddamn body is like a mulligan stew.” ( 9, 201 ), “Bullshit, thought Paul, though not ungratefully…” ( 9, 203 ).
23 c) High-Pop Culture Collision
The first portion of pop-high collision is found in “Seven Exemplary fictions” which consist of seven short stories: “Panel game”, “The Marker”, “The Brother”, “In a Train Station”, “Klee Dead”, “J’s Marriage”, and “The Wayfarer”. “Panel Game” is a television game show, television, which is one of the most important sources of popular culture. In a final irony, it is the television program, the contemporary transmitter of moral values that becomes the mirror to the reader of life’s absurdity. “The Magic Poker” mixes the elements of the two above-mentioned cultures: “Once upon a time there was a beautiful young Princess in tight gold pants, so very tight in fact that no one could remove them from her.”, “Whosoever shall succeed in pulling my daughter’s pants down, … shall have her for his bride!” ( 9, 42 ). The old forms of the fairy tale provide with new modes and ideas that help better disclose the reality of nowadays. There are no more beautiful Princesses but there are many pretty girls in ‘tight pants’. In the past men had to do some honorable tasks in order to achieve a princess’s hand. Today the task is different. Girls can be captured through sexual matters. Another story called “The Marker” treats the realistic need for role-play (markers) and the profound losses that occur when one pursues them too far. It dramatizes the rift between body and spirit, the self and the world, lover and beloved, the word and referent, sign and signified, the loss of orgasmic fulfillment when one fails to appreciate the uniqueness of every act. This is a comic and grotesque tale about a man (Jason) “deeply in love with his wife” who suddenly faces her rotting corpse and experiences the death of his pathway to ecstasy. He had marked her for pleasure perhaps once too often. Jason discovers that the body he has just made love to has become a stinking cadaver to which he is now genitally “hinged”. “Jason strikes wildly against the thighs in his effort to free himself…”(9, 91 ). In mood, style, and event, the story touches upon both traditional and “kinky” extremes. During the love act the police and four assistants enter, and the tone of the story, like Jason’s reality, dramatically alters. This is concrete reality with talk of behavior, law, and even Jason’s punishment. The story reads like a movie which is again the instance of popular culture (pop icon - television) about the setup for an exposure of infidelity.
24 Coover brings together, in the room where the action takes place, archetypal and unconscious fears, such as misplaced objects, the dead wife, inextrication, castration and conventional explanations from the “lawmen”. The love act here plays a role to create the harmony of disparate. The message of the story may speak about our society’s inclination not to think much about other people, sometimes ‘marking’ them too often. By presenting the readers with a detailed scene the author wants to make them see that they also do similar things; he warns them what can happen. In “Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady” Coover obviously enjoys the image of human society as a carnival or circus where the bulk of humanity can gasp at, spit upon, or taunt the absurd or the unfortunate. The circus is the place for ritual exorcism of one’s deepest and ugliest drives. In this story, Coover focuses closely upon two popular circus inmates. He refuses any conventional or mythic rendering of the “comic...coupling” of the fat lady and thin man and tells a bitter tale of their romantic and literal coupling. The characters perform grotesque “functions”. Here Coover employs pop culture details so important in people’s present-day life: slim women, muscular men, diets, and fashion. Nowadays, beauty performs a great role in people’s life. Feminine beauty today means slim figures, fashionable clothes, and cosmetics. Such features are emphasized by every type of media, everyday and everywhere. Any woman who is plump is forced to be on a diet which is one of the most important pop icons as well. Masculine handsomeness is stressed by man’s posture and muscular body. Clearly, these characters defy their ordinary roles. Speaking of the couple, and writer as well, Coover asks: “Who can blame them if they see outside themselves symbols of their own?” ( 9, 140 ). Despite the sympathy they gain from the other circus anomalies, they are incapable of entertaining ordinary public, which can only read them in conventional terms, and of earning adequate revenue for their godlike ringmaster. Each then tries to recover his original shape, but in so doing becomes the other’s antagonist. We again meet with an attitude that people today are too absorbed in some values of popular culture. By diving too deeply into them they lose their identities and it becomes very difficult for them to return to the previous status. “A Pedestrian Accident” is a funny, grotesque, bawdy, and sometimes surreal series of events that are reported after the pedestrian Paul is gravely hit by a truck. Although he has lost his ability to speak, his perceptions provide the substance of the story. His neck may be broken, but he is concerned with whether or not the light was
25 green or red when he crossed. The truck carries the advertisement “MAGIC KISS LIPSTICK” (pop icon). As he lies under the huge wheels, a crowd gathers. Initially solicitous, it soon grows bored. However, a series of performers entertain: a doctor illustrates his ineptitude in these matters of life and death (very often it happens in the present reality); a policeman recites appropriate bureaucratic instructions, although at points he seems genuinely moved by the suffering Paul; the truck driver is intent on proving his innocence and the fact that he is a good family man. Best of all is Mrs. Grundy who despite her mistaking Paul for another man makes clear the nature of the luscious world the dying must leave. Like a Greek chorus, she chants a prayer that might well send any modern-day prince to his rest. Full of puns it ends “O mortality! O fatal mischief! Done in! A noble man lies stark and stiff! Delenda est Carthago! Sic transit glans mundi !” ( 9, 189 ). The most compelling aspect of the story is its tone. Paul’s mental and physical pain in his grotesque and imminent death is poignantly and ironically captured in his comments which reinforce both his profound isolation and the indifference of the world about him. The doctor says: “I know it’s not easy to accept death...[but] death begets life”; Paul remarks: “The world was an ephemeral place, it could get away from you in a minute” ( 9, 184 ). The indifference of the doctor, policeman, beggar and other people once more gives us the chance to see the society of our own. This story is a perfect reflection of image of 1960s America. Coover emphasizes such a trait by exaggerating people’s behavior in this story to show that no one cares much about others. Aware of his growing separation from the natural and social world, Paul seeks connection: “What am I without them? Could I even die?” ( 9, 188 ). At the end, Paul is literally left to the dogs, a potential hoard of Charons, and one rips a piece of his flesh. A satanic beggar who is mistaken for a priest waits for him, and the spit he hurls upon Paul becomes the rain of the universe. The real, ugly, lonely, and painful process of death is not yet over. Paul still awaits a comforter: “My God...why hast thou forsaken me?”. For an instant, the earth upended again, and Paul found himself hung on the street.... There’s nobody out there... How much longer must this go on?” ( 9, 205 ). Paul’s final words (allusion to God – the instance of intertextuality) may imply the longing for God’s absolutes and values that were forgotten by people so long ago. One of the most impressive pieces in the book is called “The Babysitter”. Coover’s short story is experimental, written in paragraph-long sections, which present many different points of view and many characters’ fantasies. The story is composed of
26 numerous fragmentary episodes, which describe contradictory versions of events taking place one evening at the Tucker family’s house where the babysitter is, and at a nearby party where Mr. and Mrs. Tucker are spending the evening. A teenaged babysitter’s evening becomes a kaleidoscope of dangerous erotic fantasies – her employer’s, her boyfriend’s, her own. As the narrative progresses, more and more different versions are spawned, closing with a number of alternate endings, for example in which the babysitter is raped and murdered, the babysitter accidentally drowns the baby, or the Tuckers come home to find all is well. Unlike conventional narrative all these versions apparently have actual status instead of a single actual version being privileged over other unrealized virtual ones. The subjective wish worlds of some characters are interpolated into the narration of the actual story versions:
He stares benignly down upon the girl, her skirt rumpled loosely around her thighs. Flushed, frightened, yet excited, she stares back at him. He smiles. His finger touches a knee, approaches the hem. Another couple arrives. Filling up here with people. He wouldn't be missed. (9, 215)
Here Mr. Tucker’s virtual fantasy about what he might do with the babysitter is presented in the same continuous present tense flow as the actual events taking place at the party. It is up to the reader to separate Mr. Tucker’s virtual fantasy from the actual story level of the party filling up with guests; there are no markers in the text itself to distinguish the different ontological levels. Television – a feature of popular culture – plays a great role in this story. TV is one of the most important transmitters of popular culture signs. Sections of narrative taken from the television are also inserted into the running text of the watching babysitter’s reactions to the TV narrative:
The dark man grunts rhythmically, backs off, then plunges suicidally forward - her own knees draw up protectively - the sheriff staggers! caught low! but instead of following through, the other man steps back - a pistol! the dark one has a pistol! the sheriff draws! shoots from the hip! explosions! she clutches her hands between her thighs - no! the sheriff spins! wounded! the dark man hesitates, aims, her legs stiffen toward the set, the sheriff rolls desperately in the straw, fires: dead! the dark man is dead! (9, 214).
27 The TV detective story is presented through the babysitter’s eyes. It is retold very expressively with a help of exclamatory sentences to show the babysitter’s reaction to the actions happening there. Even the girl’s reactions are presented. She is so influenced by television that her body language speaks what she experiences while watching. Television in nowadays life became so important and got entangled with reality that it began to influence it making people mix between real and illusory/virtual scenes. On the whole, Coover’s short story “The Babysitter” with its montage-like technique and discontinuous narrative mimics TV’s form. In the story there is no perceivable boundary line between real and imaginary events. Coover concludes the volume with a series of stage directions called “The Hat Act”. His subject is the ultimate failure of the magic poker or the sentient lens – the artist-magician. What he implies is that after a series of truly fabulous tricks, the artist must capitulate to the jeers and hostility of his highly critical and demanding audience. He is also limited by the very materials he is working with. There is, indeed, a limit to his magic. Initially, the man “dressed as a magician with black cape and black silk hat” gains warm applause and laughter as he busily pulls rabbits, himself, a half-naked woman, and hats out of still other hats, although it is always “a desperate struggle” ( 9, 241 ). These tricks beget newer and more unusual routines. He is able, for example, to decapitate bodies and then to put them together again. But as the performance goes on, his own demands, as well as those of his merciless audience, increase, as do their common hysteria and desperation. The work of art and the task of creating may well begin as an innocent trick, but it ends in mayhem or silence. The magician is destroyed by his own power: “They [the audience] clutch their mouths, turn away, and vomit” ( 9, 255 ). To my mind, the writer wanted to pass the idea that people nowadays are very bored of everything not knowing what to want, like and enjoy, and they search for new modes to entertain themselves, very frequently in unexpected and cruel ways brought by inborn violence that lies in their subconsciousness until it is provoked to come out. Summing up, “The Hat Act” is frightening portraits of the sexually energized artist whose initial powers over the simple and naive turn to madness and violence.
28 d) The Theme of Sexuality
Sexuality is the feature which could be attributed to popular culture. To my mind, the author employed so many techniques and structures about sexuality in his stories to show that it is very deeply ingrained in our everyday life and is an inseparable part of our culture. The underlining theme in “Pricksongs and Descants” is the sexual narrative because Coover wants to emphasize that sexuality is too frequent and too open in today’s life. On the whole, it is not wrong, but the way of using it is abnormal. Sexuality became too naked, too public, and too straightforward now. By exaggerating this theme in his stories, Coover reflects the present society stressing its emptiness. Jack opens up the story trying to cut down his stalk – his phallus. He thinks about his daughter and the stories he has told her, his “mythic fiction of innocent love”. Little Red Riding Hood (“The Door”) attempts to argue that this is a new generation, but Granny knows otherwise, that this is a story that lives on forever. That is what Coover realizes in his fiction. When Little Red Riding Hood goes off into the forest, she is really going off to explore the truth of sexuality. In this story, as well as in “The Door,” Coover takes the motifs of folk literature and explodes them into motivations. “The Gingerbread House” begins as a traditional fairy tale: “Two children follow an old man, dropping breadcrumbs, singing nursery tunes” ( 9, 61 ). Though it seems very simple and innocent at first, it turns to gain a full gamut of colors and sexual undertones in the subsequent chapters: “The old man stoops down, lifts her bright orange apron, her skirt, her petticoats” ( 9, 66 ), “…from her flawless chest two firm breasts with tips bright as rubies.” ( 9, 71), “… they lick at the meringue on the windowsills, kiss each other’s sweetened lips” ( 9, 75 ), or “Laughing gaily, they lick each other clean” ( 9, 75 ). We see the abundance of fairy-symbolism, dark forests, doves, candy houses, fairies and witches; Coover transforms these stock images in such a way that they begin to alter their familiar shapes. In one chapter a dove symbolizing innocence is mutilated by a witch, its heart presented to the boy who becomes unexpectedly aroused. In another the girl rescues the dove and hides it under her petticoat. It is found by the old man, dead, nestling between her thighs. The reader’s gaze is sustained for a long time, the familiar becomes terrible, the terrible erotic. This literal journey is also an allegorical one. The old man tries to lead these two ambiguously innocent children to a greater knowledge of the world by telling them bedtime stories of gingerbread houses
29 and evil witches, but he knows one day they will understand that he has let them down. He will inevitably lead them into the forest then abandon them. They will find the gingerbread cottage and indulge in all its sticky, pulsating delights. To my opinion, it is the only way for the children to prepare enter the adult world. “The Magic Poker” is also permeated with sexual undertones: “The caretaker’s son, genitals hanging hard and heavy, eyes glitter, shrinks back into the shadows as the girl approaches…” ( 9, 27 ) or “…her soft maidenly breasts under the ruffled blouse, her firm haunches gleaming golden over the shadowed grass” ( 9, 31 ), “… not by his barbered buttocks, but by the hair around his genitals: the tight neat curls fan out in both directions like the wings of an eagle, or a wild goose…” ( 9, 39 ) or “…then takes hold of the man and lifts her skirts” (9, 44 ). These extracts prove that now people adore sexuality, feel no shame about nakedness and demonstrate their bodies with delight. In other stories, like “Panel Game” or “The Marker” sexual background is felt as well, as in the television panel game: “Lovely Lady shyly reveals belly” ( 9, 81 ) or in Jason’s imagination: “Nude now, she moves lightly about the room…” ( 9, 88 ) and “He removes his clothes, hooking his trousers over the back of the armchair and tossing the other things on the seat cushion” ( 9, 89 ). In “J’s Marriage” the author makes things all the more human by showcasing the sexual undertones. For example: “And that night, in feverish exultation, he buried his face in her breasts and caressed them, and she allowed it.” ( 9, 115 ), “…a stroking of his naked back while he was bent over his lathe, a pressing of his hand to her breast…” ( 9, 116 ), “With trembling fingers he tore off his shirt, ran to her, pressed her to his chest… tearfully kissed her ears, her hair, her eyes, her neck, her breasts…” ( 9,116 ), or “…she began to bathe her breasts with a small damp sponge…he took the sponge from her hands…washed her breasts…he undressed her…” ( 9, 118-119 ). The narrator of “The Elevator” has many different moods and he displays his moods by things that he can relate to, like a horror story or a love story. Coover uses ideas taken from visual media (TV as a pop icon) to tell different stories in the mind of the narrator in “The Elevator,” each one using the framework of a popular type of movie or television fiction. Telling the story with a help of television makes it more realistic. The story is about a man, who is essentially a loser. Every day he shows up for work and takes the elevator with everyone else, and he dreams up scenarios that might happen on the elevator. His imagination starts: “His gaze coolly courses her belly, her pinched and belted waist, past her taut breasts, meets her excited stare. She breathes
30 deeply, her lips parted. They embrace. Her breasts plunge softly against him. Her mouth is sweet” ( 9, 128 ). The man gets braver: “You may lie on me. My body will absorb part of the impact.” Her hair caresses his cheeks, her buttocks press like a sponge into his groin. In love, moved by his sacrifice, she weeps” ( 9, 130 ). “To calm her, he clasps her soft buttocks, strokes them soothingly… She has removed her skirt.” (9, 133 ). His fantasies develop in full freedom: “Their naked bellies slap together, hands grasp, her vaginal mouth closes spongelike on his rigid organ. Their lips lock, tongues knot” ( 9, 134 ). This story can be a horror story or a sappy love story. Coover shows how these different forms of stories merge together to form what we call life. In a way, the man in “The Elevator” is acting like his own Jack, distracting himself with stories, while continuing on the path to his ultimate demise. He may be on the elevator ride to death, but he will at least entertain himself with other, more interesting lives. The characters in “Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl” are highly stylized like the facecards: Swede, the taciturn guide, Quenby, his island-lonely wife, Ola, their nubile daughter, Carl, the fisherman out from the city. Carl, a businessman on a fishing holiday, either sleeps with one of his fishing guide’s women or he does not; if he sleeps with one of them, it is either Swede’s wife Quenby or his daughter Ola; whichever one he sleeps with (if he actually does sleep with one of them), Swede either finds out about it or he does not. Carl describes “... her flowering breasts under the orange shirt, her young hips packed snugly in last year’s bright white shorts, her soft girlish thighs, slender calves: these were not Swede’s” ( 9, 152 ). This plot disregards the later thoughts of Carl as he sits in the boat thinking about Ola as Swede’s “...skinny little daughter, looked more like Swede” ( 9, 165 ). Next, Carl thinks alone, “far from your wife, nobody even to play poker with, a man does foolish things sometimes ... for example, awakened perhaps by footfalls of deer outside the cabin, or the whistle of squirrels, the cry of loons, unable now to sleep. You step out, barefoot, to urinate by the front wall of the lodge. There seems to be someone swimming down in the bay ... Hardly thinking you slip off your underwear, glance at the house, then creep out on the rock beside her. “How’s the water?” you whisper ... drugged by the fantasy of the moment...” ( 9, 163- 166 ). The story suggests that man’s thoughts almost all the time go round the same theme – sexuality. Whatever he does, he notices himself thinking about women, nakedness, kissing, and making love. This fact demonstrates people’s vacuity and passion for physical love once again.
31 As the girl in “The Milkmaid of Samaniego” walks alone toward the arched bridge, past “oaks and cypresses”, her breasts appear fuller and “her hips broaden perceptibly”; her movements are gliding and assured. Indeed, “as she walks her skirt flutters and twists as though caught by some breeze, though there is none”. Immediately after this, she encounters the old man. “No, no! the maid, the maid !” writes Coover whimsically ( 9, 176 ), as though one expected the man to harm her. Nothing happens. The maid exposes a bemused smile, her vessel for carrying the milk, a pitcher on her head, undisturbed. Suddenly, it transforms into what it or she really is, a carrier of fertile eggs: “a kind of internal energy seems to take possession of the eggs”. Chickens materialize, which become hens, which then become sows and all the animals of the traditional barnyard. Finally, a “tall lad, dark and fine-boned with flashing-brown eyes” appears and “gazes” at the girl “in wonderment” ( 9, 177 ). Yet, as Coover’s reader might expect, he too breaks out of his mythic role, as he virtually accosts the girl. He grabs her and the pitcher falls; the animals disappear. At last, it is the dirty, old man who comes to her rescue. He, the poet, magician, and pied piper, then introduces her to the world of experience and “midnight suns”. Even the sad and grotesquely cruel story “A Pedestrian Accident” is marked by sexually colored strokes. No matter that the man is hit by the car the manners and behavior of the passers-by are not influenced by that: “She cupped her plump hands under her breasts and hitched her abundant hips heavily to one side.” ( 9 ,193 ). One more story full of nakedness, fantasies and passion is “The Babysitter”. Imagination starts: “The babysitter’s blouse is pulling out her skirt, showing a patch of bare tummy: the target. “I’ll spank!” ( 9, 209 ), “Her eyes close when he kisses her. Her breasts, under both their hands, are soft and yielding.” ( 9, 214 ), “Her soft wet breasts rise and fall in the water, and her tummy looks pale and ripply.” ( 9, 215 ), “Bent over slightly, buttocks flexed, teats swaying, holding on to the edge of the tub.” ( 9, 217 ), “Mark is kissing her. Jack is under the blanket, easing her panties down over her squirming hips. Her hand is in his pants, pulling it out, pulling it toward her, pulling it hard. She is doubled over, against her knees, between his legs.” ( 9, 222 ), “She weighs her breasts in the palms of her hands, watching herself in the bathroom mirror…” ( 9, 223 ), “He squeezes her close between his thighs, pulls her back toward him, one hand sliding down her tummy between her legs.” ( 9, 225 ), “He’s pushing something between her legs, hurting her.” ( 9, 235 ).
32 Cruelty and sexuality get entangled one with another in the last story of the collection “The Hat Act”: “Large man reaches inside lovely assistant’s tight green shorts, rolls his eyes, and grins obscenely. She grimaces and wiggles rear briefly.” ( 9, 251 ), “Lovely assistant re-enters, smiling, dressed as before in high feathery hat, tight green halter, green shorts, net stockings, high heels.” ( 9, 251 ), “Pressing hands down against hat brim, she wriggles and twists until one naked breast pops out of hat” ( 9, 253 ).
e) The Theme of Violence
One more feature of popular culture frequently found in “Pricksongs and Descants” is violent and cruel human behavior. Almost every story is marked by it. In “The Magic Poker” the main characters seem to be possessed by Evil: “I tear the light switches, gut the mattresses, smash the windows, and shit on the bathroom floor. I rust the pipes, kick in the papered walls, unhinge doors. … In fact, it’s a pleasure.” ( 9, 22 ), “I have pulled out its wires, chipped and yellowed its ivory keys, and cracked its green paint.” ( 9, 23 ), “…because they just want to destroy! Lust!” ( 9, 29 ), “The caretaker’s son bounds about the guest cabin, holding himself with one hand, smashing walls and busting windows with the other, grunting happily as he goes.” ( 9, 29 ), “He hops up on the piano, finds wires inside, and pulls them out. He holds his genitals with one hand and rips out the wires with the other, grunting with delight.” ( 9, 38 ). Violence like sexuality is very pervasive in today’s life. In my opinion, the writer wanted to stress how the people, especially youth, nowadays employ violence in their everyday actions. There are very few sacred things left if there are some left at all. People tend to damage and destroy things and do this without any scruples, even feeling pleasure. There is also much cruelty in “The Gingerbread House” in the scene with a dove (the symbol of innocence). “She cackles silently, then suddenly screeches madly, seizes a passing dove, and tears its heart out” ( 9, 64 ), “The boy falls upon it, his hands bloodied by beak and claws” ( 9, 66 ), “His way is marked, not by breadcrumbs, but by dead doves, ghostly white in the empty night.” ( 9, 73 ). In some places cruelty may play a different role. In my opinion, this scene was marked by violent undertones in order to stress the difficulty of passing from one period of life to another. As it was stated earlier, the way to adulthood is always with barriers and paved with bloody rocks.
33 “They hold him up against the table and the police officer, without ceremony, pulls Jason’s genitals out flat on the tabletop and pounds them to a pulp with the butt of his gun. “Now get rid of that fucking corpse!” ( 9, 91 ). Such is the denouement of “The Marker”. Even the police officers, the ‘must-be’ guards of social norms, distort them with no boundaries. A similar situation is presented through the policeman’s words after a car accident about half-dead man in “A Pedestrian Accident” that speak about him as ‘a guardian of moral values’ louder than his behavior: “Let them watch if they want to … it will help keep the flies off him” ( 9, 203 ). The beggar’s attitude and actions are even more eloquent: “Of course…not a priest at all: an old beggar. Waiting for the clothes when he died” ( 9, 205 ). The life of today seems have lost all the moral values. “In a Train Station” is the example of violence explosion. As the main character Alfred again waits for the 10:18 Express, which will never arrive, he spends his time with the stationmaster, a satanic instructor performing a series of ritualized activities. These range from the most banal conversations on the “good” life, “good” wife, “good” weather, and “good” food to the murder of a drunk stranger. Afterward, the stationmaster resets the clock to 9:27, which is when the story begins. “Waiting is to experience the action of [“accursed”] time”, where “nothing real ever happens”, but Coover interrupts the story with: “Now, assuming both Alfred and the Express Train to be real” ( 9, 99 ), which introduces a metafictional dimension. The story is full of violence and cruelty: “As though struggling against an unseen hand, he presses the knifeblade downward, touches it finally to the man’s throat, but, with a short anguished cry, withdraws it” ( 9, 103 ), “Stationmaster severs the tall stranger’s head with three quick strokes” ( 9, 103 ). Fight and killing seem to be natural actions. The most shocking story is “The Wayfarer”. The main characters’ behavior is unjustifiable: “I unstrapped my rifle from my back and poked the barrel under his nose. I lowered the barrel and punched it into his chest.” ( 9, 121 ), “I shouted down at him. I ordered him to stand. I ordered him to lie down. I shook the rifle in front of his nose. I ordered him to remove his hat. I fired a shot over his head. I kicked dust into his face. I stomped down on his old papery shoes with my boots. I ordered him to look at me. I ordered him to lift one finger. I screamed at him. I broke his nose with my rifle butt. I ordered him to sit. I ordered him to stare vacantly. I ordered him not, under threat of death, to focus his eyes. I ordered the blood to flow from his pulpy nose.” ( 9, 122 ), “I shot him in the chest. Only by strenuous self-control was I able to restrain myself from
34 tearing his clothes off to inspect the wound.” ( 9, 123 ) and finally “I grew annoyed and shot him in the head” ( 9, 124 ). Even the ‘must-be-joyful’ story “The Hat Act” is not cheerful at all. On the contrary, it is cruel and obscene: “Second leaps to feet, smashes first in nose. Loud cheers. First kicks second brutally in face. First smashes second back against wall, knees him in groin. First clips second with heel of hand behind ear. Second crumples to floor, dead. Prolonged cheering and applause.” ( 9, 250 ), “Magician pitches deflated corpse of second large man into wings” ( 9, 251). At the end of the act even the audience is disgusted with the show: “They clutch their mouths, turn away, and vomit.” ( 9, 255 ).
VI. The Role of Intertextuality in Coover’s Stories
Coover’s art of “rewriting” in the fields of some important literary genres range from folk/fairy tales, exemplary novellas, detective stories, effective history, theology, parody, inter-/hypertexuality. His fictions examine life in the fairy tale, but by rewriting the archetypes that inhabit the fairy tale, the part with the wolf is no longer what the reader may expect from a traditional fairy tale. Fairy tales are powerful narrative tools. They are the basic frameworks of the burgeoning imagination. When people are growing up their first exposure to the land of “make-believe” comes in the form of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Coover’s treatment of fairy tales as well as fables and scriptures makes up a good portion of his fiction, but it is exemplary in his collection. He admits that he has an iconoclastic streak, as he continuously deconstructs familiar myths, fairy tales, biblical stories, and political systems, saying ( 1999, 1 ):
“I have always had the feeling that we are born into a world dreamt up by other people, that we find ourselves living in other people's dreams, and only by challenging those dreams do we have a chance to wake up for a moment. I have spoken often about this confrontation with the stories that govern our lives. I am not out to wreck everything. If a story still has validity and vitality, fine. But many of the most powerful stories, or the stories that keep some people in power at the expense of others, are dead if not dangerous, and need to be deflated, revised, destroyed. What’s more, it’s fun.”
35 Here the author again expresses the idea of challenging the stories. We should not be passive just taking these stories as something simply imposed on us. Only having them in our minds makes no sense at all. These stories should not possess and govern us; we have to learn how to use them wisely in order to get some advantage from them. In other words, a man has to violate and oppose the well-established norms and dogmas that prevent his personality from maturing. Coover’s metafictional forays become a way of freeing up the inertia of the traditional forms. He subverts the fairytale paradigm, exposes the ambiguous status of the seemingly ‘moral’ tale. We see a lot of symbols like dark forests, doves, candy houses, fairies and witches which gain different forms and meanings when transformed by Coover. Bacchilega ( 1999, 1 ) states that fairy tales “are thus produced and consumed to accomplish a variety of social functions in multiple contexts and in more or less explicitly ideological ways”. Cope ( 1999, 1 ) mentions how all these stories are being told by “the voice of authority,” and therefore it is that voice of authority, and the child’s “absolute abdication to that absolute authority” that gives these archetypes their power. The child who is hearing these characters and ideas for the first time is hearing them straight from the mouth of authority, and that adds something powerful, something magical to the ideas. Fairy tales are the first major stories that work their ways into a child’s imagination, so their reactions to these stories are much different than any other stories they will ever hear, because these stories are untouched. Coover realizes in his stories, especially those that involve archetypes that who is telling the story, who is the voice of authority, is the most important aspect of the story. Coover rewrites myths and tales and explores his willingness to break the frame of his fiction so as to include both fantastic and realistic elements. The writer essentially asks his readers to constantly question the authority of the writer, and not to let any archetype be accepted without an introspective look. Though there is room in the text that by disregarding simply a few phrases and words a reader can make the story understandable. In the story there is no perceivable boundary line between “real” and imaginary events. Narrators are usually seeking to ‘de-originate’ the text – to demonstrate that it reflects many voices.
36 Speaking about his writing style Coover says:
“It's all material that's close to the mythic content of our lives, and is therefore an important part of our day-to- day fiction-making process. The pop-culture we absorb in childhood - and I'd include all the pop-religions as well - goes on affecting the way we respond to the world or talk about it for the rest of our lives. Sexed-up fairy tales, stories refracted through drug-smeared mirrors, nonfictional forms prostituted into novels, the domestic novel turned on its head and emptied, finally, of its dear cheese”. (1999, 1)
In other words, everything what is connected with the mythology of our life is very important. We gain signs and codes of popular culture from the early days of our lives and these signs affect our way of thinking and behavior all life long. They help us see the world in one or another color. Coover’s medium in this collection is essentially that of the fairy tale. Indeed in “The Gingerbread House”, “The Door: A Prologue of Sorts” and “The Magic Poker” we are confronted by familiar stock characters: Red Riding Hood, Jack, the wolf and the mother. However, Coover stretches these characters and the image of the classical fairy tale beyond their traditional framework in order to show the straightforward moral lessons. Coover’s “Pricksongs and Descants” is a piece of experimental writing. It not only challenges ideas about fiction and authorship, but also about reading itself. Coover rewrites Little Red Riding Hood, gives us a beautiful new Hansel and Gretel, adds to our knowledge of Joseph and Mary, injects as much bitterness as flood into the story of Noah, leans toward goat-boy allegory in a tale titled “Morris in Chains”, etc., and at all times contrives to counter, even to destroy, the meaning and power of the original. Coover himself remarks, in a dedicatory preface addressed to Cervantes and placed with predictable perversity well within the body of the book:
“The novelist uses familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms and to conduct the reader to the real, away from mystification to clarification, away from magic to maturity, away from mystery to revelation” (9, 79).
37 “The Door: A Prologue of Sorts” is Coover’s first short story in his collection. It opens the collection to the reader rather like doors do in Alice in Wonderland: as well as providing a physical entrance to the body of Coover’s work. It is a great example of his exploration into narrative gaming. The days of two-dimensional paper-doll characters are already gone. Here the author reconstructs a traditional fairy tale “Red Riding Hood” by giving the reader a vibrant Little Red Riding Hood happily skipping along into adulthood instead of to grandmother’s house. Also, he transforms “Beauty and the Beast” by portraying an aging Beauty who once was in love with a beast. This affects the narration by excluding the omniscient narrator and moving into first person thoughts and feelings. We, the readers, see Jack’s indecision about educating his daughter, Red, about the monstrosities existing in their fairy tale world. Coover includes granny’s bitterness and tenacity as she describes her unhappy ever after with the Beast who never became the prince. It is said that the old forms of traditional tales give new colors and ideas to better disclose reality. Another product of “The Door” involves exposition of the sexual undertones found in most fairy tales. Primarily fairy tales were parables to children concerning how to behave, whom to trust, and how to love. However, times have changed; people need new modes to gain the same results. In such a way, by searching for the news ways, Coover transforms fairy tales sharpening every point, which is necessary to be noticed for the present-day society. Such reconstructed fairy tales serve the role to inform and warn the people about their behavior, as well as, encourage revalue their values. In traditional tales the female reaching puberty often slept through it or was locked in the tower until she was ready to be rescued and live “Happily Ever After”. Here Granny’s life beyond her marriage to the Beast who never became a prince is filled with the pain of his “thick quick cock” and the embarrassment as he “dropped a public turd or two” ( 9, 16 ). Similarly, pubescent Little Red with a “bit of new fuzz on her pubes and juice in the little bubbies” skips on down the lane toward her own adulthood, her own ever after ( 9, 16 ). As she approaches the symbolic door, which in “The Gingerbread House” is red and pulsing, and then decides to pass through it, the reader can only infer her initiation into adulthood through blood and barriers. In the first story of the collection, “The Door: A Prologue of Sorts,” Coover starts with an instant demonstration of the very specious nature of fairy tales. Fairy tales have very
38 tenuous meanings. This sense that the ideas that readers think are being taught by the tales are not the actual ideas at all is present in “The Door”. At the beginning of the story we meet Jack who is suffering an existential crisis in the wake of his coup over the giant. Chopping nubile trees down and ruminating on the intentions of his creator, he realizes the paradox that he has become the Ogre, jealously protecting the innocence of the child now approaching the door of the old wood cabin. He fells a tree and a nest falls to the ground. He has told her the stories, “he’d given her her view of the world […] and because of her gaiety and his love, his cowardly, lonely love, he had left out the terror” ( 9, 14 ). Of course, there is only one intact egg left in the nest. Beauty has no sentimental rubbish. Indeed it is she, not the wolf that lies awaiting the girl with the basket. She warns of the hidden snares embedded in the old tales. “The Door” is structured to combine two modes of experimental form, primarily the changing point of view. The story begins with Jack/Giant lamenting his role in his daughter, Red’s, movement through the tale. He wonders if he should have warned her of the perils to come, or let her figure it out. There is nothing striking about the presentation of these thoughts, but when Coover slips into the Granny’s diction it seems weird, as punctuation and capitalization are absent. The sentences run together in a breathless and hurried way. She is vulgar and brash; she shifts to the innocent Red, who vaguely hints toward her knowledge of the ramifications of her passing through the doorway into her own tale. Coover portrays a pubescent girl eager for the next stage in her life but terribly unprepared. There is no wolf in this odd mixture of fairy tales “Jack and the Beanstalk”, “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Beauty and the Beast”, but Coover tells us that it is the point. There is no need for a wolf because Jack himself is the wolf. He is the wolf, the woodsman, and the Beast, just as the Granny is Little Red Riding Hood and the Granny, in an unending circle. They are living an unending cycle of stories. In each story, Little Red Riding Hood will come, so will the wolf, and so will the woodsman. Such a change of characters and their roles may suggest the multifacedness of the present man. Another example of intertextuality is Coover’s story “The Gingerbread House”. In this story the author rewrites the fairy tale about Hansel and Gretel. When Coover introduces the reader to the situation in “The Gingerbread House,” the reader’s prior
39 knowledge of the Hansel and Gretel story lets Coover play games with the story without having to fill the reader in on what is happening in the plot. In the original story the father of two siblings brings them to the woods and the children find the Gingerbread House of the witch. The revelation of “The Gingerbread House” is similar to the original one, but here the boy and the girl, are being taken on a trail leading to sexual discovery; the same sexual discovery that Little Red Riding Hood finds for herself at the end of the Woods. In this transformed fairy tale the Witch gains a different role like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood; she appears almost exactly like the Granny in “The Door. Her role here is to instruct the children in the loss of sexual innocence. The father in this story acts much like Jack in “The Door”. He is a patriarchal figure lying to his children. The father in “The Gingerbread House” knows what is going on exactly, and still he takes his children down the path. The path leads to the gingerbread house, a house where the boy finds a “peppermint-stick chimney” which he “comes sliding down in a rainbarrel of vanilla pudding” and they both marvel at the door. This door is “heart-shaped and blood-stone red, its burnished surface gleaming in the sunlight. Shining like a ruby, like hard cherry candy, and pulsing softly, radiantly” ( 9, 75 ). The gingerbread essentially is a “garden of sexuality”. The children even realize that this is a place where children may arrive, “but, they say, none leave” (9, 65 ). After dropping them off, the father has a change of heart, and uses one of the wishes he has in his possession to send them back to the beginning of their journey, hoping there can be a different ending. This, of course, is all for naught. One cannot stop the natural progression. The father and Jack may conspire to keep their children young and innocent, but they must know that at the end of the woods in the gingerbread house, there awaits a Granny/Witch for all of us to be sent to the next stage in our development. This is the motivation that Coover discovers in the fairy tales rewritten in his fiction, and that is what he brings out in his work. “The Magic Poker” is one more story that contains many elements borrowed from fairy tales. On one of the most basic levels, Coover brings together details from other stories, which evoke specific associations in the reader, and then he transforms them: bright red doors, green and shiny snakes, black spiders with red hearts, clearings in deep and damp forests, protective and instructive grannies, and stiff black cloths. Narrative elements from legend, folk and fairy tales along with plenty of archetypal characters appear, for instance, the elegant and paternal lover versus the uncouth, bestial one; the sad, inhibited, and suffering sister and her more competent and
40 extroverted counterpart. Coover invents two sets of apparently contrasting men and women and, of course, the narrator, all of who merge at points and then separate. Each character is both totally free from and yet tied to specific significances and contexts over which one has no control. The girl with the gold pants is the girl with the yellow dress which then becomes a rusty dress; her function to her surrogate self (sister) is like that of the rusty poker to the narrator-artist. After a fantasized grandmother tells her children “I’ll tell you the story of “The Magic Poker”, a series of disconnected historical and even contradictory statements follow, for example, that the island was founded by wealthy Minnesotans, by woodland creatures, and so on. The following implies the broad panorama of private and public experience that the story treats; meaning goes beyond traditional logic:
“Once upon a time, two sisters visited a desolate island. They walked its paths with their proclivities and scruples, dreaming their dreams and sorrowing their sorrows. They scared a snake and probably a bird or two.... They wrote their names above the stone fireplace in the hexagonal loggia and shat in the soundbox of an old green piano. One of them did anyway; the other one couldn’t get her pants down” (9, 41).
Emphasizing high and popular culture collision, signs and words often float in referential ambiguity, sometimes attaching to corresponding lines of meaning or feeling, like tentative musical harmonies. Each character functions similarly and is thus “descanted” with contrasting and counterpointing details. Time sequences of past and present are also descanted. The nameless girl who can’t remove her gold pants is a single detail that recaps the entire story, but major motifs repeat in isolated details in any given paragraph. Typically, this gold pants detail suggests male/female complementarity, an emblem of Coover’s continual search for or evocation of the mind/body or material/spiritual union, the word in search of union with the Word. This girl becomes all women – the “beautiful young princess” in another tale recalled, the sister Karen, and the grandmother playing the piano to two children (one of whom is she). Similarly, the prince becomes all men, combining the innocent and the vulgar, the sensitive, sensuous, elegant, and paternal qualities that are attributed to the different males in the story – the Prospero and Caliban figures (owned from W. Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest”) and the narrator himself, who is then ultimately identified with the poker. The poker is girl’s salvation, although she fears and yet caresses it. Indeed,
41 there are half a dozen explanations in time and fantasy of the girl’s activities with the poker, for example, she kisses it and a suave, elegant man appears; she kisses it and nothing occurs. Everyone’s fantasy, legend, reality, fear, and pleasure combine. Coover transforms not only fairy tales; he also experiments with other types of stories. In “The Brother” he employs religious facts about Noah and his Arc. The story is presented by the nameless farmer-narrator who explains in a sort of stream of consciousness how he has always helped and even rescued his “buggy” brother, Noah, twenty years his senior. Now, for six months, he has ignored his farm and pregnant wife to help cut the pine trees for the odd boat that Noah, for some weird and probably crazy reason, is building. Like Noah’s neighbors, the narrator cannot resist Noah’s “weaseling” for help. After completing the boat, the brother returns to Noah’s house for a bit of wood to build a cradle (ironic parallel to the ship) for his expected child, little Anna or Nathaniel. There he discovers an ark already housing animal couples. As the rains begin, the brother now back home and his wife celebrate: their crops will flourish, and they may finally spend some time indoors. As the rains continue, however, it becomes clear that the crops, the livestock may drown. The brother runs to Noah to ask for temporary rescue in the ark. When the story ends, he is left out in the rains, weeping and begging for aid from the selfish and crazed. Noah, who sails off, is totally indifferent to the tragedy behind. Having observed his wife dead, the brother goes off to the top of a hill, which is a sardonic reference to Moses, to await his similar fate. By this story Coover bitterly challenged the selfishness and cruelty inherent in the original Bible story – the nature of a God who would design such a scheme and the “elect” Noah who works for God’s love. He operates an additional and bitter irony through the story, alluding brothers to God colloquially. Noah asks his brother victim, for instance, if he will help him “for God’s sake” ( 9, 92 ), and later the brother says: “by God the next day the rains” still come. In a final irony, Coover suggests that the only “divinity” one should revere is his brother. The story suggests the idea that there is no God or people have started to believe so. “J’s Marriage” is one more transformed biblical story. It is similar to “The Door” because of Joseph’s desire for his virginal bride. He describes his artistry as a lover, his deep love and patience for his new bride, and his sheer appreciation for her beautiful body, only to be upstaged by god and the Holy Spirit. Coover’s “J’s Marriage” contains large paragraphs of diction from Joseph. Every Christian has taken his perceptions for granted as miraculous. The paragraphs
42 are long and sentences short. It reads much like a police account, all the words are there but emotion is somewhat detached. In a similar matter, “J’s Marriage” invokes many allegorical traditions into the tale. Instead of god-like narration of the Bible, Coover brings Joseph’s voice to light. Here the reader witnesses Joseph’s questioning his love for the “intelligent and imaginative” Mary, despite his age and that he is “far more broadly educated” ( 9, 112 ). This tale twists and turns as Joseph debates his love for the Virgin Mary and later marriage proposal, as well as his subsequent anger toward a god who would “do such a useless and, well, yes, in a way, almost vulgar thing” ( 9, 117 ) in impregnating his wife before they consummated the marriage. Again Coover challenges familiar and formal traditional narrative in a playful and humorous way in order to reflect reality in a more palpable way. Coover explains the role of popular tales and stories from the Bible in our “post era” saying: “…the stories have invaded us and colonized themselves inside us. We can be a generous and tolerant and unquestioning host, or we can challenge them and refuse to be their mindless servants. Can’t easily analyze these things away once they get inside. Have to wrestle with them on their home turf, make them show their true shapes, convert them to something we can live with.”
The old man from the story “The Wayfarer” is drawn with numerous archetypal details: he is sitting on an “old milestone” and wearing coats that are “thick and many”; he is silent, unmoving, approving, and reproving. He is a tabula rasa for both the reader and speaker when the wayfarer refuses the speaker’s many encouragements for verbal or physical response. In utter frustration, the speaker shoots him. Raw experience, compelling, formidable, and irreducible to words is violated by the speaker trying to fill his blank memo book. Close to death after his coats are stripped he utters a random assemblage of fragmented speech “with neither [traditional] punctuation nor sentence structure”: “Just a ceaseless eruption of obtuse language”, ( 9, 123 ). With blood dripping from him he speaks “of constellations, bone structures, mythologies, and love ...of belief and lymph nodes, of excavations, categories, and prophecies Harmonics! Foliations! Etymology! Impulses! Suffering!...Immateriality patricide ideations heatstroke virtue predication” ( 9, 124 ). Having assaulted the world of possibility, the speaker can now rejoin the death flow of ordinary society, like a linguistic part of speech that has performed its function.
43 The story is about the inadequacy of capturing the richness of experience with language or any other structures. “The Milkmaid of Samaniego” is a magical tale of metamorphosis which recalls Coover’s earlier trio of characters: the innocent girl, lad, and old man now set in a pastoral world. Challenging traditional myth and symbolism, Coover reminds the reader, as he introduces the girl: “It’s almost as though there has been some...precise structure of predetermined images...before our senses have located her in the present combination of shapes and colors”, ( 9, 175 ). As he presents his now grotesque old man, he also spells out the traditional reader’s expectations of him. Suddenly everything changes, and we have before us a lusty, self-sufficient girl, an aggressively sexual, male youth, and a rescuing and poetic, dirty old man. The old man/poet introduces the mystery of experience and the wonder of imagination to the girl as his language and gestures stretch into wonderful new shapes. He reaches into his pocket for coins, which transform into “nothing less than a whole private universe of midnight suns”; her pitcher has been violated and its milk scattered on the earth. Yet the story ends with an image of her urn breaking into a “thousand tiny fragments”. With the milk soaking the earth, a new covenant is born. Coover writes:
“The pitcher like the girl weaves, leans, then finally rolls over in a gently curving arc, bursting down its rust- colored veins into a thousand tiny fragments...not unlike the broken shells of white eggs. Many of these fragments remain in the grass at the foot of the bridge, while others tumble silently down the hill into the eddying stream below” (9, 179 ).
Once again, the initiation ritual involves the bonding of the old and new, the embrace of black flags and ruby red cherry doors. Another example of intertextuality is Coover’s story “The Babysitter”. Visual media which is a very important pop icon helps to disclose the high-low culture collision in the story. The main character herself is a contemporary archetype. There are certain ideas of the babysitter that have entered into the collective cultural consciousness. This is especially evident in the urban legends being told about babysitters in the 1960s, soon before Coover wrote “Pricksongs and Descants”. The most popular legend involves a babysitter who is busy watching television when the phone rings. The voice on the other line says, “I’m upstairs with the children, you’d better come up.” She ignores it, but after the second time, she calls the operator, who
44 asks her to hold on the line so they can trace the line. She does, and after he calls again and hangs up, she receives a phone call, warning her that the calls originated from inside the house. After making her exit, the police arrive to find the murderer upstairs along with the two, now dead, children. This tale is essentially, what Coover uses as the background for his story “The Babysitter”. Most people must have been familiar with the story, so when they would read something about a babysitter, the story must be at least in the back of their minds. As Gordon says, the telling of the story is in the manner of, “the ultimate pricksong” ( see Tsai ). We may draw a conclusion that a traditional myth about babysitters should be violated.
VII. Metafiction in Coover’s Stories
This chapter aims at the instances of metafiction that help to disclose high-low culture collision noticeable in “Pricksongs and Descants” by making the readers feel uncomfortable either about the structure of some stories or about the way of presenting them. Such discomforts are very noticeable for the readers and usually have a hidden message inside which is meant by the author. The first story in this collection of short stories marked by metafictional elements is “Magic Poker”. Here we meet a piece of writing in which the author is a character. From time to time we see narrative footnotes, which continue the story commenting on it . “I wander the island, inventing it” ( 9, 20 ), announces Coover’s writer-magician, inviting the reader, whom he also invents, into his island paradise – the blank page upon which his artistic shaping will materialize. This Xanadu of green snakes and dogwood trees and of love and isolation is not only the product of his imagination; it also possesses autonomy of its own: “I sometimes wonder if it was not...one of my characters who invented me” ( 9, 27 ). The island is also created by the reader. “But anything can happen” ( 9, 20 ), the narrator explains, establishing the mood of his twenty-five-page chronicle. Two sisters, two men, a world of burgeoning and decaying objects, a poker that is primarily the magical and generative pen, magic wand, and phallus, populate the island which, even within his fictionalization of it, is both real and fantasized, a fantasy within a fantasy. Everyone’s imagined and real actions and thoughts weave in and out of everyone else’s. Each is transformed and is the
45 transformer, the artist and his object, both in control and helpless in the continuously generative linguistic universe. The author establishes touch points in place and history: “My invented island is really taking its place in world geography...like the old Dahlberg place on Jackfish Island”, and then he immediately explodes these within a timeless background or within the absurd, self-conscious admission of his metafictional role: “Yes, and perhaps tomorrow I will invent Chicago and Jesus Christ and the history of the moon” ( 9, 40 ). Comments continue through the whole story. They speak even about the structure of the story. “Can the end be in the middle?” writes Coover, to which he quickly answers, “Yes, yes it always is” ( 9, 33 ). It is an appropriate description of this continually evolving story. Near the conclusion, in fact, the narrator creates a number of statements that sound like introductions to a story we have already experienced, as though to remind us of our inability to finalize anything. The Coover-narrator is always prominent, the magician waving his wand before his audience, reminding it of his powers: “I have brought two sisters to this invented island, and shall, in time, send them home again”. As though speaking of the built-in limitations of words he adds: “It might even be argued that I have invented their common parents. No, I have not. We have options that may, I admit, seem strangely limited to some” ( 9, 25 ). At times, the author clarifies a wishful fantasy, for example, that the girl would succumb to the beast as well as the prince, or he interrupts the narrative with speculations on meaning: “The tall man...has been deeply moved by the desolation of this island. And yet, it is only the desolation of artifact, is it not?” ( 9, 28 ). He even comments on the mechanics of fiction writing: “Wait a minute.... What happened to that poker?...I had something going there, archetypal and even maybe beautiful, a blend of eros and wisdom, sex and sensibility, music and myth” ( 9, 30 ). The writer uses such techniques in order to sound more realistic and convince the readers. Readers here become spellbound by Coover’s linguistic enchantments. Coover himself called this story the anchor of the volume. In the metafiction of ”Klee Dead” the writer is subject, although he tells us he is going to write about the unfortunate suicide of Klee, whom he neither knows nor is interested in. What is fascinating is the pace of his report, with all its funny and odd digressions and with its alternating self-mocking and serious comments. The story reflects the speaker’s response to death, and its inner structure of climax and
46 denouement is the result of his emotional seesaw. All of this is set against Coover’s evocation of the shift of everyday, experiential reality, which inevitably propels the narrator’s digressions. Everything is finally juxtaposed to the single, final denominator motivating the entire story – the present reality of death. First, the speaker is angry as he observes that office bureaucrats coldly record Klee’s suicide and that bystanders are actually titillated by it. But as he focuses on single responses, he free-associates to the constancy of human needs. “Klee Dead” deals with the writer’s and world’s fascination, indifference, morbid curiosity, and fear toward the final mystery of death. This story is about Wilbur Klee’s death. The question is raised: “What is life, after all, but a caravan of lifelike forgeries?” ( 9, 111 ). People may adapt to death and to time and loneliness, but they share a profound yearning for love, work, and family. The recluse Millicent Gee, for example, lives with an old ram, a stagnant aquarium of dead fish, and “interfiliated’ cats. She has a boy, but he comes around only for “seasonal devotions”. The narrator speculates on Millicent’s life “impulsively driven to load up empty spaces, to plump some goddamn thing, any object, real, imagined, or otherwise, where now there might happily be nothing” ( 9, 105 ). This is exactly what Coover is doing in the story, filling his spaces, as people do their houses or lives, with rituals or explanations to deal with the inexplicable. It seems impossible to explain Klee’s suicide, nor pregnant woman’s unnecessarily feared venereal disease, which became a “reason” for her guilt-ridden husband’s suicide. Yet the man killed himself. The only truth about any of them is “he ...is...dead.... The proof...here in the pudding” ( 9, 106 ). What remains at the end for both the dead and those surviving, is the rubbish of metaphor, a few of Klee’s personal effects, as well as “the farts” of the detached people who cleaned up after his mess. Finally, given this form of story and its low “entertainment” level, an apology seems appropriate: “I’m sorry”, remarks the narrator. ‘What can I say?...Here, take these [circus] tickets” ( 9, 111 ). The story is impressive in its range of tones. The first two paragraphs, for example, reveal not only the narrator’s need for connection but also his essential and inevitable isolation. He would place himself and language between experience and the fact of death; he would attempt the impossible.
47 “Klee, Wilbur Klee, dies. Is dead, rather. I know I know.... In some languages, it is possible to say: to die oneself...cunningly planting the idea that one’s own hand was perhaps involved.... But unluckily I don’t know any of these other languages.... And even if I did...it would be inconceivable I should know them well” (9, 104 ).
Language reflects the limits of human comprehension, as it also reveals the human frustration in touching meaning. The speaker in “The Wayfarer” accepts and reaches a climax; he then prepares himself, like the leper, for the equally difficult task of seducing his reader, equally fearful and innocent of his true powers: “We wait, as he waited for us, for you. Desperate in need, yet with terror. What terrible game will you play with us ? me”( 9, 120 ). Surrendering his ideal of objective, cold art, the “perfect circle” for a mote intimate expression that embraces brutality and death, the speaker is at last one with his subject. He must now occupy the same relationship to his reader. This is a powerful, disturbing, and occasionally sardonic story that treats many subjects. Metafiction details the often-grotesque nature of reality, both the subject and experience of life and fiction. For the individual-creator, “me” is the ultimate measure of the universe. After a great turmoil, during which the fat lady in “Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady” is even sold to a rival circus and the ringmaster is disposed of, the narrator keeps reminding us that we are in the world of metafiction. He then tries an absolutely ridiculous solution to glue the story together: the two (the thin man and the fat lady) suddenly and gratuitously return to their original forms, and when this fails to move the audience or the reader, he makes them ride on a rocket. Even this fails. The “beautiful” has obviously transformed into the “ludicrous”. At the end, the narrator might even make the rocket crash and thus destroy his fiction. Once again, Coover’s focus is less upon the specifics of his tale than its teller. Early, the narrator informs us that this circus legend has a broad significance and is “the ultimate image of all our common romances [a pun on love and traditional fiction].... We are all Thin Men. You are all Fat Ladies” ( 9, 138 ). Indeed, at the point the couple would seem to have their problems resolved albeit through the narrator-author’s absurd, well made plot machinery, the story, as story is not over. As the narrator puts it: “No easy label can be affixed”( 9, 139 ). Speaking later as the ringmaster, he says: “Our precious metaphor...has lost some of its old charm”. He would, if he could, work out a denouement, but as he admits: No, these two “are not the whole circus”; they can’t be
48 forced into an easy explanation. Nor is life one [simple category, a one-ring circus]. There are three rings ...And then there are more. Who can grasp it all? And who, grasping, can hold it!...We can hang on to nothing. Least of all the simple.... Look out !” Coover’s characters/plot/single words, his fictions do indeed defy the gravity. All dance on a tentative tightrope and then actually take off into space. Another story marked by metafiction is “Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl”. The language and the situation both seem to imply that this story does not take place, but is a fantasy. On the boat, Carl’s wavering thoughts of being in trouble with Swede seem unnatural when placed with each other. Carl’s mind wanders to details like, “This time, though, he would remember and not throw the empty can away” ( 9, 166 ). It doesn’t make sense that the same boat trip would lead to him thinking, “You know what’s going on here, don’t you? You’re not that stupid. You know why the motor’s gone dead, way out here, miles from nowhere ... After all, there was the missing underwear” (9, 161 ). The two thought processes do not belong on the same boat trip. All of these ambiguities and discrepancies lead one to disregard the possibility that everything is true. It seems to imply conventional heterosexual male fantasy. In Carl’s fantasy about Quenby the language or clue that it may be a fantasy is given by the ambiguity of what Quenby brings to the cabin with her. It is also fantastic the way that clothes simply melt off her and yet she can’t wait for him to take his T-shirt off. The whole scenario seems to be a bit too much like the fantasy of a lonely man, “far from his wife”. Carl’s imagination is presented as he is staring, “at the bed, the roughed-up sheets, watched yourself there” ( 9, 162 ). Also, why would Carl fantasize about a woman who was not his “type”? The idea that the two sexual sections are simply fantasies does not fit in with the text. Again, if the readers want to come away with this understanding then they must disregard parts of the text. The above-mentioned story “The Babysitter” is not fiction, but fictions. It consists of plenty of short paragraphs, which are mixed. There is no clear order; the reader has to solve a puzzle by putting paragraphs one after another in the right sequence in order to understand the story. Instead of a linear story the reader is faced with a collage of different narratives, which resembles the collage achieved by channel hopping on TV. Coover presents to the reader all the expository information required of fiction: characters and action. However, it is impossible for the reader to organize the actions into a cohesive, linear plot; it is also undesirable. “The Babysitter” exploits the art of fiction, the notion of a story, to its full potential, exploding a given situation
49 beyond the limits of linear plot and past the ordinary story-telling conventions of time and space. Coover’s tale gives new meaning to reader response, as each substitution and possibility that exists in it is limited only by the imagination of the reader. Narrative development is at the reader’s discretion; it is the reader who rewrites Coover’s fictions. The elements that are part of the basic expository information of “The Babysitter” are storytelling conventions. The situation of the story is simple and suburban; a schoolgirl comes to baby-sit for a couple that go to a party. The father and the boys are constantly creating their own fictitious events for what will happen with the babysitter. Coover mixes the imaginary events of their minds with imaginary events from the television, showing how neither is any more real. In fact, the two are actually intertwined, as when the mother, encountering the most sordid ending imaginable (her children dead, the babysitter raped and murdered, and her husband vanished) merely responds by asking, “Let’s see what’s on the late movie” ( 9, 239 ). In this place, the mother’s behaviour reveals the nature of the present man and all the society. Pop culture icons permeated our lives so deeply that we pay more attention to them, rather than to real events. The man is lost between real and visual matters and puzzled how to behave or react. The story’s features deal with the insecurity felt by adolescents as they are required to accept increasing responsibilities while making the transition to adulthood as well as the awkward sexual transitions.
50 CONCLUSIONS
Postmodernism as a literary trend was formed in the sixth decade of the 20th century. The literature of that time was greatly influenced by reality which was brought by several events. It rejected the man’s ability to understand the outer reality. A human being is at a loss, not knowing what to do, how to behave, whom to trust. Literature may help him see things in the right way. Postmodern literature is marked by parody, irony, metafiction, grotesquery, black humor, absurd fantasy, “playing” with the forms, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, transforming them, colliding what is meant to be high and popular culture. Some writers saw that old forms and methods were no longer capable to reflect the present-day reality. This idea was highly emphasized in John Barth’s essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” and became a rallying cry for postmodern writers. Robert Coover is an American postmodern writer. While writing he is searching for new modes and ways to reflect life and show the readers to be or not to be, how to be, how to live and how to behave in this world. As the literature is exhausted the author has to look for new forms or combine old ones in new ways in order to make literature replenished. In “Pricksongs and Descants” Coover, solves this problem by employing popular and high culture collision, intertextuality and metafiction techniques, transforming literary genres, “playing” with a text, marking his stories with parody, black humor, absurd fantasy, intertwining the themes of sexuality, violence and television. By integrating the blend of two cultures Coover wants to criticize mass society; he highlights the process of people’s melting in the mass, losing their real/authentic faces, and becoming identical imitators. In his collection of short stories R. Coover describes the society of 1960s America which was influenced by the social, historical and political conditions produced by the assassination of President J. F. Kennedy, war in Vietnam, the explosion of industry, the development of mass society. Such atrocious events aroused horror in the society by teaching people to distrust themselves and to betray others. The mass society was created by the explosion of technology and industry in America unsuspected before wartime. The society is no longer a stable group of individuals with shared values but a mass of passive and indifferent people.
51 The main concern of this collection of short stories is to show the message of the author presented through high-pop collision. High culture in literature is the term referring to the cultural milieu composed of the best cultural products. It is the values, attitudes, behavior, clothes, and entertainment forms that were adored by the most powerful sections of society, its social, political, economic and intellectual elite in the past. High culture in “Pricksongs and Descants” was presented through the exemplary human behavior, polite manner of speaking, respect to other people, and self-sacrifice. Popular culture is associated with commercial culture and all its trappings. It is the present-day people’s culture that prevails in any given society, results from the daily interactions, needs and desires. The most frequently found instances of popular culture in the collection of short stories are too open and shocking sexuality, unexpected violence, and repeated humiliation. The most important idea of the collision is the dissatisfaction with the contemporary America society. While analyzing the collection it was shown that the society is in the process of decaying. The present-day people are insensitive to others, indifferent to high culture values and religion dogmas; they indulge in physical love, openly demonstrate their nakedness, suddenly explode with anger, curse words and brutality, sometimes mix between the true and virtual reality. In order to disclose this disappointment, the author satirizes the society with the help of various literary means by “playing” with them, putting them in the opposite sides of culture and using them to blend high-low culture features. High and popular culture collision here serves as a mirror in which society can better see itself. The author tries to find the most eloquent forms to better disclose the true reality because the old ones can no longer reflect it. The readers better notice and pay attention to the forms that are unexpected to them, so Coover reasonably puts the ideas that he want his readers to notice into the high-pop culture collision which highly surprises them.
52 SUMMARY
Šio darbo tikslas yra atskleisti aukštosios ir populiariosios kult ūrų sankirt ą amerikie čių rašytojo Roberto Coover’io apsakym ų rinkinyje ,,Raudos ir dainos” (1969) remiantis postmodernizmo literat ūros ypatumais: nauj ų form ų ieškojimu, ,,žaidimu” su jomis, populiariosios kult ūros pabr ėžimu, aukštosios ir žemosios kult ūrų suliejimu, ironija, juoduoju jumoru, absurdo fantazija. Aptariami pagrindiniai postmodernistin ės visuomen ės bruožai – žmoni ų susvetim ėjimas, įsiliejimas į mas ės visuomen ę, vertybi ų praradimas, grožio kultas ir seksualumo garbinimas, dievišk ųjų absoliut ų atmetimas, smurto ir nepagarbaus elgesio protr ūkiai, keiksmažodžiais užteršta žmoni ų kalba. Šie bruožai analizuojami apsakym ų rinkinyje “Raudos ir dainos”, nes j ų pagalba ir yra atskleidžiama anks čiau min ėtųjų kult ūrų sankirta. Prie šios sankirtos atskleidimo prisideda ir intertekstualumo, metafikcijos ir žanrų (pasak ų, religini ų istorij ų, įprast ų, gerai žinom ų kasdieni ų įvyki ų) transformavimo pavyzdžiai. Pagrindiniai darbo metodai yra nuodugnus skaitymas, kiekvieno apsakymo analizavimas ir interpretavimas, bandant apibr ėžti jo žanr ą, pastebint aukštosios ir populiariosios kult ūrų atvejus ir j ų pateikimo b ūdus, už čiuopiant ši ų dviej ų kult ūrų susikirtimo tašk ą ir analizuojant toje sankirtoje pasl ėpt ą autoriaus mint į. Darbe atskleidžiama pagrindinė apsakym ų rinkinio mintis – nepasitenkinimas šiuolaikine Amerikos visuomene. Remiantis apsakym ų rinkinio analize, bandoma parodyti, jog visuomen ė yra nykimo stadijoje: žmon ės yra nejautr ūs vieni kitiems, abejingi aukštosioms vertyb ėms, bažny čios normoms, pakl ūstantys stereotipams, besim ėgaujantys fizine meile, atvirai demonstruojantys nuogum ą, lengvai pasiduodantys pyk čio, keiksm ų ir smurto prasiveržimams, kartais nebesuvokiantys skirtumo tarp virtualaus, populiariosios kult ūros išaukštinto, ir realaus gyvenimo. Nor ėdamas išreikšti š į nepasitenkinim ą knygos autorius bando t ą visuomen ę pašiepti į pagalb ą pasitelkdamas literat ūrines priemones, varijuodamas jomis ir tokiu b ūdu supriešindamas bei suliedamas aukštosios ir populiariosios kult ūrų bruožus. Šiame darbe taip pat akcentuojamas rašytojo noras surasti kuo patogesnes ir iškalbingesnes rašymo formas, nes senosios nebegali atskleisti tikrosios ši ų laik ų realyb ės. Skaitytojas dažniausiai pastebi tas rašymo formas, kurios j į nustebina savo netik ėtumu. Tokiu b ūdu Coover’is savo pagrindines mintis, kurias nori perteikti skaitytojui ir priversti j į susim ąstyti, pristato per aukštosios ir populiariosios kult ūrų sankirt ą, nes toji sankirta yra netik ėta jo skaitytojui ir ver čia j į pažvelgti giliau.
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