Robert Coover - Pricksongs & Descants

Quisiera yo, si fuera posible (maestro apreciadisimo), excusarme de escribir este prólogo, not merely because the temerity of addressing you with such familiarity and attaching your eminence to these apprentice fictions is certain — and quite rightly — to bring on my head el mal que han de decir de mí más de cuatro sotiles y almidonados , but also because here we are in the middle of a book where prologues seem inappropriate. But just as your novelas were “exemplary,” in the simplest sense, because they represented the different writing ideas you were working with from the 1580’s to 1612, so do these seven stories — along with the three “Sentient Lens” fictions also included in this volume — represent about everything I invented up to the commencement of my first novel in 1962 able to bear this later exposure, and I felt their presence here invited interpolations.

Ejemplares you called your tales, because “si bien lo miras, no hay ninguna de quien no se pueda sacar un ejemplo provechoso,” and I hope in ascribing to my fictions the same property, I haven’t strayed from your purposes, which I take to be manifold. For they are ejemplares , too, because your intention was “poner en la plaza de nuestra república tin a mesa de trucos, donde cada uno pueda llegar a entretenerse sin daòo de barras, Digo, sin daòo del alma ni del cuerpo, porque los ejercicios honestos y agradables antes aprovechan que daòan”— splendid, don Miguel! for as our mutual friend don Roberto S. has told us, fiction “must provide us with an imaginative experience which is necessary to our imaginative well-being… We need all the imagination we have, and we need it exercised and in good condition”—and thus your novelas stand as exemplars of responsibility to that most solemn and pious charge placed upon this vocation; they tell good stories and they tell them well.

And yet there is more, if I read you rightly. For your stories also exemplified the dual nature of all good narrative art: they struggled against the unconscious mythic residue in human life and sought to synthesize the unsynthesizable, sallied forth against adolescent thought-modes and exhausted art forms, and returned home with new complexities. In fact, your creation of a synthesis between poetic analogy and literal history (not to mention reality and illusion, sanity and madness, the erotic and the ludicrous, the visionary and the scatological) gave birth to the Novel — perhaps above all else your works were exemplars of a revolution in narrative fiction, a revolution which governs us — not unlike the way you found yourself abused by the conventions o£ the Romance — to this very day.

Never mind whether it was Erasmus or Aristotle or that forget table Italian who caused your artist’s eye to focus — not on Eternal Values and Beauty — but on Character, Actions of Men in Society, and Exemplary Histories, for it was the new Age of Science dawning, and such a shift was in the air. No longer was the City of Man a pale image of the City of God, a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosm, but rather it was all there was, neither micro-nor macrocosm, yet at the same time full of potential, all the promise of what man’s mind, through Science, might accomplish. The universe for you, Maestro , was opening up; it could no longer be described by magical numbers or be contained in a compact and marvelously designed sphere. Narrative fiction, taking a cue from Lazarillo and the New World adventurers, became a process of discovery, and to this day young authors sally forth in fiction like majestic — indeed, divinely ordained! — pícaros to discover, again and again, their man hood.

But, don Miguel, the optimism, the innocence, the aura of possibility you experienced have been largely drained away, and the universe is closing in on us again. Like you, we, too, seem to be standing at the end of one age and on the threshold of another. We, too, have been brought into a blind alley by the critics and analysts; we, too, suffer from a “literature of exhaustion,” though ironically our nonheros are no longer tireless and tiresome Amadises, but hopelessly defeated and bed-ridden Quixotes. We seem to have moved from an open-ended, anthropocentric, humanistic, naturalistic, even — to the extent that man may be thought of as making his own universe — optimistic starting point, to one that is closed, cosmic, eternal, supernatural (in its soberest sense), and pessimistic. The return to Being has returned us to Design, to microcosmic images of the macrocosm, to the creation of Beauty within the confines of cosmic or human necessity, to the use of the fabulous to probe beyond the phenomenological, beyond appearances, beyond randomly perceived events, beyond mere history. But these probes are above all — like your Knight’s sallies — challenges to the assumptions of a dying age, exemplary adventures of the Poetic Imagination, high-minded journeys toward the New World and never mind that the nag’s a pile of bones.

You teach us, Maestro , by example, that great narratives remain meaningful through time as a language-medium between generations, as a weapon against the fringe-areas of our consciousness, and as a mythic reinforcement of our tenuous grip on reality. The novelist uses familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms and to conduct the reader ( lector amantísimo! ) to the real, away from mystification to clarification, away from magic to maturity, away from mystery to revelation. And it is above all to the need for new modes of perception and fictional forms able to encompass them that I, barber’s basin on my head, address these stories. If they seem slight for such a burden as this prolix foreword, please consider them, in turn, don Miguel, as a mere preface to all that here flowers about this little book-within-a-book, to the other works that have already preceded them in print, and to all that is yet to come. “Mucho prometo con fuerzas tan pocas como las mias; pero ¿quien pondrá rienda a los deseos?” I only beg you to remark: que pues yo he tenido osadía de dirigir estas ficciones al gran Cervantes, algún misterio tienen escondido, que las levanta. Vale.

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1

Panel Game

Situation: television panel game, live audience. Stage strobelit and cameras insecting about. Moderator, bag shape corseted and black suited, behind desk/rostrum, blinking mockmodestly at lens and lamps, practiced pucker on his soft mouth and brows arched in mild goodguy astonishment. Opposite him, the panel: Aged Clown, Lovely Lady, and Mr. America, fat as the continent and bald as an eagle. There is an empty chair between Lady and Mr. A, which is now filled, to the delighted squeals of all, by a spectator dragged protesting from the Audience, nondescript introduced as Unwilling Participant, or more simply, Bad Sport. Audience: same as ever, docile, responsive, good-natured, terrifying. And the Bad Sport, you ask, who is he? fool! thou art!

“Wclcome!” greets the merry Moderator, arms flung wide, and the Audience, cued to Thunderous Response, responds thunderingly: “to the big question!”

You squirm, viced by Lady (who excites you) and America (who does not, but bless him all the same), but your squirms are misread: Lovely Lady lifts lashes, crosses eyes, and draws breath excitedly through puckered mouth as though sucking milkshakes through a straw, and, seemingly at the other end of the straw, the Moderator ingests: “Tsk, tsk!” and, gently reproving, waggles his dewlaps. Audience howls happily the while and who can blame them? You, Sport, resign yourself to pass the test in peace and salute them with a timid smile, squirm no more.