Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale

5. The Late Fairy Tales of Robert Coover

Lateness is being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present. Edward Said The Late Fairy Tales of Robert Coover   Of all those contemporary writers over whom the fairy tale has exerted a significant influence, Robert Coover is perhaps the most consistent. His fairy-tale texts are relatively few in number, yet they stretch across his writing career, beginning in the late s with the story experiments of the still startling collection Pricksongs and Descants, followed by the carnival excesses of Pinocchio in Venice (), the recent midlength prose works, Briar Rose () and Stepmother (), and most recently the anthologized pieces of A Child Again ().1 The same consistency of interest is evident in the work of Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, and Salman Rushdie, however , as well as that of a host of less celebrated contemporary authors. Rather, what marks out Coover’s project—if we can talk of such a thing, which I believe we can—is a perhaps surprising consistency of style; surprising because the idea of style is not a quality or a textual feature naturally associated with that restlessly ludic strain of postmodernist writing of which Coover’s work stands for many readers as a paradigm. The texts of literary postmodernism, as conceived in the s and s, were said to lack style, 5 whether inadvertently or on purpose. According to Fredric Jameson’s now famous critique, literary style is the personalized expression, on the surface, of a singular, discrete subject. The stylistic ebb and flow of the writing is underpinned and guaranteed by the subject; it is the latter’s metonym. Once the idea of such a subject is removed, style—“what is as unique and unmistakable as your own fingertips, as incomparable as your own body”—is literally at an “end” (Postmodernism , ). All that remains is “a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity” without foundation, “the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture”; in other words, pastiche (–). This is far from the only view, of course. While certain strains of postmodernist literature may well be marked by the strategic adoption of modes of writing, and while the idea of a “healthy linguistic normality” may well have waned, low-level serial experimentation need not be read as capitulation to surface pleasure—if such capitulation is indeed a bad thing.2 The myth of literary style can appear irrevocably entangled in a Romantic ideology of canons, strong precursors, and their anxious influence. Rather than continue to tie writing back to its source, whether literary or authorial, it should be faced forward, put to work as part of the contestation of worldly ways of seeing. Carter addresses the issue directly in acknowledging a move in her own writing from expressionism—Jameson’s chosen paradigm of stylistic imprint—to something altogether less self-centered: “It’s mannerist [Carter’s term for postmodernism], you see. Closing time in the Gardens of the West. . . . It’s the only way I can write. I’m not sure what beautiful writing is” (Haffenden ). The flaunting of many styles serves in this way to puncture the pretensions of style as signature and index of authenticity. We need only think of the various distances separating the work of Carter from that of a near contemporary such as Martin Amis, distances for which style serves as a key unit of measure. More perhaps than any other contemporary English-language writer, including Carter, Coover has pursued narrative fiction as a project of critical engagement with particular ways of seeing. The majority of his texts work on specific generic modes, from the Western (Ghost Town, ) and other forms of cinema (A Night at the Movies, ) to sport’s writing (The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., ) and the murder mystery (Gerald’s Party, ). While such textual raids may be indicative of a polemical disregard for authorial consistency, style is nevertheless what Cooverhas,atleastasconcernshislong-termandongoingdealingswithone The Late Fairy Tales of Robert Coover  specific form: the fairy tale. Consider the following two pairs of examples. The first extract is in each case taken from the  story “The Gingerbread House” (included in Pricksongs and Descants), while the second is from Stepmother , published in : but Granny it’s a new generation! hah! child I give you generations without number transient as...