Myth and Carnival in Robert Coover's The Public Burning - aisna

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6 Dainottoin most of Coover's fiction there exists a tension between the process ofman creating his fictions and his desire to assert that his systems have anindependent existence of their own. For Coover, this tension typicallyresults in man losing sight of the fictional basis of his systems andeventually becoming trapped within them. (McCaffery 25-26)Similarly, Marc Chénetier argues that, for Coover, fictionsorganize meaning, but they also gel it, they arrange between the worldand the self a sumptuously embroidered screen of sortileges that is hardto remove at will (fascinum), a screen that clings too tightly to what it issupposed to reveal and takes its place... Mythification... is, in propriotempore, mystification, a chain of choices and inventions, something likea structure forever after prearranged, a narrative pall from under whichit becomes highly strenuous to escape. (Chénetier 1988, 87)In both McCaffery's and Chénetier's statements, one notices anecho of Kermode's distinction between fiction as pragmatic explanationof the world and the hypostasis of fiction onto the plane of myth as"agent of stability [and] call for absolute" (Kermode 39). When "aseries of overlapping fictions [that] cohere into a convincing semblanceof historical continuity and logical truth" (PB 122) is "mythified" andits artificial nature is forgotten, the historical necessities and logicaltruths thus created may seize control over human life in the name ofReason, Patriotism, and Righteousness. Put in a different perspective,a heuristic of reality can be stabilized into absolute truth, and thuscreate the entropic episteme (in Foucault's terms) of a social andpolitical order. Once a whole society is entrapped in a "mythification"of reality, a totalitarian control can start its work of repression, aimingat coercing everything and everybody into the framework of myth.If myth, narratively speaking, is a story that organizes the real asa meaningful experience, it is also, ideologically, a way to organize asocial reality as a meaningful unicum and to reduce conflicts anddifferences to a totality of sorts. The ritualistic fire of the apocalypse orthe holocaust is, for Coover, the symbolic agency of this ideologicalreduction. This ritualistic power of symbolic fire, agent for thepurification and reconstitution of the social body, has been singled outby Gaston Bachelard:
RSA Journal 37fire purifies everything... fire separates substances and destroys materialimpurities. In other words, that which has gone through the ordeal offire has gained in homogeneity and hence in purity. (Bachelard 103-04,author's emphasis)This is undoubtedly the social meaning of the public burning, asymbolic purification of the social body from its impurities—theoutlaw, the reprobate, the "other." But the holocaust is also, forCoover, the narrative principle sustaining the classical novel: linearnarrative, unique diegesis, the final closure leading to the epiphany ofTruth, all contribute to create a plot that is nothing less than theelimination of innumerable other ways to recount the so-called "mysteries"of existence. In foucaultian terms, the novel, by encompassingthe chaotic material of reality within the pervasive plot of theomniscient author, institutes a "theater," a "spectacle" for the reaffirmationof social Truth and Power. The mystery of the classical novel,which epitomizes a society and its agents momentarily incapable ofmaking sense of the misleading signs left by the criminal, is finally"worked out to a solution by a power that no one has charge of. Theequivocal role of the [narrative closure] is thus a part of a [narrative]strategy whose ideological implications should be plain" (Miller 49). Itis maybe against these "ideological implications" that Coover's narrativetechnique, by showing that (social) myths and truths "are merelyartifices—that is, they are always in some way false, or incomplete"—produces statements which are both aesthetic and political (Coover1983, 68).Coover's statements, then, are not so much political or literaryassertions as topoi—"commonplaces" where the literary and the socialcoexist in some sort of metonymic contiguity. The essence of thesetopoi is allegory. The resulting rhetorical complexity is far greater thanmany reviewers of Coover's The Public Burning have yet allowed. Ityields at the very least an intriguing resonance, a "sympathy" betweenthe real and narration, and a rich dissonance of implications. Read inthis context, Coover's fiction shows the writer enlarging his relationshipto the living subject by evoking the precise contiguity—albeitsimply rhetorical and metonymic—between fiction and reality, mythand ideology. The writer's metafictional efforts are not inert and
Page 1: ROBERTO MARIA DAINOTTOMyth and Carn
Page 5 and 6: RSA Journal 39order, hypostatized a
Page 7 and 8: RSA Journal 311matter, The New York
Page 9 and 10: RSA Journal 313Scenery, perspective
Page 11 and 12: RSA Journal 315"policing power [and
Page 13 and 14: RSA Journal 317Superhero Uncle Sam
Page 15 and 16: RSA Journal 319Ages" (PB 58). In a
Page 17 and 18: RSA Journal 321so she burns—and b

Myth and Carnival in Robert Coover's The Public Burning - aisna

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