SOURCE: Cornis-Pope, Marcel. “Rewriting the Encounter with the Other: Narrative and Cultural Transgression in The Public Burning.” Critique 42, no. 1 (fall 2000): 40–50.

[In the following essay, Cornis-Pope discusses Coover's evocation of “otherness” and marginality in The Public Burning, especially as portrayed through the novel's composite voices and Nixon's interactions with the tyrannical Uncle Sam character and the scapegoated Ethel Rosenberg.]

Though his eyes are closed, his senses withdrawn, for one vivid moment he sees himself at a distance in the Fairy's arms. […] What he sees up there is a decrepit misshapen creature, neither man nor puppet, entangled in blue hair and lying in an unhinged sprawl in the embrace of a monstrous being […] grotesque. Hideous. Beautiful. […] Somewhere, out on the surface, distant now as his forgotten life, fingers dance like children at play and soft lips kiss the ancient hurts away.

(Pinocchio in Venice 329–30)

Thus ends Pinocchio in Venice (1991), Robert Coover's most intriguing dramatization to date of the self's dangerously exhilarating embrace with the “other.” In Coover's imaginative rewriting of Carlo Collodi's children's story, the boy-puppet turned Nobel-winning art historian returns to Venice (rather than to Collodi's native Florence) in search of his lost muse-savior-teacher, the protean Blue-Haired Fairy. By moving his protagonist to a decadent Venice reminiscent of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Coover suggests that the failure of male imagination to deal with metamorphic femaleness is linked to the more profound failure of modern civilization to balance order and contingency, system and fluidity, self and other. Professor Pinenut cannot solve the enigma of the Blue-Haired Fairy without simultaneously pondering modern civilization's problematic divisions between life and art, nature and metaphysics, body and spirit. Pinenut's solution at the end of the novel allows him, however imperfectly, to transcend some of those oppositions. In an act of “creative communion,” which both annihilates and reconstructs him, the professor melds with a polymorphous Blue Fairy who, in Coover's vision, represents an emanation (rather than an idealized denial) of “Venice's corrupt and mongrel history” (175–76). The novel's narrative structure backs up this denouement, moving from the deceptive linearity of its opening chapters to an increasingly mixed and disruptive narrative approach. Narration is “carnivalized,” its rules of verisimilitude stretched to include character conversion and an irreverent recapitulation of history that valorizes the disruptive energies of human desire, “mongrelizing” plots and identities.

The encounter with protean femaleness has been at the center of other Coover fictions from Spanking the Maid (1981), a novella that exposed the patriarchal treatment of the woman's body and soul as a “blank” on which the master can write his sadomasochistic ideology, to Ghost Town (1998), which confronts the Western hero with the unwieldy task of reconciling two versions of femaleness representing civilization and the wilderness, order and lawless desire. Another recent novel, John's Wife (1996), suggests that contemporary culture is still largely unprepared for the kind of “mystical communion with the Other” (266) that Pinenut experiences in Pinocchio in Venice, lacking the visionary power or willingness to perform the polymorphous bonding that violates conventional onto-logical and cultural boundaries. As another character in John's Wife muses, “We are born into the stories made by others, we tinker a bit with the details, then we die” (138). “Tinkering” with the details of the stories available to us is not enough. What we need is a radical “reset[ting of] the basic patterns,” “breaking down the boundaries for a moment, producing monsters we secretly know to be more real than the good citizens who eventually subdue them” (224, 225).

Much of Coover's fiction has been concerned with approaching traditional plots from “the other side,” recovering the silenced or victimized point of view. Robert Morace has suggested that “the basic plot of Coover's plays, stories, and novels” pits “the pattern-keeper, who accepts the determinacy of a teleological universe, versus the pattern-breaker, who embraces indeterminacy and imaginative freedom” (193). Although Morace has focused on Coover's concern with “the tyrant Other” as pattern-keeper and oppressor of individual imagination, I want to argue that equally important in Coover's fiction is the identification of the other with the excluded and repressed. Coover's protagonists seek out those excluded “others” (female or ethnic) because they function as expanding mirrors for the self, promising to complete and gratify the ego with the experience of lost alterity. Coover prods his characters to engage those figures of replenishing otherness (what Jacques Lacan called le petit autre or the “small other”—Séminaire. Livre III 50); but he also discloses the contradictory dynamic that underlies this effort, with the self desiring both to master and to be mastered by an idealized other. The first impulse leads to the incorporation of the other; the second to submission to an idealized other. As Coover's fiction shrewdly points out, that idealized figure of otherness may end up looking very much like the “tyrant Other.” In Lacanian terms, they are both versions of the grand-autre (Séminaire. Livre III 68), the great other in whose gaze the subject seeks its identity.

The most complex articulation of the encounter with a replenishing—challenging “other” can be found in The Public Burning (1977). Reread from the perspective of Coover's more recent work, The Public Burning offers the first successful model of narrative and cultural reinscription of the excluded other. The novel is too complex and polysystemic for a mere political reading, encouraging alternative anthropological-narratological concerns with the circus imagery and rituals of scapegoating (LeClair 106ff), metafictional critiques of the “language of power” (Mazurek 30), or the mixture of high and low narrative styles in the Cold War “narrative[s] of containment” (Nadel 159–60). Still, those issues cannot be properly understood without some reflection on Coover's revisionist politics of history that reconsiders relationships between centers of power and margins, selves and others. Coover's novel foregrounds the confrontational narratives of the Cold War, tracing their origin back to a Manichaean collective ideology embodied in Uncle Sam—the novel's official reflector and “Tyrant Other.” At the same time, Coover's book attempts to destabilize the official ideology of history, denouncing it as a performance benefiting those in power, and opening it up to excluded voices. The narrative perspective is split among a composite third person voice (of the “culture”) or composite first person voice (of Uncle Sam), which regurgitate official descriptions and attitudes; the first person narration of Vice President Richard Nixon; and occasional voices of dissent. Nixon's voice is analytic and self-justifying, arguing the American ideological position without always taking it for granted. The third person narrative reads like a “pastiche of the topical junk gathered from newspapers, magazines, films, television and radio shows, Broadway plays, advertisements, popular songs, baseball scores, and the like” (Andersen 123). Mixing official pronouncements with the choral resonances of “Bible-belters, ex-FBI agents, Catholic hard-liners and anti-Zionists, ladies' clubs, Hearst newsmen, the legendary China Lobby, patriotic queer-bashers” (The Public Burning 17), that composite voice provides both background and ideological motivation for the Rosenberg trial. Coover's novel creates the impression that America's entire culture participated in the construction of a hysterical narrative that cast the other as the archetypal enemy.

Jackson Cope has rightly argued that The Public Burning makes a significant effort to move from monologic to dialogic discourse: “The novel incorporates at times a dialogue about history (Ethel's operetta with Ike), but more usually supplies an immense cacophony of views, overlapping of voices that wedge Coover out as a bit singer in his own chorale. Nixon has no more privilege than the author, though he is so desperately trying to listen into history's conversation” (71–72). But The Public Burning stops short of creating a truly “heteroglossic” structure capable of distinguishing “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices,” and a polyphony of “consciousnesses with equal rights and each with its own world” (Bakhtin 6). In spite of its structural heterogeneity, the novel remains trapped in the ideological “chorale” that has shaped America's mythic narrative. As Coover explains, “I was striving for a text that would seem to have been written by the whole nation through all its history, as though the sentences had been forming themselves all this time, accumulating toward this experience. I wanted thousands of echoes, all the sounds of the nation” (Interview in LeClair and McCaffery 75–76). Few of those echoes are radically dissonant, capable of putting forth effective alternatives to the official narrative. The public performance in Times Square is dominated by the composite voice of Uncle Sam as the “tyrant Other.” Coover's archetypal creation is the unchallenged master of “a lot of styles” (89), a “pieced-together semiotic Frankenstein” (LeClair 128). But his voice is pseudodialogic as long as Uncle Sam admits no alternative points of view and has “nothing to believe in except himself. An audience of one” (233). In spite of his protean, folksy vocabulary, Uncle Sam is too class- and race-conscious to represent genuine American “heteroglossia.” His pronouncements parrot the languages of power and discrimination, from the “old style of Holy Writ” (63) to the contemporary rhetoric of ideological division. Uncle Sam is “clearly not partial to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Voodooists, or Romanists. If he had any favorites at all, they were among people like Ezra Benson's Mormons, the eccentric, evangelical, and fundamentalist sects nurtured here on this soil” (345). Unlike his political incarnations (for example President Eisenhower) who pursue a more hypocritical version of American fundamentalism, Uncle Sam proclaims not only “America's election” but also her right to annihilate its cultural others (“those who expects to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of […] massacreein'”—7).

Alternative voices such as those of the Rosenbergs or their defenders are not absent from Coover's novel, but they have difficulty in breaking through Uncle Sam's dichotomic discourse. Although The Public Burning pursues a historical vindication of the other, the Rosenberg counter-narrative remains uncertain and mediated. On the rare occasions they are allowed to take center stage, the Rosenbergs alternate between dignified silence and bombastic statements that are immediately framed by Uncle Sam's or Nixon's comments. Both underscore the provocative nature of the Rosenberg diatribes against the “American system” (101), their political “grandstanding.” The traditional interlocutors of power (the press, creative writers, political philosophers) are also subdued. With the exception of a few references to Arthur Miller's politically charged play The Crucible (1953), which had the McCarthy era as much in mind as the Salem witchcraft trials on which it was based; Einstein's statements in defense of the Rosenbergs; W. E. B. Du Bois's writings on race that brought him the accusation of being a Russian agent in 1951; and the fiction of Steinbeck, Farrell, Caldwell, and Moravia, denounced in Congress for their “filth, perversion, and degeneracy” (215), Coover presents high culture as a reinforcer of political power. In Coover's sweeping perspective, all political and cultural institutions are responsible for maintaining the Manichaean narrative that pits America against its cultural and ideological others. Time magazine, personified as “The National Poet Laureate,” revives his “great poetic affinity for War” (323), “quickening” it with “audacious [Homeric] imagery and original prosody” (320). Applying his agonal imagination to history, the Poet reduces historical experience to linear confrontations that reinforce “deep tribal” prejudice (328). The New York Times embodies the “Spirit of History” in a more raw, more manipulative form. Its newspeak reports promote “arbitrariness as a principle,” replacing logical relations with “randomness as design” and objectivity with “a willful program for the stacking of perceptions” (191). The “vast, intricate, yet static tableau” produced by the New York Times dismays Julius Rosenberg. Julius would like to destroy “all this so-called history so that history can start again” but realizes that his martyrdom would become “just another thread in the fabric, another figure in the eternal tableau, one more exemplary parable for the hucksters to amuse themselves by” (195).

And yet the very discourses that try to repress the humanity of the other end up by being disrupted or contaminated by it. The historical vindication of the other thus takes place within the dominant discourse that is rendered uncertain and pluralized. Under Uncle Sam's very nose, a “rash of evil doings” spreads around the world and the Times Square stage undergoes subversive distortions: a mannequin dressed like Uncle Sam with a Hitler mustache is strapped into the electric chair, and the luminous slogan “America the hope of the world” is distorted to read successively “dope,” “rope,” “rape,” “rake,” “fake,” “fate,” “hate,” “nate,” “nite,” and “joke” of the world (36–41). The novel lists other similar disturbances that mark a continuous linguistic and ideological slippage away from the official order of history. Uncle Sam's own language is submitted to a deconstruction that exposes the cynical meaning hidden behind the surface rhetoric:

[…] It is our manifest dust-in-yer-eye to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplyin' millions, so damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead, fellow ripstavers, we cannot escape history! […] I tell you, we want elbow-room—the continent—the whole continent—and nothin' but the continent!

(8)

Despite Uncle Sam's successful restoration of the Times Square slogans to read “America the Poke of the World / America the Pope of the World / America the Hope of the World” (65), the memory of the subversive errancies cannot be wiped out. The more control power exercises over significance, the greater the risk of entropic breakdown. Marginalized perspectives such as those of the Rosenbergs return to haunt the official discourse, exposing its monologic blindness and creating a partial transfer of symbolic potential from victimizers to victims. By summing up the forces of alterity under the code of the “ungraspable Phantom,” “made of nothing solid,” Uncle Sam exposes himself to the haunting of the repressed specter that for Jacques Derrida is always disruptive and revolutionary, mixing a “coming back” with “coming for the first time” (4, 6–7, 10–11).

The most dangerous disruption for Uncle Sam's triumphalist spectacle ensues during the Times Square blackout, just before the executions. Plunged “into a nighttime far deeper than that from which this morning they awoke” (492), the crowds undergo a “tribal implosion.” Though Uncle Sam returns promptly to blaze a “New Enlightenment” on his people, his light reveals a scene of “rampant nihilism, bestiality, liberated freak shows, careless love and cheating hearts, drunkenness, cock-sucking, and other fearsomely unclean abominations […] not exactly Cotton Mather's vision of Theopolis Americana” (495). That scene parodies the apocalyptic “end of history” imagined by the Cold War ideology, suggesting that the seeds of darkness are sown by the self-proclaimed champions of light. That the blackout occurs when Nixon calls on Uncle Sam to drop his pants as part of a collective ritual of self-baring indicates that the custodian of the Cold War ideology is himself a version of the Phantom Other he created.

When the “enemy” other is brought onto the execution stage in Times Square further disturbances are created. Julius's frailty suggests a Christ figure to some, but Uncle Sam dismisses that impression as a ploy, “the Phantom's last weapon” (508). Ethel's execution disrupts the official script even more profoundly: her defiance prevents the crowd from commiserating with her, and her unexplainable survival of the first electrocution attempt robs watchers of their catharsis. Ethel momentarily escapes the stereotypic roles of “witch-like phallic mother” and recalcitrant spy (Carmichael 96), insisting “on being herself, forcing them to think about something or someone other than themselves, which is both disquieting and exciting” (The Public Burning 513). The doctor's horrified announcement, “This woman is still alive,” points to Ethel's irreducibility as the official culture's “other.”

Of all Coover's characters, Nixon understands best the seductive power of the other. In the novel he tries to negotiate a balance between a conformist political career in the service of a “Tyrant Other,” Uncle Sam, and moments of “breakaway wildness” that bring him perilously close to a subversive other, Ethel. Nixon begins by patiently exploring the Rosenbergs' lives to understand the centrifugal forces that pulled them out of the mainstream. He is intrigued by how close his own destiny as a struggling middle-class young man had come to intersecting theirs. Ethel's career resembles his own: daughter of poor immigrants, Ethel Greenglass hoped to establish an identity by performing as singer, actress, and union speaker. Like Nixon, she was committed to politics and the public dimension of language, speaking always as if “to a vast audience” (408). But Ethel remained trapped in her marginality through lack of opportunity and political craftiness, while Nixon managed to drift to the center of power. In an ironic reversal of the stereotypical definition of the other, the Rosenbergs remind Nixon of Horatio Alger's self-made Americans (129): they are resourceful and committed, even though to the “wrong” ideology. Their entire existence—from their “beggardly childhood on the Lower East Side, [to] their clumsy romance, their abandoned children, their depressing withdrawn lives”—haunts the establishment “with a strange dark power” (352). For Nixon, this is the power that brings “History itself alive—perhaps by the very threat of ending it!” (352).

Coveting that power for himself, Nixon seeks a rapprochement with the other. As he moves beyond stereotypical definitions to the intimate aspects of the Rosenbergs' existences, Nixon is filled with an unexpected longing to touch their lives. That longing can be explained in part through the parallels that Nixon draws between Ethel's adolescence and his own. But Nixon's moments of identification with the scapegoated other have a deeper motivation: the other represents for him the energy and “dream of life,” the “trance of timelessness” (315). In his secret reveries, Nixon pictures himself in the role of the other's champion, sharing stories and feelings with his rediscovered sister-lover, Ethel. Or he loses himself in hallucinatory visions of otherness, exotic ethnicity, homosexuality, and animal gluttony. Despite his efforts to contain the damage done by opening the subconscious “gates and flood[ing] the syntax routes” (181), Nixon is periodically detoured from conventional reality, made aware of his incontinent and fallible body. He also begins to function like an empathetic historical medium, remembering “things that had never happened to me, places I'd never been, friends and relatives I'd never met who spoke a language I didn't know” (144). His identification with others makes him feels awkward and yet “richer somehow” (145).

Nixon's reveries of cross-cultural rapprochement are interrupted by Uncle Sam's angry reminder that it is his patriotic duty to participate in the war against the “arch-degenerate, alien to us in ever' way—habits, hopes, blood even” (336). The Rosenbergs are for him just the most recent incarnation of that historical enemy. But when left alone, Nixon returns to his troubled questions about his own marginality and subaltern position as Uncle Sam's “whipping boy” (340). In Coover's words, Nixon lives “close to the center, yet not quite in the center, off to the edge a bit, an observer” (LeClair and McCaffery 74–75). Feeling vulnerable in spite of his exemplary Cold War track record, Nixon courts the Republican elite, trying to gain access to its inner circle by playing golf with Uncle Sam. Yet he suspects that he will remain an outsider for the Eastern Establishment with its “unchallenged customs and a blind loyalty based on the blood of Party” (58).

As Nixon becomes more tolerant of his own in-between position, he undertakes “Something Truly Dangerous” in chapter 21: a journey into that “strange space between” to “reach” the other. Propelled by a desire to “provoke a truth for the world at large to gape at: namely, that nothing is predictable, anything can happen” (365), Nixon takes a train to Sing Sing, moving against the general flow of the crowds toward Times Square. His contradictory motives for seeing the Rosenbergs reflect his ideological “in-betweenness”: he wants to get the Rosenbergs' confessions and stop the executions; to establish “a partnership in iconoclasm” (368) with them, exposing the arbitrariness of the power structures; and to act as a mediator between Eisenhower and Julius Rosenberg, or small-town traditions and city revolution. As he draws closer to his destination, disguised as mustached poet-clown, Nixon discovers a riskier reason for his journey: that of rescuing the distressed Other from her dungeon. Inside the prison, he moves deftly through a number of studied roles (as debater, “progressive” Republican, champion of minorities); but then he startles both Ethel and himself by becoming emotional and addressing her as a human being. Renouncing his inhibitions, Nixon embraces Ethel, exhilarated by the “tart bite of danger” but also by the “delicacy of innocence, the tang of the unexpected, the nutty flavor of playfulness, the subtlety of the first encounter” (437).

Nixon and Ethel seem to gain a momentary sense of togetherness from this interaction. But Nixon's gain is far greater. Without risking self-cancellation like Professor Pinenut, Nixon experiences a similar instance of “mystical communion with the Other, the most ecstatic and visionary moment in his life” (Pinocchio in Venice 266). Through his identification with Ethel, Nixon rediscovers his potential for feeling and adventure, as well as the memory of an America of “warmth and brotherhood I had not known since those mornings we all huddled around the kitchen stove in Yorba Linda” (The Public Burning 439). Ethel functions both as an object of desire (Lacan's “petit object a”) and a signifier of otherness (Lacan's “grande autre”) that replenishes and expands Nixon's identity, giving him self-recognition: “It was incredible this rapport, this perfectly reflected image, it made shivers run down my spine” (441). “[W]as this what the dialectics of history was all about,” he wonders, this “ecstasy” of reunion? (439) Through his reunion with this replenishing other, Nixon feels a new freedom from both Uncle Sam and the Phantom: he believes he has escaped “outside guarded time” (442), in a nonpolarized posthistory. Ethel, on the other hand, does not feel empowered by their embrace that ends in a grotesque dance entangled in clothes that would not come off and real life emergencies that interrupt fantasy. Nixon's self-congratulatory notion that “he is making history this evening, not for [him]self alone, but for all the ages!” (439) does not benefit Ethel. As the guards approach to take her to her execution, Nixon runs away, abandoning Ethel to her fate. His effort through the remainder of the novel is to atone for his transgression and rescue his political career. Finding himself transposed inexplicably onto the Times Square execution stage, “his pants a tangled puddle at his feet” (469) and the message “I am a Scamp” written by Ethel on his buttocks, he turns the humiliation of being caught with his pants down into a face-saving political speech on the theme of national vulnerability (“we have ALL been caught with our trousers down!”—473) and the sacrifices that all patriotic Americans need to make in order to meet their “responsibilities in the world” (482).

In spite of his retrenchment effort, Nixon remains suspended between the remembrance of Ethel's “life-giving embrace, where everything seemed possible, once more” (475), and his capitulation to the crudest political game. Nixon's voice in the epilogue is troubled, illustrating Bakhtin's definition of the bifurcated consciousness of the “traveler” who combines the voice of the “public apologist” with that of the “self-inquisitor” (see Cope 79–81). The two final episodes he narrates—his effort to justify himself to his wife, groveling like a dog, and his submission to Uncle Sam's sodomizing embrace—put even his human identity into question. The scene of his violation by Uncle Sam suggests what Ethel must have felt in his own crude embrace. Nixon responds to Uncle Sam's attention with a mixture of terror and love, accepting his “election” to power as his own execution and acknowledging the irreducible ambiguity of the other (he begins to suspect that his Sing Sing encounter had not been with the victimized Ethel but with a disguised Uncle Sam). Nixon himself can be read as a version of the other, at once a victim and victimizer. He is, in Daniel E. Frick's description, Coover's “secret sharer,” a “double” that spotlights “the tug-of-war between Coover's designs—his desire to expose the corruption of America's dominant culture—and his artistic self-doubts, his troubling visions of political powerlessness. Put simply, the creation of this alternative self allows Coover to explore the shadowy fears of failure” (Frick 83).

By making Nixon the book's main narrator, Coover created not only an authorial alter ego, but also a credible focalizer for the process of historical construction and manipulation. Politics for Nixon is an all-encompassing, fateful performance in which he tries to play multiple roles: as stage manager, assistant director, producer, and even hero in the failed attempt to rescue Ethel from the towers of Sing Sing. Nixon competes for ownership of that performance with other resourceful scriptwriters: the Prosecuting Attorney who turns justice into a form of entertainment through “backstage manipulations imaginative and exhaustive” (121); Uncle Sam who, as “our Superchief in the Age of Flux,” is “still hungering after some kind of shape to things” (341); the cynical Poet Laureate Time, who argues that “only through the frankly biased and distorting lens of art is any real grasp of the facts—not to mention Ultimate truth—even remotely possible” (326); and President Eisenhower whose own concern “is in the area of stagecraft,” “the effect of the action” (230). Nixon's first instinct as a political performer is to fall back on the tested roles of “tragic lover, young author, athlete, host, father, […] businessman” (361), played in school shows. But as his awareness of personal and national crisis increases, Nixon decides “to step in and change the script” (363), taking risks against the master narrative controlled by Uncle Sam. The liberated “random movements” he experiences during his trip to Sing Sing make Nixon feel “closer to reality, closer to God” (366). Through his “rival act of authorship” that disrupts Uncle Sam's story about the Rosenbergs and challenges the “narrative of America's election as the ‘stuff we make up to hold the goddam world together,’” Nixon becomes an agent for Coover's own “subversion of a national mythology […] from the inside” (Frick 84–85).

Nixon performs as an authorial surrogate in other areas: in his political memoirs, the vice president uses his awkward “in-betweenness” to deliver scathing portraits of his associates, from John Foster Dulles and Jack Kennedy to President Eisenhower. In his review of the Rosenberg case, Nixon's lawyerly instinct perceives “a lot of backstage scene-rigging and testimony-shaping” (82). His lengthy musings confront the “riddle of history” (115), wavering between a belief in “case history, the unfolding patterns, the rewards and punishments, the directed life,” and a suspicion that we live in a “lawless universe” where if “there was a certain power of consistency, there was also power in disruption” (363). The latter hypothesis scares Nixon with its radical polysystemic possibilities: for if “there was no author, no director, and the audience had no memories,” being “reinvented every day,” then perhaps “there is not even a War between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness! Perhaps we are all pretending!” (362). Intellectually, Nixon can admit that the struggle against an ideological other is a cover-up for “the motive vacuum,” the “lie of purpose” (363). Politically, however, he finds that lack of determination unacceptable. Therefore, Nixon the ideologue prevails over Nixon as author-historian. Betraying his polysystemic belief “that all men contain all views, right and left, theistic and atheistic, legalistic and anarchical, monadic and pluralistic; and only an artificial—call it political—commitment to consistency makes them hold steadfast to singular positions” (363), Nixon chooses a “singular position” in the end, allowing himself “to be possessed by Uncle Sam, be used by him, moved by him” (261), like “public property” (262). In surrendering his body and intellect to Uncle Sam, Nixon acknowledges the more masterful author. The grand author is literally and symbolically a rapist, violating the order of history so as to assert his domination over the private and public domain.

The one who suffers most from that reassertion of the master's voice is not Nixon but his other. In spite of its momentary disruptions, the misogynist master discourse reasserts itself periodically: Eisenhower refuses to grant the Rosenbergs a pardon because “in this instance it is the woman who is the strong and recalcitrant character [… t]he man is the weak one” (249); Uncle Sam advises Nixon to keep his “little wife well tilled, willed, I mean” (332); and Nixon himself exchanges his risky fantasy of identification with subversive femininity for a profitable homosocial bond. By comparison to The Public Burning, Coover's more recent novels challenge the masculinist discourse more successfully. Still, The Public Burning remains the best demonstration of the manifold ways in which dogmatic ownership over history can be challenged at a narrative and ideological level. The presence of multiple authors (Uncle Sam, Nixon, FBI agents, the Poet Laureate Time), representing partly different interests, creates unexpected gaps and revelations in the official narrative, like the “H-polarizer” 3-D glasses carried into Times Square by a forgetful moviegoer. As he staggers out of a horror movie about a Frankensteinian professor who dips living people into hot wax to make them into historical figures, the unnamed spectator superimposes the apocalyptic blaze he saw at the end of the movie over the Times Square pageantry. Though literally a “misreading” produced by the “eye-straining, H-polarizer haze of alcohol” and 3-D glasses (283), the moviegoer's hallucinatory vision reveals deeper truths. By seeing the Times Square “public burning” for what it symbolically is, a “final spectacle, […] [an] atomic holocaust” (286), the 3-D spectator proves “the only sane person left on the face of the earth” (287). He is also an excellent illustration of the kaleidoscopic vision of the “dissident” writer who “maximizes the effects of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and paradox with a view of occupying the domain of the excluded middle” (Maltby 145–46). Dragged away by the guards when he tries to offer himself as sacrificial substitute in the electric chair, the 3-D spectator leaves a weighty message with us (“BEWARE THE MAD ARTIST” [288]) that simultaneously affirms and warns against the power of the word to rewrite history.

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———. John's Wife: A Novel. New York: Simon, 1996.

———. Pinocchio in Venice. 1991. New York: Grove, 1997.

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———. Spanking the Maid. New York: Grove, 1982.

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