Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page

by Stéphane Vanderhaeghe

Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page is an unconventional study of Robert Coover's work from his early masterpiece The Origin of the Brunists (1966) to the recent Noir (2010). Written in the second person, it offers a self-reflexive investigation into the ways in which Coover's stories often challenge the reader to resist the conventions of sense-making and even literary criticism. By portraying characters lost in surroundings they often fail to grasp, Coover's work playfully enacts a "(melo)drama of cognition" that mirrors the reader's own desire to interpret and make sense of texts in unequivocal ways. This tendency in Coover's writing is indicative of a larger refusal of the ready-made, of the once-and-for-all or the authoritative, celebrating instead, in its generosity, the widening of possibilities--thus inevitably forcing the reader-critic to acknowledge the arbitrariness and artificiality of her responses.

608 pages, Paperback

First published March 13, 2013

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Before I wrote I said and you read ::

But for now we will only quote (with authoritativeness, naturally, by way of their insertion within quotation marks) the words of Derrida that more sentences are ....."to come".


...and then it began with an ending, which in the words of a character play’d by Julie Andrews, Is a very good place to begend.

.... and but so in sum we’d have to say that Vanderhaeghe is to Coover as Bahktin is to Rabelais. Which is to say perhaps more authoritative and definitive and DURable than one or the author or even the critic (not to forget “you”) would like the case to be. But such is publishing. It’s been said and can’t be unsaid, as a wise=person once said.


Now that we’ve got that out of our collective way....

.... not to forget what was said before the re=reading (always re=reading, re=member!) in some kind of hypothetical or anticipatory mood ;; maybe subjunctive if we could get the subject to speak straight. We should address the already said as it is written even though you (or even “one”) hasn’t read it yet. Is that a temporality difficulty you’re having?

As to the first concern, you will say for certain that it is tedious. It is also genius, in its own very unique way ;; a way which is all its own, but clearly plagiarized -- the uniqueness part is plagiarized -- directly from the genius=author upon whom this parasitical=critical text is feeding. Well, but it (“you” in the second person of the parasite) knows and acknowledges that all of its words are not its own ;; its all been said before (where have we heard that one before?)

As to your (our?) second concern, it doesn’t read itself very much as fiction ;; I mean it has more of the “criticism” thing about it. But the odd thing is that the thing off of which it is feeding is already LitCrit, is already a Criti=fiction (to borrow another word from another one of these guys ; let’s call him Federman). So, its fiction in so far as it is pretending to be a critical reading (but always RE-reading) of Coover’s always already critical texts (are they books? novels? fabric?)

Yes, as you’ve said, it’s written in second person. But who’s to stop me from saying “you” when there is no means to fore=see (just look down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see just how non-”linear” book=reading IS) just who is going to be addressable as that “you.” But I (and maybe “you=too” (=two?) [you=hoo ; yahoo!!!]) can fore=see some of these conservative goodreads reviewers reading something like this Generosity (or the generous Coover himself) and saying things like “pretentious twaddle” or “what a bunch of jargon” -- the later would be false because there is very little “jargon” (ever hear someone speak Educationese?) but there are a lot of made up words -- “made up words” is like par=for=the=course of any THINKing text. On the other hand, a brief and not=linear peek into the biblio=graphy (the writing about books at the END of the pages’ Generosity) indicates a lot of French stuff ;; a lot of conservative readers who think that novels are still about old=fashion’d (Pinocchio is really old=school, fashion’d with craft and skill; wooden) characters and plots (you know, people like Don Quixote who can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality ; readers who like to ask, But wouldn’t you like Don Quixote as a next=door=neighbor? -- but Cervantes, in an exemplary fashion, exemplified by both Coover’s and Cervantes’s Exemplary Fictions, believes and knows otherwise) -- well, they wouldn’t want anything like critical understanding, critical (RE (always “re-)-reading to disturb the atomization of a private reading (never re-reading, because the spOILer would have been built in). No, but YOU know that there’s more to reality than the illusions created upon a blank (blanche) page ;; the NOIR-ink inscribed there=upon is.... not living flesh but void. We are all, after=all, all REALISTS. Some are just better at it than others ;; or rather, take it more serio-comically, as it dictates. Pay attention!

[get on with it finally already...]

Yes, prominent French names ;; but we’ve always said enough about that (already).

Yes, true. I’m jealous of this Coover treatment. I’ve said “parasite” before but that just doesn’t seem right. And I don’t want it to sound -- as it must sound -- like the parasite feels guilty about being a parasite ; nothing original in criticism. But there’s nothing new in the novel either. That’s a dead genre. But others who still whip the dead=horse carcass of the novel -- the usual suspects, you’ll know, all with a certain family resemblance (all kicking the horse Beckett and Joyce put to rest ; mercy=shot) -- also deserve this kind of reverential service in criticism, the kind of criticism which learns its craft from the carcass on its exam=table ;; unmistakably, this French=man Vanderhaeghe has LEARN’d from Herr Coover, a mere american (but, srsly, read The Public Burning; it has an urgent message for our time......s).

Enough with the Gaddis and DFW already ;; there are, as we’ve already said but find ourselves always repeating ourselves ;; there are other carcasses out there which need cleaning.

That’s all I need to say today. No one will read this book. I mean, maybe some one will. Coover gets read more frequently than I’ve ever credit’d and I still can’t credit that he’s read more frequently than some of those other carcasses still drying out since the HEY=daze of the HIGH seventies. Mummies or zombies ; whatever the fashion is.


Once upon a time, it was said :: with appropriateness we end with our BIG=inning ;; (whatever was it in the end then that happen’d to gloomy gus? anyone?)

This will be either genius or terribly tedious. Shall it be read as criticism or as fiction?

It is written in the second person.

Full Stop.

There are several prominent French names in the "Other Works Consulted, Cited, Paraphrased, Erased and/or Misappropriated."

But what it looks like what it will do is make jealous fans of all those postmodern writers who are not Robert Coover.

Which is to say, it looks like it is high time for a similar synthetic study be done for the likes of DFW or Gaddis or Your Favorite.

Here is something for your edification, brought to my attention by one of the Grayes, "Pleasure and Pain," By Alan Friedman from 1982, NYT Books, regarding Coover's Spanking the Maid and Hawkes' VIRGINIE, Her Two Lives and something called "belletristic masturbation":
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27...


_______________
Okay, too, there’s another Coover mystery persisting which Vanderhaeghe has done some work with but which isn’t in Generosity but is generously available internet’dly ;; and which will also give a preview of the voice of this work of criticism. And it is this ::

“RC//DC: Robert Coover & the Strange Case of Dr. Chen” ; ...the main topic of Dr. Chen's Amazing Adventure, a fascinating, albeit obscure, novella concerned with just such questions as literary fame and success, canonization and posterity, not to mention the relevance of art and literature in times when—while in a broader context fundamentalisms of all shapes and sizes were flowering far and wide like quitch; and who is Dr. Chen if not a fundamentalist of a sort?—the literati bespattered themselves in the useless, sterile succession wars to "postmodernism," all of them, as Dr. Chen himself has it in one of his typical rants against institutionalized writing and writers, "more or less lost and cornered in the dirty alleys of so-called 'realism.'" http://www.flashpointmag.com/vanderha...

That article is all that is available, seemingly. It is the first google=hit ; the second google=hit is the Completists’ Club Coover page.....


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And then too so that you don’t have to find out the hard way that you do not want to read Robert Coover & The Generosity of the Page, here’s a conveniently available chapter thereof ::

“The End and The Origin of The Brunists :” The End--At L(e)ast, Perhaps... (Or, “The Death of ‘The Death of [...] “The Death of the Novel”’”?) ; http://www.flashpointmag.com/vanderbr...