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Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction pp 103–131Cite as

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Problems and Pratfalls: Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme and Metafictional Style After Beckett

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Abstract

Despite Beckett’s commitment to writing ‘without style,’ he would present a considerable influence over the stylized and carnivalesque narratives of postmodern metafiction in the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter will investigate the Beckettian legacies of Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme, together with Beckett’s place in contemporaneous discussions around ‘the literature of exhaustion’ (Barth, 1967). For Coover (a regular contributor to Evergreen), the negative style of Beckett’s Malone Dies is refashioned into the flamboyant ‘Last Quixote’—a figure who comes to bear on the 1969 collection Pricksongs and Descants. Elsewhere, Barthelme demonstrates a particular interest in the ‘problem’ of Beckett, whose influence is reconfigured in ‘Not Knowing’ where ‘the more serious the artist the problems he takes into account.’

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Quoted in Diedre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, p. 149.

  2. 2.

    In Patricia Waugh’s compendious study, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, (Routledge: London, 1984), the concept is defined as writing ‘which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.’ p. 2 Waugh draws upon a vast array of texts that exemplify the metafictional impulse including Beckett’s Watt , Molloy , Malone Dies and Waiting for Godot , alongside examples by John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Walter Abish, Muriel Spark, B.S. Johnson, Jerzy Kosiński, Vladimir Nabokov, Brigid Brophy, Italo Calvino and others.

  3. 3.

    Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, (Wilfrid Laurier University Press: Waterloo, 1980), p. 6.

  4. 4.

    Boxall, Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism, p. 2.

  5. 5.

    Larry McCaffery, The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass, (University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, 1982), p. 22.

  6. 6.

    William H. Gass ‘Look at Me, Look at Me, Look at Me Now, Says This Sparkling, Teasing Prose,’ in The New York Times, (October 19, 1969), https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-pricksongs.html?scp=2&sq=Babysitter%2527s%2520Seduction&st=Search. The first use of metafiction is often attributed to Gass’ 1970 study Fiction and the Figures of Life.

  7. 7.

    Ibid.

  8. 8.

    John Barth, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion,’ p. 72.

  9. 9.

    Ibid. p. 67.

  10. 10.

    Ibid. p. 68.

  11. 11.

    Ibid.

  12. 12.

    ‘A Dialogue: John Barth and John Hawkes’, in Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, ed. by Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, (University of Illinois Press: Chicago, 1998), p. 15.

  13. 13.

    For a more detailed analysis of John Barth’s highly ambivalent debt to Beckett see James Baxter, ‘The “Problem” of Beckett in Postmodern American Fiction,’ in Textual Practice, (October 2018).

  14. 14.

    Peter Boxall, ‘Nothing of Value: Reading Beckett’s Negativity,’ in Beckett and Nothing, ed. by Daniela Caselli, (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2010), p. 29.

  15. 15.

    Ihab Hassan, ‘The Literature of Silence,’ in The Postmodern Turn, (Ohio State University Press: Cleveland, 1988), p. 3.

  16. 16.

    Israel Shenker, ‘An Interview with Beckett (1956),’ in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Raymond Federman and Lawrence Graver, (Routledge: London 1979), p. 149.

  17. 17.

    Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, (London: Flamingo, 1996), p. 402.

  18. 18.

    S.E. Gontarski, ‘From Unabandoned Works: Samuel Beckett’s Short Prose,’ in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989, (Grove Press: New York, 1995), p. xxv.

  19. 19.

    Ibid.

  20. 20.

    McCaffery, The Metafictional Muse, p. 25.

  21. 21.

    Coover, ‘The Last Quixote,’ p. 135.

  22. 22.

    Ibid. p. 132.

  23. 23.

    Ibid. p. 136.

  24. 24.

    Helen Moore Barthelme, Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound, (Texas A&M University Press: College Station, 2001), p. 46.

  25. 25.

    Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, p. 523.

  26. 26.

    Neil Schmitz, ‘The Hazards of Metafiction,’ in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 7, No. 3, (Spring 1974), p. 210.

  27. 27.

    ‘An Interview with Robert Coover,’ in Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, ed. by Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, (University of Illinois Press: Chicago, 1998), pp. 65–66.

  28. 28.

    Ibid. p. 77.

  29. 29.

    Samuel Beckett, ‘German Letter of 1937,’ in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, (Calder: London, 1983), p. 171.

  30. 30.

    See ‘Interview, 1986: David Applefield,’ in Thomas Kennedy, Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction, (Twayne Publishers Inc.: Woodbridge, 1992): ‘The seminal, crucial and critical influence on me was Beckett at a moment when I needed conviction about myself as a writer in a vocational sense as opposed to a commercial or professional sense. And he also clarified for me, at least as I understood it at the time, where narrative art had drawn itself to, and what might the ways out of it or beyond it.’ p. 116.

  31. 31.

    Robert Coover, ‘In answer to the question: Why do you write?’ in Revue française d’études américaines, No. 31, (February 1987), p. 119.

  32. 32.

    Neil Schmitz, ‘The Hazards of Metafiction,’ p. 21.

  33. 33.

    Lois Gordon, Robert Coover: The Universal Fictionmaking Process, (Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale, 1983), p. 8.

  34. 34.

    Coover, ‘The Last Quixote,’ p. 132.

  35. 35.

    Ibid.

  36. 36.

    Ibid. p. 138.

  37. 37.

    Ibid.

  38. 38.

    Ibid. p. 135.

  39. 39.

    See ‘Excerpt: The Unnamable,’ published in Chicago Review, No. 12, (1958), pp. 82–86. In ‘The Last Quixote,’ Coover also alludes to the controversy surrounding the publication of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch that would lead to the inauguration of Big Table.

  40. 40.

    Coover, ‘The Last Quixote,’ p. 133.

  41. 41.

    Ibid. p. 134.

  42. 42.

    Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, (Rutgers University Press: New Jersey, 1962), p. 179.

  43. 43.

    Samuel Beckett, ‘The Essential and the Incidental,’ in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, (Calder: London, 1983), p. 82.

  44. 44.

    Coover, ‘The Last Quixote,’ p. 139.

  45. 45.

    Ibid. p. 141.

  46. 46.

    Ibid.

  47. 47.

    Neil Schmitz, ‘The Hazards of Metafiction,’ p. 212.

  48. 48.

    William H. Gass, ‘Look at Me, Look at Me, Look at Me Now, Says This Sparkling, Teasing Prose,’ (1969).

  49. 49.

    ‘An Interview with Robert Coover,’ in Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists, p. 69.

  50. 50.

    Beckett to Bray, March 11, 1959, The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1957–1965, p. 211.

  51. 51.

    For Coover, the author is to ‘be the creative spark in this process of renewal: he’s the one who tears apart the old story, speaks the unspeakable, makes the ground shake, then shuffles the bits back together in a new story. Partly anarchical, in other words partly creative—or recreative.’ Quoted in Brian Evenson, Understanding Robert Coover, (University of South Carolina Press: Columbia, 2003), p. 13.

  52. 52.

    William H. Gass, ‘Look at Me, Look at Me, Look at Me Now, Says This Sparkling, Teasing Prose,’ (1969).

  53. 53.

    McCaffery, The Metafictional Muse, p. 60.

  54. 54.

    Neil Schmitz, ‘The Hazards of Metafiction,’ p. 211.

  55. 55.

    Thomas Kennedy, Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction, p. 47.

  56. 56.

    Gerhard Hoffman, From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction, (Rodopi: New York, 2005), p. 220.

  57. 57.

    Ibid.

  58. 58.

    Samuel Beckett, Proust, (Chatto and Windum: London, 1930), p. 19.

  59. 59.

    Thomas Kennedy, Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction, p. 44.

  60. 60.

    Brian Evenson, Understanding Robert Coover, p. 69.

  61. 61.

    Lois Gordon, Robert Coover: The Universal Fictionmaking Process, p. 106.

  62. 62.

    John Barth, ‘Introduction’, in Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews, (Counterpoint: Berkeley, 1997), p. xi.

  63. 63.

    Donald Barthelme, ‘After Joyce,’ in Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews, (Counterpoint: Berkeley, 1997), p. 9.

  64. 64.

    ‘Interview with Charles Ruas and Judith Sherman,’ in Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (Counterpoint: Berkeley, 1997), p. 226.

  65. 65.

    ‘An Interview with Donald Barthelme,’ in Anything Can Happen ed. by Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, (University of Illinois Press: Chicago, 1998), p. 34.

  66. 66.

    See ‘At the Tolstoy Museum,’ ‘Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel’ and ‘The Death of Edward Lear’ for key examples.

  67. 67.

    Barthelme, ‘Not Knowing,’ p. 11.

  68. 68.

    ‘Tom Driver in Columbia University Forum,’ in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Raymond Federman and Lawrence Graver, (Routledge: London 1979), p. 219.

  69. 69.

    Barthelme, ‘Not Knowing,’ p. 21.

  70. 70.

    Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, p. 143.

  71. 71.

    Hereafter, quotations from Barthelme’s short stories are taken from the volume Sixty Stories (G.P. Putnam: New York, 1982) and Forty Stories (G.P. Putnam: New York, 1987).

  72. 72.

    Donald Barthelme, ‘Not Knowing,’ p. 19.

  73. 73.

    ‘An Interview with Donald Barthelme,’ in Anything Can Happen, p. 34; in a striking point of intersection, Coover responds to Barthelme’s analogy in an interview with Thomas Kennedy; ‘His bemused and foundered wreck would contemplate with wry delight its barnacles; my blind barnacle would try, in that hysterical moment before something ate it, to intuit the full enormity of the wreck upon which, as though condemned, it fed.’ Thomas Kennedy, Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction, p. 120.

  74. 74.

    Ibid. p. 41.

  75. 75.

    David Gates, ‘Introduction,’ in Donald Barthelme: Sixty Stories, (Penguin: London, 1982), p. xviii.

  76. 76.

    Tracy Daugherty, Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme, p. 252.

  77. 77.

    Ibid. p. 388.

  78. 78.

    ‘Interview with J.D. O’Hara, 1981,’ in Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews, (Counterpoint: Berkeley, 1997), p. 275.

  79. 79.

    Ibid. p. 279.

  80. 80.

    Donald Barthelme, ‘Not Knowing,’ p. 14.

  81. 81.

    ‘Interview with Charles Ruas and Judith Sherman,’ in Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme, p. 227.

  82. 82.

    ‘Donald Barthelme Interviewed by George Plimpton,’ (1984), Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjokr7W1ixk

  83. 83.

    Quoted in James Knowlson, Images of Beckett, photographs by John Haynes, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003), p. 37.

  84. 84.

    Lawrence Shainberg, ‘Exorcising Beckett,’ in The Paris Review, No. 104, (Fall, 1987), p. 106.

  85. 85.

    ‘Interview with Charles Ruas and Judith Sherman,’ in Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews, p. 227.

  86. 86.

    Barthelme, ‘Not Knowing,’ p. 18.

  87. 87.

    Ibid. p. 21.

  88. 88.

    Ibid. p. 12.

  89. 89.

    Samuel Beckett and George Duthuit, ‘Three Dialogues,’ p. 141.

  90. 90.

    Barthelme, ‘Not Knowing,’ p. 24.

  91. 91.

    Ibid.

  92. 92.

    ‘Interview with J.D. O’Hara, 1981,’ in Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews, p. 286.

  93. 93.

    Barthelme, ‘Not Knowing,’ p. 21.

  94. 94.

    Barthelme, ‘After Joyce,’ p. 9.

  95. 95.

    Francis Gillen, ‘Donald Barthelme’s City: A Guide,’ Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 18, (1972), p. 37.

  96. 96.

    Tony Hilfer, American Fiction Since 1940, (Longman Publishing: New York, 1992), p. 218.

  97. 97.

    Samuel Beckett and George Duthuit, ‘Three Dialogues,’ p. 145.

  98. 98.

    This matter is explicitly addressed in Barthelme’s interview to J.D. O’Hara in Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews, (Counterpoint: Berkeley, 1997), p. 283.

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    James Baxter

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Baxter, J. (2021). Problems and Pratfalls: Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme and Metafictional Style After Beckett. In: Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction . New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81572-1_3

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