SOURCE: Walsh, Richard. “Narrative Inscription, History, and the Reader in Robert Coover's The Public Burning.” Studies in the Novel 25, no. 3 (fall 1993): 332–46.

[In the following essay, Walsh examines Coover's reinterpretation of the Rosenberg trial and McCarthy-era hysteria in The Public Burning, arguing that the novel's carnivalesque satire—particularly as embodied in the Nixon and Uncle Sam characters—dramatizes the collective psychology of Cold War American society.]

Robert Coover, one of the most impressive of the postmodern American novelists, established in his early fiction a preoccupation with the ways our various explanatory narratives impose upon the truth of our experience. His exploration of these ideas was at its most abstract and metafictional in the stories of Pricksongs and Descants (1969); but his major novel The Public Burning (1977), about the Rosenberg executions and the climate of McCarthyism in which they occurred, gave the same concerns a hard political edge. The novel displayed a new emphasis upon the specifics of recent American history in Coover's work, to the extent that he was obliged to conduct a large part of the final editing under great pressure from the house lawyers at Viking.¹ It both recreated and transformed the ideological narratives of fifties Cold War orthodoxy in order to explore the ways in which they inscribed both populace and protagonists, compelling them toward a deadly resolution. At the same time the argument itself worked towards an equivalent affective inscription of the reader, raising questions about the necessary conditions for moral judgment.

Fundamental to Coover's strategy in The Public Burning is a surprisingly unsympathetic treatment of the Rosenbergs themselves. They are kept at a cool distance throughout, even though the chapters narrated by Nixon are largely devoted to his (self-interested) attempts at reaching an understanding of them. Nixon's intensive study does not approach an imaginative empathy with the Rosenbergs but appropriates their story to his own life. He pursues relentlessly the parallels between the upbringing, experiences and character of Julius Rosenberg and his own, construing their lives as mirror images of each other and thus, in the process of assessing where Julius deviated from the Horatio Alger career profile, establishing his own adherence to that narrative. His analysis of Julius remains always subordinate to his obsessive self-analysis, maintaining the priority of the political aspirations which underlie his interest in the Rosenbergs.

Beyond this, the Rosenbergs' direct presence in the novel is limited to the quotations from their Death House letters and from Ethel's clemency appeals. These too are for the most part given in support of Nixon's theory that the Rosenbergs are consumed by the roles in which they have cast themselves, and so they operate exactly against the intimacy direct quotation would otherwise offer. Nor is Nixon's theory so unreasonable as to be purely a projection of his own obsessions (though it is that as well). Coover needs it to explain the Rosenbergs' strange behavior at the trial, and later in prison, where the Warden reports them “behaving in what they probably think of as, well, symbolic ways—you know, acting like they're establishing historical models or precedents or something.”² It is also an explanation to which Coover himself alluded when he criticized Louis Nizer's The Implosion Conspiracy for “accepting the Rosenbergs' courtroom role-playing at face value,” and asked, “was the cause for their suspicious courtroom behaviour in fact their pretending to be somebody they were not during the trial?”³ In the third of the novel's “intermezzos,” in which the tone is usually at its most direct, Julius and Ethel's letters are used to create an extended statement of their stand against the pressures upon them to confess, under a title calculated to give maximum force to its melodramatic content—“Human Dignity Is Not for Sale: A Last-Act Sing Sing Opera” (p. 381). In spite of the use to which it is put this is not a pejorative representation of the Rosenbergs, as is made clear at the beginning of the second intermezzo, a dramatization of Ethel's clemency appeal to Eisenhower, in which her histrionic rhetoric is rationalized: “At no time during the dialogue does the PRESIDENT address the PRISONER, or even acknowledge her presence on the same stage. The PRISONER, aware of this, sometimes speaks to him directly, but more often seems to be trying to reach him by bouncing echoes off the Audience” (p. 247). In their hopeless situation, the suggestion that the Rosenbergs have adopted strategic roles carries no satiric charge, as it does in the case of Nixon himself. It does ensure that even the limited presence they do have in the narrative is discredited, and invalidated as a focus of reader identification. Clearly Coover is not concerned with a novelistic identification with the Rosenbergs, and therefore forfeits the sort of empathetic recreation of their martyrdom that would have generated the greatest emotional force from the story. But the cost of such an approach would have been to alienate the reader from the prevailing mentality of fifties America, the entire atmosphere of Cold War hysteria that condemned them. It is this phenomenon with which Coover is most concerned, and in which he seeks partially to implicate the reader.

If the Rosenbergs themselves do not ultimately concern Coover neither does the degree of their innocence or guilt, though he has expressed a firm opinion on the issue elsewhere: “If you read the trial record … you pretty much have to conclude that the Rosenbergs were innocent of the charges against them. But they were either responsible for protecting some other secret, or believed themselves to be.”⁴ But in the novel this interpretation of the reality behind the public record is put into the mouth of Richard Nixon, and he, at the novel's climax, is there at the head of the crowd rushing to pull the switch on Ethel. The actual innocence or guilt of the Rosenbergs was a minor issue among the forces that took them to their deaths: the title of his novel indicates that Coover places the emphasis upon the American public themselves. His concern is with the collective mind of America at the time of the executions: the ways in which its attitudes and responses conform to perceptions of the political situation modelled upon religious and mythical narratives, and acted out in ritualistic manner by the entire nation.

The fundamental manipulation by which Coover transforms his narrative from a historical fiction into a metaphorical realization of the fiction behind history is the transposition (offered deadpan in the first paragraph of the prologue) of the Rosenbergs' executions from the death chamber at Sing Sing to a stage in the middle of Times Square. This fusion of literal and metaphorical creates a narrative space that is both and neither, where analytic metaphor and historical fact can operate together without the mediation of an authorial narrator. Coover has said in interview that “Stories tend to appear to me, not as formal ideas, but as metaphors, and these metaphors seem to demand structures of their own.”⁵ This structure is apparent in The Public Burning, the founding metaphor that suggests itself being contained in the simple proposition that the Rosenbergs were scapegoats.

By developing this metaphor Coover is able to tease out all the overtones of primitive ritual in the scapegoat role the Rosenbergs fulfilled in the McCarthy Era, and create a full blown sacrificial rite in which the whole tribe of America participates. The metaphor owes an acknowledged debt to Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which Coover has playing on execution night to an audience of one, the author. “Ah well: art …” he broods, “not as lethal as one might hope …” (p. 490). Coover's own art, at over twenty years distance, is offered more as analysis than as polemic. He takes quite literally the Manicheanism of the Cold War rhetoric that dominated the period, translating it into the scripture of a sect whose forces of Light, under the aegis of Uncle Sam, are besieged by the communist Phantom's forces of Darkness. That such a translation is so simply effected gives an authority to the metaphor that compels attention throughout the considerable length and intricacy to which he extends it—and he is able to turn an enormous quantity of the public record of the time to his purpose. The first intermezzo, “The War between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness,” is subtitled “The Vision of Dwight David Eisenhower (from Public Papers of the Presidents, January 20–June 19, 1953)” (p. 149); and in this collage of quotations Coover is able to establish an extraordinary insistence upon the metaphors of light and darkness and the religion of the American Way. “It was as though he'd never really believed in God,” observes Nixon, “until he discovered Him there in the Declaration of Independence” (p. 184).

The susceptibility to Coover's analysis of the behavior and events surrounding the Rosenberg executions suggests a link far more tangible than the trick of a metaphor: it suggests that the rhetoric and thought of Cold War America tapped into the substantial and insidious power of religious thought, superstition and ultimately the anthropological propensities of the American people. Coover's anthropological interest is apparent in his characterization of the Times Square chapters in terms of a concept he borrows from Roger Caillois: “‘Dreamtime’ is a ritual return to the mythic roots of a group of people … This idea of a ritual bath of prehistoric or preconscious experience was very attractive to me as I began developing the Rosenberg book.”⁶ The Manichean cult he imposes upon the climate of fifties America is therefore of interpretative value not just in itself but as an example of the way the politics of a modern society may draw strength from unacknowledged primitive models. The gathering in Times Square is an instance of the “collective effervescence” by which Durkheim characterized all religious or quasi-religious assembly. But while Durkheim held the creative power of such occasions in high regard, Coover's view is much less optimistic. The function of the Rosenberg executions is presented as reaching beyond the fulfillment of doctrinal expectations to the satisfaction of more fundamental needs. On the morning of the executions all America wakes in a state of sexual excitement: “But none, curiously enough, has used his or her aroused sexuality on a mate, it's as though, somehow, that's not what it was all about” (p. 164). The electrocutions are sanctioned by the harmony between their political motivations and the deep psychological needs of the American public.

The displaced source of these needs is revealed by the episode in which a moviegoer, after seeing the 3-D movie, House of Wax, walks out onto the street without removing his cardboard glasses. The surreal and slapstick scenes that result serve as his own private descent into “dreamtime,” exposing his deepest fears: “It's all coming together … into the one image that has been pursuing him through all his sleepless nights, the billowing succubus he's been nurturing for nine months now, ever since the new hydrogen-bomb tests at Eniwetok: yes, the final spectacle, the one and only atomic holocaust, he's given birth to it at last” (p. 286). In a standard carnivalesque inversion, the crazy distortions of the 3-D glasses are fundamentally truthful, expressing the madness of the country's psychological state. As beneficiary of these insights, the man himself “is very clear-headed, which is the main cause of his panic. It strikes him that he is perhaps the only sane man left on the face of the earth” (p. 287). He remains, however, a representative American, and the irreconcilable opposition between his personal insight and the public creed required of him lead him to throw himself into the chair on the Times Square set, his words serving as a satiric literalization of Eisenhower's rhetoric: “The President said it: ‘the one capital offense is a lack of staunch faith!’ THROW THE SWITCH!” (p. 288). The lengths to which Coover pursues his metaphor are grotesque, but it is the force of insight behind it that allows him to extend and elaborate it so fully, and continue to surprise with new points of contact between trope and history.

Summoned into being by this metaphor is the figure of Uncle Sam, who is deity and high priest to the sect, both the product of the unfolding American narrative and its orchestrator. This religious authority is grounded in his identification with the American folk consciousness: he is an amalgam of every popular hero from David Crockett to Superman, possessed of a rich folk vernacular which draws its imagery and rhetoric from the frontier experience and is given free rein throughout the novel. He is a character burdened with the history of a nation, but who eludes the ironies this generates by appealing to exactly the complexities of motivation and personality created by the equation between nation and character. So, dismissing his flagrant contempt for the Constitution in the Rosenberg case, he scoffs: “Bah! The wild oats of youth! … puritanism! whoo, worse'n acne! It's great for stirrin' up the jism when you're nation-breedin', but it ain't no way to live a life!” (p. 531). The expediency of character takes precedence over any commitment to the historical imperatives of a national constitution. The novel's evocation of American folk consciousness has been examined at length by David Estes, who notes that its barbaric values are preserved through an engaging humor.⁷ As Estes presents it, this is pure diagnosis on Coover's part; but his use of folk humor in the novel also makes a sly appeal to the reader. In the case of Uncle Sam, it generates a degree of affection quite at odds with the ethical response he provokes, and disconcerted critics have objected that he is simply not dislikable enough, finding it “hard to remember that he represents anything worse than the national talent for garrulousness.”⁸

Uncle Sam's role in the novel is complicated by functions other than that of personified national character. He is also the spiritual force that animates the president, his incarnation, and as such he is part accumulated heritage of the presidency—his looks are an eclectic sum of the features of past presidents—and part abstraction of the electorate, the spirit of enfranchised American opinion. All these elements in Uncle Sam have a role in furthering the inexorable movement towards the executions of which he is the architect. Personifying them in a character allows Coover to consider them in a way which is both intimate and analytical. As a character Uncle Sam, for all the vice Coover displays in him, evokes a response complex enough to challenge the reader with complicity in the ideology he represents: he holds a fascination which inhabits his worst excesses, and as such forbids the easy condemnation his (or America's) behavior would otherwise invite. The creation of Uncle Sam also crucially involves giving the national character a consciousness of its own, enabling him to articulate and act upon the implicit desires and fears of a generation. In this way matter that would be restricted to discursive interpretation and diagnosis in a less radical novelistic approach becomes a forceful, persistent presence and prime mover in the novel. Recognizing the value of character but addressing abstract issues, Coover has turned the latter into the former, and so enabled his presentation of what would otherwise have been a thematically overburdened argument.

Uncle Sam's role, especially in presiding over the Times Square ritual sacrifice, is that of ringmaster; part of Coover's larger structural concept of The Public Burning as a three ring circus. According to this framework, the different types of chapters (impersonally narrated, Nixon narrated and intermezzos) correspond to the three rings, and Nixon plays the clown to Uncle Sam's ringmaster. This structural concept combines two elements, carnival and performance, which are intimately related to the substance of the novel. Coover's use of the carnivalesque, according to the specification provided by Mikhail Bakhtin, is apparent throughout. The Nixon chapters harp ceaselessly upon the Rabelaisian motifs of Bakhtin's “material bodily principle”—Nixon's grotesque appetites, his sexuality, his smell, his increasingly shabby appearance, masturbation, flatulence, urination, defecation, buggery and his public exposure on the Times Square stage. In the impersonal chapters carnivalesque action builds in a crescendo as events in Times Square progress: an example is the slapstick scene in which the Supreme Court Justices who have earlier vacated a stay of execution flounder ignominiously in a pile of GOP elephant droppings. A rigorous penal code is in operation here—not just the simple inversion of rank that characterises carnivalesque in general but a much more specific degradation according to merit regarding the Rosenberg case. So Justices Douglas and Black, who opposed the overruling, escape the ordeal—as does Justice Frankfurter, who hovers on the brink but is spared for his belated choice of the dissenting camp.

The distinction has to be drawn, though, between carnivalesque in the narrative and the subject matter as carnival, for the latter, despite appearances, is significantly not the case. The structure of the novel as circus implies the subjugation of carnival through presentation or performance, the use of controlled carnival for tendentious purposes by ringmaster Uncle Sam. The function of the gathering in Times Square is to satisfy the primitive demands of the people with a simulation of carnival disorder—a logical extension of the scapegoat function fulfilled by the Rosenbergs. Or, in Durkheim's terms, it is a gathering of the tribe in order to consolidate their faith by participating in the effervescence of religious assembly: “This is why all parties, political, economic or confessional, are careful to have periodical reunions where their members may revivify their common faith by manifesting it in common.”⁹ “Oh, I don't reckon we could live like this all year round,” says Uncle Sam, “But we do need us an occasional peak of disorder and danger to keep things from just peterin' out, don't we?” (p. 95). The carefully contrived framework within which the festivities are allowed to take place betrays the hand of a manipulative Uncle Sam, as the embodiment of the national interest aloof from the people who should define it. As such, carnival is used as a generator of orthodoxy: the only genuine occurrences of carnivalesque in the narrative are in fact disruptive of this doctrinaire show, not allied to it. The detail of Bakhtin's concept of carnival makes clear discrimination possible. Carnival, for him, is spontaneous, and not to be equated with politically organized festivals: the Times Square burnings are minutely organized by Uncle Sam and his deputies. Carnival, as distinct from official occasions, involves the suspension of hierarchical rank, norms and prohibitions: rank is rigorously observed in Times Square through the provision of a VIP enclosure and the parade of dignitaries before the crowd; and the whole purpose of the occasion is the consolidation of anti-communist norms and the punishment of transgression. Bakhtin's carnival is the instrument of truth, exposing the formal impositions of dominant narratives rather than reinforcing them, as is the function of the Rosenberg executions for the dualistic framework of Uncle Sam and the Phantom.

Coover's narrative itself, however, does possess all these properties, and another lacking in the Times Square festival which goes to the center of his use of the carnivalesque. This is the particular function of carnival laughter, which Bakhtin distinguishes from straight satire: “Carnival laughter … is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival's participants … This is one of the essential differences of the people's festive laughter from the pure satire of modern times. The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it. The wholeness of the world's comic aspect is destroyed, and that which appears comic becomes a private reaction. The people's ambivalent laughter, on the other hand, expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it.”¹⁰ It cannot be said that the revels in Times Square, the relentless mockery of the Rosenbergs perpetrated in the series of comedy acts that precedes their execution, meet this specification. But Coover's narrative itself goes to considerable lengths to locate itself within the world it satirizes, wary of transcendent pronouncements and cultivating the ambivalence of participation. He thus aligns himself with the spirit of carnival laughter, which Bakhtin considered to exist in an indissoluble relation to freedom. He has himself commented on the comic vision: “I tend to think of tragedy as a kind of adolescent response to the universe—the higher truth is a comic response.”¹¹ This, in Bakhtin's terms, is a rejection of the modern attitude to laughter, that “that which is important and essential cannot be comical,” in favor of the Renaissance concept of laughter: “Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning, it is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and man.”¹² In order to maintain the inclusiveness of his comic vision, Coover takes great care to subvert the reflex response his material invites. An unequivocal sympathy with the victims against the establishment is resisted by a sustained distance from the Rosenbergs; the portrayal of Nixon, while acutely satiric, is also unexpectedly empathetic; Uncle Sam too has an appeal that conflicts with the monstrosity of his character; and the impersonal narration is given from a self-ironizing perspective within the Cold War orthodoxy, rather than the exterior perspective that straight satire would involve.

Ultimately this circle of laughter inscribes the reader too, the process of reading the book itself becoming the arena of disruption. The central strategy here, and that which has most perplexed critics, is the use of excess. It is a cumulative effect, operating principally in the impersonally narrated chapters, where it is built upon an expanding repertoire of devices. There is the manic folk speech of Uncle Sam throughout, and the whirlwind summaries of world events synchronous with and more or less related to the action of the novel. Later, there are exhaustive lists of those present at the Times Square executions (and hence in some degree culpable—a roll-call of the damned): these include lists of Hollywood celebrities, tycoons and politicians, including all ninety-six senators in alphabetical order by state. There are slapstick and horror comic passages which continue long after their essential point has been made (the series of skits on the Death House letters, the mob hysteria during the blackout). And there are scenes which strive to exceed the limits of literary propriety, such as Nixon's sexual encounter with Ethel Rosenberg minutes before her execution, or his final initiation by Uncle Sam in the buggery scene of the epilogue. In form or content, all these devices serve the same effect, one which informs the argument of the novel as a whole. In seeking to explore and imaginatively recreate the atmosphere of Cold War hysteria Coover has deployed a technique which, in its insistence, generates an immense narrative momentum in the novel towards its denouement, analogous to that felt by America itself: “it's almost as though there is something critical about the electrocutions themselves, something down deep inside, a form, it's as though events have gone too far, as though there's an inner momentum now that can no longer be tampered with, the nation is too deeply committed to this ceremony” (p. 211). But in its excess, the narrative enacts the logic by which this momentum can compel a complicity in unsought violations: the inexorable march of the narrative exceeds the limits prescribed by convention, so that to read it at all is to be, and to experience being, coerced into transgression. The predictable and potentially trite repudiation of McCarthyist hysteria is given force and value by a method of narration that duplicates the mechanisms involved.

Implicit in this narrative momentum is the sense of an ineluctable script to history, by which the unfolding events are motivated. It is there too in the appropriation of carnival by Uncle Sam's circus. Circus is the performance of carnival, and wherever the narrative attention turns from the circus itself to its production and reception, this difference is elucidated. It generates the concept of history as drama which finds echoes at all levels of the structure of the novel. The Rosenberg executions therefore function as the fulfillment of a script, the finale of an act in the circus of history, which satisfies America's expectations of pattern in its perceptions of itself. Such expectations are based upon the theological script of manifest destiny: “Throughout the solemn unfolding of the American miracle, men have noticed this remarkable phenomenon: what at the moment seems to be nothing more than the random rise and fall of men and ideas … is later discovered to be … a necessary and inevitable sequence of interlocking events, a divine code, as it were, bringing the Glad Tidings of America's election” (pp. 8–9). The script that governs American history is a priori, and the diversity of events must be subordinated to a pattern that will encode it.

Coover gives considerable attention in the novel to the ways in which this imperative is met. A chapter is devoted to the daily augmentation of history in The New York Times, presented as a shrine to which millions of pilgrims bow their heads each morning. The nature and value of this pilgrimage is described between quotations from the headlines on the morning before the executions. The random jumble of the headlines, a non-polemical collection of facts, is their guarantee of objectivity, but Coover quickly shows that in presenting itself as such, the Times becomes a framework through which reality is sifted, and so shaped: “Yet even this extravagant accretion of data suggests a system, even mere hypotyposis projects a metaphysic. ‘Objectivity’ is in spite of itself a willful program for the stacking of perceptions … Conscious or not, The New York Times statuary functions as a charter of moral and social order, a political force-field maker, defining meaningful actions merely by showing them” (p. 191). The pilgrims draw comfort from the monumental stability of the shrine's great stone tablets, and find meaning already implicit in its assertion of order in chaos. This function of The New York Times for the people of America is supplemented by Time magazine, whose role is to elucidate the script in the pattern. Coover personifies Time as the “National Poet Laureate,” and elaborates his poetic credo while he surveys the scene in Times Square: “Raw data is paralyzing, a nightmare, there's too much of it and man's mind is quickly engulfed by it. Poetry is the art of subordinating facts to the imagination, of giving them shape and visibility, keeping them personal … Some would say that such deep personal involvement, such metaphoric compressions and reliance on inner vision and imaginary “sources,” must make objectivity impossible, and TIME would agree with them, but he would find simply illiterate anyone who concluded from this that he was not serving Truth” (p. 320). Time's acknowledgement of the subjectivity of his version of events is undercut by his pernicious claim to retain a privileged relationship with reality, to possess a “real grasp of the facts—not to mention Ultimate Truth” (p. 320). Ultimately, Time does not present his reportage as fiction, and betrays a cynical, manipulative understanding of the power of his “art”: “If he burst through the scrim of phenomena and grasps the whole of tonight's events, he will celebrate them; if they overwhelm him, he will belittle them. He's a professional, after all” (p. 329).

This perception of the power latent in historical narratives, the scriptwriter's opportunities in the inaccessibility of fact, is essential to both the political impetus towards the Rosenberg executions and Nixon's abortive attempt at revising the plot. The concept of history as drama is obsessively dwelled upon in the Nixon chapters, drawing sustenance from his discovery of a shared thespian background with Ethel Rosenberg and his own preoccupation with performance and the public self he is always at pains to maintain and advance. His analysis of the trial dwells upon its qualities as performance, considering the merits of all the protagonists, including the Rosenbergs, as actors before an audience of jury and nation. From here the idea becomes more and more inclusive, the aspect of performance encroaching upon that of audience until the two are coextensive and universal: “Not only was everybody in this case from the Judge on down—indeed, just about everyone in the nation, in and out of government, myself included—behaving like actors caught up in a play, but we all seemed moreover to be aware of just what we were doing and at the same time of our inability, committed as we were to some higher purpose, some larger script as it were, to do otherwise” (p. 117). Nixon's perception of the dominance of theatrical motifs at all levels of the affair leads him to the revelation that the entire episode of American history is “a little morality play for our generation” (p. 119). This in turn allows the more radical perception, his recognition of its fictional nature: “And then what if, I wondered, there were no spy ring at all? What if all these characters believed there was and acted out their parts on this assumption, a whole courtroom full of fantasists? … Whereupon the Rosenbergs, thinking everybody was crazy, nevertheless fell for it, moving ineluctably into the martyr roles they'd been waiting for all along” (p. 135).

That Coover is able to place such subversive thoughts in the mind of Richard Nixon is indicative of the dual function he has in the novel. This dualism is the product of a divided consciousness Coover is able to ground firmly in the historical model of his character. On the one side there is his ingrained lawyer's scepticism, the sort of analytic detachment which leaves him unconvinced by the neat narratives that surround the case: “If you walked forward through all this data, like the journalists, like the FBI invited everybody to do, the story was cohesive and seemed as simple and true as an epigram … But working backwards, like a lawyer, the narrative came unraveled” (p. 131). On the other side is the strict orthodoxy consistent with his position as Vice President of the administration that oversaw the Rosenberg executions. His drive towards the center of power involves a rigorous assimilation of the prevailing ideology, and the militant anti-communism by which he made his name almost justifies his eager appropriation of their piece of history: “even though finally I didn't have all that much to do with the Rosenberg case itself, I always felt that—indirectly anyway—it was my baby” (p. 80). But the fact that he figures hardly at all in the public record of the relevant events allows Coover to exploit the tensions between his drive toward the center and his felt exclusion, his observer's role. He works this paradoxical status deep into Nixon's narrative, making it fundamental to his character and tracing its sources right back to childhood experiences such as his baptism at a Los Angeles revival meeting: “I didn't really quite believe in what I was doing. It was like being in a play and I could throw myself into the role with intensity and conviction, but inside I was holding something back” (pp. 525–26). Nixon is both a committed performer and an observer of his own performance. Coover is able to use him both as the analytical narrator of a substantial portion of the novel's material and as an object of satire in his own right because this division is made to work within the character himself.

As Nixon turns his lawyer's eye upon the Rosenbergs, his every insight into them and the circumstances that have conspired to bring them to the chair reflects back upon the self he is obsessively remaking into the likeness of a president. By working within this divided consciousness, Coover is able to undermine the narratives of the Rosenberg prosecution and the McCarthyist atmosphere that motivated it, and even of the Rosenbergs themselves, while leaving not an alternative, revisionist narrative (which would remain, after all, a narrative) but the derelict, undermined hulk of a self, Nixon's and the nation's, held together only by self-delusion and the lust for power. Nixon as representative of the national orthodoxy is stripped bare by Nixon the cynical observer. But since the latter is only the means of securing the former position, it is the former that remains, barren but beyond the limits of his own analysis. Nixon's exposure of the “lie of purpose” (p. 363) does not result in a liberation from his public self but in his perception of the opportunity for advancing it. When he steps outside of the script and heads for Sing Sing, it is to augment his own role in the action by rewriting it. At least this is the superficial motive: underneath the political ruthlessness unstable emotions have been aroused by the humiliations he has endured, and deeper, contradictory motives begin to surface.

The interaction between Nixon's contradictory selves and his humiliating pratfalls is the main use to which Coover puts his concept of Nixon as the clown of his circus. The clownish behavior derives much of its force from the character of the historical original, but the main impetus of the comedy in the Nixon chapters is the combination of his series of pratfalls with an immense apparatus of self-consciousness which undertakes the assimilation of each to his created self, even as he blunders into the next. He is the only character the novel makes available for any degree of empathy, yet this intimacy is achieved through the presentation of a huge quantity of autobiographical information in ludicrously deluded self-analysis. The satiric exposure of Nixon's self-deceit does not distance the reader from him because the comedy arises from frequent glimpses of a Nixon almost wholly absent from his own narration: a Nixon who harbors unacceptable desires, feels genuine (if discreditable) emotion, shows weaknesses, naiveties, and ethical uncertainties. The intimacy with which Nixon is portrayed serves the cause of an empathetic involvement that goes well beyond the basic objectives of realist characterization. Nixon is the self-narrated representative, within the novel, of the reader subject to its narration. His self-deconstruction, exposing the series of contradictory roles by which he inscribes himself and is inscribed within his context, is vicariously that of the narrative's inscription of the reader.

Coover's Nixon, then, is a series of masks, the inadequacy of each of these indicating the existence of another behind it. The ludicrous attempt to create a statesmanlike, affable public figure is the work of the calculating, cynical politician, himself the facade of an emotionally and sexually desperate man, whose needs cover those of a pathetic self-pitying child. Nixon, with all the ragged and disreputable motives beneath his public face, is a microcosm of America, and Coover's purpose here is to explore on a psychological plane the same phenomena he approaches anthropologically in the impersonally narrated chapters. The unexpected sympathy for Nixon to which several reviewers have testified is a parallel to the unexpected ambivalence Coover cultivates in the novel as a whole, and Nixon's descent into himself during the Sing Sing adventure is an analogue of the communal descent into dreamtime in Times Square. The stripping of the layers of his personality that occurs in his encounter with Ethel proceeds alongside repeated transformations in his motives—which, given the fantastic nature of the situation, are virtually generating the action. Initially, he is the statesmanlike Vice President exchanging ideological formulae. Behind this role the self-obsessed career politician soon becomes apparent: “I … moved my right foot forward slightly and tilted my head as though expecting to be photographed. Or rather, expecting nothing of the sort, but recalling from other photographs that such a pose suggested alertness and vitality and clarity of vision” (p. 430). This strategic consciousness begins to develop beyond its political function to serve emotional purposes: “‘Admit it, Ethel! You've dreamed of love all your life! You dream of it now! I know, because I dream of it, too! …’ My God! I was amazing!” (p. 435). His successful transition to the emotional level allows for its displacement by the self-pity that motivates it: “‘You won't die, Richard! Don't be afraid!’ ‘Two of my brothers died!’ I bawled. ‘I always thought … I would be next!’” (p. 441). Nixon's control of the fantasy he is living out has begun to slip, however: in a maneuver that exactly mirrors the principle of excess by which the narrative itself is driven, Nixon finds himself drawn beyond the limits of his wish-fulfillment as Ethel demands immediate sexual satisfaction, dragging down his trousers to expose him completely in his carnal reality. From this point Nixon recoils, and as he escapes into the death chamber with his trousers tangled round his ankles he is already rewriting the experience in the rhetoric of his political memoirs: “I ducked back out of sight, reflecting that a man who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life's mountaintop experiences: only in losing himself does he find himself” (p. 446).

In the parallel time scheme of events in Times Square there are several explicit bridges to the Sing Sing narrative (the sound of prisoners rattling their mugs against the bars, the dipping of the lights as the dynamos are tested) which prepare for the moment when Nixon, hiding with his pants down in the Sing Sing death chamber, turns around to find himself standing (quite logically) on the replica stage set in Times Square. This sudden fusion of the novel's two narrative lines indicates the equivalence of the psychological and anthropological levels at which they operate, but also represents Nixon's reassimilation to the official drama. His desperate improvisation is a regathering of the paraphernalia of his constructed selves. The scene becomes a parody of the situation during the fund crisis that had threatened his Vice Presidential candidacy, and echoes of the rhetorical maneuvers of his “Checkers” speech provide a rich source of comedy: “and so I came here like this tonight—and incidentally this is unprecedented in the history of American politics” (p. 474). The parallel provides him too with the device that saves him: “I would suggest that under the circumstances, everybody here tonight should come before the American people and bare himself as I have done!” (p. 482).

Nixon's “pants down for America” ploy is successful, but when he oversteps the mark and demands that Uncle Sam himself comply he ruptures once more the scarcely established smoothness of the evening's performance. Trapped in the circle of Nixon's rhetoric, Uncle Sam reluctantly drops his pants, exposing the darkness beneath his façade, his identity with the Phantom, and plunging the populace into a raw encounter with their instinctual drives: “There was a blinding flash of light, a simultaneous crack of ear-splitting thunder, and then—BLACKOUT!!” (p. 485). For the crowd, loss of the national narrative embodied in Uncle Sam unleashes all the primitive fears and carnal desires it had so effectively harnessed. “In the nighttime of the people” (pp. 486 et seq.) there occurs a communal stripping of identities parallel to Nixon's experience at Sing Sing, until the prototype of all their projected fears, like the darkness beneath Uncle Sam's pants, is exposed: “for the people in their nighttime have passed through their conventional terrors and discovered that which they fear most: each other!” (p. 490). The exposure of this irreducible asociality is insufficient to change the course of events, however. As with Nixon, the people are unable to countenance the anarchy that has been revealed in them, and recoil into the only order available, readopting the old safe roles even in their discredited artificiality. Uncle Sam returns bearing “freedom's holy light,” the nuclear glow from Yucca Flat, Nevada, and the executions proceed on cue.

While the executions are the consummation of America's renewed commitment to the script of Cold War orthodoxy, the consummation of the disaffected Nixon's personal role is achieved in the buggery scene of the epilogue. In the throes of this experience, Nixon attempts to comfort himself with just this equation of self and nation, even as the autonomy of his sceptical self is obliterated: “This is not happening to me alone, I thought desperately, or tried to think, as he pounded deeper and deeper, destroying everything, even my senses, my consciousness—but to the nation as well!” (p. 532). Nixon's aspirations have frequently prompted him to speculate about the nature of the Incarnation: he notes from his observation of Eisenhower that it apparently requires a vacuum to fill, and self-consciously bemoans the impediment of his own self-consciousness. His final experience of the process, sodomy as the destruction of the self, by which succession to the presidency is facilitated, ends his eager conjectures: “I recalled Hoover's glazed stare, Roosevelt's anguished tics, Ike's silly smile: I should have guessed” (p. 533). Leaving Nixon huddled on the floor and bawling like a baby, Uncle Sam departs. His and the novel's parting words, “always leave ‘em laughin’ as you say good-bye!” (p. 534), turn the focus of attention upon the way the reader has been situated in the narrative. A dubious complicity has been courted throughout, by means of the comic appeal of Uncle Sam himself, the accessibility of Nixon, the ubiquitous strategy of excess and the principle of carnival laughter. The reader's subjectivity is constructed by its situation within the discourse of the novel just as Nixon's identity is constructed by the roles he would appropriate. Nowhere is this clearer than in the carnivalesque function of laughter throughout the novel, which has been to satirize from within, resisting the illusion of transcendent perspective. Yet if satire is to remain functional as a critical tool, a distinction between laughing at and laughing with must be retained. Uncle Sam problematizes this distinction, and the argument of the novel, by turning the reader's affective implication in the narrative to unsettling effect, makes the problem explicit. The Public Burning ends, self-consciously, as an assertion of the moral necessity of self-consciousness: its last line is not a punchline, but an observation about punchlines.

Notes

1. Interview, Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, ed. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 77.

2. The Public Burning (New York: Viking, 1977), p. 407. All subsequent references in the text are to this edition.

3. Robert Coover, rev. of The Implosion Conspiracy, by Louis Nizer, New York Times Book Review, Feb. 11, 1973, p. 5.

4. Quoted in Thomas Alden Bass, “An Encounter with Robert Coover,” Antioch Review 40 (1982): 297.

5. Interview, p. 66.

6. Ibid., p. 74.

7. “American Folk Laughter in Robert Coover's The Public Burning,” Contemporary Literature 28 (1987): 239–56.

8. Thomas R. Edwards, “Real People, Mythic History,” rev. of The Public Burning, New York Times Book Review, Aug. 14, 1977, p. 9.

9. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen & Unwin, n.d. [1915]), p. 210.

10. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 11–12.

11. “An Interview with Robert Coover,” Critique 11:3 (1969): 28.

12. Bakhtin, pp. 67, 66.