[In the following essay, Cioffi explores the problematic representation of real and fictive worlds in The Public Burning, particularly as evident in the character of Richard Nixon, whose fictional persona in the novel subverts his actual historical identity, thus unsettling the reader's assumptions about American history and fiction itself.]

Even without the reminding analog of the recent, ritualized executive pillorying, Robert Coover's The Public Burning still resonates like a venerable B-52 pressed into service. It still comes loaded with chaos and destructiveness, with a version of bottled lightning not usually available in stores—nor even over toll-free phone numbers or on the Internet. Indeed, even after the latter-day “public burning” cum impeachment of the current American president, there is still something disjunctive, unintegratable, and disturbing about Coover's world view, about his novel's development of character, about its importations from fantasy, about its resolution or pseudoresolution. That the novel's plot line has played out for the public with Kenneth Starr as the Nixon figure, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky as the Rosenbergs, and House prosecutors as Uncle Sam suggests not merely the novel's prescience but its uncovering of an American archetype.

Characterized by one verbal pyrotechnic display after another, culminating in perhaps the most carnivalesque scene in American literature since the forest covenant in “Young Goodman Brown,” it is, nonetheless, far more than surface flash and virtuosity. It's a roman à thèse, but at the same time almost picaresque, with its main character—half-time narrator, Richard M. Nixon, as a number of critics have attested, gradually working his way into the reader's heart.¹ Yet mixed with the views and emotional “development” of that apparently historical character are portraits of “Uncle Sam,” a transhistorical, otherworldly entity, a character from fantasy, a god from myth, a being of superhuman abilities who embodies and espouses an almanacky American folk humor, wisdom, bluster, braggadocio, and boyishness. In brief, the world of The Public Burning is not really mimetic, nor does it follow nonmimetic generic formulas (science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, allegory), patternings that might accord with readers' expectations. Its hybrid or mosaic status further complicates through Coover's inclusion of not only a picture of Nixon at once sympathetic and damning, but a whole bevy of historical personages, including the Rosenbergs, Eisenhower, the Supreme Court justices, and all the United States senators. Even William Faulkner makes an appearance, as do other celebrities from all walks of culture. Finally, beings from patently imaginary realms make their way into the novel, including The Phantom, Betty Crocker, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and Tom and Jerry, all of whose addition makes the mélange almost impossible to consume, a literary version of the meal that Nixon concocts for himself in chapter 9:

I'd found a rib bone in the refrigerator for Checkers, a bowl of vanilla pudding, three overripe slices of tomato, a french-fried chicken back, a partial tin of Spam, a plate of soft fudge, cole slaw, a Dr. Pepper, some sour gherkins, a peach half in syrup, and a cold hamburger for myself—more or less in that order and eaten as discovered. I was very hungry and it all tasted good. There was actually some red Jell-O in there with canned mixed fruit in it: I wasn't sure of the flavor, but I ate it up anyway, thinking: Who knows? it may be the last of its kind. I'd also cleaned up what was left of a jar of apple sauce, bottle of skimmed milk, bowl of tapioca, and tin can of cold baked beans, followed by caviar and strawberry ice cream, lit up a ceremonial pipeful of Rum and Maple, and sat down in an armchair to digest.

(177–78)

And if the comparison is lost on the reader amazed at the excess of gluttony, Coover speaks through his narrator to spell out in the next paragraph an important motivation for fiction: “Foo. I'd eaten too quickly. I felt terrible. But one had to be uncomfortable, I knew, to do one's best thinking” (178). The novel is in some ways hard to digest, but as Coover tells Frank Gado in a 1973 interview, “I've never turned away from unpleasantness in order to provide escapism” (149), a remark that suggests “foo” might be the kind of response Coover was looking for after all.

I argue that this novel, particularly its climactic series of scenes in the last hundred pages, is meant to disturb readers ontologically. Coover effects that curious unsettling through a series of tamperings with “reality” or the so-called “Actual World” (AW) of the 1950s: he portrays a cast of characters who inhabit at once the historical, actual world that the reader knows surrounded the figures of the 1950s political scene and a paraworld that shows the reader again and again that his or her assumptions about the unstated features and nature of this world are mistaken. Although I think Arnold Weinstein, in his Nobody's Home, might be going too far to suggest that this is a “bomb-text,” “in its systematic assault on linear narrative, its proliferation of discourses, its prodigious display of power in all its modalities, its associative logic and multiple circuitry” (256), he is basically correct that it is a novel meant to explode rigidly held notions about the sovereignty of fictional and nonfictional realms.

I would like to suggest that Coover uses his novel to theorize about the world-making and reading processes of fiction. Specifically, Coover uses his novel to short-circuit three different kinds of inferences that readers and writers inevitably make: inferences about the outlines of a fictive world, about the motivations of characters, and about the designating power of proper nouns. He intends his novel's distorted version of events to lay bare some of the ontological problems with stories based on the historical record. Those can be stories told in a court of law, or stories told in an annal of events, or stories about particular figures—historical fictions. They all blend fiction and fact. Some measure of their disautonomy stems from the mental machinations of the reader, who to grasp the rules and outlines of the fictional universe “fills in” AW information that the text does not specify. Some arises from the depicted inner lives of the characters, that is, the author's notions of people's (characters') motivations and drives that a narrative about history will typically proffer; and some comes from the use of well-known names, which in an important sense always carry the same referent and have “actual world” reverberations, whether in a world of fiction, the newspaper, or in the historical record. If there is a bomb, it is one that gradually implodes in the reader of this book who tries to sort the real from the fictional, the history from the tall tale, the prototype from the character, and the suggested from the inferred.

I

The way readers view fictional worlds in relation to an “actual” one is the concern of possible worlds literary theory, an approach little used in practical criticism, and never applied to Coover's works.² The methodology, although not fully systematized, rests on the philosophical notion derived from Leibnitz that there are many, perhaps an infinity, of “possible worlds,” of all imaginable shapes and make-ups, one of which is the “actual world” (usually called AW). The privileging of one world—and the labeling of it as “actual”—gets a lot of theorists in a bind, but most of them end up putting the concept “in brackets,” that is, setting aside issues of whether there is one actual world amid the billions of subjectivities, of whether that world can be “represented” in any way through words. Possible worlds theorists simply assert the existence of an actual world. As one of the principal forces behind possible worlds literary theory, Lubomír Doležel, remarks, “We grasp fiction in opposition to reality. If reality is called fiction, a new word for fiction has to be invented” (x). Lest that formulation sound too high-handed, Doležel goes on to specify the relation: “[I]n constructing fictional worlds, the poetic imagination works with ‘material’ drawn from actuality; in the opposite direction, fictional constructs deeply influence our imaging and understanding of reality. However, the exchange can be properly observed and described only if we insist on a distinction between the actual and the fictional” (xi). Doležel is essentially stating that there is, if not an actual world, then something in an antipodal relation to fiction and that most people can recognize the dividing line, even when writers self-consciously attempt to blur or erase it.³

To an extent, though, all fiction blends an actual world with its own text world, insofar as readers infer elements of the AW into a text. Umberto Eco writes, “everything that the text doesn't name or describe explicitly as different from what exists in the real world must be understood as corresponding to the laws and conditions of the real world” (83). Yet Coover's novel frustrates that particular ordering device of “filling in” or inferring a world. For example, readers might infer that when Nixon gets into a cab, it is an internal combustion engine vehicle, and the cab driver is probably sane, has a license, and so forth. But then we discover that the cab driver is The Phantom himself and seems less interested in his fare than in insulting “Nick” and hitting two copulating dogs. Or perhaps the reader might infer that Uncle Sam is a being of superhuman strength, but that is clearly not the case when he confronts Justice Douglas, who defies him. Indeed, the reader will be fooled if he or she assumes that the characters' ontologies will remain consistent throughout the course of the novel. Like monsters in some science fiction movies, these characters' powers, weaknesses, and proclivities evolve and mutate, constantly frustrating any ordering principles.

The most strikingly powerful “fillings-in” concern the character of Richard Nixon. Readers, for example, might think that Nixon is basically a decent person, sympathetic to a degree (see note 1), despite his political opportunism. But then the vice president ignores a gang rape taking place in front of him on a train, in fact uses it as an occasion for some insight into his own political manipulations:

And then, as they'd dragged the dazed woman out of the seat and spread-eagled her down at one end of the car, it suddenly came to me what I had to do! I had to step in and change the script! It was dangerous, I knew, politically it could be the kiss of death, but it was an opportunity as well as a risk, and my philosophy has always been: don't lean with the wind, don't do what is politically expedient, do what your instinct tells you is right!

(363)

Of course this ironically dramatizes how self-deluded (and abstracted, not to mention impotent) Nixon is, but it is also an example of how Coover is constantly unsettling us by showing how our assumptions, our inferences, are just plain wrong.

The last scene certainly does that as well, catching us unexpectedly off guard, demonstrating how our fillings-in had been mistaken all along. Uncle Sam has seemed to be avuncular, cantankerous, but by no means loathsome or dreadful. Richard Walsh points out that Sam is not dislikeable enough (I think he means not dislikeable enough throughout to justify the last scene): “his [Coover's] use of humor in the novel also make[s] a sly appeal to the reader. In the case of Uncle Sam, it generates a degree of affection quite at odds with the ethical response he provokes” (336). But it is plain that any “fillings-in” about that figure from another realm are likely to be incomplete, likely to naturalize rather than fully or accurately delineate that entity.

Critics confronted with the last scene, which reverses notions of Uncle Sam's ontology, tend to view him and Nixon in figurative terms. For example, Weinstein “supernaturalizes” Sam, which I think might be a mistake:

This scene, gruesome though it is, and distasteful though some may find it, displays the final transmutation of the elements, the final alchemical trick that Coover has in store for his readers. Nixon resists heroically, but he yields at last when Sam threatens to open him with a hatchet: ‘No!’ I shrieked, giving way. And in he came, filling me with a ripping, all-rupturing force so fierce I thought I'd die! This … this is not happening to me alone, I thought desperately, or tried to think, as he pounded deeper and deeper, destroying everything, even my senses, my consciousness—but to the nation as well!’ […] It is a sublime line, a final audacious transformation of hackneyed political cliché into American myth, worthy of the classical writers; depictions of Jove's sexual exploits, conceiving power once again as sexual, showing that the pastime of the gods is to put it to the nation: Uncle Sam is fucking America.

(258)

Weinstein is “filling in,” using myth as his script: Nixon has become America, and Uncle Sam is the embodiment of the gods. (Some critics, of course, see Sam as the embodiment of America.) However, those particular inferences diminish the force of the scene. First, it is Nixon who “realizes” he is the “nation,” and by that point in the novel it seems that Nixon's intuitions and perceptions should be viewed with much suspicion. In addition, although Uncle Sam certainly resembles the gods in terms of some of his powers, his ontology is not fully clear (not just the confrontation with Justice William O. Douglas but also Sam's inability to figure out where Nixon had gone just hours before the execution suggest a very limited power that does not square with the power he has, for example, over the natural elements). And finally, the scene showcases not so much “power once again as sexual,” but rather the movement of power into violence, which appears as explicitly homosexual, explicitly rape. The scene is no more about sex than is “the rape of the Kalmuks” scene in Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, or the homosexual rape scene in James Dickey's Deliverance, or the prison rape-castration scene in James Edward Olmos's American Me. It is so shocking because the reader had been naturalizing Uncle Sam all along, seeing him as outrageous, but not really dangerous—more a ringmaster than an exploiter—garrulous and racist, but so dazzling, electric, and charismatic that one almost forgave him. Through that last scene Coover shows him as ultimately far more sinister than that, and shows us a Nixon who, as he himself moves toward a supernatural explanation, is once again ignoring a rape that is happening in his presence—but this time, to himself.

I propose a different series of inferences. In her book Intimate Violence, Laura E. Tanner suggests that victims of rape and torture experience a “disorganization of the self”: “Violence […] has the capacity to destroy not only the form of the victim's body but the familiar forms of understanding through which that victim constructs him or herself as subject” (4–5). The final, violated Nixon hardly embodies America; he more closely resembles the all-but-lobotomized Winston Smith at the end of 1984:

The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

(226)

That is a man whose mind has been completely homogenized, an emotional discombobulate whose emotions have been brutalized and drugged into submission and confusion. Nixon at the end of The Public Burning is in almost as bad shape:

His words warmed and chilled me at the same time. Maybe the worst thing that can happen to you in this world is to get what you think you want. And how did we know what we wanted? It was a scary question and I let it leak away, unanswered. Of course, he was an incorrigible huckster, a sweet-talking con artist, you couldn't trust him, I knew that—but what did it matter? Whatever else he was, he was beautiful (how had I ever thought him ugly?), the most beautiful thing in all the world. I was ready at last to do what I had never done before. “I … I love you, Uncle Sam!” I confessed.

(534)

Equally unable to see the actual events before him, Nixon is a shattered consciousness grasping at the straws of delusion. Coover suggests here something that most readers had not really inferred throughout, namely that in order to want to succeed in politics, one has to love being a victim; one has to be completely mad.

II

Such a realization makes the reader go back and reinterpret much of the novel, realizing that various inferences about its world and characters that he or she made along the way were probably wrong: the fillings-in of an AW where the text did not specify were probably, in many cases, mistaken. That brings up yet another ontologically unsettling issue raised by Coover, who himself is something of a theorist of fiction: How much of what Marie-Laure Ryan calls a “contaminated” fictional world (one that mixes historical and fantastic elements) is entirely set off and autonomous, and to what extent has it to do with history or biography per se?

Coover blurs an AW with something patently non-AW in another interesting way by dramatizing the imaginings, dreams, fantasies, and noetic machinations of characters within a text. Those are inferences that the author makes about what could have been going through the minds of his characters. Called “sub-worlds” by Eco, they can be difficult to distinguish from a depicted AW. The effect is to create a dissonance and disautonomy: by presenting to readers a complex, specific panoply of a historical character's thoughts, dreams, motivations, and fantasies, Coover essentially grafts a consciousness onto the historical characters' intricately detailed inner lives, one that in some ways enlarges readers' notions of the actual figures and in some ways usurps or contravenes them. Thus the characters are, in Brian McHale's term, “amphibious,” neither fully fictional nor fully historical.

In The Public Burning, the Ethel-Nixon love scene (“its most unforgettable,” Raymond Mazurek remarks [41]) is a good example of Coover's tampering, by way of “subworlds,” with ontological states. First, it is important to note that it is preceded by a masturbatory fantasy (an obviously full and elaborated “subworld”) involving Ethel that colors the “actual” scene. Hence any narration by Nixon of his meeting with Ethel is likely to be suspect, for at this point in the novel, it is fairly evident that much of Nixon's world is a projected subjective reality that bears only passing relation to the things happening around him. Although Mazurek says that “One cannot, finally, make Richard Nixon and Ethel Rosenberg embrace” (41), Daniel E. Frick, in evident agreement, simply sees the scene as being not about Nixon and Ethel, but involving Nixon and (likely) J. Edgar Hoover in drag (85). But the scene, which so vividly comes across through Nixon's subworld version of it, lives as a four-page-long kiss between Ethel and Nixon. The subworld of Nixon is so intense, so elaborated, that it takes over what might well be the reality of the text world (that Hoover, not Ethel is involved). Indeed, if Frick is correct (and I vacillate in my belief about whether he is or not), such a reading suggests that Nixon is not merely “ontologically insecure” to borrow a term of R. D. Laing's that John Guzlowski employs (58), but a near solipsist. Were that the case, then the reader is making inferences about Coover's inferences about a historical figure whose inferences about what happens around him are unreliable. Essentially the novel uses “subworlds” to thematize the whole idea of “filling in” details about, or “ordering” one's world. And in the novel, this “zeal for pattern” generates more entropy than order.

The Public Burning is on one level a realistic character study rendered fantastic by the Nixon-narrator's own fantasizing, his internal creation of possible worlds (here he indeed resembles Coover himself, as Frick suggests; but he also resembles the reader, an insight suggested by Richard Walsh's analysis). What is further unsettling is that a large percentage of his mental activity leads him to what seem to be “correct” conclusions. He may be mad, he may be deluded, he may be a solipsist, but he seems to have some insights. For example, Nixon concludes that the Rosenbergs' trial was very unfair. Coover himself confesses to believing that (“If you read the trial record […] you pretty well have to conclude that the Rosenbergs were innocent of the charges against them” [Bass 297]). And Nixon's inferences about the witnesses, the trial, the judge's bias, and the like all seem not only correct, but quite astute. He even realizes why the Rosenbergs were convicted: “with this jury, dowdiness was guilt” (122). Of course, he alloys his perceptions of the trial with his Walter Mitty-like fantasies of how he could have successfully defended the Rosenbergs. In his own “subworlds,” Nixon blends genuine insight with a weirdly self-promoting cant, almost as if, at every turn, he were trying to buck himself up through shibboleths or delusion. He frequently, for example, compares himself to Lincoln, Horatio Alger, and even Clark Gable. At the same time he uses words such as “heterochthonous.” He feels good about the way he can carry on a conversation but think about entirely different things. He feels sorry for those people he defeats, or for people who have to die, but adds, “my mother taught me this” (84). In short, Nixon's “subworlds” create for the reader an ontological “thickness” to the character. In many ways, he seems likable and admirable, just slightly misguided, unclear about how to construct a personality and public persona. Through those maunderings and complex ruminations the reader senses the many masks Nixon wears and how much he revels in such masquerading—a proclivity that is not so bad in itself: hadn't Emerson, too, wanted to play all the roles, especially that of the “herb and berry woman”? The masquerading serves more as buffoonery than deception. Only when one recalls the public record of the AW Nixon do these masks and roles take on a genuinely evil cast: in the novel, the masquerading serves more as buffonery than deception.

Those sections, I think, make the strongest argument for the fictional autonomy of The Public Burning—its disconnection from history and the AW. They help the reader construct a character whose consciousness has a degree of moral uncertainty and logical subtlety that swerves rather widely, it seems to me, from received knowledge about an AW Nixon.

Yet, the historical connection still exists, despite Nixon's nearly winning, nearly fictional hyperconsciousness. John Ramage points out that the Nixon of the novel is much like the Nixon from Six Crises: “Coover's Nixon is simply a caricature of the historical one of Six Crises, who converts his life into a series of carefully staged ‘crises,’ featuring himself as the embattled but detached hero alert to turn every historical gap into personal gain” (61). Coover's version of Nixon excessively extrapolates the Six Crises AW Nixon; the biography's framework by contrast is only a skeleton-like version of the Nixon of the novel, but he is still Nixon. Coover's Nixon sees himself as a hero struggling against difficult odds, but the novel, more than Six Crises, fleshes out and foregrounds a Nixon who does not work with a defined notion of self. Rather, he fights against it. His hyperconsciousness, his intellectualizations force him constantly to shape the flux of experience and the swings of emotion (not to mention the unceasing “bodily principle” he confronts, namely his beard, his body odor, his clothing) into a graspable and understandable paradigm, but his greatest revelations are that there are no real ordering principles that hold. Coover has given us a Nixon who certainly differs from an actual world Nixon, but he has equipped him with an inner voice that explains and justifies the differences so convincingly that the reader is able to accommodate him to a pre-existent AW version.

In short, the subworlds of Coover's Nixon show him to be a rounded, apparently autonomous character while at the same time subsume and form something of a between-the-lines version of the Nixon of Six Crises. They also create a character whose mode of thought might be consonant with the public image of historical record, someone involved in the Watergate break-in (“let the best man win so long as it's me” [48]). Nixon's imagined but conceivable subworlds highlight or perhaps render more chiaroscuro the hazy boundary between fiction and AW. As Coover himself remarks, “The world itself being a construct of fictions, I believe the fiction-maker's function is to furnish better fictions with which we can re-form our notions of things” (Gado 149–50). Paradoxically, The Public Burning is the “better fiction” because it tells us about the way things are in an Actual World: Nixon's consciousness must have been far more complex than “received knowledge” has suggested. He was an opportunist, in many ways a scoundrel; but at the same time his influence was considerable and his rise to fame rather remarkable. By presenting the elaborate, imagined subworlds of this character, Coover is forcing the reader to re-examine his or her own reading of history and question to what extent it has been shaped by “orderings” whose narrative lines or voices may well have modified important details.

III

Finally, actual names, which Coover uses rather liberally, carry considerable resonance; and the novel seems to be asking what happens to these names, what ontological weight do they carry, once they are removed from the AW and transported into a rather nonrealistic fiction. As Peter Nesselroth notes, “More than any other words in a language, real names, whether historical or fiction, have the potential to produce new stories. That is because they already come with built-in stories (or ‘definitions’) from other contexts, either fictional or supposedly factual, like encyclopedias” (142). But what happens in a narrative about a widely known historical figure, especially when that narrative, existing in a nonrealistic, nonhistorical-novel mode, allows the reader access to a very complex consciousness, one that often contradicts the one in popular imagination? Is Coover's Nixon the AW Nixon? In fact, a defiantly “strong” reading of the text would posit that all the fantastic elements of the novel could be creations of Nixon's (subworlds), his imagined possible world within the possible world of the novel. Yet I maintain here that even as the character departs from an AW Nixon, it retains its essential “Nixon-hood.”

Saul Kripke's notion of a “rigid designator”—a name that “in every possible world” “designates the same object” (48)—might be of some help here. In Naming and Necessity, Kripke writes much about Nixon, though he is discussing an AW Nixon and various possible Nixons. (He does not allude to Coover's Nixon, however, though I think his discussion relevant to Coover's Nixon.) He suggests that we analyze Nixon by looking at the Nixon available to us, the AW Nixon, and then asking what “might have been true” of him:

Theorists have often said that we identify objects across possible worlds as objects resembling the given one in the most important respects. On the contrary, Nixon, had he decided to act otherwise, might have avoided politics like the plague, though privately harboring radical opinions. […] So we do not begin with worlds […] and then ask about criteria of transworld identification; on the contrary, we begin with the objects, which we have, and can identify, in the actual world. We can then ask whether certain things might have been true of the objects.

(53)

In that analysis, Coover's Nixon is the real Nixon, because the name is a rigid designator, and The Public Burning is a novel that explores “what might have been true” of Nixon. That seems unproblematic. A difficulty arises, however; we as readers can be fairly certain that much of the novel could not have been true of Nixon and was constructed by the author to be patently false.

Kripke goes on to use an example from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations that, I think, helps explain the curious case of how a rigid designator retains its “rigidity” even within a fantastic, fictional universe:

There is one thing [Wittgenstein writes] of which one can say neither that it is one meter long nor that it is not one meter long, and that is the standard meter in Paris. But this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it but only to mark its peculiar role in the language game of measuring with a meter rule.

(Kripke 54)

Kripke explains that the meter stick standard obviously varies in length somewhat—because it is an object subject to heat, moisture, and the like—a variability that suggests it cannot ever be a fixed meter in length. At the same time, though, it “fixes the reference” of a “meter,” so it is the standard meter. The difficulty Wittgenstein points out is, in Kripkean terms, that the word “meter” is a “rigid designator,” but the stick, being part of a physical world, is not.

I think something of the same situation works with Nixon in Coover's novel, and that causes readers ontological difficulties. The Nixon of the text is fluid, changing, confusingly like a character from a novel: He narrates; he tells his inner feelings; he describes events around him and happening to him; a third person narrator tells about him. But Nixon, the name of a famous person, is a rigid designator. It already exists in people's minds as a more or less complete entity or object. So readers find themselves rejecting Coover's picture of Nixon as an AW Nixon because it fails to match up with information from their own AW experience (what Doležel calls their “AW encyclopedia”). At the same time, though, to read the novel, to understand, even apprehend it—to feel its considerable emotional impact—readers must conceive as real the AW character of Nixon. So readers are caught in the same situation as Wittgenstein with the meter stick: they can neither say that Coover's Nixon is an AW Nixon nor that he is not an AW Nixon.

Brian McHale discusses a similar problem of Coover's novel, though focusing on the character of Eisenhower, who is historically real and also an incarnation of Uncle Sam:

Integration of the historical and the fantastic, especially integration within a single character, exacerbates the ontological hesitation which is the principle of all fantastic fiction, for here the hesitation is not between the supernatural and the realistic but between the supernatural and the historically real.

(95)

But I think that misses the point. The reader is not in the position of hesitating about whether Coover's Ike is real or supernatural. I think that most mature readers understand that there are no such beings as Uncle Sam, that he does not “transubstantiate himself” into presidents (and that Mickey and Minnie Mouse are cartoon characters, and the laws of physics do not work as they do in the novel). So the reader, even if she or he is not especially alert, is not hesitating between envisioning a supernatural and a historically real character; the hesitation, rather, concerns one's own conception of the AW rigid designator (Eisenhower) and how that accords with Coover's variation of it (him). Can I modify my picture of the late President Eisenhower to accommodate Coover's conception of him? In what way does Coover's picture enlarge or deepen mine?

IV

“There was just action and then more action” (362), Nixon reminds us, suggesting that any theory is likely to be false. Coover would agree. In discussing the “great sociologues” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Coover tells Thomas Alden Bass, “I treat all these ideas ironically […] as generators of metaphor, poles of energy. But they are all finally partial, and therefore, lies” (295). Kripke is getting at the same issue when he discusses the “cluster theory of names”: “It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong. You may suspect me of proposing another theory in its place, but I hope not, because I'm sure it's wrong too if it's a theory” (64). Making up an idea that would order reality, abstract notions, history, or what-have-you will inevitably be incomplete, wrong, a distortion of the actuality it attempts to organize. Yet at the same time, such “ordering” is necessary for life, for fiction making, and for reading.

It seems that Coover is not so much modifying history to suggest what might have been as setting up an apparently fully autonomous other world, one that happens to be populated by characters whose names are those of figures from American culture of the 1950s. Although we can see these characters as “counterparts” to their historical eponyms, the novel will not let us do so confidently for very long. It specifically frustrates our attempts at historical pattern making or ordering. We might first see this story as about the Rosenbergs, one that sympathetically shows their martyrdom, but ultimately it's not that at all. Their characters flatten out as the novel progresses, largely because we see them through Nixon's eyes and in “intermezzo” sections where their characters are as stereotyped as those in commedia del'arte. If the novel seems a portrait of Richard M. Nixon, well, that works for awhile, too; but again, his portrayal fairly rapidly departs in several ways from the biography of the thirty-seventh president. Allegorical readings also offer difficulties: what might this be an allegory of? A one-to-one correspondence between the events of the novel and those of some other ur-story or history fails to emerge—although it might be an allegory of itself (or the events depicted), which would be a strange but conceivable generic extension. In short, I suggest that Coover has constructed the novel to defy interpretive strategies, generic categorizings, and characterological pigeonholings. It is finally historical, realist, fantastic, allegorical. As Vincent Balitas conceives it, “We think we are reading one thing while all the time we are actually reading something quite different” (379). That feeling persists until the very end, at which time it is difficult to figure out what we have just read.

Many critics have noted that the novel is about how the factual is essentially a fictional construct and that Nixon was perhaps best able to exploit the political advantage that such a position would provide. Bernhard Reitz, for example, suggests that Nixon “reveals himself as a vacuum that craves to be filled by fictions” (236). Perhaps. But I wonder to what extent this novel is also about how some fictions are better orderings of an AW than others. Certainly the Procrustean orderings and Manichean dualities in the novel eventuate in a primitive, carnivalesque sacrifice of human dignity and life. Justice William O. Douglas chides Uncle Sam, “Don't you think it's about time you got down off this Sons of Light and Darkness kick?” (77); as the only completely positive character (and the novel's dedicatee), Douglas may have the privilege of giving Coover's “message” that easy categorizations are wrongheaded. It is not a surprising one, considering the elaborate complexity of the novel and the manner of its composition. Coover tells Larry McCaffery that it was “made up of thousands and thousands of tiny fragments that had to be painstakingly stitched together. […] It was like a gigantic puzzle” (Kennedy 108). The unsettling blend of fiction and nonfiction, the disautonomous text, and the toying with rigid designators are all devices in Coover's postmodern armamentarium that take aim at exploding our notion of what reading is like, presenting us with an experience in “dream-time” itself, an appropriately named cognitive realm that seeks to “weaken and tear down structures so that they can be rebuilt, releasing new energies” (Gado 157). The “dream time” that the novel depicts (namely the public burning itself) seems somewhat unproductive, but that is because it is in some way the wrong kind of “dream-time”: its value is instrumental. The productive “dream-time” rituals are valuable in and of themselves. One such ritual is that enacted by the novel itself, in its entirety—or the act of reading it. For finally, the energy that spins off The Public Burning, although not exactly nuclear, redeems its excesses so much that they will be neither forgiven nor forgotten; it allows the reader to see, if only by a subfuscate glow, the “swarm of black thing” (346, 524), the scary but fascinating welter of experience that cannot be understood, classified, or subsumed—the abyss of collective desire, events … the thick rotundity of the world.

Notes

1. In an interview with Geoffrey Woolf, Coover himself admits that Nixon is a sympathetic character: “You can't have an unsympathetic clown” (qtd. in Andersen 123). Daniel E. Frick contends that Nixon is a “version of [Coover's] authorial persona” (82), his “secret sharer” (83) who, at one point, “is the model of the kind of writer that Robert Coover aspires to be” (85). Lois Gordon calls Nixon “sympathetic” and “heroic” (62, 80). Robert Morace writes of Nixon ‘“Although he is not entirely likable, Nixon does share with Coover's most sympathetic characters the ability to see through the fantasies of others” (203). Richard Pearce goes a bit too far, I think, contending that when Nixon kisses Ethel, “he comes to life as a man of feeling, sensitivity and sincerity” (135). Somewhat more soberly, Richard Walsh writes of Nixon, “he is the only character the novel makes available for any degree of empathy, yet this intimacy is achieved through the presentation of a huge quantity of ludicrously detailed self-analysis” (343).

2. Brian McHale comes closest to applying a “possible worlds literary theory” methodology to the novel in Postmodern Fiction. He writes how the novel includes “characters of different ontological statuses […] gathered together in an impossible, heterotopian locus” (21).

3. As might be expected, Doležel is impatient with postmodern fiction and probably does not find Coover's work to his liking: “[T]he current boom in transworld travel and transhistorical parties has made it as easy for a writer to move a fiction person from one world to another as it is for a child to move a Lego piece from one tower to another. The game is no longer exciting, and it is time to invent a new one” (226).

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