World Famous Comics: The Public Burning (Coover, Robert)
The Public Burning (Coover, Robert)
By: Robert Coover Publisher: Grove Press Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Grove Press Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 544 Publication Date: April 02, 1998
Amazon.com Review: For quite some time after the 1977 publication of The Public Burning, it was almost impossible to find a copy. The book's own publisher seemed--no, was reluctant to admit it even existed. That's because this imaginative reconstruction of the 1953 execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted for giving atom bomb secrets to the Soviets, was the first major work of modern fiction to feature a still-living historical figure as a prominent character. The book's obscurity was the publisher's attempt to avoid legal repercussions from Richard Nixon, who over the course of the book engages in a romantic interlude with Ethel Rosenberg and graphically surrenders himself to a rapacious Uncle Sam.
Now that Nixon's dead, however, readers are free to marvel at one of the few American novels to rival Joyce's Ulysses for sustained stylistic inventiveness. Snippets of speeches and articles from Time are recast in poetic form, entire scenes are presented in dramatic verse, as events in the Rosenberg case move towards their historically destined conclusion. --Ron Hogan
The Treasonous Truth The sheer brilliance of 'The Public Burning' cannot be understated. From the virtuousity of the writing to the subtle intelligence of its criticisms, this book still stands as a classic. Importantly, this novel is not merely an unfavourable take on the culture of the cold war but is a broader interrogation of the ways in which history folds into fantasy in American life, how law becomes theatre, war becomes spectacle, politics an electrocution. Its cartoonish aspects are not simply Coover's attempt to indict the era through mockery nor an invitation to stand over people in the past. Instead, they are a representation of a culture that can only ever come to terms with itself through cartoons, a nation that needs its enemies animated, its champions superheroic, its values decomplicated in dusty bromides and staid clichés. Most intriguing perhaps is the treatment of Eisenhower: in Coover's world, an example of how even the most moderate and benign public figures are entangled in the extremities of violence and cynicism that are not just the work of the political fringes nor the province of any one political party over another but are instead the popular centrifuge around which the idea of America assembles itself. There is no doubt that this is a highly political book but it is not political because it is partisan (a work of the Left raging against the Right) but rather because it is sceptical of politics altogether. All Americans assemble to see the Rosenbergs fry -- wherever they may lie on the political spectrum, Democrat or Republican, conservative or dissident. What burns in this novel is the public -- the very idea of a public entity or a civic realm which is constituted through well-intentioned notions of truth, security, justice, freedom and faith, but which cannot have any of these without an allegiance to the idea of the nation itself, an allegiance which will allow dissent within tight bounds but which will put those too far outside this boundary - especially those who move against the state in a criminal way - to a showy, spectacular death. At the heart of all this lies Nixon, not just because the disgraced future President is an indication of democratic bankruptcy, a representative of how power has become so misplaced, but also because he embodies the emptiness of the idea of the nation itself, the coercive need to 'act American' which is necessary to put into motion this patriotic stir of activity, this great rollicking farce. I note that some reviewers here have taken issue with the apparent lack of depth in the characters Coover offers in this book - Uncle Sam as snake-oil salesman, Nixon as buffoon and so on -- but this misses the author's real aim: to assemble already well-worn clichés in such an intense concentration that they expose the impossibility of character in such a culture, to demonstrate how the idea of America strings itself together in a series of lip-service wisdoms about history and destiny that ultimately eclipse individuality and to place each and every person in proximity to the electric chair, implicating everyone in the violent lunacy of the legal execution, which, because it is carried out in the name of the people, cannot help but involve the people in their entirety. Too often authors attempt to criticise America by putting forward a vision of what the 'real' America actually is or what the 'true' America should be, an alternative in either way that 'sheds light' on how the 'actual' inherent worth of the country has been corrupted. Coover, on the other hand, will have none of this: the carnivalesque inferno he conjures out of the careful blend of fiction and fact is aimed at decimating any salvageable idea of the nation at all, of tearing the whole logic of allegiance to the ground. In this sense, and quite proudly and profoundly, 'The Public Burning' is as treasonous to America as the Rosenbergs were deemed to be themselves.
It has to be said, however, that this book is not so much a defence of the Rosenbergs themselves or their crimes as it is a critique of the law that convicted them. It is a misreading of this book to assume the Rosenbergs are made into heroes, or that their operatic casting as victims should make us excuse their proven or potential guilt. Rather, Coover looks to them not to pardon them but to tell a story that will act as a counternarrative to how guilt and innocence were decided in this case. To this day, the controversy surrounding the Rosenberg trial is not so much to do with whether they were foreign agents (it seems Julius Rosenberg was involved in espionage, though the evidence is still out on his wife, Ethel) or whether the information they provided to the Russians was of any actual use (there is still some debate over this) but rather the gross miscarriage of justice embodied in the way they were put to death. As Justice Douglas explains early in the book to Uncle Sam, the US Constitution states that "no person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court." In the Rosenberg case, there was only one witness - Julius' brother-in-law, David Greenglass - and no confession. As such, to get around this, government prosecutors tried the Rosenbergs on a lesser conspiracy law, a piece of legislation which had been enacted by Congress to circumvent the 'two witness' provision by revising it so that only one witness's testimony could permit a conviction. And yet the hypocrisy of this was not so much the law in and of itself but the fact that the Rosenbergs were convicted on this lesser law even as they were sentenced to death on a *higher* law. Their prosecution went against the provisions of the Constitution but they were also handed the maximum punishment for treason - death - that only the Constitution allows. In other words, what enabled them to be executed was the very document that was shunned by prosecutors in the first place. This kind of legal cherrypicking is at the heart of Coover's critique because it demonstrates how the Constitution - designed, remember, not only to protect the nation from traitors but also to prevent the misuse of power, a different kind of treason - was corrupted in this case to serve the so-called national interest. If Coover wants this book to be traitorous in its searing critique of the idea of America, he also wants it to be constitutional. In fact, what Coover ironically shows us is that to be treasonous and to be a constitutionalist is one and the same in the USA so many years on from its founding. To think ourselves outside the nation is to actually think toward the document that brought it into being. This is not to say that Coover believes he can discern some 'true' shape of the nation in the constitution. No, in adhering to the constitution so closely, he cleverly highlights how the self-autonomising nature of that document - as the 'thing-in-itself' of the nation, as that which declared it into existence and thus somehow simultaneously embodied a pure *arrival* at its essence, already, case closed, all those hundreds of years ago - is so routinely and naturally undercut by the manipulations inherent to the history of the nation's actual practice. In truth, there is no democratic ideal so guaranteed by that founding document that we can't find a way to detain it or delay it or circumvent it on the ground - and always in the name of that selfsame democratic ideal, of course, and in the name of the constitution that is meant to forever defend it. In this sense, 'The Public Burning' is neither a simple-minded polemic against the cynicism of a culture nor a ham-fisted attempt to excuse the inexcusable. In the end, and with great courage and sensitivity, it is one long oath to a nation we would like to think exists but never really does.
Thanks, Kevin It's good to have red-baiting reviewers like Kevin Bowman to prove Robert Coover's point a half-century after the Rosenbergs died and nearly thirty years after his book appeared. Gee, even an evil intellectual ("vindictive college professor") turns up in Kevin's review. Talk about fully-formed characters.
It's a great book. You don't have to agree with the politics. There are parts where Coover goes way over the top, as you might expect with any 800 pound gorilla of a novel like this. It's true, it is a little "sophomoric" sometimes. It's profound more often, though, and not just because Coover takes potshots at Luce's Time Magazine.
Seriously, this is an unjustly ignored masterpiece. Let's hope there are more vindictive college professors out there.
Godawful Any book based on the premise that the Rosenbergs were innocent, deserving of beatification, victims of awful America, is not going to date well. 1977, I suppose, was a kind of high-water mark for that sort of thinking. If you have a friend who thinks Stalin was unfairly maligned, this may be the book for him.
I was forced to read this book cover to cover by a vindictive college professor who assigned it to me (and me alone) as the subject for a class writing project. I loathed every minute of it. From its doctrinaire anti-anti-communist, anti-Americanism; its sub-Dos Passos modernism; its sophomoric delight in scatology (giggle, giggle, tee hee, Nixon has sex with Ethel Rosenberg and is then anally raped by Uncle Sam). There are no fully-formed characters, just endless making of puerile political points. Nixon-bad. Time Magazine-bad. America-bad. Ethel Rosenberg-saint and martyr.
Its like a bad book treatment of a very bad Ken Russell movie. I'd rather eat jagged metal bits than be forced to read this pompous, train-wreck of a book ever again.
No more than a sideshow attraction Every now and then I finish a book and ask, "Now why did this author write that?" I'm not talking about trash reading. We know what that's for; entertainment. No, when I ask "Why?" after finishing a book, it's generally a longer work with artistic ambitions and evidently an important point to make. I just can't tell what that point might be.
Take "The Public Burning". The author, Robert Coover, is widely considered to be one of the leading lights of American experimental fiction. The novel is a semi-fictionalized narrative of the days preceding the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, here as in real life convicted of treason for selling atomic secrets to the Russians. It's a good read, but what's the value in telling a true story in such an odd way? The true story is dramatic enough as is. Coover never quite answers that, and it weakens his book.
Feel free to skip this part if you know the historical facts:
Back in the 1950s, the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear bomb. Many assumed that the Soviets must have stolen nuclear information from the U.S. through a network of spies, and the FBI picked the Rosenbergs as the guilty parties. They were convicted and sentenced to death, and despite a last-minute stay of execution by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, they went to the electric chair on June 19, 1953.
In his novel, Coover recasts the Rosenberg execution as a piece of political theater, deliberately staged by the Eisenhower administration to boost American morale, and therefore set to take place as the novel opens not at the Sing Sing death house, but in the middle of Times Square. Uncle Sam, here a real person, is a sort of superhero, possessed of remarkable powers in his neverending battle against the Phantom, his appropriately shady Communist counterpart. And perhaps most bizarrely, while half the chapters have the usual third-person narrator telling the story in a kind of hyper-inflated circus language, the other chapters are narrated by none other than Vice President Richard Nixon.
Before we get to Tricky Dick, however, let's consider the carnival-barker narration of the other chapters. It's filled with comic-book jargon, interjections on the order of "Good Heavens!" and various other cheesy rhetorical devices. Uncle Sam himself speaks like a snake-oil salesman, tossing in many a "Whoopee-ti-yi-yo!" and things like that as the execution approaches.
Evidently, this book seeks to present the United States as a nation of con men and suckers, but in the midst of all the tinsel and ballyhoo (directed by Cecil B. DeMille, with sets by Walt Disney), it seems like a lot of fun. Coover shows a nice balance between the exhilaration of rah-rah Americanism and the horror of the rot under the surface. It's all part of the same long, strange trip, and you can't have one without the other.
With a similar schizophrenia, in his sections of this book, Nixon has a sort of poetry in his soul and genuine sense of mission, both of them about as banal as you please. That sounds like a contradiction in terms, I know, but what else can you say about a character who comes right out and says that he loves his wife primarily because she belongs to him? Who can't decide between serving his country and serving himself, and often conflates the two? And who spends half his time parsing every one of Uncle Sam's most moronic clichés like it was the entrails of some sacrificial chicken?
If this description reminds you of your favorite national politican, Republican or Democrat, I assure you that's not a coincidence. Nixon himself once said, in real life, that John Kennedy was what people wanted to be, and he himself what they actually were. In any case, his fictionalized counterpart here is doubtless what we're afraid we are. He is Vice President of the United States, for God's sake, and he's still a loser. He sweats and stinks through the pages in desperate need of a shave or a toilet, he strains to justify himself and his past in the middle of a national crisis, he can't even relax while playing golf. And needless to say, the more he struggles for victory, the more clownish he becomes. By the time the book is over, a jammed Times Square has had an eyeful of Dick Nixon with his pants around his ankles, and there are worse humiliations in store for him.
Okay, so far we've got an examination of the American split personality from two very different and complementary points of view, filtered through an actual historical event and featuring historical figures. I was intrigued. So why did I feel so let down when I reached the last page?
I think it's because, when you get right down to cases, nothing really happens in "The Public Burning". Ethel and Julius Rosenberg die, Uncle Sam taps Nixon as a future president, and things go back to the way they were before. For all the flash and dazzle, the comic book zip, the world of this book and the world we live in are pretty much alike. Which isn't a bad thing, but the flourish made me anticipate something more, some explosive scream at the end. Instead, "The Public Burning" reads like Coover simply observed these events through a literary kaleidoscope and wrote down what he saw. That makes for good painting sometimes, but not necessarily good novels; "The Public Burning" is an amusing experiment, but so what?
In short, this book would have made a truly fascinating short piece, and even as is it's a lot of fun to read for the language alone. Really good full-length novels, on the other hand, leave what Anthony Burgess called some kind of residue in the mind. "The Public Burning" just slides right through. Bring on the next one.
Benshlomo says, 500-odd pages ought to weigh more than this.
Unfinished Perhaps it's unfair of me to rate this book, since I didn't make it to the end. It was disappointing, since I've liked others of Coover's books. This one is written in a stream of consciousness style reminiscent of James Joyce/"Ulysses" (which I liked a lot). Similarly, it also is incredibly literate and erudite, lots of language play which still somehow was mostly just hard and not fun the way language should and can be. I could appreciate the humor intellectually, but it wasn't really funny. The subject matter is a cynical take on a dark subject, the Rosenberg executions. I can certainly understand why its release was so contoversial. It might help to know more about the period but as someone who came of political age (later) during the Watergate years I know little about Nixon as VP and many of the social references were lost on me.
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