Critical Response Archive: Pricksongs and Descants

Reading Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants was like going through a primer in postmodernism, as each of the stories showcased an aspect of what had become associated with postmodern literature. There were stories that gave old ones a spin, stories that called attention to their existence as stories, boundaries between what is real and imagined blurred, pop cultural phenomena twisted into grotesque acts of human malice, and the notion of unilateral space-time cast into the wind. Each story in Pricksongs and Descants challenged the notion of what constitutes a short story and the conventional structure of such. Some broke conventions with much success, while others fell far short, or else distracted me with the problematic representation of the female characters.

I most enjoyed the style of the stories “Morris In Chains,” “Seven Exemplary Fictions,” and “The Gingerbread House,” which broke the rules in interesting and delightfully bizarre ways. In “Gingerbread House” and “J’s Marriage”, old stories are told from another character’s perspective (though “Gingerbread House” stays rather true to old-fashioned storytelling form), making them new and original. In “Panel Game,” a game show becomes a grotesque act showcasing humiliation and the basest and selfish instincts of human nature, eerily predicting the inception of “reality” television thirty years early. In fact, many of Coover’s stories present a distorted and/or monstrous version of reality, revealing the darkness of humanity. “A Pedestrian Accident,” “The Wayfarer,” and “The Leper’s Helix” are others that have this theme up front-and-center.

Other stories, I did not enjoy so much. “The Magic Poker” jumped from one reality to another much too quickly and abruptly to my taste, and the stories in “The Sentient Lens,” static and disconnected, though the language was quite intricate and beautiful. “Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl” was the least innovative and interesting, the only story that actually bored me halfway through. The women in these stories (and a few others) were reduced mainly to their bodies, described very sensually by the onlooking narrator (whether they were a part of the action or not), but their own thoughts and motivations were withheld from the reader. Many of the female characters also experience either sex, death, or both, real or imagined, further reducing them to objects and literary devices. This did not hold entirely true to the male characters. And that is what is most bothersome about it. So, while much of Coover’s fiction was progressive for the time, his portrayal of women definitely was not.

One thing that I had not come across in any other fiction thus far was the helpless victimhood of many of the characters. In stories like “A Pedestrian Accident,” “Morris In Chains,” “Panel Game,” and “The Marker,” we learn very little about the main characters themselves, but are compelled to sympathize with them. They were mere pawns of theme and plot, somehow knowing they were trapped and could do nothing, but uncertain why. The storyteller thus becomes a cruel and sadistic god, putting his creations through humiliation and torture for the benefit of the narrative. This device brings the motivations and purpose of fiction to the foreground, placing all literary traditions in the background. It’s a cool concept that works in the aforementioned “Panel Game” and “A Pedestrian Accident,” not so much in “The Marker.” While his work is not perfectly progressive, Coover certainly proved himself to be one of the great spearheaders of the postmodern movement early in his career with these stories.

Critical Response Archive: Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch is one of those novels that may or may not withstand the test of time. Though it is one of the most acclaimed and influential novels of the last century, it did not have a very great impact on me personally. It’s described as “satire,” but I found it less humorous and more absurd. The vulgarity for me was also too much, and I found many of the depictions of homosexuals and foreigners to be problematic. It could be a matter of personal taste, but I did not find much that was so groundbreaking at the time. Certainly there was plenty of obscenity, but Kerouac and Ginsberg got there first. Such obscenity is so prominent in today’s culture that one can doubt if Naked Lunch has as much of an impact now as it did then.

What I did find interesting were the strange worlds that the narrator found himself in. However, I found it frustrating that I couldn’t really ground myself in any specific type of world. I chalk this up to the structure of the novel, which doesn’t really tell an overarching story, but several little stories loosely strung together with a character whose identity is multifaceted and unknown. One couldn’t know who was the narrator in sections that utilized the third person, and the nature of the narrator’s reality is constantly called into question, as he is always fucked up on some drug and hardly a reliable source about the reality of the world surrounding him. Cool images were conjured up by the artful language, but they were fleeting, lost in the murky waters of confusion. The proliferation of slang and made-up words also made the narratives difficult to follow, and one can definitely make an accurate guess about its age even without knowing about the Beat generation. However, Naked Lunch succeeded in constructing the consciousness of a drug junkie: a consciousness most of us are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with. For this, I commend Burroughs and his prose.