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.