Response 3

by Alora Young

Pricksongs & Descants (Part One)

Robert Coover’s Pricksongs & Descants is a little (or, a lot) overwhelming. There’s a lot to take in, to wade your way through. We expect that the further we read, the more understanding we’ll gain, and yet with that understanding often comes even more confusion as the strangeness continues with a steady increase. Coover manages to shove us into his crazy, fabulist, and metafictionalised world right from the book’s opening.

‘The Door: A Prologue of Sorts’ confused me to no end. Part of that, I think, had to do with the fact that we are bombarded with a story we know we at first think we’re familiar with, and quickly discover that we aren’t. We start with Jack and the Beanstalk, and then some information is added that completely throws that theory off – this added information, however, doesn’t seem quite detailed enough, and leaves us with more questions the further we read, like, “Wait, what daughter?” By the end of this “prologue of sorts”, we find ourselves within some variation of Little Red Riding Hood, a variation in which “Something had changed”, and now we’re focusing quite obviously on the door. The door, which Coover has apparently been leading us towards this whole time, and will continue to lead us to throughout the rest of the text. As of yet, I’m unsure, though, whether he’ll ever push us through the door. Or, perhaps he wants us to walk through it ourselves. We are left wondering, and despite any (likely) instances of confusion, we are successfully drawn in.

‘The Magic Poker’ is the perfect story to kick us off completely and get us further acquainted with Coover’s brand of metafiction. Confusion once again ensued, but didn’t dilute my enjoyment of the story at all. The imagery was wonderfully crafted, giving us a detailed picture through carefully chosen wording that conveyed far more than just description. An excellent example of this is when Coover describes how “At the main house, the mansion, there is a kind of veranda or terrace, a balcony of sorts, high out on the promontory, offering a spectacular view of the lake with its wide interconnected expanses of blue and its many islands.” The tone of this, the exact picture of sophistication, is highly contrasted with the high-energy, impulsive, and animalistic feel we get from: “The caretaker’s son bounds about the guest cabin, holding himself with one hand, smashing walls and busting windows with the other, grunting happily as he goes.”

What I found to be the most intriguing part of this story, I only discovered upon analysis in class. The scene in which the girl in the golden pants is sketching the man with the pipe on the balcony, she mistakes him for the feral caretaker’s son, drawing “his buttocks” “bare and shaggy”. This is an intriguing implication, that we cannot truly separate ‘sophisticated’ and ‘civilised’ from ‘nature’, what has come to be seen by civilisation as ‘savage’. It seems to be a comment on humanity, that the further we attempt to distance ourselves from this notion of ‘savagery’ and ‘nature’ being one in the same, the more savage we actually become. This idea is repeated in ‘Morris In Chains’, as we see our ‘sophisticated’ characters acting in an entirely unnecessarily violent way towards the criminally ‘natural’ Morris. I find this disturbing, like all the stories in this book seem to be in one way or another.

In the reading so far, ‘The Gingerbread House’ was perhaps the most true to the well-known version as Coover’s fairytale “riffs” come. One of the major differences here is that the story ends us halfway through the commonly told plot-line. The fact that the story ends with, once again, a door, and this time also, with “that sound of black rags flapping”, leaves us without relief and with more questions than we have answers. Yet, after how dark and pessimistic the previous 42 chapters were, I feel like any ending provided would not have been happy, and so am left disturbed once more, still waiting outside Coover’s damn, cleverly used door.

Every one of the ‘Seven Exemplary Fictions’ was disturbing in so many ways. There was the common theme of death – the worst of which I think may have been in ‘The Marker’, because, really, the guy’s wife had been dead for three weeks, rotting in their bed, there’s a good chance he’d been having sex with a corpse all that time, and yet he was more upset about losing the place in his book – that kept finding new, uncomfortable ways to sneak up on us. Coover does a wonderful job in this case of placing the reader in situations (especially through the use of second person in ‘The Panel’) we would really rather not be in, let alone witness. On that note, I can’t help but notice that the final sentence of the collection is, “I enjoy my work.”

So far, Pricksongs & Descants has showed me a kind of fiction I’ve never read before, and I think a large part of the pleasure I take in reading it is simply in the fact that it is so different, and therefore feels so new. It feels like I’m learning about writing, and as a writer, I feel that should always be at least some part of my motivation to read. Even when I find myself with little comprehension of what is happening in the story, not to mention why it is happening, it doesn’t seem to matter because Coover keeps me holding onto this hope that the further I read, the more I’ll understand. He keeps me in front of the open door, waiting to be allowed through.