Legendary NarrativesThis collection of early stories is not a lesser work in any way. In it, Coover maps out the journey that his writing career would subsequently follow. It announces and displays his early ambition and skill.It reflects a dual interest in the subject matter of fiction and its methodology. As Coover says of some of his stories, in retrospect:"...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 to the real, away from mystification to clarification, away from magic to maturity, away from mystery to revelation. "And it is above all to the need for new modes of perception and fictional forms able to encompass them that I, barber's basin on my head, address these stories."The Interpolation of the [Post-] ModernCoover tells his stories within the framing device of other stories, of myths and legends, of fairy tales and parables.Fairy tales, in particular, are often written with great economy, perhaps because they formed part of an oral tradition in which they were memorised and recounted from generation to generation for the benefit of the young.Their economy leaves Coover scope to interpolate modernity into the tradition of the fairy tale. Transposed to the contemporary, he fleshes his tales out with "pricks and cunts". In doing so, he reminds us how much fairy tales have always been concerned with sexuality (especially the fear of seduction, abduction, rape, murder and the premature loss of virginity), thus making explicit what was formerly and formally implicit.Some Titular HypothesesThis concern is signaled in the title of the collection, which adapts an expression used by "Granny" in the first story, a prologue of sorts:"I know who's got her giddy ear with his old death-cunt-and-prick-songs..."The idea of a "death-cunt" (a "black hole", in the words of Rikki Ducornet) is a "perception of the female body as seduction, a lethal detour of the spirit leading to enslavement; the cunt as snare, prison and coffin."(view spoiler)[See Rikki Ducornet’s "The Death Cunt of Dell":http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Dea... (hide spoiler)]
Coover, wearing a top hat, drives down the street in a hummer, windows rolled down. He's got an MP3 file of his contradictions, recited by Brian Blessed - "ROBERT COOOOOOOOOOO-VUH! The FOLKSSSSY intell-ECT-ual! The chi-chi-chi... CHILLY... (stage whisper) pornographer. Teller of BEDTIIIIIIIME STORIIIESSSSSSSS.... AAAAAAAANNND... horror stories!" He's doing 50 in a 35 zone, but he's bored by that, so he floors it and swerves back and forth across the street, pancaking other cars and busting up parking meters; a trail of coins flies in his wake, which pedestrians scoop up. The hood of his hummer is painted with - what else? - a couple engaged in the most grotesque sex imaginable, their bodies exaggerated so horridly that no one but the most devoted fetishists could find either of them attractive. He runs over a pedestrian on his rampage, but saves the poor man by lifting the car up. The grateful pedestrian scampers off. Coover looks around and realizes the destruction he has caused, leaps into his magic hat, and comes out with the tools necessary to fix the problem. If you can put up with the flat characters (mostly abstractions in the postmodern tradition), Pricksongs is wicked and violent fun. "The Hat Act" and "The Magic Poker" are major achievements in American metafiction, "The Babysitter" is demented and disgusting cubist horror, and it's hard not to laugh at "A Pedestrian Accident" if yours is a dark sense of humor. Just make sure to wear a seatbelt at all times, because you could always fly out of Coover's hummer and crack your head open on the concrete.
What do You think about Pricksongs And Descants (2000)?
Robert Coover occasionally uses his formidable talent as a post-modern experimentalist to find a voice for his characters, often common, weak men, which would be unavailable to a less adventurous writer. His best stories equal Stanley Elkin's best. Unfortunately, he falls too often into the throw away narrative jokes and gimmicks of the worst of John Barth's work.Notes:I no longer have the patience for this sort of jumbled meta-surrealism, the territory of John Barth and Fellini, and the destruction of narrative. When Coover manages to use his experimental talents to find new ways of expressing some form of reality, instead of disregarding any reference to reality, his narratives are gritty and exceptionally memorable. Coover's experimentalism sometimes catches the colloquial rhythms of common men more convincingly than so many strict realists.Like Stanley Elkin, Coover reveals the insanity and grotesqueness of mid-20th century America by including the freaks of a sideshow next to the freaks in business suits. Unfortunately, Coover rarely, if ever, allows his narratives to come to the foreground and determine the mode and quality of his storytelling.Coover's heroes are living through the hell of everyday life and are only sympathetic through their suffering. "The Babysitter" is a deconstruction of a John Cheever story, split into an array of scenarios, some hoped for, some feared, and some, most alarmingly, both, by a familiar cast of suburban characters.
—Michael
4.5/5In Pricksongs and Descants, Robert Coover messes around with storytelling. The best works in this collection—"The Magic Poker", "The Gingerbread House", and one of the greatest short stories ever, "The Babysitter"—consist of partitioned paragraphs with variations of actions contained within a single story that give you this multi-dimensional/choose-your-own-adventure experience. His style of postmodernism, which, in several of the stories, involves the retelling of biblical and fairy tales, is smart and playful—as opposed to one of his contemporaries, John Barth, who, in Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera can come across as obvious, self-congratulatory, and obnoxious. Coover wants you to know what he's up to, but his prose and humor are so vibrant and engaging that the art of storytelling never trumps the storytelling itself.
—Josh Luft
What a fabulous title. Too bad the collection doesn't quite live up to it. Coover's got marvelous talent and a great imagination. That's not up for debate. I'm convinced "The Babysitter" is one of the modern classics of the short story form, and "The Pedestrian Accident" is also pretty swell. However, I just couldn't get into many of the others. Perhaps I should have expected this, having announced many times to myself and to others how the majority of post-modernism tends to rub me the wrong way. Oh well, I tried. But if it's your "thing", it's probably an essential read. The aforementioned two stories certainly are for any fan of short fiction.
—Sara
