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3 / National Security in the Age of the Global Picture Democratic governments might become violent and cruel at times of great excitement and danger, but such crises will be rare and brief. —alexis de tocqueville The book [The Public Burning] is continually metamorphosing as though invaded by history as a kind of body-snatcher. —robert coover Democracy as Discontent— Robert Coover, The Public Burning The assumption that, in the second half of the twentieth century, literature was able to engage the politico-historical dimensions of our age appears in literary criticism as the central element of the shift from high modernist aesthetics to a new model, postmodernism. Classic studies on the much-debated concept of literary postmodernity suggest various political acts that tacitly point towards the Left. However , in most contemporary literary studies, the categories that define politics, or talk about the foundation or disintegration of the social bond, are taken for granted. More specifically than Ihab Hassan, Brian McHale, or Matei Calinescu, Linda Hutcheon’s work aims at a “politics of postmodernism” emerging within the poetic structure of historiographic metafiction and from the rise of literary parody. Yet there is no comprehensive study of the possible intersections between political thought and the “innovative” contemporary novel, which are not limited to “cultural studies,” Marxism, identity politics, or to Foucauldian analyses of power structures.1 The literary-philosophical configuration of the “limit of modernity”—made explicit by the intellectual history of the term “postmodern”—needs to account for the trials of the political in the Cold War: the closure of politics in the totalitarian state (doubled by a sense of national identity crisis in Eastern European countries) and the democratic impasse in the United States due to the national security in the age of the global picture / 117 institution of an indefinite state of exception under the rubric of the National Security State. The novels discussed in this chapter, The Public Burning by Robert Coover and The Royal Hunt by D. R. Popescu, show that the conceptual framework of postmodern literary studies is unable to address the challenges faced by these texts’ political interpretation of historical events. In our view, Coover and Popescu’s interpretive narratives are representative fictions that, in their imaginative accounts of popular sovereignty, attempt to make sense of the “constitutive contingency of the political sphere and its generation of fantasies of unity that appease the anxieties of social fragmentation, stabilizing the social with the creation of political institutions.”2 In The Public Burning (1977), Robert Coover responds to Cold War political culture in the United States by staging a literary fantasy that, through distinct narrative voices that cross from the private into the public realm, encompasses the imagination of power that American foreign policy attempted to embody from the 1950s to 1970s. In Robert Coover’s words, his controversial Cold War novel was intended as a “restaging of the 1953 Sing Sing executions of the alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in Times Square as a kind of public exorcism with Uncle Sam as emcee and carny barker.”3 In 1966, Coover plans to draft scenes for a “street theater or a commedia dell’arte”4 but in a year or so, his project develops into a narrative about the beginning of the Cold War, focused on the Rosenberg case; he is, however, neither interested in proving that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were innocent of the alleged conspiracy charges nor in investigating their Communist affiliations . In an interview with Larry McCaffery, he talks about the case as “a watershed event in recent American history” that “encapsulated the Cold War madness.”5 Writing The Public Burning is thus a political act originating in the 1960s counterculture without claiming to be an avantgarde statement in the manner of Kathy Acker’s The Burning Bombing of America: The Destruction of the US (1972). As an indictment of Cold War culture, Coover develops a complex (and, in many ways, excessive) literary narrative—which begins with Justice William O. Douglas granting the stay of execution and ends with the public ceremonial “sacrifice” of the Rosenbergs two days later—a carefully designed literary composition made up of political and religious speeches; references to Hollywood films, particularly High Noon and House of Wax; and classical literature that would support the all-encompassing idea of a national circus. This central point is made clear in what I believe to be the most crucial of Coover’s reflections about his novel: “Suddenly the whole American...

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