Richard Nixon by Robert Coover, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

ED IT O R ’S CH O ICE* R I C H A R D N I X O N B Y R O B E R T C O O V E R , R O L A N D B A R T H E S B Y R O L A N D B A R T H E S STAN FOGEL University of Waterloo “ Imagination rules the world, shithead.” Robert coover “The Natural is never an attribute of physical Nature; it is the alibi paraded by a social majority; the natural is a legality.” roland barthes Xhab Hassan’s injunction in Paracriticisms to withstand the subjugation or assimilation of the new is apposite here: Reaction to the new has its own reasons that reason seldom acknowledges. It also has its rhetoric of dismissal, a. The Fad — “ It’s a passing fashion, frivolous; if we ignore it now, it will quietly go away” . . . b. The Old Story — “ It’s been done before, there’s nothing new in it; you can find it in Euripides, Sterne or Whitman” .. . c. The Safe Version — “Yes, it seems new, but in the same genre, I prefer Duchamp; he really did it better” . . . d. The Newspeak of Art — “ The avant-garde is just the new academicism.” 1 Some stories by Max Apple and Donald Barthelme and novels such as Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March by Frederic Tuten, and The Public Burning by Robert Coover arguably con­ stitute a distinctive genre: historical fiction differentiated from a more tra­ ditional historical fiction by its parodic and metafictive characteristics; meta­ fiction defines that self-conscious fiction which is primarily concerned with exploring the theory of fiction. Whereas traditional historical fiction incor­ porates historical details to provide verisimilitude or the texture of a partic­ ular period and/or locale, the new historical fiction seeks to deconstruct the historical context, to reveal it as a construct, as artifice. Of Doctorow’s * The category of “ Editor’s Choice” has been established by the Advisory Editorial Board for those essays which, for reasons of subject, methodology, conclusions, or the like, fail to gain the unqualified acceptance of the usual panel of readers for the Journal but which the Editor feels should nevertheless — perhaps because of their very unorthodoxy or controversiality — be offered to the readers of English Studies in Canada for their consideration. E n g l is h St u d ies in C anada, v iii, 2, June 1982 purpose in Ragtime, Barbara Foley writes, “he is using the reader’s encyclo­ pedic knowledge that a historical Freud, Jung, Goldman, and Nesbit did in fact exist in order to pose an open challenge to the reader’s preconceived notions about what historical ‘truth’ actually is.” 2 This is in contradistinction to Lukács’s position in The Historical Novel: “ Detail. . . is only a means for achieving . . . historical faithfulness” 3 and characters “in their psychology and destiny always represent social trends and historical forces.” 4 Although J. Ffollowell’s Fact and Fiction and M. Zavarzadeh’s The Mythopoeic Reality attest to critical interest in contemporary historical fiction, their focus has been primarily on writers such as Truman Capote and Nor­ man Mailer whose perspectives differ from those of Coover, Barthelme, et al. The work of Capote and Mailer is less of a challenge to constituted reality than it is an acceptance of or a repugnance toward the absurdity of that reality. Zavarzadeh, to be sure, hints of a yoking of both approaches when he writes, “The nonfiction novelist’s arrangement of facts is not endorsive (authenticating) but mythopoeic: it reveals the disorienting fictiveness inherent in facts.” 5 Nevertheless, Zavarzadeh’s emphasis devolves mainly on the “ fictiveness inherent in facts” rather than on the myths which give rise to those facts, on the bizarre quality of reality in the contemporary world rather than on the ideology or doxa which might account for the bizarreness. Events are transcribed by Capote, Mailer, and others such as Flunter Thomp­ son and Andy Warhol because the events themselves are fantastical and novelistic. Zavarzadeh cites, for instance, what he called the empirical irony in a remark made...