Robert Coover

Robert Coover is a highly experimental writer, both a fabulist and a writer of metafiction. It seems that he is in very much the same tradition as John Barth and Donald Barthelme. I believe that once I read an artice somewhere, that pointed out the fact that while William Gass (another of the big experimental guys) only cared about what the language was doing, Coover is most excited to discover strange ways to structure his story.

Anyways, I've been reading his short story collection, Pricksongs and Descants, and he opens the section "Seven Exemplary Fictions" with a letter to Cervantes. I think what he has to say is extremely interesting, so here are some excerpts.

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But, don Miguel, the optimism, the innocence, the aura of possibility you experienced have been largely drained away, and the universe is closing in on us again. Like you, we, too, seem to be standing at the end of one age and on the threshold of another. We, too, have been brought into a blind alley by the critics and analysts; we, too, suffer from a "literature of exhaustion," though ironically our nonheroes are no longer tireless and tiresome Amadises, but hopelessly defeated and bed-ridden Quixotes. We seem to have moved from an open-ended, anthropocentric, humanistic, naturalistic, even - to the extend that man may be thought of as making his own universe - optimistic starting point, to one that is closed, cosmic, eternal, supernatural (in its soberest sense), and pessimistic. The return to Being has returned us to Design, to microcosmic images of the macrocosm, to the creation of Beauty within the confines of cosmic or human necessity, to the use of the fabulous to probe beyond the phenomenological, beyond appearances, beyond randomly percieved events, beyond mere history. But these probes are above all - like your Knight's sallies - challenges to the assumptions of a dying age, exemplary adventures of the Poetic Imagination, high-minded journey toward the New World and never mind that the nag's a pile of bones.

You teach us, Maestro, by example, that great narratives remain meaningful through time as a language-medium between generations, as a weapon against the fringe-areas of our conciousness, and as a mythic reinforcement of our tenuous grip on reality. The novelist uses familar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms and to conduct the reader (lector amantisimo!) to the real, away from mystification to clarification, away from magic to maturity, away from mystery to revelation.