Response 3

Jenna Wilhelmi

October 4, 2010

Pricksongs and Descants and Insanity!

Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants can best be described as a ride of sorts. In order to get into his text you must keep your knowledge of fairytales handy, but not expect him to follow the story exactly. You must also loosen your death grip on reality because, otherwise, Robert Coover won’t be any fun for you.

In The Door: A Prologue of Sorts, Coover weaves three endearingly popular legends into one story. The three tales are: Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Beauty and the Beast. Jack has become the woodcutter in Riding Hood, Grandma is wed to the beast that is the big bad wolf, and Red is all grown up and as gullible as ever. So, what exactly is Coover trying to say? I can only speculate at this point.

In the section narrated by the Grandma she complains about how she married the Beast, expecting him to become a handsome prince, only to be disappointed. It felt to me as though Coover was trying to say something about the illusions many people have when they get married. From an early age, most children are told the can have the fairytale life. Girls are told that the just have to wait for their prince to appear and all their dreams will come true. However, as we all eventually learn, a fairytale is just a fairytale. Grandma was the Beauty who married the Beast – the Beast who would never be a prince. Then she goes on to say that she has been with the wolf so long that she can’t life without him, that he has become a part of her life, and I was immediately reminded of my grandparents. They screech at each other like cats and dogs, but would never think to leave each other because they have grown too comfortable together. It seems that Coover, and a lot of other adult writers, speak of love as something you do when you’re young and that you settle into when reality kicks in later.

Speaking of reality, in the opening section following Jack, the narration suddenly shifts and an omnipresent voice steps in. It might be Coover, it might be a narrator, but what the voice says is more important that who says it. Either way the voice is a father who is afraid he failed his daughter. He is afraid he failed her because has shielded her from the outside world by only telling her fairytales and he knows she will soon have to face the real world. Of course this daughter is going to realize the world is no fairytale. Jack knows at this point in his life and Red seems to sense that she is about to reach this pivotal point in life when she approaches her Grandmother’s house, but she just keeps playing out the story.

But isn’t that what we all do? We know something bad will eventually happen to us, but we just keep playing our part despite our fear. Coover appears to believe in some concept of fate, that even if we knew our story we would just let our lives play out as if we didn’t. On one hand, when we know what is going to happen, even if it is horrible, we are not as afraid because we will no longer be surprised. This is why we enjoy haunted houses and roller coasters. You know it is going to be scary, but it can also be enjoyable as well. Fear is what makes us feel alive and therefore we crave it at some primal level. Coover shows several references in The Magic Poker and Morris in Chains that shows he thinks we must occasionally indulge this primal side of us. It is a rather large part of us after all.

Overall, I found Coover slightly confusing, but once I let go and just let him take me for a ride he made sense. It was almost as if I was reading a dream I had had. When in the dream, everything makes sense, but once I woke up it didn’t make sense at all. I could probably read this story a hundred times and find something different each time. It took several reads to get to what I wrote above. But there is something about the dreamlike quality of Coover’s writing that draws me to him and I’m not just saying that. I started this book fully intending to be frustrated, put-off, and end up hating this book. Then Coover had to go and surprise me. Maybe it was the fairytale references, maybe it was the insanity, but Coover caught my interest. If that makes me insane so be it! I would rather be crazy that boring old normal any day.