SOURCE: "Robert Coover," in his American Self-Conscious Fiction of the 1960s and 1970s: Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Ronald Sukenick, Poznan, 1986, pp. 64-98.

Robert Coover ranks unquestionably among the most versatile contemporary authors. A "literary polyglot," as one critic has called him, he has tried his hand at poetry and translation, has written a collection of plays, a book of short stories and many uncollected short fictions, six novellas (two of them in the form of film-scripts), and three novels ranging from the mere two-hundred-page The Universal Baseball Association—through the solid, four hundred pages long The Origin of the Brunists—to the truly encyclopedic The Public Burning.

While Barthelme foregrounds artifice in his writing basically through miniaturization, contraction and linguistic terseness, Coover secures it very often through flamboyant, almost extravagant elaboration. Though it is largely a function of the author's style, in his two longest works it is also very much a structural property. In general, however, Coover's fiction lacks overtly self-reflective or otherwise aggressive strategies aimed at instantaneous piercing of the reader's habitual universe of discourse by, as Barthelme would have it, "kicking him in the knee." "I don't like, on the whole, assaults on the audience. I don't like assaults on anybody really" [Shanti, Summer 1972]. Commenting on the innovative writing of his generation (both Barthelme and Sukenick are mentioned here), Coover said: "We were all working in a vacuum. It was only our books appeared in the … early sixties that we realized we were dealing with the same kinds of things" [Antioch Review, Summer 1982]. The "same kinds of things" had to do with the growing sense of dissatisfaction with conventional formulas of literature and the subsequent radical reaction against them. The main character of Coover's first novel voices a rather desperate reflection: "Should have never invented the written word. Kept folly hopelessly alive." It clearly partakes of Barthelme's observation that signs are only signs and some of them are "lies" or, even more closely, of his motion to retract "the whole written world."

The Origin of the Brunists (1966) is, both from a critical and biographical point of view, a rather uncomfortable book. As the author has repeatedly stressed, it is not his first work, most of Pricksongs and Descants and the core story of The Universal Baseball Association having been written before it. Although formally acknowledged as the best first novel by an American author of the year, its reception was from the beginning mixed, and in the overall perspective of Coover's writing it is not regarded as his outstanding work.

By saying that his intention was to present an exemplary realistic narrative, the author himself seems to be "responsible" for the misinterpretation of the book. Actually, on more than one occasion he has identified himself as a realistic writer. But then the same label could be easily applied to Barthelme who, having found the world to be absurd committed himself to affirm its absurdity by simply recording it. This is also the essence of Coover's understanding of literary realism: "All these topics … of the realistic novel are not realistic topics. They are not out there in the world" [unpublished interview with Janusz Semrau]. Although with The Origin of the Brunists he thought of it as "paying dues"—"I didn't feel I had the right to move into more presumptuous fictions until I could prove I could handle the form as it was"—in the process he "turned it into [his] kind of book" [Frank Gado, First Person, 1973]. As Larry McCaffery notes: "From our perspective today, it is obvious that The Origin of the Brunists shares with other innovative books of the time (V., Barth's Giles Goat-Boy, Barthelme's Snow White, Sukenick's Up) a sense of self-consciousness, outrageousness, and a flaunting of artifice" [Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 2]. In formal terms the sense of artistic self-consciousness derives here basically from the use of certain organizing principles of musical composition. The paradox about The Origin of the Brunists is that as far as events are concerned there is really nothing unreal in it, but the novel's design is born of "something else," namely the nineteenth-century symphonic form: "I was looking for a way I could get the movement set up and the way the sections inside could work." In larger terms, Coover explains that he has a vision of narrative as "a certain kind of motion":

Music is a particularly strong example of this because you're riding the time line in a very specific way. It's a time line that is so abstract, and yet carrying us from here to there in a very clear narrative way.

The earliest attempts at systematic musicalization of literature are usually attributed to the German Romantic poets and the French symbolists of half a century later André Gide and Aldous Huxley were the first to theorize about the role of music in the novel, and to implement the idea on a large scale in their own work. As William Freedman says, the aim of the musical novel is "not to halt time in pattern of imagery, but somehow to reproduce its insistent flow in moving patterns of narrative, memory, and thought" [Laurence Sterne and the Origins of the Musical Novel, 1978]. The symphonic form, normally taken to signify an extended and thoroughly developed work for orchestra, seems to be very well suited for this kind of undertaking.

The Origin of the Brunists opens with a short prologue adumbrating the story and anticipating its resolution. The section can be compared to the first, fast allegro movement of a symphony which provides a point of departure and often also the title for the whole composition. Coover's prologue is very lively and quick:

Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. What did he really expect?

In the classical symphony the allegro is followed by a slow movement introducing some variation of form. Accordingly, the beginning of Part One in Coover's novel is marked by a perceptibly different tempo than the Prologue:

Clouds have massed, dooming in the small world of West Condon. The patches of old snow, crusted black with soot in full daylight, now appear to whiten as the sky dulls toward evening. The temperature descends. Slag smoke sours in the air.

As the narrative sketches leisurely its setting, we are also introduced in the first ten pages of the chapter to most of the characters. Soon, the work reveals its full, orchestra-like amplitude, with the impressive, diverse cast of over twenty vividly delineated major figures and a host of lesser ones. When the story gets properly under way the book begins vibrating with a dazzling variety of styles and voices, resembling the symphonic principles of transformation and flexibility. Combined with conventional third-person narration and occasional journalistic reportage are sermons, lyrics, monologues, unattributed dialogues, stream-of-consciousness passages and voices from the supernatural. Some sections are written in italics, some in boldface, some are typographically spaced out. There are also sequences endowed with rhythm and musicality of their own, and later in the novel the scale of its narrative technique is enriched with the epistolary form and elements of staged drama.

On the thematic plane the book achieves the symphonic effect of multiformity and kinetic movement through a number of apparently independent subplots, digressions, anecdotes, and jokes.

Meditate on Beethoven. The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions. Majesty alternating with a joke, for example, in the first movement of the B flat major Quartet. Comedy suddenly hinting at prodigious and tragic solemnities…. All you need is a sufficiency of character and parallel, contrapuntal plots.

All these ideas of musical contrast, transition and modulation on which Philip Quarles speculates in Point Counter Point are very much present in The Origin of the Brunists. Exemplary in this respect is the theme of love and sex. Idealism and purity of feeling are juxtaposed with adultery and crude desire; adolescent initiation is set next to voyeurism and sadism. This is, incidentally, where Coover reveals at one point more conspicuously than anywhere else in the novel his playful, "manipulative" authorial disposition. Part Three closes with a routine, forced marital bed-scene:

She runs her hands inside his pajama pants. He is still irritated with her for having turned him on…. "Is he risen?" she asks in his ear then, astonishingly resurrecting this old premarital collegetime joke of theirs…. "Indeed," he whispers, rolling on his back to receive her: "he is risen!"

The opening of Part Four continues this play on words, but the context is totally different:

West Condon, as though unable to gaze and longer look upon the deep black reach of night, rolls over on its back to receive the Monday sun, now rising, as men say….

In traditional literary terms, Coover's first novel follows, as Richard Andersen has noted, a variety of modes: novel of manners, psychological novel, social satire, fabulous story, religious parody, black humor novel, soap opera, and radical protest novel [Robert Coover, 1981].

Obviously, musical expansion is not endless and the classical symphony is probably more than any other form marked by unity of design and rigor of execution. It usually consists of four distinct major movements and is characteristically circular, being governed by the principles of exposition, development, and return or dramatic recapitulation of its motifs. The Origin of the Brunists is made up of four parts and all the subplots eventually converge to produce a quasi-apocalyptic ending. The musical idée fixe introduced into the symphony by Berlioz at the beginning of the nineteenth century is present in the book in the guise of an obsessive religious cult whose growth is its principle, immediate theme. The novel ends with an epilogue entitled appropriately "Return," which rounds off the main story lines. In this sense—with its tail in the mouth, so to speak, as well as its movements of repetition and return—the novel clearly departs from the linearity of structure inherited from Aristotle and basically observed in literature until the twentieth century. As we have suggested earlier and as Larry McCaffery stresses in The Metafictional Muse, "if Coover is 'paying dues' to traditional fiction in The Brunists, his payments often seem to be made with ambivalent feelings [since] he constantly undercuts the realistic impulses of the book."

An interesting, if familiar, element signalling (the need for) creative self-consciousness is the figure of Justin Miller, a newspaper editor who is the central character of the novel. "[His] name supplies the first clue about his role, for Justin was a second-century writer and apologist for Christianity" [Larry McCaffery, in The Metafictional Muse, 1982]. Miller becomes somewhat inadvertently the new cult's public relations man and its historian, and thus sets much of the story in motion. However, although he does not altogether lack a sense of order and is aware of the "fictionality" of the movement, he gets entangled in it like most of the others. As Coover explains elsewhere, "his confused vision of things spreads through the narrative like a mild high, comforting, sleep-inducing." The only one to preserve personal integrity and to maintain distance toward the maddening Brunists controversy is Miller's enigmatic assistant, Lou Jones. Though seemingly a marginal character, this is precisely where the author of the book, Robert Coover, otherwise practically absent from it, can be located.

Jones had a knack … [for] a goddamn song-and-dance act that had had the whole klatch laughing and crying at the same time…. [He was] gifted with an uncommonly facile feedback system, making his way any way he could, keeping a perverse eye out and telling good stories about what he saw … though his humor sometimes had a way of biting too deep.

In this respect The Origin of the Brunists reminds of King, Queen, Knave with its minor figure of perverse old Enricht as Nabokov's Machiavellian double. Enricht passes noise lessly through this apparently conventional narrative only to declare surprisingly at one point: "I do everything … I make everything. I alone." When he reveals later in the novel to be a "famed illusionist and conjuror," we need not even be told that "the whole world was but a trick of his, and all those people … owed their existence to the power of his imagination." Although Coover does not grant his own surrogate just as much power, Lou Jones likewise leaves an occasional imprint on the progress of the story:

"Mount of Redemption," said Sal.

"I never heard it called that," Vince said.

"When did it—?"

"Tiger Miller's old buddy Lou Jones made it up."

"What's the point?"

"What's the point of any cunt?" asked George, and they all laughed idiotically at that.

Significantly enough, the Mount of Redemption provides setting for the climatic scene of the novel, and Lou Jones is the sole person who remains unaffected by the general frenzy of the moment. This is only natural since he seems to be in fact orchestrating the whole event. The posture in which he is presented brings to mind none other than that of Velazquez in "Las Meninas":

… now Miller saw him, moving impassively up the hill, photographing them as he went, kneeling for angles…. Jones, in drooping fedora and glistening raincoat, shaped like a big dark bag made an odd contrast to the frenetic worshipers who performed for his lens. There was something almost contemplative … almost statuesque about him as he crouched to peer into the instrument in his lap…. [Again] he … saw Jones, slyly amused, in modest retreat partway down the hill, photographing it all.

The book divorces itself from the earnestness of its proclaimed/supposed genre also through various, often quite elaborate patterns of numerological coincidences and recurrences. Most of them center on the number 7. Initially, with epigraphs like "Write what you see in the book and send it to the Seven Churches," "Of every clean beast thou shalt take to three seven and seven, the male and his female …," they might seem to add to the atmosphere surrounding the evolution of the new religious cult. However, after just a little of this sort of number-chasing, "we sense that Coover is playing a joke on us—inducing us to establish fictional patterns in much the same way" [McCaffery, in The Metafictional Muse]. Indeed, as a subjective choice, any given number can generate imaginative and perfectly autonomous games and fantasies. In this case seven and its multiples can be in fact regarded as the writer's peculiar self-conscious trademark or ironic signature. The frequency with which it appears in the world of The Origin of the Brunists, or rather the way it is forced upon it, clearly defies all standards of probability. When we first meet Justin Miller, he is sitting in his office staring out the window—"unwashed in fourteen years." His high-school basketball number was 14, and so is the sum of the figures on the license plate of his car. One night he realizes within a dream that all this had happened to him when he was "in the seventh grade." Vince Bonali, the other major character of the novel, happens to have seven children; a shot of whiskey hits him one morning like "seven hundred blazing bicarbonates," and one of his sons is reported to have been AWOL "since the seventh of April." When the novel opens the Brunists history is in its fourteenth week, and at this point the community is "just seven short months" from city elections. The mining disaster which sparks off the movement "reduces itself to numbers," and so does the whole cult. In the fatal accident from which Giovanni Bruno emerges as a prophet he is the only survivor out of 98 trapped miners ("the infamous product of fourteen and seven"). There are six other men with him at the time, they entomb themselves up in a room around the fourteenth east and seventh south shaft of the mine, and on that particular night a local basketball game is stopped with the score 14-11. Furthermore: "The number between nine and seven, eight, was the date of the explosion, and the day of the rescue was eleven, two one's or two, the difference between nine and seven." Fourteen is the number of weeks separating the critical event and the expected end of the world; March 21 proves to be "the first day of the sign of rebirth and the night Mrs. Collins' house burned, marking mystically the commencement of their final trial," and the new creed itself is based on "the seven Words" Giovanni Bruno ever manages to utter following his rescue. Finally, all but one of the four Parts of the novel consist of seven chapters; the other one has twelve sections, but together with the Prologue and the Epilogue it makes another multiple of the notorious number. It is also in this context that we may say after Barthelme that "repetition is reality" since by recalling again and again the number 7 The Origin of the Brunists creates its arbitrary and independent, numerological, reality. What emphasizes the nature of the book are frequent, deliberately baffling time-checks. They may contribute to the growing intensity of action, but their ultimate inconsequentiality and obtrusive manner in which they are presented clearly punctuate the text with another bluntly artificial element.

Five years after the appearance of The Origin of the Brunists Coover published a quasi-novella The Water Pourer which was originally to be included as a chapter in the novel. In a two-page preface to it the author explains "the process of something coming in and going out of the text and what the text is like." This short essay can be seen in itself as an outline of his creative aesthetics. Since in general, Coover argues, art is "a polarizing lens" and the narrative—"like the universe"—is "explosive," at some point you have to "contain" it. Obviously, "weak vision is not suited for these explosions." The symphonic form and numerological games (the principles of design and modulation) is what informs the strength of Coover's vision in The Origin of the Brunists. They contain its narrative flow and draw the reader to see what the author himself sees, thus preventing "the loss of the reader to the explosion itself." The general idea is to "make an attractive and curious shape and drive the narrative through it, absorbing part of [the reader's] peripheral vision." In more personal terms, Coover has explained in an interview:

Even though structure is not profoundly meaningful in itself, I love to use it. This has been the case ever since the earliest things I wrote when I made an arbitrary commitment to design. The reason is not that I have some notion of an underlying ideal of order which fiction imitates, but a delight with the rich ironic possibilities that the use of structure affords.

The Public Burning (1977), a real whale of a book which established Coover as a major voice in contemporary fiction, brings considerable extension and refinement of the stylistic technique and the narrative strategy employed in The Origin of the Brunists. With all parts divided into seven chapters each and some pertinent (if only marginal) numerological speculations, the author's playful trademark is unmistakably present in the novel. Its four major movements, clearly marked opening and finale, sophisticated musical vocabulary, song lyrics and breath-taking rhythmical sequences seem to suggest another symphonic composition. Still, for all its disruptiveness as a structural principle in literature, the classical symphony goes historically only too well with the nineteenth-century concept of the realistic novel.

Apart from The Brunists everything else that I did does not belong to that time. People have heard me say about the influence of music on my writing and then have tried to find a parallel and have criticized me on the ground that they do not see what they expected. I tend to like best of all either pre-Monteverdian music or contemporary music. I like Penderecki, for example, or Ligeti. The idea of cramming tons and tons of little bits of sounds.

Donald Barthelme's appreciation of twentieth-century music [quoted in The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition, 1982] comes in particularly useful here:

… it has to do with bombardment … and that's a structural concept…. The aesthetic idea being what it would be like if we had all this noise pulled together and then turned up very high—increase the volume…. It's late twentieth-century music, which is, clearly, noise.

The subject matter of The Public Burning is even more "outrageous" than that of the previous book. It focuses on the famous and controversial Rosenberg spy case of the early 1950s and dramatizes a well-known political figure, Richard Nixon. Basically, the narrative deals with the two days and nights preceding the execution, but the novel includes absolutely everything that might have had any bearing on the trial—from the Korean War and contemporary government scandals and intrigues to cultural and pop cultural aspects of America. The author's vast and ironic vision makes him put in the pages of The Public Burning things that are normally considered to be outside the realm of belles-lettres. The mode of presentation deliberately confounds rather than expounds the action, which is thus immediately charged with literariness. We are bombarded with what appears to be an endless recitation of documentary facts, figures, dates, quotes, testimonies, speeches, interviews, autonomous essays, and various topical "debris" gathered from newspapers, magazines, movies, TV and radio programs, Broadway plays, advertisements, sports scores, etc.

… like the 4998732500 foreign aid bill, little numbers like the 5 tons of gravel and dirt that Jimmy Willi is buried under in Lambertsville. The 6-2 record of Vinegar Bend Mizell. The 500 Fingers of Dr. T. by Dr. Seuss—You've got to see 480,000-key piano hit an atomic clinker! WITH STEREOPHONIC SOUND! Allison Choate of Apawamis cards a 77. 55 Chinese are ordered out of the country, Eleanor Hortense Almond dies at 103. Volume declines to 1010000 shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The President is visited by 100 schoolchildren, and the Vice President tells Senator Taft: "I broke 100 at Burning Tree Sunday, Bob!"

As Coover appears to be somewhat teasingly explaining at the outset of the novel, the "reasons" for this general strategy of diffusion (more specifically of informational excess and radical recontextualization) are "theatrical, political, whimsical." While the book aims at and succeeds in projecting the sense of dynamism and constant movement of American life and character ("I was striving for a text that would seem to have been written by the whole nation through all its history…. I wanted thousands of echos, all the sounds of the nation."), its primary goal is to expose the complex and ultimately stupifying operations of history and social myths. The writer's frankly biased treatment of history goes back to the roots of his creative philosophy, namely to his commitment to a relativistic vision of reality. In The Public Burning he calls objectivity "an impossible illusion," and has Nixon wonder: "What was fact, what intent, what was framework, what was essence?" At this point, with his famous pronouncement that all visible objects are but as pasteboard masks, Melville invites another interesting comparison. Many of Coover's chapter headlines seem to be taken out of Moby Dick: "All Aboard the 'Look Ahead, Neighbor Special'," "High Noon," "The Eye in the Sky," "Spreading the Table of Glory," "A Rash of Evil Doings," "The Phantom's Hour," "How to Handle a Bloodthirsty Mob," "Something Truly Dangerous," "Uncle Sam Strikes Back." Both works share many features, such as proliferation of characters, improbable coincidences, dramatic tension, density of references and allusions, elements of other genres.

Based on the belief that "the more elaborate the attempt to hide fiction, the creakier it becomes," The Public Burning features artifice as an essential element of its total reality and brings the reader's attention to the fiction-making process or, in the author's own words, "exposes its activity as it goes along."

I've never had anyone come up and ask: "Were they really executed in Time Square?"…. The main thing, I think, is that anyone reading the book is aware from the very first line that he's reading a book of fiction.

Not only in this respect, but in a more general artistic sense the power of the novel resides just as much in its style as in its content. On the level of language the narrative seems to delight in elaboration and sheer extravaganza. Much of it is self-apparent or, to use the writer's favorite phrase, "look-ma-no-hands" virtuosity fiction. The book includes in its stylistic repertoire rhetorical parody, deliberate agrammatical utterances, abstruse and protruded puns and anagrams, finally various paralinguistic gestures.

"Who—Whoo—Whoop! Who'll come gouge with me? Who'll come bite with me? Rowff—Yough—Snort—YAHOO!"

"Knock knock!" Eh? Who dere? "Grassy!" Grassy? Grassyquien? "Grassy-ass, amigos! Mooch-ass grassy-ass! Ha ha, de nada, jefe!"

"Ah see no pahticulah point in sendin' may-un to Ko-REE-ya to dai, Mistah Cheymun," declaims Congressman Wheeler, "whahl ay-tomic spies are allowed to liy-uv heah at HOME! One Justice yieldin' to the voCIF'rous my-NOR-utty preshuh groups of this yere CUNT-tree is indee-FENsuble! Ah can-NOT sit ahdly by HEah in this yere layjus-LaY-tuv BAHDY without seekin' to DO somethin' abaout it!"

The new President was packaged and sold by BBDandO as "Strictly a No-Deal Man Clean as a Hound's Tooth Who Will Go to Korea Restore Faith in God and Country On a Crusade to Clean Up Creeping Socialism Five-Percenters the Mess in Washington Crook Cronies Mink Coats Deep Freezers and Rising Inflation."

"Too many have gawn CRAY-zy ovuh socawled SS-EVIL rahhts, a CUM-yunist propaganda FAY-vrit, and this heah class a PEE-pul is ri-SPWAN-subble fer this heah FOO-lishnuss!"

Earl Rovit's perceptive review of The Public Burning [The American Book Review, Vol. 15, December, 1977] concludes by asserting that it is not ultimately "about" the Rosenberg trial, the Cold War, or the early traumas of Richard Nixon—"Coover's central concern … is with words." In larger terms, the book is characterized by constant changes in point of view and narrative tempo, shifts from the present to the past tense, juxtaposition, montage and unexpected intercuttings. At one point Nixon comes up with an emotionally voiced reflection which proves to be an apt commentary on the novel's performance:

There were no scripts, no necessary patterns, no final scenes, there was just action, and then more action!… that was what freedom was all about!… Act—act in the living present!

The Public Burning underscores its fictionality with various graphic elements: captions, italics, ellipse and typographical designs, e.g.,

                           it
                          was a
                     sickening and
                  to americans almost
                incredible history of men
            so fanatical that they would destroy
              their own countries and col
                   leagues to serve a
                      treacherous
                         utopi
                           a

Apart from song lyrics, similarly inserted in the text are Coover's own, rather peculiar, nursery rhymes:

      He's in here, boys, the hole's wore slick!
      Run here, Sam, with ye forked stick!
      Stand back, boys, an' le's be wise,
      Fer I think I see his beaded eyes!

There are also bigger, topological designs. The narrative assumes several times the guise of staged drama or musical/music hall, with scene descriptions (including costumes, props, etc.) and stage directions in self-contained "Intermezzo" pieces of some ten pages each. They might, as they do in music, connect the main parts of the composition, but their primary impact is only too obviously disruptive. Although the novel is so meticulously documented, it is unmistakably Coover himself who manages the stage and directs the drama. As Robert Alter observes [in Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre, 1975]: "the theater within the novel is a conspicuous vehicle of fictional self-consciousness, beginning with Master Pedro's puppet show in Don Quixote; and … we cannot escape … from the awareness that in abandoning the artifice of narration [the author] has adopted the artifice of the theater."

Five years before the publication of The Public Burning Coover said in a general context: "I love spectacle and virtuosity and risk-taking and the feeling of being surrounded by the setting." All these elements are certainly present in the book. In the final analysis the most intriguing of them is probably willed "risk-taking." One of the most ambitious and audacious contemporary works of fiction, the novel appears to be a precarious high-wire act. Initially, it may give the impression of disarray, uncontrollable narrative flow and ungraspable spatial realities. On closer scrutiny, however, it teems with symmetries and proves to be tightly contained. What gives the book an immediate sense of control and discipline of execution is its outer numerological organization. Inner balance is achieved by means of regularly alternating narrative voices of the author (text) and the main hero, Richard Nixon. The former offers chapters of straight impersonal presentation which, in general, are characterized by dynamism and linguistic as well as formal exuberance. The latter is by comparison more conventional, obtuse and meditative. The single most important structural (also thematic) entity is Uncle Sam. As the embodiment of the American spirit or, as is the case here, American hysteria and as such an apt extension of the atom bomb image, he/it is the centrifugal and centripetal pivot of the novel. As Sharon Spencer suggests in Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel [1971],

… an ideal image for the visualization of how motion is suggested by "constructed" fiction is the circle; its center must be thought of as representing the subject of the book; the circumference, the point of view or the perspective from which it is seen.

Although in the physical sense the author's stance is that of positive self-effacement, his personal bitter irony and hilarious humor (Nixon as clown) are readily recognizable and are felt throughout the novel. Even if, as defined self-reflexively through Justin Miller, Coover's humor sometimes has "a way of biting too deep," this is precisely the realm in which the book vests—next to imagination ("THIS WORLD IS BUT CANVAS TO OUR IMAGINATIONS!")—its ultimate message: "'always leave 'em laughin' as you say good-bye!'".

As for the overall intent and final effect of The Public Burning, Coover "uses [it] to fight a pestilential fire with a fire that purifies. And even if his success is limited and evanescent—as it must necessarily be—it is a success that aggrandizes all of us" [Earl Rovit].

Talking with Thomas Bass about characteristic features of his literary generation Coover mentioned—next to "the reaction against the sclerosis of old forms," and "the adoption of self-conscious narrators"—an interest in prenovel forms: "allegories, saints' lives, myths, epistolary romances, fairy tales, legends." The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) partakes of most of these conventions, with the concept of allegory as its most conspicuous lineament. The clue to it is the book's epigraph taken from Kant's Critique of Judgement: "It is not at all requisite to prove that such an intellectus archetypus is possible, but only that we are led to the Idea of it …" The novel leads us to origins of creativity and subsequently takes to grotesque limits the authorial dream and sacred privilege of long standing—the demiurgic, absolute control over the work of art.

The hero of the book, an aged and lonely bachelor, invents a complicated game played with dice and charts. The game has its own dialectics, a huge history behind it, and a potentially infinite horizon ahead of it. The title suggests, in fact, that it is a universe in its own right, with Henry not only its sole proprietor but also its fundamental "prop." As several critics have observed, his full name, J. Henry Waugh, makes an acronym translating itself as Yahweh—the Hebrew name for God.

All the while Henry brings to life new characters, controls their fortunes, and plays arbitrarily with time. He is most attentive to detail and concerned with effect. He thinks long, for instance, before deciding on a name for a new player:

Bus stop. Whistlestop. Whistlestop Busby, second base … Thornton's. He'd been looking for a name to go with Shadwell, and maybe that was it. Thornton Shadwell. Tim's boy. Pitcher like the old man? Probably. But a lefty.

The immediate excitement is obviously in the play itself but the part of it he "enjoys most" is "writing it up in the Book." Henry had always been drawn to games and experimented with a variety of them, but in the long run it was "the beauty of the records system which found a place to keep forever each least action—that had led Henry to baseball as his final project." Much as he hates his real job, this is actually where the game connects with his professional skill and career as an accountant. Henry's boss explains to him one day: "Accounting like baseball is an art … and a rough competitive business. Some make it and some don't." The same applies even more directly to creative writing which seems to be precisely Henry's art. Not only does he develop financial ledgers for each club, tabulate and file box scores, but provides each player with a comprehensive biography, invents dialogues, looks, mannerisms, and keeps a running and permanent record of the whole activity. "Now it consisted of some forty volumes…. He seemed to find more to write about, the more he played the game."

Henry's is indeed an artistic experience, and certain of its principles can be spelled out from his behavior. "The first phase in the creative process consists of frustration in reality. The creative person is faced with some dilemma … that cannot be resolved through ordinary problemsolving techniques" [Jay and Jean Harris, The Roots of Artifice, 1981]. Henry's game is not only a response to his humdrum personal existence but also to the devastating dreariness and absurdity of the world at large. To start with, "how could anyone take seriously" a sign like "Dunkelmann, Zauber and Zifferblat, Licensed Tax and General Accountants, Specializing in Small Firms, Bookkeeping Services and Systems, Payrolls and Payroll Taxes, Monthly, Quarterly and Annual Audits, Enter Without Knocking." Inside the drab office, "the clock on the wall … in its fat white roundness and hard black numbers always reminded Henry of Horace Zifferblat himself," and thus, befitting the boss' name and personal characteristics, of tyrannizing conventionality of time and dogmatic reverence for authority and hard work. As Waugh joins daily "the sour community on its morning pilgrimage," the streets appear to be "pregnant with the vague threat of confusion and emptiness," only to give him "a sober sense of fatality and closed circuits." The buses are often late and jammed, the drivers are heard "barking orders" and when a waitress sponges for him the table one morning, "the rag … smelled like something between an old goat and a dead fish." When he wants to buy flowers to commemorate a tragically "killed" player from his game, the florist offers him a prickly wreath which, to Henry's dismay and horror, turns out to be made of plastic.

… a deep gloom was on him. He looked out, not to sink in. A dog barked at a window. Cars passed. A child smashed ants on the sidewalk with an egg-shaped stone. No, not a stone. Plastic again.

Newspapers invariably speak about "Gold and silver shortages. Orgy that the cops broke up. Rapes and murder. Making of another large war." Henry registers more experience than others and he certainly does so with greater intensity:

Oh, yes, he was sick of it! He saw those news guys, writing it all down … a pack of goddamn leeches, inventing time and space, scared shitless by the way things really were.

Actually, Waugh is something of a philosopher. He finds it pleasant "to muse about the origins" and is often inclined to talk "about time and people and history and how everything seemed to flow confusedly together." As a larger version of the journalistic distortion of reality, history in fact deeply disturbs and depresses him: "History my god. An incurable diarrhea of dead immortals." Henry develops a similar attitude toward popular values and stereotypes symbolized in the novel by real baseball, "THE GREAT AMERICAN GAME":

"You don't go to games, real ones?"

"Not for years now. The first game I saw … I nearly fell asleep…. I would leave a game, elbowing out with all the others, and feel a kind of fear that I could so misuse my life."

In the essay "Poetic Creativity, Process and Personality" [from Creativity and the Individual, 1960], R.N. Wilson defines acquisition of technique as the second stage of the creative process. "Experience must be translated into form, and to do so, the poet must acquire technique…. Technical mastery develops from exposure to models and practice in skills." This stage of artistic development can be found in Henry's trial-and-error experimentation with other games. Also, before he finally plunges into the world of the Association he spends a long time meticulously perfecting its rules and the basic technique of play. Every artist is believed to entertain faith in his vocation and the unique significance of his own work. "Being refused a social recognition on the basis of his work is the professional creator's trauma. He resolves this trauma syndromatically through his pursuit of the fantasy of greatness" [Harris and Harris]. Even though his sole friend, Lou, suggests that maybe "it's not worth it," for Henry his enterprise is obviously "more than just another ball game," it is an "event of the first order." Actually, he is aware that some people might view his game as (at best) "a kind of running away," and he does not even try to achieve any social reputation along this line. Instead, he does indeed fantasize about greatness as such:

… what a wonderful rare thing it is to do something, no matter how small a thing, with absolute unqualified unsurpassable perfection!… to do a thing so perfectly that, even if the damn world lasted forever, nobody could ever do it better….

The simple statistics are ruled by the dice, but the logs are governed by Henry's imagination. This is where his disposition and behavior respond to the next two stages of the paradigmatically defined creative process: "the envisioning of combinations and distillations" and "elucidation of the vision" [Wilson]:

This has been called insight, inspiration, or intuition, [but it] cannot be planned or ordered … [it] may occur in a flash, at the end of deep consideration, or it may be set off by external stimuli. [Finally] conscious application of energy to master the insight gained arises.

With phrases for the Book flashing through his head,

Henry paced the kitchen, his mind on several things at once. He poured what was left of the coffee, put another pot on.

… to the refrigerator, to the sink, back to the table. He slapped the back of the chair with his hand. Incredible!

He wrote out a few possible lead sentences on scratch paper, but none appealed to him. He stood, poured himself another cup of coffee, carried it back to the table and stood there, staring down at the open Book.

Naturally enough, Waugh goes occasionally through "dull-minded stretches," feeling "much like giving up,"

until one day that astonishing event would occur that brought sudden life and immediacy … excitement, a certain dimension, color. The magic of excellence. Under its charm … it could happen! Henry reeled around his chair a couple. times, laughing out loud….

However overwrought and burlesque, the presented intellectus archetypus seems to contain a tacit autobiographical disclosure on Coover's part:

The way I can do work is … I get a kind of new idea about something. Sometimes it just happens itself … I see it and sit down and write it—not very often though; I'm very lucky when that happens.

"Attempting to accept the identity as an artist is a significant factor in the life of an artist. This is one reason the adult artist seeks the company of other artists" [Harris and Harris]. Appropriately enough, Lou is presented as an artist in his own right. He is a comical food-artist who can all the same be admired for his confrontation with the "raw stuff" of his vocation:

It was amazing to watch Lou when he really attuned to his eating. All clumsiness vanished and his fingers played over the food as upon a musical instrument, his face flushing with pleasure and mild exertion.

Henry's friendship with Lou does well to display two diametrically different levels or modes of creativity. As B. Chiselin would define it, Henry's art is of the higher, "applicative" sort, as it "alters the universe of meaning by introducing into it some new elements [and] some new order of significance"—Lou's vocation is "reproductive" since it merely "gives development to an established body of meaning through initiating some advance in its use." It is not surprising, therefore, that when Henry finally introduces Lou to the Universal Baseball Association, it does not stir any imaginative response in his friend and the evening's game ends as a pitiful disaster.

With his mind constantly drifting back to his table, Henry is able to feel himself perfectly and absolutely in tune with his characters, setting, and action: "sweating with relief and tension all at once, unable to sit, unable to think, in there, with them!… licking his lips, dry from excitement." Given also the fact that his Book is, essentially, a conventional project—"functional details of the game were never mentioned [in it]"—Henry can be instructively linked with the nineteenth-century novel and its tradition. "It was in this period that many major novelists began to talk about a hallucinated sense of the presence of their imaginary characters, began to record a feeling of loss when they finished a book" [Alter].

For all its immediate features such as brute force, boisterousness or crude jokes, the world of the Association offers precisely that which Henry's own life and reality as he knows it lack: beauty, affection, excitement, justice, magnitude, order, and—above all—a sense of achievement and self-identity.

The game was over.

Giddily, Henry returned to the bathroom and washed his hands. He stared down at his wet hands, thinking: he did it! And then, at the top of his voice, "WA-HOO!" he bellowed, and went leaping back into the kitchen, feeling he could damn well take off….

Waugh is not, at least initially, completely devoid of specifically authorial self-consciousness. Still, although he is also aware that it could be "a defining of the outer edges" and that "total one-sided participation in the league would soon grow even more oppressive than his job," Henry finally overestimates his capacities and underestimates the problems of his art. When in the 56th season of the game he plays nearly a quarter of it in just twenty-four hours instead of, as it usually required, two weeks, he loses the sense of his real self and of his situation. Consequently, his precarious equilibrium between neurotic and genuinely artistic disposition is destroyed. He can no longer discriminate among his experiences, begins to assume unconsciously the personalities of his players in public places, and mixes the world of the Association with the real one in general. As his personality keeps dissipating, Henry gives up his job, loses all control over the artifact, and in the end inexplicably disappears from the novel ("down there a couple blocks ahead: lead on, Barney! lead on!").

The Universal Baseball Association is not—formally—a work breaking new ground in literary self-consciousness. Also, it is self-conscious insofar that it is a self-reflexive (authorial) consideration of some larger problems involved in fiction-making. Still, it is certainly one of the most fascinating books about self-consciousness in art. Its message leaves no doubt about Robert Coover's own creative philosophy. A mature, truly self-aware artist will, as John Barth actually did, call the kind of histrionic disposition presented in the novel "a lot of baloney" [Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Winter-Spring 1965]. Barth can be cited in this context as a spokesman for postmodern literature at large:

You hear respectable writers, sensible people like Katherine Ann Porter, say the characters just take over. I'm not going to let those scoundrels take over. I am in charge…. When writers speak of … characters taking over and space-time grids, it's usually because they don't know why they do the things they do.

Even if, as Margaret Heckard for instance argues, "taken as a whole Coover's works do not form a single coherent canon" [Twentieth Century Literature, May 1976], the present novel is not only a kind of compendium of ideas about writing, but can be treated as a guidebook to the author's own fiction as well. Many of Coover's central thematic concerns and even formal concepts are ingrained in The Universal Baseball Association. Though published nearly ten years after it, The Public Burning echoes almost ad verbum Waugh's interpretation of history. Also, with the detailed analysis of Henry's Book, the author seems to have had developed the idea for The Public Burning in his hero's mind, as it were:

Into the Book went the whole UBA, everything from statistics to journalistic dispatches…. Style varied from the extreme economy of factual data to the overblown idiom of the sportswriter, from the scientific objectivity of the theoreticians to the literary speculations of essayists and anecdotalists. There were tape-recorded dialogues, satires, prophecies, scandals…. [Its] shifting mood oscillat[ing] between notions of grandeur and irony, exultation and despair, enthusiasm and indifference, amusement and weariness.

Given the fact that the core of the story (basically the second chapter) had been written before The Origin of the Brunists, that novel may also be linked along the same line with The Universal Baseball Association. The Brunists story seems to be indebted to it for one of its most interesting and complex characters—Ralph Himebaugh. Engaging the Nabokovian game of cryptograms and logographics we can detect here a fairly explicit reference to Henry Waugh. Capitalizing and turning upside down the middle "m" and translating "i" and "e" as id est, it reads: H(i)(m)(e)(b)augh, i.e., "b" rother of H. Waugh. The analogy is indeed amazing. Like Henry, Himebaugh is an oldish, lonely and eccentric bachelor. He is a brilliant file cabinet lawyer, and thus his professional skill is also to a certain extent an art of paper records and statistics. Dedicated to private ways of truth and obsessed by "the horror of existence qua existence," he devotes his life to the construction of a numerological system that would order the "universe of screaming particles" and thus reveal the "truth beyond phenomena." Like Henry, he develops the project in the seclusion of his home; his writing is "pedantic" and "precise," the "logs and papers" are always "spread on the kitchen table." Finally Himebaugh decides on the number 7 as his organizing principle, and goes on to give letters alphabet value in numbers. After a time he also finds himself totally imprisoned by his fantasy and experiences a similar fate: "they all noticed how his health had deteriorated," "he was really cracking up!"

With the bulk of it written later, The Universal Baseball Association in fact "takes up the concept of fiction-making where The Origin of the Brunists left off" [McCaffery]. What is to be noted about it first, however, is the background presence of some other element characteristic for Coover's writing: contentious attitude toward the Christian dogma, numerological structure, musical references, linguistic exuberance. Henry's game as well as his life translate themselves quite comprehensively in terms of numerological patterns and coincidences. All of them center, inevitably, round the number 7. Henry is 56 years old (as is the father of the all-time star of the league), we are introduced to the Association in its 56th year, and the 49th game of the season proves to be a turning point in its history. Seven is the number of opponents each team has, and there are fifty-six ways to advance players in the charts. The real sport of baseball itself is in a sense governed by the number—with its three main activities (pitching, hitting, fielding) performed around four bases. Although Henry's imagination is the prime mover of the game and its universe, they both depend just as much on intelligence, strategy and choice as on pattern, luck and accident. This is what gives him a feeling of some "ultimate mystery" since he is not aware, [though] his creator—Robert Coover—certainly is, that the game of dice is only seemingly devoid of assignable cause and final effect. Mathematical probabilities applying to it are predictable owing to the fact that the sum of the spots on each two opposite faces of a cube is constant, always totalling seven. The observant reader will note that all this is too neat. Although it might appear, as it does for example to Frank Shelton [Critique, August 1975], that "Coover suggests the possibility that another order of existence may be working behind the dice" and thus behind the number informing it, Henry's game is obviously meant to be ironic:

… the design, the structure of the book is so self-revealing—and it's not a gloss on the text from which it borrows its design [Genesis I.1 to II.3], in the sense of being a theologian's gloss; it's an outsiders gloss….

Everybody knows about the seven days of creation, the seven wonders of the world, the seven mortal sins, and the seven-year cycle of famine and plenty. Wisdom and Freedom are proverbially said to rest on seven pillars, and Shakespeare has platitudinized the seven ages of man in the famous passage "All the world's a stage…." Also, seven is believed to mark off the climacterics of human life, and there is the inexorable combination of three spiritual elements with the four basic corporeal ones which is said to account for all human existence. Numerology in Coover's fiction is not, however, an example of how man can "navigate" in the world, but rather a perfect illustration of how—in the writer's own words—we can "stumble through it." Coover's numerological games serve to underscore the "manmade" nature of his art. In larger terms this is to make us aware that it is "one of the ways that the mind gets locked in fixed distorting patterns."

The concept of game as such which is the immediate subject matter of The Universal Baseball Association is probably the single most important element in Coover's literary aesthetics. Games feature prominently as a thematic motif throughout his fiction, but they provide essentially a formal principle. Even though Henry is absent from the last chapter of the novel, his game (100 seasons later) still goes on, as if endowed with vitality and life of its own. The past is brought into the ongoing present, the game becomes self-reflective, and the chapter gives the whole book a puzzling, unaccountably open finale. In effect, it challenges the mainstays of so-called objective reality, such as causality, the possibility of isolating objects and events, the sense of purpose, absolute time and space. Reminiscent of Donald Barthelme's suggestion that "there are always openings, if you can find them," the author voices through Henry the fundamental belief: "the 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." Also, "the game on his table was not a message, but an event."