A Retelling Of Your Favorite Tales
By BEN SZMANDA
But don Miguel, the optimism, the innocence, the aura of possibility you experienced have been largely drained away, and the universe is closing in on us again. Like you, we, to seem to be standing at the end of one age, and on the threshold of another. We, too, have been brought into a blind alley by the critics and the analysts; we, too, suffer from a “Literature of exhaustion,” though ironically our nonheros are no longer tireless and tiresome Amadises, but hopelessly defeated and bed-ridden Quixotes. We seem to have moved from and open-ended, anthropocentric, humanistic, naturalistic, even — to the extent that man may be thought of as making his own universe — optimistic starting point, to one that is closed cosmic, eternal, supernatural (in the soberest sense) and pessimistic. The return to being has returned us to Design, to microcosmic images of the macrocosm, to the creation of Beauty with in the confines of cosmic or human necessity, to the use of the fabulous to probe beyond the phenomenological, beyond appearances, beyond randomly perceived events, beyond mere history. But these probes are above all—like your knights sallies — challenges to the assumptions of a dying age, exemplary adventures of poetic imagination, high minded journeys toward the New World and never mind the nags pile of bones. You teach us Maestro, by example that great narratives remain meaningful through time as a language-medium between generations, as a weapon against the fringe areas of our consciousness, and as a mythic reinforcement of our tenuous grip on reality. The novelist uses familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms and to conduct the reader (lector amantisimo!) to the real, away from mystification to clarification, away form magic to maturity, away from mystery to revelation, And it is above all that the need for new modes of perception and fictional forms able to encompass them that I, barber’s basis on my head, address these stories. — From the prologue to Seven Exemplary Fictions, directed to Miguel Cervantes.
The above quote seems to work well as a thematic statement for the entirety of Robert Coover’s collection of fictions, Pricksongs and Descants. Each piece could stand up on it’s own as an excellent short work of fiction. Taken as whole, however, the book presents a demanding and very entertaining read; one that does exactly what the author intends: to question familiar forms of storytelling.
I’m hardly a music expert, so I had to look up what both a pricksong and a descant was — although I had a wild guess about pricksongs after the first few stories. Turns out I was wrong: a pricksong is a form of early music notation. A descant, by the way, is a type of chorus featuring a traditional theme with a host of improvisational voices around it. And so, several of the stories here are broken up into paragraphs or small clusters of paragraphs, with each cluster advancing one or several outcomes of the plot. The result is a way of telling a story that flushes out a bewildering array of options, not only for the outcome of the plot, but for the personality of the characters as well. It’s confusing until you get the hang of it, then it is just spectacular.
In his above-mentioned letter to Cervantes, Coover says that the author of don Quixote “struggled against the unconscious mythic residue in human life,” which may also explain the running presence of the Greek god Pan throughout the book. He assumes various guises: The feral caretaker’s son on an abandoned island estate, a fugitive sheep herder, a near catatonic old man, a spiritually castrated office worker — all populate Coover’s stories here, and all serve to represent the irrational wildness that can never quite be driven off by reason. The caretaker’s son, for example, seems to have more power over the story than the narrator himself. Likewise, the sheep herder and the catatonic old man are both seen by the stories’ “protagonists” as grave enemies of the state, as people who could upset the fragile order of things.
Coover explores old stories and tries to invest new meaning in them. He considers the virgin birth of Christ from the perspective of his hapless step-father Joseph. I suppose the plot of this one sort of writes itself, but Coover does it well: Joseph plays the chump, of course; an older man taken in and worked over by a younger, less educated, woman. The prologue finds Jack after toppling the giant, where he sets himself up in the castle atop the beanstalk, only to discover he had become a monster himself.
One of my favorite fictions here is probably Coover’s retelling of Hansel and Gretel, leading up to their confrontation with the witch. He follows the action of the children’s father as he leads them out into the woods, charts his grief and his sad resignation, and finally shows the rush of anger he needs to commit his horrific act. Coover portrays wonders whether Gretel was as unaware as she seemed, and follows Hansel’s brave, failed, act of rebellion.
There is a lot here that’s worth a look. Coover is a good writer; he takes a lot of chances, and those chances always seem to pay off. And it’s not just sterile technical skill either: These fictions are really enjoyable to read. They don’t, however, have a lot of emotional content. I understand that’s not what he’s trying to bring out, but if you are looking for a lot of psychological depth in the characters that make up a story, you may want to look else where. If you want to see a smart writer tear apart and re-arrange familiar stories and plots in new and crazy ways, I’d check this out.