‘Nothing but words’: Chronicling and Storytelling in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning

Abstract

Robert Coover’s 1977 novel The Public Burning combines a figurativere-telling of the final three days of the ‘atomic spies’, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, with a satirical portrait of Richard Nixon. Re-staging the execution as a public ritual in Times Square, Coover’s novel interrogates the creation, and our understanding of the political and historical record, and its symbiotic relationship with the public. When Nixon comments in the novel, ‘Form, form, that’s what it always comes down to!’ we recognise a sentiment that surely the author himself shares, as The Public Burning, for all its exuberant excess, and digressionary indulgence, has a carefully constructed architecture, portraying past events via alternating modes of representation.1 The prologue and even-numbered chapters are ‘narrated’ by a seemingly omniscient voice in the third person, which offers an epic, panoramic view of the sweep of history; the oddnumbered chapters and epilogue constitute an interior monologue of then Vice-President Richard Nixon.