Response 3 Pricksongs and Descants Part 1

Chelsa Lauderdale

Intro to Writing and Literature

10/4/10

“Pricksongs and Descants” Part 1

Robert Coover, the author of Pricksongs and Descants, is known for shaking up fairy tales and bedtime stories and for being a magical-realist writer. This becomes evident even in reading the prologue where Coover begins with fairytales perhaps to clue the reader in on the fantasy element that is apparent in the short stories of the book. Coover uses the prologue as a story in itself to catch the reader’s attention while still telling something of the stories to come.

The first story, “The Magic Poker”, contains a lot of metafictional elements, such as the poker turning into a human. Coover retells pieces of the story repeatedly, sometimes one right after the other which he could be doing for emphasis or to symbolize importance. However, Coover does not simply retell them, but changes them and adds to them, occasionally completely changing the story around. It seems as though Coover is very invested in the story because he repeatedly interjects the story in his own voice as the author to inject random pieces of information and also to correct himself or tell the reader that he’s going to adjust something about the story. This becomes especially prevalent when he stops the story to say, “Wait a minute, this is getting out of hand! What happened to that poker, I was doing much better with the poker, I had something going there, archetypal and maybe even beautiful...” (30) This might be concluded as Coover describing his thought process while he writes. Coover also creates a conundrum in this story when he states “just as I have invented you, dear reader...” which causes the reader to wonder about his or her meaning and if the reader is in fact, just the creation of someone’s mind. The two girls in the story are completely different people. The girl in the gold pants think that everything’s destroyed around the island for no reason, but in the ruins of the house, Karen sees the beauty of nature from the regrowth of the plant life. This is probably the reason why the girl in the gold pants is compared to a broken window while Karen would be represented by the one window that is intact. However, Karen breaks that window with the magic poker which could symbolize that the man who appears when the poker is kissed has ruined Karen’s innocence.

The first of Coover’s “Seven Exemplary Fictions”, “Panel Game” creates a similar conundrum by fully introducing the reader into the story by using a second person point of view. This makes the events of the story more easy to envision. The story is composed of short choppy sentences that create imagery and still keep the reader’s head spinning. The characters in the stories, though having very blunt names such as Aged Clown, Lovely Lady and Mr. America, are also equally personified by their actions as the story progresses. Mr. America’s is the most prominent as he is most heavily described as just being really fat which could be a symbol for the gluttony of American civilization. Mr. America is later revealed to be Mr. Amentia who could also by the same thing in a more negative light, as the main character starts out seeing “Mr. A” as his friend and then later, when he gives him the name Mr. Amentia, sees him as a lie, or his enemy. The answer to the game show of sorts in “Panel Game” turns out to be Much Ado About Nothing which is a famous Shakespeare play full of treachery and deceit, which is also a main theme in Coover’s story.

The Gingerbread House is also a sort of tale about treachery and deceit but in a way that’s not as noticeable. Coover uses a juxtaposition between the happiness and carefree aspect of the children and the despair of the old man most likely to exemplify the hardships of the old man’s life or to simply explain how the children got into the position that they wound up in at the end of the story. He uses a multitude of words that show this difference. When describing the children he uses words such as “admire” (63), “blithely” and “delight” (64) which invoke a sense of peace and happiness in the reader, and when he describes the old man or the which he uses words like “damply” and “beetled over” (63) or “tortured” and “burning coals” (64) which stimulate some sort of displeasure in the reader. To amplify this, he does these descriptions on the same page as one another to further the chasm in the different sensations. Also, he separates the stories into short chapters to further describe the characters in the story and small details which are prevalent to the story. These small details all end up tying together, the breadcrumbs eaten by a bird who infuriates the boy and ultimately results in the death of the bird (who also seems to be connected by the good fairy of the story), the witch ripping out the heart of a bird, and the heart which is described in the same manner as the door of the candy house. Perhaps this insinuates that bloodlust and a simple want are related as the heart and door are described similarly and both of them draw the young boy in. It could also mean that, in an underlying way, that males must occasionally subject to bloodlust because both the boy and the old man have a time where they are angered into doing something horrible. There also seems to be an underlying feeling of sexuality to the stories, in the way that the good fairy is described in the story and the way that the witch tries to grab the boy after luring him with the bird’s heart.

The Marker exemplifies these sexual pretenses by making the sexuality of the story extremely blatant. This story also makes the reader wonder if the man’s wife has been dead for a full three weeks and the man has just been envisioning her as her alive, beautiful self or if something really strange had just transpired. In any case, it seems the former as the husband seems to be more upset about losing the page of his book than he is about the death of his wife.