SOURCE: Miguel-Alfonso, Ricardo. “Mimesis and Self-Consciousness in Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association.” Critique 37, no. 2 (winter 1996): 92–107.

[In the following essay, Miguel-Alfonso examines Coover's movement from mimetic representation toward self-conscious awareness in The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., drawing attention to the transformation of meaning and reality in the novel.]

After The Origin of the Brunists, Coover's interest in the examination of cultural paradigms became “limited” to the categories of fiction-making. In many of the short stories collected in Pricksongs and Descants and in his novel The Universal Baseball Association, he focuses on the interchange between the different components and strata of fictional creations. Authorial control, referentiality, the relationship between author and reader, and other elements are now subject to examination and undergo certain transformations that easily can be associated with the distinctive attitude of formal exploration of contemporary fiction. The Universal Baseball Association, however, deals with what we may call the “private sphere”—that area apart from the fundamental structures of collective consciousness, as in The Origin of the Brunists and The Public Burning. Coover's narrative since The Universal Baseball Association—hereafter cited as UBA—explores the status of fiction by examining the fundamental categories involved in its generation and development as reflected in a baseball game.

In the UBA (1968), his second novel, Coover maintains some of the subjects of inquiry he took on in the Brunist story. The novel is also concerned with pattern and the role of fictional systems in our comprehension of the world, although these themes are not so closely related to the “sense of reality” in the broad context of public ritual as in The Origin of the Brunists and The Public Burning. Although The Universal Baseball Association also engages the intrinsic problems of mimetic representation in terms of the conflict between self-consciousness and referentiality (a concern shared by all of Coover's fiction), the book focuses on this conflict in the private sphere.

Henry's board baseball game, around which he has founded the “Universal Baseball Association,” is a mimetic construction based on the actual sport. In a rather elaborate way, it reproduces the features of the game with detailed precision, and thereby represents a number of the names, terms, rules, and conventions that define the sport.¹ (For instance, he has named his eight teams for legendary teams of baseball history.) Although Henry's game is very different from actual baseball—obviously, it cannot be otherwise—the UBA basically reproduces the actual sport. Henry's design is even more detailed and precise than the game itself in areas such as record-keeping and historical account. As in The Origin of the Brunists, a large set of characters and elements—not only a variety of baseball players—takes part in the imaginary game, making the UBA appear as a complex dialogic construction. Thus, the initial conception of the UBA is as a mimetic (private and fantastic) recreation of the world of baseball.

Although taking its cue from baseball, the UBA does not produce any kind of motion. Shortly after nearly falling asleep in the stadium during a boring baseball game, Henry Waugh went home, picked up his scoreboard, and found that “what was dead had life, what was wearisome became stirring, beautiful, unbelievably real …” (UBA 166). In short, he found that scorecards allowed him to do without the game itself. Its creator symbolizes the players' actions and organizes them according to numerical combinations. He transcribes concrete, real movements into arrangements of three dice, “three ivory cubes, heedless of history yet makers of it” (UBA 16). This three-die system encompasses within its 216 possible combinations all the activity of a baseball game; no action can escape Henry's contrivance. In the UBA, numbers play the same role as words play in a literary text. Obviously, the representational capacity of numerical combinations is less powerful; a sense of immobility is characteristic of board games. Because Henry's chosen symbolic language “signifies” neither characters, viewpoints, nor ideas but just the players' movements, he has to limit the game to the inside-the-stadium action and complement the UBA with his own interpretation of the dice's combinations and an extensive imaginary recreation of the characters' inner lives.

In addition to its undeniable mimetic import, the game is also a self-contained structure ruled by its own internal laws and performed according to a unique numerical pattern, wherein any movement or action is predetermined by the roll of the three dice. For Henry Waugh, the interest of his design lies not in the sport itself but in the inside working of his organization, the mathematical perfection of its evolution, and the unpredictability of its development. It combines the accuracy of numbers and of Henry's painstaking record-keeping, on the one hand, with the erratic and unforeseeable irregularity of dice-rolling, on the other. Such a feature is not to be found in the actual playing of baseball, where the outcome of a match depends almost entirely on the players' abilities. This is why the UBA self-consciously withdraws itself from reality to become a self-enclosed structure. By reducing action to numbers, the game establishes its own representational process—as every game necessarily does—retreating from the actual baseball game, and thereby foreclosing its mimetic potentials by becoming just an imaginary structure exclusively centered on itself. Numbers and records, which in the actual game are mere indicators of the progress of the games and the overall league, become not only the medium but also the purpose of Henry's design.² Neither because he intends to discover some all-encompassing record-keeping system nor because he is an enthusiast of sports, he resorts to baseball because it lends itself to his fascination for numerical accuracy. In fact, “American baseball … had struck an almost perfect balance between offense and defense, and it was that balance, in fact, that and the accountability—the beauty of the records system that found a place to keep forever each least action—that had led Henry to baseball as his final great project” (UBA 19).

Henry's self-contained creation—with its own made-up players, rules, numbers, and combinatory potentials—is much more exciting than actual baseball-playing. Real baseball hinges on the supremacy of a set of rules given beforehand, whereas his creation rests on both authorial control and the unpredictability of chance. In the UBA world, he can perceive the interchange between the rigidity of the rules and the capricious fluctuation of numbers and also experience the effect of one on the other—thus feeling the oscillation between his mastery over the UBA and the haphazard occurrence of events. Henry enjoys

[n]ot the actual game so much—to tell the truth, real baseball bored him—but rather the records, the statistics, the peculiar balances between individual and team, offense and defense, strategy and luck, accident and pattern, power and intelligence. And no other activity in the world had so precise and comprehensive a history, so specific an ethic, and at the same time, strange as it seemed, so much ultimate mystery.

(UBA 45)

One of UBA's attractions is its capability to fuse antithetical terms and form a sort of “continuum” of experience whereby the logical opposition between theoretical evaluation (strategy, pattern, intelligence) and practical results (ultimately provided by luck and accident) vanishes. What Henry values in his construction is, then, its original synthesis of binary oppositions that integrates the individual and the team into the unique working of his creation. The essence of his design is, to put it another way, the fusion between the folk, mythical and religious, on the one hand, and the scientific, mathematical sides of the game, on the other³—all of which is, paradoxically, provided by the erratic throws of the dice. For Henry, no other sport symbolizes such a perfect integration of the intuitive and the patterned sides of (mimetic) creation. Although he has tried several board games from basketball to football, Henry has, after consideration, rejected other possibilities. Chess, for instance, seems to him “too Euclidean, too militant, ultimately irrational, and in spite of its precision, formless really—nameless motion” (UBA 156). He also tried to take up a table-top war game played by mail but quit because “the inability of the other players to detach themselves from their narrow-minded historical preconceptions depressed Henry.” To escape the dullness of his job, he surreptitiously plays a horse-racing game he hides in one of the drawers of his bureau. He has even invented a large-scale version of Monopoly that can be played using “twelve, sixteen or twenty-four boards at once and an unlimited number of players,” but finally gave up because “it never caught on” (UBA 44–45).

The basis of Henry's rejection of chess, for instance, clearly illustrates his attitude toward the microcosm he has invented. As creator, he has taken his essential task to be the act of “naming,” or giving his characters a specific identity. The play of the chart and dice is not enough to give life to his creation. Numbers and records contribute the mathematical part of the game, articulating and sustaining its structure and history, and eventually reinforcing Henry's hope that Damon Rutherford—the man whose feats “brought sudden life and immediacy to the Association” (UBA 13)—will become a legend in the history of the UBA. He also needs to suffuse the individuals he has invented with a soul and life that numbers cannot provide. His construction requires not only the external features of baseball: as a mimetic structure, its participants need the psychological characterization of real-life human beings for the UBA to materialize as something more than just an empty formal structure. This is why he feels “in there, with them” (UBA 3). As Henry puts it,

[Y]ou bring a player up from the minors, call him A. Player A, like his contemporaries, has, being a Rookie, certain specific advantages and disadvantages with the dice. But it's exactly the same for all Rookies. … But call Player A “Sycamore Flynn” or “Melbourne Trench” and something starts to happen. He shrinks or grows, stretches out or puts on muscle. Sprays singles to all fields or belts them over the wall. … Strange. But name a man and you make him what he is. Of course, he can develop. And in ways you don't expect. Or something can go wrong. Lot of nicknames invented as a result of Rookie-year surprises. But the basic stuff is already there. In the name. Or rather: in the naming.

(UBA 47–48)

This is why his imaginative construction is not limited to mere sport. His association also comprehends the lives of its players and managers, both ancient and contemporary. The viewpoints of many of its characters—their self-conscious insights into the world they inhabit—in fact take up most of the novel. The novel, therefore, dialogically sets up two opposing views, “the folk or country perspective of most of the ballplayers and the sophisticated urban perspective of Henry Waugh and Coover himself.”⁴ And the book in which Henry writes every relevant event constitutes the official history of the Association. This is a kind of “historical discourse” made of statistics. After all, he asks Lou, “did you ever stop to think that without numbers or measurements, there probably wouldn't be any history?” (UBA 49). The UBA constitutes a microcosm in itself, a mimetic construction that stems from a typically American sport, but whose creator self-consciously withdraws from the real world and develops as a completely private mythical universe. However, Henry does not exert complete control over the occurrences of the UBA baseball matches, and it is precisely his lack of supremacy over his own design, leading as it does to the death of baseball star Damon Rutherford, that marks the beginning of his extinction as owner and record-keeper of the UBA. When Rutherford, the most promising rookie in Henry's league and the man who was rescuing the UBA from a general feeling of routine and boredom, is killed by a ball fatally hurled by pitcher Jock Casey—by a dice roll of 1-1-1, Henry loses not just a player, but “[h]is own man, … every inch of him a participant,” who is characterized by “his total involvement, his oneness with the UBA” (UBA 9). The loss of Rutherford means the disappearance of the cornerstone on which the whole structure rests. It also implies a radical change in Henry's attitude toward the UBA, culminating in the bankruptcy of the order and pattern he has established—a retreat from mimesis and the impartiality of “objective” reference and the setting up of an all-encompassing authorial command ultimately leading to the characters' self-conscious autonomy.

Rutherford's untimely death definitely marks a point of inflection in the novel, from equilibrium to imbalance. As the creator of the UBA, Henry can go back, roll the dice again and wipe out Rutherford's death from the records; but he resists the temptation of intervening in the “natural” course of the game. His player must die, even if it is only the dice that so decide. An impulsive change in the overall process would not only thwart the development of the game but actually endanger the UBA's working. As he acknowledges,

[h]e was free to throw away the dice, run the game by whim, but then what would be the point of it? Who would Damon Rutherford really be then? Nobody, an empty name, a play actor. Even though he'd set his own rules, his own limits, and though he could change them whenever he wished. Nevertheless he and his players were committed to the turns of the numbers and unpredictable—one might even say irresponsible—dice. That was how it was. He had to accept it, or quit the game altogether.

(UBA 40)

For the game to work, Henry has no choice but to follow the rules he has imposed. Damon's death, furthermore, not only ruins the development of the season. For Henry, it also means that there is nothing the creator can do, at least initially, to avoid the outcome of the random dice or to sidestep its consequences. Talking to his friend Lou, he admits that “you can take history or leave it, but if you take it you have to accept certain assumptions or ground rules about what's left in and what's left out” (UBA 49). Any willful intervention on his part would not only shake the foundations of the structure by subduing its functioning to its owner's premeditated calculations; to neglect the central role of unpredictability in the overall design would also ruin his almost sacred creation of “life” and “history”; his characters would appear to be mere straw men in the hands of an all seeing god—a role he actually plays throughout but seems to be unaware of. Ultimately, his intervention would not affect the players only. His reflections on Damon's death and its consequences to the UBA imply not only the pointlessness of consciously altering the results of dice-rolling but also the impossibility of giving up the game altogether without losing his own personality as both author and master:

So what were his possible strategies? He could quit the game. Burn it. But what would that do to him? Odd thing about an operation like this league: once you set in motion you were yourself somehow launched into the same orbit; there was growth in the making of it, development, but there was also a defining at the outer edge. Moreover, the urge to annihilate … seemed somehow alien to him, and he didn't trust it.

(UBA 141–42)

This passage makes it clear that more than just a question of the formal difficulties of creativity is involved in Henry's giving up his game.⁵ Furthermore, it comprises some of the most outstanding features of the mimetic artist. First of all, his authorial commitment, as it were, toward his created universe, especially to the self-imposed rules that make it work, suggest that Henry momentarily respects his microcosm and does not thwart its progress. (This intention, as we will see, does not last long.) Second, and most important to our concern here, is the question of the creator's function in his own mimetic representation. This passage explicitly puts forward Henry's role in the UBA, how he conceives of himself as “launched into the same orbit” of his own design. The reader's view so far is that the “artistic impulse” leading Henry to establish order and pattern also forces him to get involved in his design, but in such a way that detachment (the “defining at the outer edge”) is always possible. Although his imagination pervades everything he knows and experiences, from his job as an accountant to his sexual encounters with Hettie, Henry never interferes in the inner working of the game. Until Rutherford's death, then, Coover presents Henry as comprising all the virtues of the mimetic artist: his creativity, which combines reference to reality (to actual baseball) and personal artistic variations, his search for pattern and, most important, the recognition of the eventual openness of his own interpretive system. But Rutherford's death increasingly brings about a central dilemma in this almost flawless structure.

Henry, therefore, compels himself to maintain the rules that make up the functioning of the game, even though “Casey had put out the light and everybody was playing in the dark” (UBA 136). However, he surrenders to the powers and privileges of his role as creator. Although he cannot finally avoid Rutherford's death, his anger leads him to alter the development of the baseball games in order to bring Jock Casey and his team (the Knicks) to their knees. He first cheats and changes a roll of 2-6-6 on the dice into a 6-6-6 one. When he does so for the second time and manages to get two dice-rolls of 6-6-6, he is able to get Casey killed by a fatal line drive from batter Royce Ingram (Rutherford's friend and partner). In so doing, Henry has consciously given up the random quality of his game to assume a sort of full-scale godlike attitude toward the UBA that marks a turn from unpredictability to his all-embracing rule that precludes the occurrence of randomness and chance.⁶ He is aware that “if you killed that boy out there, then you couldn't quit, could you. No that's a real commitment, you'd be hung up for good, they wouldn't let you go” (UBA 201). But he ultimately takes his revenge. Aware as he is that his action will inevitably come down to his being absorbed by his own creation, he assumes his part as the UBA's only ruler. This implies Henry's becoming self-conscious of the potentials of his authorial control not only for purposes of revenge but because it opens the way for him to realize that, as an artist, he can do whatever he wishes with the Association—manipulate it at will or quit altogether:

[T]he circuit wasn't closed, his or any other: there were patterns, but they were shifting and ambiguous and you had a lot of room inside them. … [T]he game on his table was not a message, but an event: the only signs he had were his own reactions; if these worsened, it might be best, after all, to close down the Association, maybe invent some new game, or in fact go join some club or other.

(UBA 143)

This passage brilliantly illustrates what happens to Henry after he decides to mediate in what was hitherto the work of randomness. It summarizes the most prominent features of his abrupt transition from a mimetic to a radically self-conscious creator. The core of this change resides, as I see it, in Henry's realization that his game is “not a message, but an event”: with this insight into the very nature of his (or any) fiction, he can give up the idea of his creation as conveying some meaning and conceive of it as a structure whose self-referential quality only he can provide. The possibility of manipulating the game at ease within its own patterns, a prerogative any artist can potentially make use of, not only allows him to control its functioning at every level; as an “event” in itself, the game, for Henry, can hereafter do without any human attribute (the lives of its players, for instance), and, most important, without its own history. What constituted the game's very heart has been now emptied of any value or merit; what was exciting is now worthless. Having realized that he has become the Lord of an entire world, Henry's first gesture is to limit meaning and reference to the self-referential play of “his own reactions.” Henry's responsibilities toward the UBA have given way to a narcissistic consideration of himself as absolute owner that will inevitably lead to the collapse of the previous order.

The radical change from balanced mimesis to overwhelming authorial control has another significant effect. By conceiving of the game as pure “event,” after having erased its historical consciousness, the UBA appears, in the eyes of the reader, as a timeless structure. The temporal dimension Henry has established for the UBA fades away. Unable to feel at home in the real world, he retreats to his imaginary world, where the game seems to take place in a sort of time-vacuum. References to the UBA's glorious past cease to appear, while the promising future vanishes. When Henry loses his job, the fragile equilibrium between his real life and the baseball game falls to pieces. (He no longer has “that balance, that rhythmic shift from house to house” [UBA 141] that allowed him to lead a normal life.) In so doing, his assumed role narcissistically impels him to avoid the constraints of time. His having become the all-comprehending figure of the overall design forces the course of the history of the Association to move in one single direction—the one its master wishes—in such a way that the endless possibilities that loomed at the beginning of the novel evaporate.

As this dismal reality distresses him, the entire world also turns into number and record. Reflecting on war, for instance, he coldly concludes that, in the same manner as he needs the accuracy of numbers, “people needed casualty lists, territory footage won and lost, bounded sets with strategies and payoff functions, supply and communication routes disrupted or restored, tonnage totals, and deaths, downed planes, and prisoners socked away like a hoard of calculable runs scored” (UBA 131).

As a kind of heir of the Brunist historian Justin “Tiger” Miller, Henry Waugh, the creator and organizer of the UBA, has some correspondence with his West Condon forebear, the publicizer of the Brunist cult. Both Henry and Miller give shape to their respective creations by modeling them into written form and providing them with a pseudo-historical consciousness—the former through his newspaper, the latter through his book of records. Henry, like Miller, carries out a mimetic-creative act analogous to what Northrop Frye identified in his Anatomy of Criticism as “low mimesis,” which he characterized in the following terms: “[w]ith the low mimetic, where fictional forms deal with an intensely individualized society, there is only one thing for an anthology of myth to become, and that is an act of individual creation” (59). Frye's concept cannot include contemporary literature, but in light of that classical study, the mythic side of the UBA can be thought of, as generated by Henry's individual creative act to oppose the dullness and egotism of the world in which he lives. “Low mimesis,” whose development Frye attaches to the literature of the nineteenth century, is characterized by “a sense of contrast between subjective and objective, mental state and outward condition, individual and social or physical data” (59). Untouched by the outside world, with a history of its own and an enigmatically precise functioning, the UBA emerges as a mythical structure that stems from Henry's act of creation. It comprises the world of his game versus reality, on the one hand, and his state of alienation versus the more pragmatic views of his friend Lou and his boss, Mr. Zifferblatt, on the other. These divergencies epitomize the contrasts put forward by Frye as the indicators of low mimesis. Whether or not Coover has read Frye, this correlation between the latter's literary theory and the former's novel underscores the mimetic quality of the UBA story and suggests, as many Coover critics tend to overlook, that the metafictional concerns of the UBA are very closely linked to the question of mimesis, whether high or low.

The most important occurrences of Coover's reflexive exploration, at least on the question of mimesis, take place at the end of the novel. In the final chapter, we still find ourselves in the UBA, but nothing remains of the rest of the narrative. The reader has been launched from year LVI, in which the novel began and developed, to the year CLVII of the UBA. The story of Rutherford's death has become a legend known as the “Parable of the Duel” or “the Great Confrontation.” On Damonsday, the best rookies of the season go to the stadium to reconstruct the confrontation between Rutherford and Casey, so that one of them inevitably will be killed by a beanball. After Rutherford's death, the Association seems to have reached the state of a group of “static participants in an ancient yet transformed ritual” (UBA 203). The scene in this chapter takes place more than one hundred seasons after the rest of the novel. Henry Waugh has disappeared, and the story of the UBA now involves the descendants of the characters we knew, who, completely self-consciously, have become actors in a game-world. The players have somehow realized that they are the product of a creative imagination as they start to question their origins and role in the game. For them, “the imaginative recreation of sports play has become the world.”⁷

In this year CLVII of the UBA, the rookies Hardy Ingram and Paul Trench have been chosen to perform the Great Confrontation by playing the roles of Damon Rutherford and Royce Ingram, the sacrificed victim and his avenger, respectively. An unnamed character will play the part of Jock Casey (referred to as “Gawky Jock, the Mad Killer”). Here we have a myth represented within another myth, and a game played within another game. This mise-en-abîme effect suggests not so much that another playful imaginative structure has generated within the UBA—because the ritual of the Great Confrontation appears more profound to the players' lives—but rather that the dramatization of the Duel is a necessity for the characters to return to their origins. However, the recreation of these origins does not relieve the characters of the existential void they feel. The attitudes toward the ritual vary. For some characters, the historian Barney Bancroft was the central figure of the UBA. For others, like Cuss McCamish, the whole setup is a lie, and their attitude is that of continuous mockery. Some even dare to argue that Casey and Rutherford in fact never existed, and the ritual is only “another of the ancient myths of the sun, symbolized as a victim slaughtered by the monster or force of darkness. History: in the end, you can never prove a thing” (UBA 224).

The baseball game has become the characters' only world: the UBA has materialized as the only reality available. When Paul Trench attempts to give up the game, he arrives at the following conclusion: “He wants to quit—but what does he mean, ‘quit’? The game? Life? Could you separate them?” (UBA 238). With its own “mysterious” origin, it emerges as the only possible world in which they can live. What was a representation for Henry has become a whole world for its characters. Trench, who is to play the role of Royce Ingram in the recreation of the Duel, reflects on the dead-end of this reality:

And he doesn't know any more whether he's a Damonite or a Caseyite or something else again, a new Heretic or an unregenerate Golden Ager, doesn't even know if he's Paul Trench or Royce Ingram or Pappy Rooney or Long Lew Lydell, it's all irrelevant, it doesn't even matter that he's going to die, all that counts is that he is here and here's The Man and here's the boys and there's the crowd, the sun, the noise.

(UBA 242)

This sense of immediacy has done away with the UBA's historical consciousness, diminishing the temporal dimension of the game to a here-and-now imperative. In fact, there is no sign in the final chapter of the novel that baseball is still played in the Association; all we know is that the ritual is the most significant event of the season. The old UBA has disappeared, or, rather, has become a legend. In a quest fraught with religious overtones, the participants begin to question not only where they come from but also if there is any creator (or record-keeper) at all. Rapsberry Schultz's answer, which, in a way, voices Coover's view of the development of self-consciousness in mimetic representation, is that “even if there weren't [a record-keeper], I think we'd have to play the game as though there were” (UBA 239). Coover is here suggesting that the relevance of authorship and ownership in an imaginative creation can disappear as the radical immediacy of the structure grows stronger. The figure of the creator, in Henry's case representing not only historical consciousness but also the very origin of the UBA, can thus vanish whenever his design gains self-awareness. Eventually, the characters grow so self-conscious that they can do without him. In this sense, as Coover puts it, “the league had progressed from individualism and egocentrism … to a moral and philosophical concern with the very nature of man and society” (UBA 216–17).

The fact that in the last chapter Coover chooses to present the UBA from within is also relevant. It is an attempt to show how the equilibrium between mimesis and self-consciousness seems to be restored. Although there seems to be no balance between Henry's game and the real world from the very beginning of the story, the final chapter reestablishes a sense of equilibrium within the game. When Henry evaporates and the characters become increasingly aware of their role as actors, the novel progresses from the state of authorial command to stability—a stability, nonetheless, marked by the players' sense of existential impasse. Although ultimately they do not reach any helpful conclusion about the meaning of the ritual (and of their lives), the fact that they are divided into pseudo-political circles, as it were, and that no possible interpretation of the Great Confrontation prevails over the others suggests the existence of a sense of order and equilibrium that, however fragile, preserves the working of the structure. Whether or not free from Henry's all-pervading control, the myth of the Duel provides the characters with a subject of reflection on which they can develop their interpretive “autonomy”—although the chapter is still too sketchy to see their evolution—and can find, either consciously or unconsciously, an equilibrium between the possible explanations they are able to elaborate.

Coover's narrative point of view in the final chapter, then, allows us to see how the self-conscious functioning of the Association is possible thanks to the permanence of the mythical encounter between Damon and Casey. For Paul Trench and his fellows, “the continuing strength of this story [of Damon's death] through time is evidence that it is somehow essentially true” (UBA 223). The vague sense of historical purpose that the myth of the Great Confrontation provides is the only meaningful intuition the characters share—each in his own way—and the ritual becomes the only significant action they can perform after so many years.

Finally, and most important, by showing us the inner development of the UBA, wherein a myth has been recreated aside from Henry's figure, Coover implies that there is an endless interchange between mimesis (Henry's game) and self-representation (the characters' view of themselves and the UBA). In time, Coover seems to suggest, mimetic representation becomes—so long as we focus not so much on the author as on its characters and his imaginative world—a self-enclosed structure in which what was a referential representation turns into a sort of opaque, self-conscious discourse looking for its own origins and meaning. In the context of the UBA, this opacity is brought about not by ideological concentration, as in The Public Burning, but by the disappearance of the very authorial figure that has hitherto given a purpose and name to the UBA—a purpose that now has to be discovered and interpreted by the characters. By turning from the “outside” to the “inside” narrative point of view, Coover discloses the artificiality of “transparency,” the fundamental imaginative assumption of mimesis, in two ways.

First, he definitely rejects the idea that representation, whether linguistic or historical, remains plain and well-defined throughout time. By obliterating Henry's authorial power, the purely factual meaning of Damon's death, according to which the reader has been constructing the story, vanishes. As the game grows self-conscious and the Duel emerges as a myth, the mimetic processes that originated the UBA lose their relevance until they disappear. The question, however, is not only whether or not mimesis is necessarily replaced by self-consciousness—in the UBA, this is only an effect of the shift in point of view—but also whether time, and not just the author's mediation as meaning-maker, can change the referential powers and limits of representation.

Second, Coover shows how the referential mechanisms involved in mimetic representation, far from being one-sided, have two faces: the purely representational and the self-referential. The former brings an imaginative construction into existence, whereas the latter regulates its inner functioning. Neither of them is to prevail, unless planned for some specific purpose—such as Henry's revenge.

One example of this essential equilibrium is the fact that the importance of historical discourse does not disappear with Henry. In his role as historian, he seems to be represented by Barney Bancroft, “the only … truly human participant in that incredible drama. Maybe the only real one” (UBA 223). Although overtly self-conscious, the UBA preserves a “real” character whose task is the writing of history—yet history now is a kind of guess-work. The conclusion Bancroft reaches in his account of the Great Confrontation is that the whole UBA needs “a new ordering, perspective, personal vision, the disclosure of pattern.” Bancroft had found, after all, that “perfection wasn't a thing, a closed moment, a static fact, but process” (UBA 212).

The players in this final chapter have no access to the referential elements of the Great Confrontation. The former historian, Henry, ceased to keep records when Damon died, and they are now too far away in time to find any reliable source of information. Once reference has been lost, the only available meaning is the mythical, fabled one. Experiencing the most opaque side of the myth the characters are compelled to perform, and according to this mise-en-abîme correlation I have pointed out earlier, Henry's characters begin to feel exactly as their creator confesses he felt when he went to a baseball game:

There were things about the games I liked. The crowds, for example, I felt like I was part of something there, … like in church, except it was more real than any church. … I even had the funny idea that ball stadiums and not European churches were the real American holy places. Formulas for energy configuration where city boys came to see their country origins dramatized, some old lost fabric of unity.

(UBA 166)

Despite its ironic tone, there are echoes of this view in Coover's interview with Frank Gado, in which he recalls Durkheim's thought on religious consciousness as a sense of “being part of something beyond our individual existences” (156). Henry's role, however, has changed since he recalled his experience in the baseball stadium. Now he is not the searcher for meaning but the reason why his characters look for the sense of transcendence that he once experienced. When the shift in Coover's point of view makes him disappear, Henry transcends his own position as author and meaning-maker and becomes, to his characters, an object of metaphysical reflection. It is now the players who sense themselves as part of a design whose comprehension is far beyond their grasp. The most daring ones see themselves as “mere ideas hatched whole and hapless, here to enact old rituals of resistance and rot” (UBA 230), the conception that, ironically, best approaches the truth of their nature. Their inability to transcend the immediate actuality of their lives leads them to a state of paralysis in which the only possible answer is that the myth has no purpose at all. It is simply there, standing for reality. When his partner Hardy Ingram is about to be killed in the annual recreation of the Duel, Paul Trench witnesses the scene, he “tries to speak, but he can find no words. It's terrible, he says; or might have said. It's all there is” (UBA 242). This last sentence suitably summarizes the consequences of Coover's change in point of view and of the transition from mimesis to self-consciousness. We bear witness to the UBA's constitution and functioning as a mimetic structure with a perfectly calculated organization, and we can clearly perceive the existence of Henry's authorial control, regardless of its fluctuations. Thus we can control the overall narrative in the same manner that Henry controls his game. Later, however, when Coover launches us into the UBA world itself, the previous frame of reference (author/game) is lost; what was only part of the story has now become the whole setting—and, subsequently, Henry's view is now the reader's. With this radical shift, a substantial change in the fictional world of the novel has taken place as well. By presenting Henry's and his characters' points of view, Coover strategically shifts from mimesis to self-consciousness.

There is still a further point to be made about the narrative changes I have been discussing. Although I have assumed Henry's disappearance from the scene of these last pages, it is difficult to ascertain whether or not he has vanished completely from the final chapter of the novel. There is no mention of him, although he seems to be incarnated in certain characters: the historian Barney Bancroft, who writes The UBA in the Balance and Rapsberry Schultz, an amateur who “plays himself some device with dice” (UBA 234). Physically, he does not show up, but traces of him can be found. This effect, again provided by the shift in Coover's point of view, can be understood in three different ways.

First, we can assume that Henry has completely vanished from sight. The self-conscious development of the UBA is, in this view, absolute: Authorial control is ultimately obliterated; the focal frame of reference is lost; and, for the reader, transparent representation seems to fade away. This approach underscores the collapse of authorial control as the novel's main reflexive concern and conveys not only the implicit impossibility of regarding the UBA as “non-self-referential literature” but also underscores a parallel between Coover's narrative practice and certain typically postmodern theoretical notions, such as Barthes's or Gass's celebrated claims about the “death of the author.”

On the other hand, we can also think of Henry as still present in his game, either incarnated in some character or just ruling his world “from above,” but always with such a godlike detachment that his presence can be felt throughout but never verified. This view, although basically retaining the original mimetic qualities of Henry's baseball game, still represents the UBA as a self-enclosed structure insofar as the game still enjoys a life of its own. In fact, as soon as Henry's authority vanishes, which seems to be the case in the final chapter of the novel, the characters, yet unsure about the purpose of their own existence, are in fact freer to choose one or another interpretation of the meaning of the Great Confrontation, and thus can, in many senses, be regarded as autonomous individuals.⁸ For this reason, Henry's possible permanence in his design, however actual or symbolic, does not modify any conclusions arrived at according to the first, “self-conscious” approach.

A third view—the most accurate, as I see it—combines the two preceding ones. This approach accounts for the majority of the reflexive concerns of the novel. It requires that we take the figure of Henry only as a textual frame of reference, so that we can look at the UBA not so much as an object in itself but as an unfolding plurality of processes. The perfection Henry seeks with his game is not, Barney Bancroft finally finds, “a thing, a closed moment, a static fact, but a process” (UBA, 212). Instead of taking the game as the aim of some representational mechanism, whether mimetic or self-conscious, the novel can be studied exclusively in terms of its inner development, apart from the more or less significant figure of the fictional author. The UBA narrative allows for this kind of “fabulationist” view that accounts for the purely narrative progress of the novel without giving up the mimetic qualities I have mentioned earlier. According to this third approach, Henry's figure can still be regarded as the pivotal element between the two sides (mimetic and self-referential) of the creative process; but, and this is crucial, he now appears more as a formal constituent of the whole creative process that he sets in motion. In this regard, Henry emerges as an element Coover introduces in order to thematize his dominant reflexive interest; but, however meaningful, this growth is not to be taken as a direct consequence of authorial intervention but as what, Coover implies, is the natural outcome of the meaning-making metaphor he wants to explore. As a meaning-making process in itself, this metaphor—the construction of a fictional system—comprehends all the levels and aspects of the UBA story, from the simple act of creating a baseball game to the imaginative recreation of the players' lives and the degree of self-consciousness they enjoy in the final chapter. Henry's disappearance would not, then, be a strategy that substantially changes either the novel's reflexive element or the course of the narrative. This does not mean that the effacement of the author produces no effect on the story. Rather, the fictional author's absolute detachment constitutes a purely formal device that greatly helps to understand the evolution from mimesis to self-consciousness in the UBA. Conceiving of the author as a vehicle, then, makes Coover's concern in this novel to be the creation and development of a fictional system.

It is this third view that most accurately accounts for the changes in the UBA narrative; but the most important question is left unexplained, inevitably, I would say. Regardless of Henry's being present in some way or another, the novel's main point is whether or not the UBA has become a self-enclosed microcosm because self-consciousness is the necessary final stage of any mimetic construction. This is the unresolved difficulty Coover's novel poses for the reader. The fragile balance between these two different, yet complementary, referential modes can be found, Coover implies, in all fictional systems, and constitutes the core of his idea of representation as put forward not only in the UBA but in other novels as well—notably in The Origin of the Brunists. The struggle between these modes is not, however, finally resolved; this largely constitutes the most ambiguous side of the novel.

To sum up, any study of the UBA's reflexive quality must take into consideration the interplay, or evolution, from mimesis to self-awareness. In any case, its exploratory disposition implies, again as in The Origin of the Brunists, that no possible balance between mimesis is, at least in fictional systems, ever kept. Coover's is an ontological, but not structural, examination of mimesis. Contemporary readings of the novel, however, usually look for an extension of the text's concerns. Figurative readings, for instance, according to which Coover attempts to broaden the mise-en-abîme effect of his story to all kinds of epistemological constructions, whether imaginative or not—would mistake reflexivity for self-referentiality. Allegorical readings of the mise-en-abîme phenomenon tend to see, in Lucien Dällenbach's words, the work's “referential dimension as merely self-reference in disguise” (49). Like Henry's characters, trapped within the game somebody has created, so are we readers as we enter Coover's novel. Coover, in turn, manages to play with Henry, the players, and us at the same time. Indeed there is a very seductive possibility of regarding the novel as a hall of mirrors in which not only Henry's artistic practice but also the purely referential truth-claims of our reading experience are reflected and called into question.⁹ In this sense, when approaching the UBA narrative, many Coover critics have been prompted to look at Coover's 1968 novel in light of Jorge Luis Borges's conception that if fictional characters can be eventually readers or authors in novels then actual readers and authors can be seen as fictitious.¹⁰ Coover's concerns in the UBA narrative do not fit in with this Chinese-boxes effect, which attempts to enlarge the scope of fictionality ad infinitum, although it can be suitable for other more complex stories (such as Julio Cortázar's “Continuidad de los parques”). The relation between Henry Waugh and his UBA differs significantly from that between the reader and a text. The make-believe component of all fictional representation does not work in the same manner in this case. The “sense of fictionality” is much stronger for the Coover reader—actually, for any reader—than for Henry Waugh, who really believes in many of his characters. The mise-en-abîme reading of the UBA, whose central interest lies in the pure interplay between fiction and reality, disregards some of the novel's most prominent subjects of inquiry—the problem of authorial control, the imaginative recreation of history—and does not account for the interchange between mimesis and self-consciousness that, in my view, characterizes the essence of the UBA.

Notes

1. In “Games and Play in Modern American Fiction,” Contemporary Literature 17 (1976): 44–62, Robert Detweiler also assumes that the UBA is mimetically self-conscious because it “imitates a number of established traditions” (60).

2. For Jackson Cope, “[a]n accountant is the precisely correct metaphor for a Platonic God who made the world by weight and measure.” Jackson I. Cope, Robert Coover's Fictions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986), 36.

3. Ronald Wallace, The Last Laugh: Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1979), 118.

4. Frank W. Shelton, “Humor and Balance in Coover's The Universal Baseball Association,” Critique 17.1 (1975): 79.

5. Larry McCaffery, The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1982), 49.

6. For an analysis of the literary implications of this authorial transformation, see Roy Caldwell, Jr., “Of Hobby-Horses, Baseball, and Narrative: Coover's The Universal Baseball Association,” Modern Fiction Studies 33 (1987): 161–71.

7. Neil Berman, “Coover's The Universal Baseball Association: Play as Personalized Myth,” Modern Fiction Studies 24 (1978): 219.

8. In “Of Hobby-Horses, Baseball, and Narrative,” Roy Caldwell argues that in the final chapter of the novel “[t]he Association has passed into another period, the Age of Interpretation” (168).

9. Wallace, The Last Laugh, 135: “While the players speculate on the meaning of their lives and their history, the reader knows that they are merely figments of a lonely bachelor's imagination. But this knowledge comically turns back on the reader, throwing into doubt his own ultimate reality.”

10. For Borges, “if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious.” Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, quoted in McCaffery, The Metafictional Muse 55. For a study of Borges's influence on Coover's UBA, see Mark F. Frisch, “Self-Definition and Redefinition in the New World: Coover's The Universal Baseball Association and Borges,” Confluencia 4.2 (1989): 13–20.

Works Cited

Coover, Robert. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. New York: Random, 1968.

Dällenbach, Lucien. The Mirror in the Text. Trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes. Cambridge: Polity, 1989.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.

Gado, Frank, ed. “Robert Coover.” First Person: Conversations on Writers and Writing. Schenectady, NY: Union College P, 1973.