History in American literary postmodernism of the last quarter of XXth century: Robert Coover`s "The Public Burning"

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Summary

coover novel history historiography

The article examines the novel by American author Robert Coover «The Public Burning» in the context of history and historiography. Basis of the study are modes of writing in historiography as analyzed by American researcher Hayden White and also a concept of history as seen in the works of French philosopher Michel Foucault. In this context, the novel by Robert Coover suggests a new perspective on history through the narrative that is based on actual historical events but is also augmented by fictional elements. Moreover, through the fictional material «The Public Burning» proposes a new approach in writing of history. The study focuses on the relations between history, folklore, public figures and a mode of writing in the novel.

Key words: American literature, postmodernism, history, historiography, a mode of writing

The main text

The problem of history as theme and concept in contemporary American fiction has been analyzed in several works: for example, in his work «After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s» [3], Samuel Cohen studies several novels by such authors as Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Don Delillo and others from the point of view of history as a concept. The novel «The Public Burning» by Robert Coover is a subject matter for different academic authors: in the article «“A Parody of Martyrdom”: The Rosenbergs, Cold War Theology, and Robert Coover's “The Public Burning”» [7] Molly Hite describes how Cold War doctrine obtains theological qualities in the novel, and in the text «History, ficiton and national identity in J. U. Ribeiro's “An Invincible Memory” and R. Coover's “The Public Burning”» [9] Luiz Fernando Valente juxtaposes approaches in deconstructing the history and national identity in the works of Coover and Brazilian author Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro. This article outlines different interpretations of historical context in the novel and presents comparisons of the text with the postmodern concepts of history and historiography, therefore providing a new perspective on the problem.

During the XXth century the paradigm of humane studies was changing under the influence of linguistics' findings by Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jacobson, etc.; structuralism and post-structuralism defined many of the key problems in the studies, and the latter philosophical and critical field (which started as criticism of structuralism's methodology) served as a basis of postmodernism. The problems and concepts of postmodernism influenced historiography and historical science in particular. One of the main subjects of discussion in these fields of study is the perception of history and its intrinsic subjectivity. Several scholars introduced different theories on history and historiography in the context of postmodern paradigm: American researcher Hayden White (1928-2018) provided the concept of history as a narrative, taking the basis from literary studies. In his work «Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe» (1973) White compares different strategies of organizing the history with the methodology of writing a coherent story, therefore implying that a historian and a writer share the modes of writing. This concept develops the idea of fictional element in the historical writing, and one of the Hayden's analysts, Andrey Ashkerov, arrives at the following conclusion: «Reality appears to be a victim of historical imagination. However, White demonstrates that this condition - at least, if we talk about historical reality - is probably the only mode of its existence» [2, p. 99]. French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) suggests different view on writing the history with genealogical method. In an essay «Nietzsche, Genealogy, History» Foucault examines Nietzsche's position towards the search of history's origin: «“Actual” history forces an event to open up in its uniqueness and sharpness. Event - and we should comprehend it not as solution, boundary, manifestation or struggle, but as changing balance of forces, power taken away, vocabulary separated from and turned against its users; one dominance that debilitates and poisons itself and the other that creeps and masks. Forces in history follow not outline or mechanism, but vicissitudes of struggle. The forces do not represent themselves as coherent forms of initial intention, they do not have meaning of a result. The forces always emerge in unique randomness of an event. Contrary to Christian world, universally woven with God's Providence, unlike the Greek world, divided between reign of will and reign of a great cosmic senselessness, the world of history knows only one reign, in which there is no providence, ultimate reason, but only “iron hand of necessity that shakes horn of randomness”» [5]. This particular idea has a basis primarily on detailed collecting of facts and offers a different approach to historical knowledge; Foucault's ideas are opposed to the White's ones in this matter.

These concepts of history and historiography have found representation in multiple fictional works. Several American authors of last half of XXth century showed different examples of writing the history in literary work (among them are «Libra» by Don DeLillo, «Mason & Dixon» by Thomas Pynchon and «Infinite Jest» by David Foster Wallace), but at the same time, these strategies present the problems of the contemporary perception of history. The main subject of this study is a novel «The Public Burning» by Robert Coover (b. 1932). The goal is to define the methods of history's representation in the novel.

«The Public Burning» was published in 1977; the text's focus is on the Execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenbergs in 1953, albeit the event is rather a reference point for the fiction than a premise for a traditional historical narrative. Coover is known as a writer who is concerned about folklore, myth, narrative and plot structure in literary work, and in that matter «The Public Burning» is a typical work of his, but at the same time, it stays close to the events from the near past and present time. Moreover, as many literary researchers point out, there is a strong criticism in the book towards the Cold War era political and social condition in the United States and (though subtle) towards the presidency of Richard Nixon, who is also one of the narrators of the novel. Additionally, as Paul Giles marks in the article «Historicizing the Transnational: Robert Coover, Kathy Acker and the Rewriting of British Cultural History, 1970-1997», «[t]he burlesque structure of Coover's novel <...> systematically brings sacred and profane together in such a way that it not only undermines the dignity of Nixon himself but also delegitimates the separatist rhetoric of an American idealist tradition stretching back to the seventeenth century Puritans» [6, p. 12]. United States' Cold war era in the novel serves as a basis for exploration of folklore, popular culture and politics in America, yet the text's composition allows to see one of the versions of how contemporary culture percepts and writes the history.

The history in the novel represented on several levels. The character of Uncle Sam is the representation of America's folk history, which combines the traits of folk heroes (such as Davy Crockett) and comic book superheroes (such as Superman). Uncle Sam in «The Public Burning» has a crude sense of humor, and his speech is similar to the speech of folk heroes of antebellum period and Old West. A lot of times the character is portrayed in situations where he shows his power and dominance through the acts of sexual violence and, among other things, urination. The researcher David C. Estes writes about Uncle Sam in the novel, that «[his] character, language, and behavior all reflect humorous folk stereotypes and conventions found in antebellum backwoods sketches, thus rooting him in the tradition that Walter Blair calls “native American humor”. Through him, then, Coover reveals the unsettling consequences on a national scale of what Americans have historically chosen to consider funny» [4, p. 246]. From this point, we could see that Uncle Sam is a representation of the whole history of the United States, he reflects the past, the present and the future of the country; his point of view is a mirror of white American's subconscious. Coover's parody of national character has its purpose in criticizing the society's state of mind during the 1950s and the 1970s, but it also represents one strategy of seeing the history of the country through the collective image constructed from folklore and mass culture.

Uncle Sam is also one of the fictional characters that Coover puts in the realm of traditional historical narrative. The Execution of Rosenbergs transforms from a historical event into a mythical ritual that holds place in Time Square. Coover takes the historical basis and constructs a myth on it through hyperbole and composing the historical figures as fictional characters. Fictional characters (besides Uncle Sam, there is Disney's «Rat pack», which consists of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Goofy, Horace Horsecollar among others, and takes part in the execution process) become a part of the history in the context of the novel and their traits also have an impact on the representation of history figures, especially on the character of Richard Nixon, who shares his image with characters of Charlie Chaplin and, broadly, slapstick comedy. Therefore, the line between the fictional material and historical chronicle has no definite placement, and at some point, the text can provide both an illusion of actual historical event and a fairy tale. Several compositional methods clearly show the fictional nature of the text, but the reader can see hints indicating the similarities between the Coover's writing and the historian's method of organizing the facts.

Richard Nixon as a main character of the novel represents a strategy of depicting a historical figure. The novel was published in a period not long ago after the Nixon's presidential term, so there is a little distance between the historical events and their literary interpretation. Novel's composition suggests that there are two temporal spaces (besides the one represented by Uncle Sam) - America during the Cold War (1950s) and America during Nixon's presidency (1970s). Furthermore, the narrative explores different point of view on Rosenbergs' execution - from historical perspective Nixon has a small involvement with the case, but in the novel he is a key figure, one of the narrators. In the article «“Nothing but Words”? Chronicling and Storytelling in Robert Coover's The Public Burning» researcher Theophilus Savvas points out the role of Nixon as a character of the novel: «Placing his literary Nixon in an unfamiliar historical context allows Coover to utilize what he wants from the public knowledge and perception of the historical figure, while still keeping enough of a blank slate upon which he can draw his own fresh character. As Tolstoy did with Napoleon in War and Peace, Coover demytholigizes his character so that he becomes "more three- dimensional than the media image popularized after Watergate... flawed but not yet dishonest» [8, p. 179]. Nixon represents two periods in the novel - 1950s, where he can be seen rather as a spectator of Cold War America and the Administration (even though he tries to act as his peers, he has a little role in the events), and 1970s, but the latter period appears in the text subtly, there are no direct anachronistic signs referring to the later years of Nixon's. Yet, the «public burning» itself mirrors the public humiliation of Nixon after the Watergate scandal. In the text he is with his “pants down” (several recurring jokes in the novel are connected with `grotesque body', as put forward by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin), i.e. “naked” in opposition to his public image. What is important about Nixon's character is his complexity, which lies in ambivalence of the author towards him. His character represents benevolent ignorance and he is sincerely concerned about the Rosenbergs' case. Moreover, his persona does not pale in comparison with the characters of Julius and Ethel Rosenbergs, which Coover depicts rather neutral. According to Paul Giles, «[o]ne of the strengths of The Public Burning, <...>, is the way it avoids one-dimensional polemics of any kind by transposing history into a form of ontological burlesque which denies autonomy to any particular moral position. Unlike Arthur Miller's play The Crucible (1953), which critiques the collective paranoia of the McCarthyite era from a distinct ethical perspective, The Public Burning preserves a greater sense of political detachment as it focuses on how the ritualistic processes of public life are constructed more generally» [6, pp. 13-14]. Therefore, Rosenbergs are neither saints nor traitors, and in that context, Nixon is rather sympathetic character; yet, at the end of the novel, Nixon goes through the transformation and gets closer to the character of Uncle Sam. The scene of an attempted rape of Ethel Rosenberg by Nixon at the Sing Sing prison and the scene where Uncle Sam sodomizes Nixon represent the relationships of power between the darkest side of the nation and its rulers. Nixon tries to manipulate history on his own terms and obtain power, but at the end of this story he becomes a servant for the nation's darkest needs and, therefore, is restrained by the nation's will.

From a historical point of view, the novel presents the alternative biography of a public figure, where its character is defined not only by the chronicle of events, but also through changing the order and the refocusing of writing. Coover's text does not imitate traditional historical narrative, but his usage of the American folklore tradition and literary fiction does not neglect the history. On the contrary, this method of writing allows to expand the historical writing and to explore different points of view on events.

One of the particularly interesting techniques of writing in the novel is a usage of public documents. Coover takes several public texts from the Cold War era and puts them in the novel almost verbatim: the texts are the basis of the «intermezzos» in the novel. Theophilus Savvas describes the function of these parts in the text: «Where the book assumes the structure of a four-act opera, it is perhaps ironic that the “intermezzos” provide not the customary relief from performance, but rather a crystallization and intensification of it. The first, a political speech by Eisenhower, poeticized by Coover; the second, a dramatic dialogue between Ethel and Eisenhower; and the third, “a Last-Act Sing Sing Opera” titled “Human Dignity is not for Sale”, have in common that they are performances constructed for the most part from verbatim quotation. So here “real” history is enacted as performance, just as the fictional history of the book as a whole is. The second and third intermezzos, created from the voices of the Rosenbergs, particularly Ethel's, function to keep the couple off the main stage, imprisoning them textually in these plays within the play. But this final act brings all the main characters of the novel onto the stage-like scaffold, and while it is not controlled by them, it certainly belongs to the Rosenbergs. They are released from the interval shows, and given due prominence, where Ethel Rosenberg's performance becomes “a true second act, a topper”» [8, p. 184]. Coover uses actual documents and recontextualizes them within the certain genre's features. The result of these manipulations is the new point of view on the historical period and also on the document itself. Through the fictional depiction of document reader can see the problems concerning the objectivity. The document has similarities with the fiction and therefore has a potential to be a part of it. These similarities include the composition of the text, which Coover enhances, for example, by giving Eisenhower's political speech a structure of a poem. The document becomes not only a record of the era, but also a material for a fictional representation.

At last, Coover also depicts the problem of the history and media. Researcher Richard Walsh writes about the chapter «Piligrimage to The New York Times» the following: «A chapter is devoted to the daily augmentation of history in The New York Times, presented as a shrine to which millions of pilgrims bow their heads each morning. The nature and value of this pilgrimage is described between quotations from the headlines on the morning before the executions. The random jumble of the headlines, a non-polemical collection of facts, is their guarantee of objectivity, but Coover quickly shows that in presenting itself as such, the Times becomes a framework through which reality is sifted, and so shaped: "Yet even this extravagant accretion of data suggests a system, even mere hypotyposis projects a metaphysic. `Objectivity' is in spite of itself a willful program for the stacking of perceptions... Conscious or not, The New York Times statuary functions as a charter of moral and social order, a political force-field maker, defining meaningful actions merely by showing them» [10, p. 340]. Theophilus Savvas notes that the character of Richard Nixon relies on the media as a source of getting the information: «Describing himself as a “newspaper nut” and explaining how he “felt very comfortable with a newspaper in my hands”, Nixon highlights the importance of reading the New York Times “because you never knew what you might need in the middle of a cabinet meeting”. Seeing himself as an outsider, Nixon relies upon the synchronic representations of the media for a fuller picture of events, but with the media fuelled by the official line, Nixon's view can only remain worryingly monologic» [8, p. 179]. The problem of the media is also important in portrayal of Rosenbergs, who were depicted either as traitors or as martyrs. Coover's neutral point of view in the novel is therefore opposed to the inherently manipulative writings on the subject, in which there are certain position on it, positive or negative. The media as a source of historical writing is an example of distorting the facts in the novel because of its monologic nature. The same quality could be attributed to the other forms of narration that were mentioned before (historical writing, fictional writing, folklore, etc.), but the media, more than other sources of information, has a tendency to manipulate because of the reader's expectation of objectivity. The media is intertwined with the sociological context more closely and therefore can be used as a tool of manipulation more effectively. But at the same time, the media is another source of history, and it also provides many alternative perspectives on different events.

To sum up, Robert Coover's «The Public Burning» uses a historical event as pre-text and transforms it, so it becomes a hybrid of fictional and factual material. Although the text is obviously hyperbolical and does not simulate the traditional “objective” historical narrative, several compositional techniques have similarities with the method of historical writing. Coover's novel suggests alternative sources of historical information, such as folklore and the media. Another method of history writing that could be considered is the refocusing and recomposing the narrative of an event, i.e. using conventional techniques of fictional writing. The subsequent points of view will not provide an objective perspective on history, but they will provide multiple sources of making one's own narrative. Therefore, the perception of history in the novel could be described by the words of its main character, Richard Nixon: “...what was History to me? I was never one to keep diaries or save old letters, school notes, or even old legal briefs, and I had won both sides of a debating question too often not to know what emptiness lay behind the so-called issues. It all served to confirm an old belief of mine: that all men contain all views, right and left, theistic and atheistic, legalistic and anarchical, monadic and pluralistic; and only an artificial--call it political--commitment to consistency makes them hold steadfast to singular positions. Yet why be consistent if the universe wasn't? In a lawless universe, there was a certain power in consistency, of course--but there was also power in disruption!” [1].

The results of this study can be used as a basis of analysis for the other contemporary American authors, such as Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon, etc. The development of this study could lead to identification of common topics within the historical context and different methods of describing the history in the fiction works of American postmodern authors.

Works cited

1. Coover R. The Public Burning. Detroit, MI: Dzanc Books, 2014. Kindle Edition.

2. Ashkerov A. YU. Metaistoriya metaistorii, ili Dekodirovanie Hejdena Uajta (Uajt H. «Metaistoriya: Istoricheskoe voobrazhenie v Evrope XIX veka») // Sociologicheskoe obozrenie. 2002. T.2. No. 1. Pp. 87-99.

3. Cohen S. After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s. Iowa, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2009. 249 p.

4. Estes D. C. American Folk Laughter in Robert Coover's The Public Burning // Contemporary Literature. 1987. Vol. 28. No. 2. Pp. 239-256.

5. Fuko M. Nicshe, genealogiya i istoriya // Filosofiya epohi postmoderna: Sbornik perevodov i referatov. Minsk: Izd. OOO «Krasiko-print», 1996. P. 74-97. URL: http://filosof.historic.ru/books/item/f00/s00/z0000552 /. (The date of application: 22.09.2019).

6. Giles P. Historicizing the Transnational Robert Coover, Kathy Acker and the Rewriting of British Cultural History, 1970-1997 // Journal of American Studies. 2007. Vol. 41. No. 1. Pp. 330.

7. Hite M. “A Parody of Martyrdom”: The Rosenbergs, Cold War Theology, and Robert Coover's “The Public Burning” // NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. 1993. Vol. 27. No. 1. Pp. 85-101.

8. Savvas T. "Nothing but Words"? Chronicling and Storytelling in Robert Coover's The Public Burning // Journal of American Studies. 2010. Vol. 44. No. 1. Pp. 171-186.

9. Valente L. F. History, ficiton and national identity in J. U. Ribeiro's "An Invincible Memory" and R. Coover's "The Public Burning" // Chasqui. 2011. Vol. 40. No. 1. Pp. 80-95.

10. Walsh R. Narrative Inscription, History and the Reader in Robert Coover's The Public Burning // Studies in the Novel. 1993. Vol. 25. No. 3. Pp. 332-346.

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