Coover, Robert (1932– ), distinctive awardwinning American writer, several of whose postmodern fictions for adults rewrite the folk tale as a foundational narrative of Western literature and culture. Born in Iowa, he has been teaching at Brown University for many years and has also lived in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Italy. For Coover, a passionate interpreter of Miguel de Cervantes and Samuel Beckett (see his essay ‘The Last Quixote’), it is through stories that we construct the world itself; thus the writer's vocation is to furnish ‘better fictions with which we can re‐form our notion of things’. Disruption of expectations, parodic repetition, keen pursuit of both metaphor and mundane detail, and unflinching entanglement in and critique of the workings of sexuality and power characterize Coover's unmaking and remaking of social fictions (e.g. religious ritual in The Origin of the Brunists, 1966; games and sports in The Universal Baseball Association, 1968; political structures in The Public Burning 1977; master–slave dynamics in Spanking the Maid, 1982; image and film in A Night at the Movies, 1987; and family in John's Wife, 1996). In proposing fictions that are overtly aware of themselves, Coover places himself in the tradition of ‘intransigent realists’ like Franz Kafka and Angela Carter. His more recent work involves a dialogue with film and creative uses of hypertext.
In Aesop's Forest (1986) Coover questions the fable: ‘Three Little Pigs’ frames Hair O’ the Chine (1979), and A Political Fable (1980) displaces Dr Seuss's Cat in the Hat from young children's bedtime to presidential elections. Some of his other fictions intensely engage specific fairy tales. Coover's 1969 experimental collection of short stories Pricksongs & Descants (1969) unsettles not only worn interpretations of Old Testament narratives, urban legends, and crime stories, but also tales like ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ (in ‘The Door: A Prologue of Sorts’), and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (‘The Gingerbread House’). A haunting and funny tale, ‘The Dead Queen’ (1973) retells ‘Snow White’ from the perspective of the prince.
Coover's grotesque and linguistically inventive Pinocchio in Venice (1991) makes a puppet, and then a book, of an American art history professor in decaying and carnivalesque Venice. In his quest to finish his autobiography, Professor Pinenut pursues the Blue‐Haired Fairy turned college student, and is in turn pursued by pigeons and policemen. While reflecting on the pre‐World War II politics of the Disney Pinocchio film, Coover playfully retells Collodi's 19th‐century
Another sustained exploration of a single fairy tale, Briar Rose (1996) retells the versions of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ of Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and others to foreground the pain that quest‐driven fairy tales demand and yet overlook. Storyteller, cook, and fairy, Coover's old crone has both deadly and antidotal tricks to play over and over again to awaken us all to the horrors of the tale which, like a dream, has captured her as well as the sleeping Rose and the frustrated ‘hero’. While exposing the poverty and violence of desire in this romanticized tale, Briar Rose also pushes the central metaphor of the tale to its limits in a powerfully generative play of perspectives and tale‐spinning.
Bibliography
- Coover, Robert, ‘Entering Ghost Town’,
Marvels and Tales , 12.1 (1998). - Gado, Frank (ed.), ‘Robert Coover’,
First Person (1973). - ‘Robert Coover’, spec. issue of Delta, ed. Maurice Coutourier (June 1989).
- McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction (1987).
— Cristina Bacchilega
