[In the following essay, Joris examines Coover's metafictional approach to literature and his affinity for cinematic technique, as demonstrated by the title story of A Night at the Movies.]

I tend to think of tragedy as a kind of adolescent response to the universe—the higher truth is a comic response.

—Robert Coover in an interview with Leo J. Hertzel cited in Critique II, 3 (1969)

I work with language because paper is cheaper than filmstock … Probably, if I had absolute freedom to do what I want, I'd prefer film.

—Robert Coover in interview with Larry McCaffery (1979)

A Night at the Movies opens with the acknowledgment of the impending apocalypse: “We are doomed Professor! The planet is rushing madly towards Earth and no human power can stop it!” Is this the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning? Both, no doubt, and then something more. Stories. Which is really the same thing, for what is the apocalypse if not a story? Or stories. By definition it is not something we can live to tell. The end of the world, and thus the end of us. How can you tell the end, your own death? You can only tell it before it happens because you will not be around to tell it after the fact. It is not a fact but a fiction. A story. No longer, under the present dispensation, The Story, but a story, one among many possible fictions. When it was The Story it was, says my dictionary, “the last book of the New Testament.” The apocalypse is a book. The apocalypse is the end of the world. A book is the end of the world. It is also the beginning of a new book. Of stories.

We, too, have been brought into a blind alley by the critics and analysts; we, too, suffer from a “literature of exhaustion,” …

And it is above all to the need for new modes of perception and fictional forms able to encompass them that I, barber's basin on my head, address these stories.

—Robert Coover, Pricksongs and Descants

Which is, of course, a very old story. Every book involves another book or books: writing is always preceded by reading; no book, no thought is totally “original” in that sense. “Like knavish cards, the leaves of all great books were covertly packed. He was but packing one set the more …” is Pierre's realization in the chapter entitled “Pierre at his book” of Melville's great novel of disappointment. Here the hero's disappointment comes about when, trying to become a writer, he realizes that literature is not the spontaneous product of some ineffable inspiration or of some “poetic nature,” but a craft that leans and relies on past books and writings. This realization leads to a loss of innocence and, as Joseph N. Riddel has shown, it is coterminous with the coming into existence of American literature, constituting, after a fashion, the fall from (a non-existent) innocence in the dawning awareness that there is no untainted originality. Here is Riddel's analysis of the chapter in Pierre entitled “Young America in Literature”:

If the satire is directed at anything other than Emerson and his original quoting or appropriation of Carlyle, it is surely a reminder that writing has always been implicated in a series of conventions and complications which preclude the thinking of its primal origin in the “poetic nature.” … Writing, Pierre discovers, implicates him in the worldly economy of textuality … Young America usurps the innocent's dream of originality, of radical innocence, and implicates its authors in a chain of fraternal production, a capitalist enterprise of textual production that abolishes the romantic dream of the “author” and subordinates his originality to the collective design of the “tailor.”

Pierre eventually has to come to terms with “this democratic economy of production, in which there is not one but many authors of every text.” Though Melville's development of this theme in Pierre can be seen as an especially explicit paradigmatic instance of this, it is not an isolated experience in American letters. Edgar A. Dryden, in a response to Riddel's aforementioned essay, shows how the same realization also affected, among others, Hawthorne who “recognizes that writers are readers too, the act of creation one of unweaving and reweaving texts of others”:

His tales are “twice-told” not only in the sense of being “musty and mouse-nibbled leaves of old periodicals, transformed by the magic arts of … friendly publishers into a new book,” but also in the sense of being interpretations of events, objects, and stories from the past. His starting point as a writer is most often an “Old Time Legend” …

“Legend,” as we know, comes from the Latin legere, which means to read. But, Dryden suggests, this discovery of “the extent to which man is a prisoner of the already known and written” is fraught with dangers and may have motivated both Melville's and Hawthorne's long periods of silence:

Both writers are overwhelmed by the exhaustion of possibilities and dismayed by the realization that their relation to their readers is based on deception and bad faith.

(192)

And yet, Dryden further suggests, these authors' continuing investigation of the limitations of story would intimate a new possibility “of a fiction which emphasizes story and reading in the face of exhausted possibilities” (192). In the second part of the twentieth century, a heightened version of this awareness will lead a number of the best American fictioners toward what can be called metafiction. Dryden goes directly to John Barth who sees in the very “used-upness of certain forms or exhaustion of certain possibilities” a point of departure for new kinds of fiction. This fiction is based on imitations (“novels which imitate the form of the Novel by an author who imitates the role of the Author”), and, as Dryden has it, “the effect of an imitation is to repeat the source in parody and thereby to reveal its fictive nature.” Barth himself is clear that such imitations are not in fact the invention of latecomers, but have been central to fiction writing from the beginning on:

If this sort of thing sounds unpleasantly decadent, nevertheless it's about where the genre began, with Quixote imitating Amadis of Gaul, Cervantes pretending to be the Cid Hamete Benengeli (and Alonso Quijano pretending to be Don Quichote), or Fielding parodying Richardson. “History repeats itself as farce”—meaning, of course, in the form or mode of farce, not that history is farcical … This is the difference between a proper, “naive” novel and a deliberate imitation of a novel, or a novel imitating other kinds of documents.

(72)

One could argue that what differentiates the contemporary postmodern or “metafictional” novel from its predecessors is not so much the fact that it imitates, or even the nature of that imitation, but rather the high level of self-awareness or self-consciousness this imitatio has achieved. The ensuing unavoidable playfulness (“it's all done with mirrors!” could be the glib encapsulation of the metafictioner's methodology) such self-consciousness creates, is paralleled, accompanied, undercut, traversed and/or undermined, as the case may be, by the deep seriousness of an undertaking aware that it is never “presenting”—or “presencing”—but always “representing,” repeating a story without single origin and from but one of many possible perspectives and thus unable to claim any final “truth-value” for itself.

This high self-consciousness of the contemporary novelist has of course its dangers, the main ones being probably a certain inevitable narcissism and a love of pyrotechnics, of technical proficiency for its own sake. The constant need to look over one's shoulder and examine and re-examine the fictional forms of the past can easily lead to staleness or a new-fangled version of academic formalism. Even in Barth's behemoths of novels the author's undoubted and vaunted love of storytelling is all too often buried under webs of conceits strangling the initial exhilaration. The reader—or at least this reader—all too often gets the sense that the multitudinous literary forms of the past consciously dredged up and parodied finally constitute the essential part of the writing, so that, paradoxically, one is reading in fact an actual, antiquarian nineteenth- or eighteenth-century novel.

It is in contrast to this rather academic version of metafiction, prey to so much ingrownness, so much “nombrilisme”—a fascination with one's own belly-button, as the French put it—that Robert Coover's work is extremely refreshing. Though highly conscious of the necessary self-reflexive nature of fictional forms, Coover has managed to avoid the trap of gratuitous parody, of repetition for the sake of repetition. Even when working with “musty and mouse-nibbled leaves of old periodicals” (as he did, for example, in The Public Burning, a novel whose language—especially the dialogue—is based on the historical 1950s speeches and writings of Eisenhower, Nixon, and consorts), he manages to “in-form” his creations with new energy and meanings. One reason for this may be that Coover, while fully aware of the re-presentational nature of all writing, has not limited himself to a self-conscious recycling of those forms belonging to the history of the novel. His vision of where we are, though highly comic as it emerges in his works, especially the short fictions, is relatively pessimistic:

We seem to have moved from an open-ended, anthropocentric, humanistic, naturalistic, even—to the extent that man may be thought of as making his own universe—optimistic starting point, to one that is closed, cosmic, eternal, supernatural (in its soberest sense), and pessimistic.

(Pricksongs and Descants 78)

It is in reaction to this state of affairs that Coover conceives the writer's mission, which is to “use 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” (Pricksongs and Descants 79).

Thus A Night at the Movies is the conscious utilization of the familiar mythic and historical forms of another cultural genre: film. As we have seen, every writer is also and may be foremost a reader. Today we would need to amend that statement and say that she or he is also a viewer of films. The movies, which have to a great extent usurped the social function (and also very often the Aristotelian strictures) of the traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, are in this sense essential documents of our present and thus, I submit, probably not only more accessible, but may be also more appropriate than say, Clarissa or even Don Quixote, to tell the story of our contemporary dilemmas or to criticize our culture. This is not to suggest that the re-flexive movement, which makes conscious and ironic or parodic use of older, “exhausted” forms, is not present. To the contrary, Coover's subtitle “You must remember this” ironically points out that film, although a contemporary cultural form, is also and at the same time already a form of the past, or better, a form “with a past”—and thus no innocent ingenue, no matter how much it would like to present itself as such.

Indeed, although the formal reference of the writing is to the medium of film, and although each one of the individual fictions that make up the book is directly related to film, the book as a whole tries to suggest the complex social occasion of “going to the movies,” of spending “a night at the movies.” That situates the event in the past and in opposition to either today's (low-brow) television culture or its (high-brow) art-cinema culture. Coover delights in constructing a nostalgic framework meant to remind us of 1940s and 1950s outings: rather than the one feature film we are likely to take in today when we are able to get off the television-couch, this is a full evening's worth of “entertainment,” including previews, serials, adventure flicks, shorts, comedy, kiddie-films, a travel documentary, a musical interlude and a “main feature.” Such a program cannot but reproduce a certain haphazard quality, a randomness alien to any Aristotelian notion of the well-wrought book, of the “novel” as a coherency mirroring a supposed cosmic coherency. But it is exactly that haphazard quality that serves the postmodern sensibility of complexity, discontinuity, randomness all the better. “Fictions,” the term Coover uses to define the genre of his book, is a concept that more accurately describes our imaginings concerning our contemporary world than the idea of “the novel.”

Coover's imitation of the genre(s) is unabashed from the very beginning: the traditional “table of contents” has been replaced by a “program,” followed by this rejoinder often found in old movie theaters or programs, and reproduced down to the erratic capitalization of the words, here usurping the place of the literary exergue: “Ladies and Gentlemen May safely visit this Theatre as no Offensive Films are ever Shown Here.” The reader smiles, detecting a clear note of sarcasm, and, of course expecting the opposite.

II

What's frightening is not so much being able to see only what you want to see, see, but discovering that what you think you see only because you want to see it … sees you …

—Robert Coover, “The Phantom of the Movie Palace”

This essay is not the place to propose or attempt a full analysis of the many fictions making up A Night at the Movies. We will have to make do with a close look or, better, with several medium-range shots (what French movie parlance calls “des plans américains”) montaged with a few zooms and panning or travelling shots of the first story. But this is no loss. That story, a dazzling tour de force of writing, can serve as paradigm for the whole book: it is, simultaneously, a comic parody of just about every imaginable movie genre, a stern fable on the porous boundaries between “fiction” and “reality,” an astute analysis and critique of the author's role, a philosophical meditation on the illusionary nature of time and the effectuation of the apocalypse announced in the text's first sentence.

The title itself, “The Phantom of the Movie Palace,” puns on the title of a well-known film, hiding and thereby highlighting another cultural genre, namely opera. Opera is a genre that, like film, partakes both of the theater and of literature. It is, moreover, also a genre that, like the novel and like silent movies, has often been declared dead. Something dead, then, although still somehow present, intruding, looming, or letting its shadow fall upon the present: that is, of course, the very definition of a phantom.

At the most superficial level of “realistic” analysis, “The Phantom” can be read as a funny and highly moral tale: in an old, slightly decrepit, and totally deserted movie theater, a lonely projectionist, refusing to acknowledge that the good old days—or “the age of gold” as Coover puts it—are over, locks himself so deeply into the fictitious world of old movies and movie characters that he finally goes insane, believing himself to be a character in an old historical movie, about to be guillotined. A rational medical diagnosis would describe the illness as paranoid schizophrenia, or if we wanted to invent a new, more literary term, “iconic schizoparanoia.” At this level of analysis a basic moral tail wags the story: The wages of the refusal to live in the present, i.e., real world, are madness, insanity. This is, however, an unsatisfactory “explication de texte,” not only because it rides roughshod over the very complexity and involutedness of the text itself, but also because it is unable to read the re-flexive nature of the moral it draws from its own flawed reading of the text. The un- or ir-reality it blames the character for wanting to live in is, of course, also that of writing, of fiction itself, and therefore such a moral would ultimately have to condemn all fiction as “only” re-presenting reality and thus never being the thing present to itself.

The most obvious mistake of such an analysis lies in the fact that it abstracts a linear plot—or tries to force the text into Aristotelian strictures—and thus falsifies the text. It is, indeed, more than a simple misreading; it presupposes a willed simplification of the textual matter itself bordering, consciously or unconsciously, on willful deception. To get to a more nuanced reading of Coover's story, in order to uncover the multilayeredness and interweaving of text and meaning, we need, first of all, to go to that text itself, to its texture. Coover's writing is anything but linear, expository prose. One way to describe its complex gestalt would be to compare it to Möbius strip—that paradoxical topographical figure where inside and outside turn into each other, creating a space literally indescribable by Euclidian means.

One could consider this Möbius strip topography of the text as its strategy, whereas its tactics are those of montage, i.e., a technique the early modernist writers brought into literature from film and that has been central for most innovative poetry and prose ever since. Coover's formal procedures or tactics thus actually imitate, parody, re-present those of the genre he is “writing about.” Writing is always a re-writing of an earlier text, although in the present case this applies not only to matters of “content,” but also to the formal procedures used in creating the text; in Derridaian terms it is not just a repetition of the trace, but a repetition of the angle at which the stylus hits the clay of the tablet—thus also a matter of stylistics.

A simple example of the text's Möbius strip strategy can be found early in the text, in pages 14–15. Coover has started his fiction by presenting, in four paragraphs, by means of rapid montage, scenes from various film genres: science-fiction, gangster, family drama, and pornography. (Further along, the story will show scenes from a Foreign Legion movie, a kiddie comedy, a Western, a Tarzan flick, and many more). This is done without any contextualization; i.e., the reader cannot know or decide where he or she stands, if she or he is purely an outside spectator watching the films with detachment, or some kind of eavesdropping participant inside the scene or frame. The fifth paragraph at first continues this pattern. The opening sentence—“The man with the axe in his forehead steps into the flickering light.”—indicates simply another shift of genres: we are now in some kind of horror movie. The second sentence—“His eyes, pooled in blood, cross as though trying to see what it is that is cleaving his brain in two.”—confirms the setting while already cross-breeding genres by shifting from pure horror to some (intentional? non-intentional?—we cannot say as yet) form of comedy, or at the very least, to a parody of the horror film.

The third sentence—“His chest is pierced with a spear, his groin with a sword.”—broadens both the horror and comic possibilities, thereby intensifying the parodic dimension. The fourth sentence opens with the logical continuation of the actions depicted by the first three sentences (or shots): “He stumbles, falls into …” Up to this point the language has been purely descriptive of an external action. Now, in the middle of the fourth sentence, it changes and presents us with what we take, or have to take, at first glance, for a metaphor: “He stumbles, falls into a soft splash of laughter and applause.” Our initial understanding of the completed sentence suggests that what we have here is a rhetorical trope where the spatial “into” replaces a temporal “as”—i.e., as the man falls, or at the same time as the man falls, the audience (who or where that as yet unnamed audience is, we do not know) begins to laugh at the horror-comic antics. The fifth sentence seems to confirm this reading, opening as it does with “His audience, still applauding …”; its end reassuringly indicates that what we have witnessed is indeed “only” a movie that has come to its end as the audience “rises now and turns towards the exits.”

However, the middle segment of that sentence—“as the light in the film flows from viewed to viewer”—is both enigmatic and disturbing. What is happening here? It cannot simply mean that the light of the movie-projector, and thus of the movie, goes out while the house-lights come on, for the sentence unambiguously states that it is the light “in the film” that now changes direction and flows from viewed to viewer. The sentence can semantically only suggest that what has been seen now becomes what sees, that the relationship of viewer and viewed is inverted. The horror movie now views the audience that in the next sentences (in fact three short sentence fragments setting the scene staccato) does indeed become the actor of another classic horror scene of that genre: “Which are locked. Panic ensues. Perhaps it is a fire.”

The next sentence buttresses the previously intuited insight: indeed the projector, i.e., the (light of the) horror movie did not go out/end, for we are now told that “Up on the rippling velours, the man with the split skull is still staggering and falling, staggering and falling.” In the next sentence the viewers of the original horror film are now viewed as caught in their own horror film:

“Oh my god! Get that axe!” someone screams, clawing at the door, and another replies: “It's no use! It's only a rhetorical figure!” “What—?!” This is worse than anyone thought. “I only came for the selected short subjects!” someone cries irrationally.

In the middle of this new film-scene further twists and layers appear in the strange dialogue (“It's only a rhetorical figure” and “I only came for the selected short subjects”), which we will come back to later. But this is not all yet: the last sentence of the paragraph introduces yet another twist:

They press their tear-streaked faces against the intractable doors, listening in horror to their own laughter and applause, rising now to fill the majestic old movie palace until their chests ache with it, their hands burn.

Now the audience, the viewers of the first film, has not only become the viewed of a second horror scene; but also, in the final twist of the paragraph, as actors in that scene, the viewers—the auditors, to be more precise—of themselves in their role as audience of the very first horror scene. The effect of these switches between observer and observed, viewer and viewed, inside and outside, in which the one seems at will to turn into the other in a whirling dervish dance of change of perspectives is exactly what I have called the Möbius strip strategy. The other set of terms that could, of course, be substituted for the one used above is “reality” and “fiction.” Clearly the boundaries between fiction and reality, between object and subject, between viewed and viewer are porous indeed.

This basic stratagem operates throughout Coover's story, both on the micro-level of the sentence and on the macro-level of the story-line. Briefly, in the latter, the main character, the projectionist, moves from the reality of his movie theater into the fiction of his films, in a chassé-croisé chase with the eternal ingenue character of his films who crosses over from the fictions of the films into the projectionist's reality-theater. The gateway for that crossing over consists also in a transformational process. The projectionist, erotically fascinated by what he perceives to be holes in the underwear of a young ingenue climbing a ladder leading to a hayloft, is however aware that they are “just water spots—it's an old film,” thus producing another one of the strange places where “fiction and reality meet.” But his desire, “his lonely quest for the impossible mating, the crazy embrace of polarities,” pushes him to conjoin the two.

To bridge the “unbridgeable distance between the eye and its object” he manipulates his old films (by means of filmic, literary, and painterly techniques: collage, montage, frottage, overlay, décollage) only to find that the ingenue has vanished—escaped through the water-marks that have shape-shifted or are they the stiletto heel marks of the incarnation of another ingenue? “a mad scatter of vicious little holes” in the middle of the screen. Thus, these holes in the screen are the gateway from one reality into another, but it is not as if the scatter of holes were random black holes: they spell out a semantically laden sentence in block letters: “Beware the Midnight Man!”

His comic gift allaying any queasiness we may have at the inevitably arising suspicion that “nothing and everything is true” (or, to use Hassan I Sabbah's harsher version of the same realization, that “nothing is true, [and so] everything is permitted”), Coover guides or rather rides us through these masterfully effected transformations and dislocations in a universe—or universes—where polysemy is not so much a metaphoric quality of individual words, but rather a metonymic function of syntax, and especially of that larger syntax structure we call narrative.

III

The hero, trying simply to save the world, enters the fun house, only to be subjected to everything from death rays and falling masonry to iron maidens, time traps, and diabolic life-restoring machines, as though to problematize his very identity through what the chortling fun-house operators call in their other-worldly tongue “the stylistics of absence.”

—Robert Coover, “The Phantom of the Movie Palace”

As behooves a good metafictioner, Coover's text is fully conscious of its own turns and twists, and on one level can be read precisely as an investigation and critique of the role of the fiction writer. The “Mad Projectionist” thus becomes another figure of the contemporary author: not the god-like creator of exquisite “true” fictions he is supposed to control completely, he is the technical manipulator of already existent data—images or words or stories—that he controls only to a limited degree. In that sense, and to go back to the suggestions made in the first part of this essay, in the traditional novel something “long forgotten” is dragged out, something that was hidden is revealed: the author as magus or demi-urge makes present what was not and would have remained thus without his mediation.

By contrast, in Coover's version of the author as projectionist, writing splices together everything we already know. We have seen and re-seen these films hundreds of times: there is no hidden origin, no long-buried truth that is finally revealed by the author. The Mad Projectionist shows us and himself what we have known all along although we did not know that we knew it. (“I think I have been in this movie before,” a contemporary idiom has it, while we could speculate, had we but the time, on how close this comes to Nietzsche's “Eternal Return.”

The Mad Projectionist qua author realizes how little control he has over the iconic cultural representations he handles, in this case, “his” characters and story-lines, and how “meaning” is independent of both his own will and of that of his characters:

They seem then, no matter how randomly he's thrown the clips together, to be caught up in some terrible enchantment of continuity, as though meaning itself were pursuing them (and him! and him!), lunging and snorting at the edge of the frame, fangs bared and dripping of gore.

(A Night at the Movies 18)

But he also senses the dangers lurking, for “he knows there's something corrupt, maybe even dangerous, about this collapsing of boundaries,” although it is simultaneously liberating, and thus he cannot stop even if at times he feels “like he's caught out in no-man's-land on a high trapeze with pie on his face” (23). When things go wrong, he has the authorial faith that “an expert touch of his finger on a sprocket soon restores time's main illusion” (26). But even that faith in minimal technical control seems a delusion, for in this story, at least, the author as Mad Projectionist does get caught in the web of his “creations” and remains unable to extricate himself. When he is led to the guillotine, the mob screams “The public is never wrong!” while a voice on the public address system (a voice that among other things is also the anonymous voice of the literary critic) recounts the crimes of the condemned. These “crimes” read like an encapsulated indictment of the innovative prose writer from Cervantes' time to today, proffered at the moment when the abstracted voice of the “critic” has taken it upon himself to produce justice and occupy the center of the stage:

… creatures of the night, a collection of the world's most astounding horrors, these abominable parvenus of iconic transactions, [my italics] the shame of a nation, three centuries in the making, brought to you in the mightiest dramatic spectacle of all the ages!

(A Night at the Movies 35–6)

And so we are in a way, led back to the opening paragraph of this essay, in a circular or, I would hope, spiral motion, which, as this is not fiction, can only try and fail to imitate the spiral of Coover's story. The end of which is no end, for although the Mad Projectionist caught in a movie of a movie seems to and, yes, gets guillotined, the dropping blade makes him “surrender himself finally … to that great stream of image-activity that characterizes the mortal condition,” enabling him to re-turn, to re-run (“it's a last-minute sort of rescue”) a film he once saw “(The Revenge of Something-or-Other, or The Returns of …)” as the Möbius strip twists one more time.

The apocalypse acknowledged in the opening sentence has indeed happened, but it is now only one old story-line among many others, and, as on a Möbius strip there is no beginning or end. The essential aspect of the apocalypse, namely that it signals the end, is denied, especially as he who tells it is there after the end. In an open universe, the apocalypse can only be local, limited, and therefore bereft of final, eschatological meaning. If Coover's story and writing techniques have so far been seen mainly under their spatial strictures—the Möbius strip is essentially a topographical gestalt, it is time now to look at the lessons they teach in matters of time, not some absolute time, but under the guise of “timing.”

The End of the World or apocalypse is also the end of time and the beginning of eternity. This concept of the apocalypse presupposes a linear, one-directional concept of time that in turn is the basis for the inevitability of events and thus for our sense of the essentially “tragic” nature of those events in the human sphere. Que sera, sera. The song, in its nostalgic whining, in fact gives the essence of the notion of the tragic: fate. The apocalypse is thus the ultimate tragic event. But Coover's apocalypse is apoplectically funny. What has happened? The answer, to abbreviate and oversimplify to the extreme, is: film. Or, better, the lessons concerning time that the art of the moving picture has given us.

Tragedy/Comedy: it is as if these literary “genres” were finally a matter of relative speed. A cinematic lesson we have all experienced: at the end of a run-of-the-mill entertaining, exciting, sometimes funny, gangster period-piece, the director wants to introduce a sense of the tragic. He does it with the slow-motion technique. Bonnie and Clyde die under a hail of fast bullets, but these bullets are slowed down so that we, the spectators, should conceive of these bullets as moving slowly, inexorably, inevitably towards their targets. In that slowness, in that infinite moment of suspension just before the bullet breaks the skin and draws blood, originates the tension between our desire to avoid, deflect, arrest the event and our realization of the unavoidable, inexorable nature of the event, i.e., of “fatedness.” The bullet was sent on its path long before we became conscious of its progress and target; it is an absolute event in a linear time frame that we cannot change or even inflect. We can only be impotent spectators. That tension is exactly what we call the tragic.

Comedy, on the other hand, resides essentially in the destruction of that moment of suspension, and of the tension thus created, by speeding up movement to the point where cause (the fate prescribed from before time) and effect happen simultaneously: the man collapses as/or even before the trigger is pulled. As Coover puts it: “Cause (that indefinable something) is a happy ending. Or maybe not.” And the reverse holds true too: take a basic slapstick pie-throwing scene, slow it down until the pie moves only by infinitesimal increments towards the face of the unaware victim, and you have tragedy. Every comedian knows that “timing is all.” Coover's statement that he considers “tragedy as a kind of adolescent response to the universe—the higher truth (being) a comic response” seems, to me, to express exactly that new knowledge of time. Once we are aware that time is not that absolute, sternly linear pattern that makes tragedy possible, but a malleable thing that can be speeded up or slowed down, abolished or created, twisted or re-run, then tragedy and comedy can become interchangeable, depending on how we read or see the world. Then, of course, an end of time, an apocalypse, becomes just one of many cosmic jokes, eternally recurring, like a bad joke that has us in stitches even as our heads rest on the block. And maybe it is our laughter that is also the signal for the guillotine to drop, the guillotine that is, as Coover puts it, that “gigantic ticket chopper” granting admittance to the movie theater of our Möbius strip world.

Works Cited

Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in The Friday Book. New York: Putnam's, 1984.

Coover, Robert. A Night at the Movies. New York: Simon, 1987.

———. Pricksongs and Descants. New York: New American, 1970.

Dryden, Edgar A. “Writer as Reader: An American Story,” in The Question of Textuality. Ed. William Spanos, Paul Bové, and Daniel O'Hara. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. 189–96.

Riddel, Joseph. “Decentering the Image: The ‘Project’ of ‘American’ Poetics?” in The Question of Textuality. Ed. William Spanos, Paul Bové, and Daniel O'Hara. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. 159–88.