FROM: Larry McCaffery

RE: An I.) announcement, II.) an open invitation, III.) a personal response to the recent "Great" or merely "good" debate

BUT FIRST A MESSAGE FROM UNCLE SAM

 
"Oh, we must fight! I repeat it, sir, I am feelin’ awesome wolfy about the head and shoulders and I must have a fight, those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of twistin’ noses and scougin’ eyeballs and rib-braking’ and massacreein’! So carry the flag, you sons a Liberty, hang on to yer balls and keep step to the music of the union, our brethren are already in the field, why stand we here idle? Time is money! No pent-up- Utica contracts our powers, but the whole boundless continent is ours, it’s as much a law of nature as that the Mississippi should flow to the sea or that trade follers the flag! Fear is the fundament of most guvvamints, so let’s get the boot in, boys, and listen to ‘em scream, let us anny-mate and encourage each other--whoo-PEE!?and show the whole world that a Freeman, contendin’ for Liberty on his own ground, can out-run, out-dance, out-jump, chaw more tobacky and spit less, out-drink, out-holler, out-fonagle and out-lick any yaller, brown, red, black, or white thing in the shape of human that’s ever set his onfortunate knickers on Yankee soil! It is our manifest dust-in-yer-eye to overspead the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying’ millions, so damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead, fellow ripstavers, we cannot escape history! Boliterate ‘em we must, for our cause it is just what the doctor ordered, logic is logic, that’s all I say, and remember, if you will not hear Reason, she will surely rap your knuckles! I tell you, we want elbow-room?the continent?the whole continent?and nothin’ but the continent! And--by gum!?we will have it!"

Uncle Sam, in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning

I. Robert Coover is going to be giving a reading on Thursday, October 7 at 7:30 PM., North Education Bldg. Room 60; sponsored jointly by the Hugh C. Hyde Living Writers Series, the English Department and the American Studies Department, Coover’s reading will be followed by an extended question and answer session. We haven’t had much chance to publicize this reading as yet, I want to strongly encourage collegues to attend-and to encourage your students to attend. While the issue of Coover’s "greatness" as a writer is still open to debate (see below), I believe his reputation as a stunning, virtuoso performer of his own works ("reading" doesn’t do justice to what’s involved here) is unquestionable. At any rate, based on my own experience, certainly Bob puts on the best show of anyone I’ve ever seen or heard in this format.

ROBERT COOVER?SOME VITAL STAT’S

Robert Coover is the author of 12 novels, three story collections, and a collection of plays, A Theological Position (1975). Coover has won fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Academy of Arts; he has also been the recipient of numerous literary awards including the Faulkner Award for his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Lifetime Achievement in Short Fiction. He currently teaches in the Writing Program at Brown University, where he recently ran a three year pilot program in the teaching of hypertext and other forms of computer-based creative writings.

II. Copies of two of Coover’s best known and most influential stories--"The Brother" and "The Babysitter"?are available in the English Department office for anyone is interested in using one of Coover’s stories in your classes. Just ask the secretary which story you’d like to use and she’ll then rizo copies you can distribute to your classes. In any event, please do announce the reading to your classes.

III. I noticed with interest the recent discussion that was reported in the minutes of the Advisory Committee Meeting concerning the appropriateness or inappropriateness of Robert Coover being designated as a "great" writer. Apparently during this micro-debate, David Matlin took the "pro position" as to Coover’s greatness; while an unnamed advisory committee member took the "anti" position, indicating that "good" seemed a more appropriate term. Since we teachers at SDSU seem to have preciously few opportunities to engage one another in collegial debates, I thought I would seize this opportunity to put in my own "2 cents worth" (surely however we feel about Coover’s work, we can all agree that this phrase needs to be update?) concerning the "greatness" or "goodness" of Coover’s work. And since presenting my own response to this matter should at least provide my colleagues with some "food for thought"?while also publicizing the Coover reading?I hereby humbly wish to offer the following comments (which I’m inventing literally on the spot---I apologize in advance for any infelicities that creep in here.

TO BE GREAT OR MERELY GOOD?THAT IS THE QUESTION
 

In my view, Robert Coover is not only a ‘great writer’ (however one wishes to define this term) but is in fact the greatest living American fiction writer?greatest in the sense of his fiction’s influence, its range of erudition, thematic significance, and formal diversity, its capacity for providing literary models that demonstrate how great narratives can respond to the massive challenges and dilemmas of writing serious fiction in our current postmodern era, and how such narratives can remain meaningful through time as a language-medium between generations; greatest in the sense of having personally encouraged and influenced other writers and critics as a teacher and critic; but above all, Coover’s greatness derives from the wondrous, moving, hilarious, excessive, word-drunk books of fiction he has published thus far. No other living author has demonstrated as great a command of the American vernacular and cultural mythology?or has managed to expanded the range of what these materials might do, might be, or how these might be expressed in fictive forms appropriate to our age. Allow me at this point to supply some supporting evidence in the form of , , ,

BLURBS:

"Mr. Coover’s work has long occupied a place of honor. . . . He goes at his task with an almost alarming linguistic energy, a Burgessy splatter of vocabulary, and a ferocious love of everything comic and grotesque.?Salman Rushdie

"The many faces, voices, and incarnations of Uncle Sam are here [in The Public Burning] in all their linguistic glory; and you will meet Sam?created, top hat to coattails …in a newsreel-rolling prologue whose satiric energy and savage musicality are simply unequaled in our literature except by some other passages, constructed on similar principles, in The Public Burning."?William H. Gass.

"Coover is one of our masters now. The tumultuous, Babylonian exuberance of his mind is fueled and directed by his equally passionate craftsmanship. He seems to be able to do anything.?Robert Kelly, The New York Times Book Review

"As his dazzling career continues to demonstrate, Mr. Coover is a one-man Big Bang of exploding creative force."?Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review

"Of all the post-modernist writers, Robert Coover is probably the funniest and most malicious, mixing up broad social and political satire with vaudeville turns, lewd pratfalls and clever word plays that make us rethink both the mechanics of the world and our relationship to it."?Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Since WWII only Lolita, Invisible Man, and Catch-22 are in its [The Public Burning’s] class for durability. But for the risks it runs, for its capacity and reach, for its literary probable social consequences, nothing I know of written in our language since the war can touch it.

--Geoffrey Wolff, New Times

"The range and variety of Coover’s work has been evident throughout his career, which was launched with the publication of his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists in 1965; the appearance of Brunists was immediately hailed by critics?it was awarded the prestigious Faulkner Award in 1966 and was frequently compared with Pycnhon’s first novel V. (which had won the Faulkner Award the year earlier). In 1969, Coover published Pricksongs and Descants, which is surely the singly most influential collection of innovative fiction to appear during the first wave of postmodern experimentalism, Coover second novel, The Universal Baseball Association (1968 is not only unrivaled as the greatest "sports novel" ever written (only DeLillo’s End Zone is even in the same "ballpark") but a dark and richly comic treatment of American cultural mythologies that also rivals Lolita in terms of its sympathetic (yet comic) treatment of the dangers of solipsism and the perils of attractions of losing oneself inside one’s own creations. Coover’s longest and most controversial novel, The Public Burning (1977) -- a massive, carnivalesque exploration of the McCarthy Era and the Rosenberg executions-- ultimately becomes a darkly pessimistic, hilarious, and disturbing evocation of America’s national identity. Gerald’s Party (1986), Coover’s pomo-treatment of the detective novel format, of memory-as-murder, of the intrusive role of the media, epistemological uncertainly, and much much more, all of which unfold as conversations heard at a single party; it begins with the class opening line, ‘No one noticed the body as first. . . ‘). I could go on to cite Coover’s equally memorable recent works?the reworkings of the Sleepy Beauty and Pinocchio fairly tales (in Brian Rose [1996] and Pinocchio in Venice [1988], the refashioning of the Western genre into an allegory about the nature and limits of rules within our collective-though-solitary wanderings towards personal extinction?but this has already gone on to long. But I hope to see many of you at the reading next week!"
 

?Larry McCaffery