knowing what to do with it. It's easy enough to answer the programmatic effusions of a Sukenick or a Klinkowitz, but it's something else again to dismiss utterly the brave if often misguided ambitions of a John Barth.
Robert Coover has worked the terrain ploughed by others, 'stirring things up,' as he has said, creating, fracturing, mythologizing, ironizing, entertaining, and confounding. Early a favorite of likeminded writers with a taste for 'brightly painted paragraphs,' compulsive stylization, 'pseudo-dramas,' and 'virtuoso exercises,' Coover has grown into something more. Though he remains in every sense a vanguard writer, he has demonstrated that advanced fiction can address important public issues without compromising its commitment to excess, risk, myth, and carnivalesque revelry. As much a satirist as Hawkes, and with as great an interest in the tendency of language to decline into self-parody, he nonetheless uses words to convey essential insights about the way human beings think and feel. To say of him, as one infatuate celebrant has written, that his 'fictions defeat attempts to comment upon or clarify them,' that in effect -732- they deny 'aboutness,' is to take him for the predictably vanguard writer he has largely ceased to be. Like John Barth committed utterly to freedom of invention and the autonomous 'reality' of his own fictions, he is at the same time more responsive to the claims of a 'reality' not of his making and rather less willing to trust exclusively the arbitrary and reflexive. The author of the fiendishly clever jeux of Pricksongs and Descants (1969) has grown into the author of more substantial and troubling if still clever and outrageous works. The novels are, all of them, at one level exercises of a willfully unfettered imagination, the calculated exacerbations of a show-off with an inexhaustible repertoire of inventions to display. The Origin of the Brunists (1966) revolves around numerological puzzles and the antics of mystic sectarians. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (1968) is a wildly intricate work built around a baseball 'game' — played with dice, charts, and statistics — which progressively devours every person and relationship tangled in the novel's complex weave. The Public Burning (1977) is a fantasist's version of a political novel conceived as a mix of the grotesque and the pathetic, the outré and the sober, the plausible and the impossible, the novelistic and the theatrical. Gerald's Party (1986) is a takeoff on detective stories and an intricately layered romance built around dreams, false leads, and memory. Together these novels constitute an ambitious project driven by irreverence, pride, and sheer joy in the power of language.
Such fiction as Coover writes typically features not only elements of pastiche and improvisation but what Robert Alter calls 'a cavalier attitude toward consistency' and an 'exhilaration of hysteria.' Violating formal principles and ordinary (or 'bourgeois') decorums, it is by turns arch and slapdash, innovative and innocent. Coover's novels presume the existence of a reader willing to work and to take his entertainments seriously, however riotous the idiom in which he is addressed. If in the end nothing can seem to such a reader really offensive or silly or significantly contradictory — if, in other words, Coover's most extravagant and novel gestures finally seem at best brilliant and amusing — the reader has at least been put through his intellectual paces and made to hang on the words of a continuously peremptory venturer.
Of course, for all of Coover's wayward brilliance, it may be that he does not deserve to be described as an avant-garde writer. By far -733- his best work is the novel The Public Burning, a work that compels at least brief consideration in terms recommended by critics of the avant-garde like Renato Poggioli and Charles Newman. Poggioli describes a situation in which liberal democratic societies cannot but tolerate and finally welcome all 'displays of eccentricity and nonconformity.' Transgression — in a pluralistic culture that forbids nothing — thus becomes not only an acceptable but also an attractive and finally dominant style. The disorienting antics and studiously 'offensive' violations of a Coover would then come to seem not only typical but also de rigueur for anyone making claims to a sophisticated readership. Understanding the terms under which he serves such a readership, a Coover will be hard put to stay ahead of their expectations. Offering the indiscriminate satire and subversive demythologizing that is the advanced novelist's stock-in-trade, Coover also slyly offers a psychological depth and compassionate tenderness that actually violate the 'contract' that implicitly underwrites his relation to sophisticated readers (who are supposed to know better than to fall for character, depth, psychology, and so on). Overstepping plausibility at every turn, he grounds his novel in a conceptualization so rigorous and persuasive that the most bizarre and ridiculous gestures are made to seem purposeful and coherent and thereby to succumb to requirements associated with older, ostensibly 'repressive' discursive regimes. In short, Coover does what he can to exempt his fiction from Poggioli's charge that the avant- garde can no longer be avant, that it is finally another conformist enterprise.
In The Post-Modern Aura (1985) Charles Newman ridicules the pretensions of the contemporary avant-garde and argues that in the United States there is none. If, as Newman has it, 'the avant- garde defines itself historically by the rigidity of the official culture to which it opposes itself,' then there can be no avant-garde that presumes upon the good-natured tolerance, affection, and support of a broad readership. Though, as Newman concedes, rigidity can be 'hypothesized' when it does not in fact exist, a writer like Coover goes about his business in more or less blithe disregard of any constraint. The unquestioned assumption underlying such a procedure is that only cultural neanderthals and political reactionaries can seriously object to the effusions of clearly gifted writers. Since such persons are not to be taken seriously, and the traditional apparatus for judging works -734- of art is no longer reliable or much in evidence, the literary virtuoso had best follow his instinct if he is to come up with genuinely adventurous and consequently admirable fictions. Though Newman does not train his sights on Coover, it is clear that even a novel with the obvious power of The Public Burning has more the character of a high-stepping entertainment than an insidiously subversive gesture. The peremptory 'violations' practiced by a Coover look more and more like mainstream appeals to readers for whom the avant-garde is simply — as Newman says — 'what's happening now.'
The Public Burning attempts to combine political radicalism and a fully liberated aesthetics — an aesthetics in which everything goes and nothing is forbidden — with the intention of producing what is at once a critique and an expression of 'America.' By now probably the most widely read would-be avant- garde novel of its time, its success has as much to do with its 'conventional' virtues as with its pyrotechnic dazzle. More various and affecting than anything by Hawkes, it is also as relentlessly inventive as anything by Barth. Many commentators stress the surprising humanity of its portrayals, however disfiguring the fantastic distortions and improbable scenarios to which characters are subjected. Others are equally, and rightly, impressed by the range and penetration of the political satire, noting that within the framework of a grotesque saturnalia Coover somehow provides a telling account of American politics in the 1950s. Coover's Richard Nixon is in many ways a great and complex character, the world in which he is made to move articulated with a shrewd command of political detail. Coover's decision to build so long a novel around the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg is justified by his capacity to make of their story an emblem of American ideas of love, adversity, ambition, and justice. However much the novel is shaped, driven by Coover's determination to go too far, to handle ostensibly 'real' characters and events with the brutally distorting contrivances of a cartoonist, the hyperbolic becomes in The Public Burning a necessary condition to which we object only if we are unable to appreciate all that we are given under its capacious auspices.
To emerge from rapt encounter with The Public Burning only to proclaim that it is no avant-garde creation, that it is too enjoyable, too accessible, too much a reflection of the quintessential energy and -735- awfulness of 'America' in its self-indulgence and imperial claim to anything it damn well pleases, is again to recall that 'avant-garde' has typically signified a defiant exigency. It is possible, in other words, to regard such a novel as satisfying and successful and, at the same time, as demonstration that a postmodern avant-garde is rarely possible. The happy few, including Coover, who can preen triumphantly within — not the entrapping but the kindly — circumscriptions of language may be as much as postmodern fiction can offer. But it is a far cry from Coover's sense that all of experience is his for the taking, the eagerly complicitous reader his for the astonishing, and the remote high modernist sense of an ascetic vocation pursued without any prospect of general applause. For all of their extravagances and calculated indecencies, both Hawkes and Barth would seem better able than Coover to identify with Flaubert's assertions that 'between the crowd and ourselves no bond exists' and that artists like himself must 'climb into our ivory tower, and dwell there along with emptiness.' One intends no disrespect to Coover when one concludes that The Public Burning is nowhere touched by any austere recognition of its own irrelevance.
More hermetic by far is the fiction of Walter Abish. From the moment his first novel, Alphabetical Africa, appeared in 1974, Abish was acclaimed as an avant-garde writer, his work typically described in the language of 'defamiliarization,' 'surface,' 'parody,' 'fragmentation,' and 'artificiality.' In most of his work he displays no wish to transform reality. He is content instead to build artificial structures
