Robert Coover: the metaphysics of bondage.
From: The Modern Language Review |
Date: 10/1/2003 |
Author: Hume, Kathryn
The author examines Robert Coover's use of the grotesque and scenes of bondage to portray the metaphysical in his novels and short stories.
Robert Coover: the metaphysics of bondage
Throughout Coover's work, we find evidence of a vision--a concept of humanity and society--that fits Frye's demonic vision. Coover is by no means alone, obviously, or Frye would not have inductively gathered the evidence he did for such a shared set of values found in writers from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, including Ben Jonson, George Orwell, and Franz Kafka. In American Dream, American Nightmare, I devote a chapter to contemporary novels in this vein: Reed's The Free-Lance Pallbearers, The Public Burning, Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, Acker's Blood and Guts in High School, Ellis's American Psycho, Mailer's Why are We in Vietnam?, Dworkin's Mercy, Vizenor's Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles, and Silko's Almanac of the Dead. (21) Most Burroughs novels belong in such company. For all that these novels share similarities of demonic site, demonic eroticism, ironic myths, and images of bondage, they are quite unlike one another. To take but one index, some have political agendas, some have social, and some ethnic.
