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“Nothing but Words”? Chronicling and Storytelling in Robert Coover's The Public Burning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

THEOPHILUS SAVVAS
THEOPHILUS SAVVAS
Affiliation:
University of Essex.
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Abstract

Robert Coover's 1977 novel The Public Burning is a dramatic re-presentation of the last three days of the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Dubbed the “atomic spies” by the media, the Rosenbergs were accused of passing on the “secret” of the atomic bomb to the Russians. The sensational trial provoked widespread attention for its seeming encapsulation of the fault lines in American society opened up by anticommunism and the emergent Cold War. Found guilty, they were the first American nationals to be executed for espionage. This paper analyses the different narrative methods that Coover employs to re-present the past. In particular I focus on Coover's juxtaposition of a third-person, seemingly omniscient, narrator with the first-person narratological voice of then Vice President Richard Nixon. I suggest that we can best understand this not simply as providing objective and subjective versions of the event, as some critics have claimed, but rather as a distinction between history as chronicle (or what I call a synchronic method of history), and history as storytelling (or diachrony). Through this The Public Burning becomes not just a satirical critique of the specific political culture of the time, I contend, but, more fundamentally, a general exploration of the difficulties of reconstituting past events into knowledge. It is here, perhaps, where the novel's continuing relevance for today lies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , February 2010 , pp. 171 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Robert Coover, The Public Burning (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 91. Further references will be to this edition and cited within parentheses in the text.

2 John Kuehl, Alternate Worlds: A Study of Postmodern Antirealistic American Fiction (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 228.

3 Lance Olsen describes them as “steroidal” in his article “Stand by to Crash! Avant-Pop, Hypertextuality, and Postmodern Comic Vision in Coover's The Public Burning,” Critique, 42, 1 (Fall 2000), 51–68, 54.

4 E. L. Doctorow, “Foreword” to John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (New York: Mariner, 2000), ix.

5 Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “An Aye for an I,” New York Times Book Review, 9 Oct. 1977, 3. Quoted in Keener, John F., “Writing the Vacuum: Richard Nixon as Literary Figure,” Critique, 41, 2 (Winter 2000), 121–59Google Scholar, 142.

6 Robert Coover, quoted in Strecker, Geralyn, “Statecraft and Stagecraft: Disneyland and the Rosenberg Executions in The Public Burning,” Critique, 42, 1 (Fall 2000), 70–80Google Scholar, 71.

7 Olsen, 54.

8 White, Hayden, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry, 7, 1 (Autumn 1980), 5–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 9. Note, however, that here it is White's aim to rehabilitate the image of the chronicle, to claim that it is not a lower form of historical representation, but simply a different one.

9 Ibid., 13.

10 Ibid., 20.

11 Most critics agree that the tone of the chronicler seems resolutely masculine.

12 Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 78.

13 Daniel Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 70.

14 John F. Neville, The Press, the Rosenbergs and the Cold War (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1997), 36.

15 Mazurek, Raymond A., “Metafiction, the Historical Novel, and Coover's The Public Burning,” Critique, 23, 3 (Spring 1982), 29–42Google Scholar, 35.

16 Tuchman, Gaye, “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen's Notions of Objectivity,” American Journal of Sociology, 77, 4 (Jan. 1972), 660–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981), 28.

18 I am not suggesting that in general Jameson's term “concept” is equivalent to “ideology,” but rather that, in America in the early 1950s, the “ideology” of the period was the most notable “concept” to emerge from it.

19 Joyce Milton and Ronald Radosh, The Rosenberg File (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997).

20 Lisle A. Rose, The Cold War Comes to Main Street: America in 1950 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 120.

21 Robert Coover, in Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, eds., Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Authors (Urbana, IL and London: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 74.

22 Robert Coover, in McCaffery, Larry, “As Guilty as the Rest of Them,” Critique, 42, 1, (Fall 2000), 115–25Google Scholar, 118.

23 Brian Evenson, Understanding Robert Coover (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 117.

24 White, Hayden, “Against Historical Realism,” New Left Review, 46 (July–Aug. 2007), 89–110Google Scholar, 91.

25 Ibid., 93.

26 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (New York: Norton 1996), 537. Quoted in White, “Against Historical Realism,” 93.

27 Keener, “Writing the Vacuum,” 137.

28 Olsen, “Stand by to Crash,” 54.

29 Frick, Daniel, “Coover's secret sharer? Richard Nixon in The Public Burning,” Critique, 37, 2 (Winter 1996), 82–91Google Scholar, 86.

30 LeClair, Tom, “Robert Coover, The Public Burning and the Art of Excess,” Critique, 23, 3 (Spring 1982), 5–28Google Scholar, 7.

31 Ibid.

32 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trand. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage 1979), 49, italics added.

33 Milton and Radosh, The Rosenberg File, 13. Reflected in the fact that they were the first people to be executed for espionage in the United States. Although, as Nixon in the novel notes, “they were being tried in fact for treason, never mind what the constitution might say” (85).

34 Foucault, 49; also quoted in Strecker, “Statecraft and Stagecraft,” 74.

35 Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” in idem, Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 131.

36 Estes, David C., “American Folk Laughter in Robert Coover's The Public Burning,” Contemporary Literature, 28, 2 (Summer 1987), 239–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 240.

37 Coover, quoted in Frick, 82.

38 Lois Gordon, Robert Coover: The Universal Fictionmaking Process (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 82–83.

39 Keener, “Writing the Vacuum,” 137.

40 Perhaps this final moment draws together the performance theme of the novel and the character of the historical Richard Nixon in one satirical image. Obsessed with the motif of “the arena” throughout Six Crises, Nixon eventually wrote a memoir entitled In the Arena (1990); in Juvenal's satires, which Coover was surely familiar with, the arena is depicted as the bastion of homosexuality.