Fictional self-consciousness in Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants

Abstract

This essay reads Robert Coover's novel Pricksongs and Descants as an instance of the interchange between mimetic representation and literary self-reflexivity characteristic of postmodern novelists such as Vladimir Nabokov or John Barth. It analyses some of the short stories collected in this volume as examples of Coover's ongoing concern with the interchange between (1) our perception of the real, (2) the systems of thought by means of which we account for the flux of reality, and (3) the epistemological nature and function of literature as a vehicle for modern self-understanding. The result is not only a (literary) experiment in which the structures of the traditional, linear novel are relentlessly questioned, but also an inquiry into the possibility of tracing a clear-cut distinction between fiction and reality and, subsequently, between art and life.Besides dealing with mimetic forms of various kinds in earlier fictions, notably in The Origin of the Brunists (1966) and The Universal Baseball Association (1968), Robert Coover has also explored the implications of mimetic representation in the specific context of literary texts. The short stories collected in Pricksongs and Descants (1969), most of them written and published in American journals and magazines before the appearance of his first novel, explicitly examine fundamental aesthetic categories by throwing them into question. Pricksongs and Descants is in fact a collection of experimental short stories whose concern is the very limits of literary representation. The role of the author, the narrative line, the boundary between reality and fantasy, and other concepts and paradigms are examined in a set of short fictions that deals with the question of meaning-and fictionmaking in the universe of literary production. In his third published book, then, Coover plunges into the field of storytelling and thereby narrows the exploratory breadth of his earlier works. And although in fact some of the issues he delves into could be metaphorically expanded in order to embrace other non-fictional representational processes, here I prefer to limit my analysis to the strictly literary concerns of the anthology.