form to bring together protagonists from the preceding novels with the author, 'John Barth,' already an ontologically unsettling character in Chimera. In this particularly self-referential twist of the literature- of-exhaustion technique, Barth reinscribes his own stories, giving the characters authorial functions and making the authorial persona subject to the logic of his own various plots. Using the university setting less allegorically than in Giles Goat-Boy, Letters deals on the one hand with the political microcosm of the 1960s campus, on the other hand with the status of language and letters in a world where books are in danger of being supplanted by advanced technologies, especially those of film. The most recent novels, Sabbatical: A Romance (1982) and Tidewater Tales (1987), are more overtly political than any of Barth's previous works. Both introduce new characters, in each case married couples whose union is a primary instance of the synthesis of apparent antitheses. Both are selfconscious in their preoccupation with the mechanics of narrative, their continuing reinscription of prior Barth stories, and their pervasive wordplay, and both use the scientific notion of indeterminacy to unsettle the implication that narrative closure ever closes anything for good. But both also explore the analogies between aspects of the writing process and techniques of surveillance and control in 1980s America. Barth had been widely regarded as one of the most aestheticist of the postmodern novelists: in 1968 he was quoted as declaiming, 'Muse, spare me (at the desk, I mean) from SocialHistorical Responsibility, and in the last analysis from every other kind, except Artistic.' His most recent novels, however, suggest that his own practice has led him to explore the affinities between the examination of narrative strategies and the critique of ideology.
Like most of the novelists under discussion, Robert Coover has made explicit statements about his reasons for disrupting established forms of representation. In a 1969 interview, he maintained that 'the first and primary and essential talent of the artist is to reach the -712- emotions…. I mean when something hits us strong enough, it means it's something real.' For Coover, 'something real' is precisely not what is conveyed through the habitual doctrines of humanism and strategies of realism: 'the contact occurs when there is communication across reality links, not across conventional links which is what most second rate writers make, you know, things you'd expect, you know how the endings are going to be.' Coover's first published works, among them a number of the short stories collected in the 1969 volume Pricksongs and Descants, seem determined to counter 'things you'd expect.' Like the fictions in Lost in the Funhouse, which was published in the preceding year, and like Cervantes's Don Quixote, Coover's own paradigm, the Pricksongs and Descants stories explicitly attack 'exhausted art-forms,' forms Coover not only sees as 'used-up' but aligns with 'adolescent thought-modes.' A number of the stories are reinscriptions of folktales and myths; many deliberately violate conventions of decorum in treating playfully an extremely inflammatory subject matter — murder, mutilation, and rape, for instance (the last also symptomatic of the masculinism that infected much experimental writing by men during the 1960s). All of them foreground conventions of fiction-making and reading. Probably the best known, 'The Babysitter,' seems a North American realization of the radically nonlinear narrative described in Borges's ficcione The Garden of Forking Paths. In 'The Babysitter,' the question of the 'real story' does as much violence to the forking paths of narration as the various versions of the story do to the story's erotic victim, the babysitter.
Coover's first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966) is in many respects a more traditional work of fiction than the contemporaneous short stories, exploring the evolution of a religious cult in terms insisting on an allegorical relation to the founding and institutionalization of Christianity. The concern with demystifying myth, a constant in Coover's work, here allows the reader a sort of benevolent outside position from which to assess events variously interpreted as mundane or miraculous. Such a reader is invited to conclude that if this is how myths arise, there is a standard of objectivity and accuracy that can be invoked to arrive at some sense of what the real story might be. This privileged vantage point disappears gradually in Coover's second and definitively postmodern novel, The Universal-713- Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968). This work not only synthesizes the major Coover themes and strategies — the origins and developments of religious belief, the affinities between historical and fictional narrative, the reinscription of folklore and myth into convention-disrupting forms — but carefully explores the potentiality of the novel, defining the genre accretively as a game, a ritual, a system evolving its own tendencies and trajectories and ultimately subject to the same entropy as any closed physical system, an analogue of history (particularly history conceived as the sort of totalizing teleological and rule-governed system that postmodern theorist Jean- François Lyotard calls a master-narrative of legitimation), and finally as encompassing and constituting a putatively 'outside' or 'real' world.
The author and God-figure of this system John Henry Waugh (JHWH — part of an elaborate structure of Judaeo-Christian allusions in a story that manages to bring such providential events as the flood, the Covenant, and the betrayal and death of Christ into a tabletop game modeled on baseball) changes his relation to the embedded Universal Baseball Association, until in the eighth and final chapter he has disappeared entirely into the game/novel/world that was presented as his creation. The embedded fiction becomes all there is and begins to reenact not only the versions of providential history concocted within this same fiction in the preceding chapter but also the kinds of authorial questions that Waugh had raised about his capacities and responsibilities as maker of this fiction. The question about the 'real' story is thus displaced into a question about origins and control: Where did this world come from and who or what is responsible for its events and outcomes? In making a fiction about how the making of fiction becomes a process comprehending all of experience, Coover has allowed metafiction to insinuate a whole series of questions about the nature and scope of interpretation, power, and design.
These questions take political shape in Coover's great encyclopedic work The Public Burning (1977), a novel so disruptive of the borders between history and fiction that legal problems delayed its publication for several years. The Public Burning is about the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs, and about the Manichean theology im-714- plicit in United States foreign and domestic policy during the Cold War. In this novel, too, history resembles fiction in having a design, author, and purpose, but in this case the confusion of ontological levels is complete from the outset. 'Fiction' and 'fact' mingle uneasily in the exuberantly xenophobic prologue and become thoroughly entangled with the first sentence of the opening chapter, 'I was with the President at his news conference that Wednesday morning when the maverick Supreme Court Justice William Douglas dropped his bombshell in the Rosenberg case.' The narrative voice is unmistakably that of Richard Nixon in his mid-career memoir Six Crises. The question of the 'real story' is immediately irrelevant in a fictional universe where figures like Nixon (who is the principal narrator), John F. Kennedy, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Dwight D. Eisenhower interact with corporate trademarks like Betty Crocker, national symbols like Uncle Sam, and political stereotypes like the Phantom, the fictional embodiment of that 1950s catchphrase 'the spectre of world Communism.'
Throughout The Public Burning, Coover literalizes the symbolism of the dominant ideology, most evidently by having the electrocution of the Rosenbergs take place in Times Square, 'the ritual center of the Western world.' The ritual murder performed as a national spectacle becomes the central event in a theological construction of history that takes as its revealed text the nineteenth-century American doctrine of Manifest Destiny. According to this Manifest theology, history has a plot — and perhaps this plot is also a conspiracy. It has an origin in the machinations of Uncle Sam and the Phantom. It has a design and perhaps an ultimate purpose, although the dimensions of these are not visible to characters enmeshed in its workings, characters like Coover's disconcertingly sympathetic schlemiel-hero Nixon, who in the closing pages is finally made privy to the central mystery of the politico-providential plot, the secret of Incarnation. In The Public Burning, the strategies of narrative fiction are writ large in the world that is represented. But this world is not merely overdetermined and artificial; it is also in unexpected ways an accurate depiction of Cold War reality — and is accurate precisely because of this overdetermination and artificiality. For Coover, as for most other postmodern writers centrally engaged with events in the public -715- sphere, the irrealist strategies of metafiction have mimetic power, revealing the extent to which official history is inevitably structured like a fiction.
Thomas Pynchon, arguably the most important of the postmodern novelists, is similarly preoccupied with the relations between history and fiction and with the entailed issues of author-ity, control, and design. Maintaining a public profile so low that it approaches anonymity, Pynchon creates fictional universes shot through with intimations of conspiracies vast and pervasive enough to undermine the possibility that there can be anything personal or individual about identity. Pynchon's characters tend to be both allegorical and stereotypical, embodying mythic
