“A Sudden Story”

•A parody of the Quest:

George and the Dragon
• A self-referential
interrogation of what
kind of story can be told
in postmodernity.
 Pomo condition: Nothing new. Now what
does the artist do?
• If all the stories have already been told, and all the songs have already been sung… what do
we do?
• (1) Take what was low and make it high? Modernist artists like Marcel Duchamp, presented
‘found objects’ as art, such as a urinal (see next slide).
• (2) Tip high to low: Arthurian legends= founding myths of British national identity;
establish master narrative of a nation of ‘knights errant’ redeeming the naïve and innocent
from evil (master narrative of redemption & good triumphing over evil).
• The story of Shaka has similar elements to it. How would it ‘go down’ if you parodied that
legend?
• If all the stories are already told the conditions are “ripe for the critical distance,
interrogation, self-reflection, and re-evaluation of how (or why) should I engage
with the culture around me, how (or why) should I make art?” (Craig Pollard, 2014,
“That Future Islands Performance.”)
• (3) Art/literature reflects on its own creation (its ‘borrowings’, its construction, it re-
organises and twists the old into new configurations).
 “Fountain” by
Marcel
Duchamp
(1917)
• Postmodernism destroys
distinctions between high
and low art.
• It challenges power
dynamics. Who decides what
is art? Galleries are owned
by a wealthy, cultured and
educated elite. By turning a
urinal into art, Duchamp
blasts these distinctions
• A postmodern reading of a text is an approach that emphasizes
the role of language, power, and subjectivity in shaping the
meaning of a text. Postmodernism challenges the notion of any
fixed objective reality or truth. Instead, it foregrounds how reality is
constructed through language, discourse, and cultural practices.
Questions to ask of a Pomo text:
• How does the text reflect the social and historical context in which it was
produced?
• How does it challenge the power dynamics of this context/or of contemporary
society? Who has voice now that was previous silenced?
• What side of the story is represented? How does it challenge essentialist ideas
of identity?
• How does the text challenge or subvert traditional literary conventions or
expectations?
• How does the text play with language and meaning, and how does this
contribute to its overall effect?
• How does the text problematize the concept of authorship and the authority
of the author?
• How does the text draw attention to its own status as a text and to the act of
reading itself?
• Pomo texts are countercultural – they challenge the dominant cultural (e.g.
ENGL301 =slaves narratives, postcolonial re-writings of history, queer
narratives, SciFi, Afrofuturism, posthumanism – ‘reimaginings’ of the past and
future; alternative worlds, hybrid identities
“The Death of the Author”
ROLAND BARTHES
French literary
theorist, philosopher,
linguist and critic.

Roland Barthes. 1968. “The Death of the Author”

S. Heath, trans. and ed. Image, Music, Text: pp. 142-8
 Death of the
Author?

• Criticism of ‘biographical’ reading of novel.

• Challenges assumption that author holds
privileged access to the one true meaning of
his/her work.
Why is the author not the
authority on the meaning of
their text?
 Why…?
1) Each author unconsciously brings to the
writing process all the texts that are already
in circulation in their life – everything they
ever encountered, everything they ever read,
all the cultural texts of which they are a
product, their whole worldview.
 Let’s unpack that a bit…
• An author/individual is made up of all the
stories/images/ideas that inform their worldview, many of
which filter into their being unconsciously.
(Thanks to Freud & psychoanalysis we know that most of the time we are not in control of our thoughts
and actions.)

• Inother words, the author is not in control of the text’s

effect.

•And …
• 2)
The author cannot control the reader
and what they brings to the reading process. Each
reader is different – each reader brings different
cultural capital, socio-political subjectivity, value-
systems etc.
“The reader is the space on which all the
quotations that make up a writing are
inscribed”
 Barthes’s conclusion …
“[A] text is made of multiple writings, drawn
from many cultures and entering into mutual
relations of dialogue, parody, contestation,
[…]The reader is the space on which all the
quotations that make up a writing are inscribed
without any of them being lost; a text’s unity
[meaning] lies not in its origin but in
its destination”
(189).
 Text = tissue??(not for snotty
noses)
• Barthes uses the metaphor of a cloth. The word
tissue comes from the Old French word tissu,
meaning “a ribbon, or belt of woven
material.” In fact, as a verb, tissue means "weave
fabric strands."
Text as network, as galaxy
“the networks are many and interact, without any one of
them being able to surpass the rest.
[…] a galaxy of signifiers ; it has no beginning; it is
reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of
which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one;
the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach,
they are indeterminable . . .The text is “plural”, it is “never
closed […] based as it is on the infinity of language”. (S/Z
p. 5-6)
Writerly versus Readerly Text
“[T]he goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to
make the reader no longer a consumer, but a
producer of the text. Our literature is characterized
by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution
maintains between the producer of the text and its user,
between its owner and its customer, between its author
and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into a
kind of idleness […] instead of functioning himself,
instead of gaining access to the magic of the signifier,
to the pleasure of writing, he is left with no more than
the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text:
reading is nothing more than a referendum."

Roland Barthes, S/Z, p. 4

 Reader is co-creator!
• The implications of “the death of the author” and the idea
of the writerly text is that the reader becomes a co-
creator!
• Metafiction
forces the reader out their comfort zone,
making them an active participant in the meaning-
making process.
• How does the story subvert our
expectations of what a story should do?
How does it subvert the Romance/quest
plot?
How is the title ironic (and its meaning
undercut or undermined)?
 Title: “A Sudden Story”
Sudden (adjective): occurring or done quickly and unexpectedly or without warning. "a
sudden bright flash"
Synonyms: unexpected, unforeseen, unanticipated, without warning

Do stories appear out of nowhere?

• How can anything happen ‘suddenly’ – it has all been the
product of the writer’s long drawn out cogitation and
rumination. There is self-reflexive (self-referential) irony in
the title.
• Theplot-line of fairytales and quest narratives are so well-
known, surely there can no longer be any surprise for the
reader?
• Suddenness is a fictional construct. Writers create suspense
by withholding information in order keep the reader
interested. The repetition of “sudden” makes it redundant
and absurd.
• Cooverbreaks the unspoken pact between writer and
reader – he does not allow us to be swept away by allure of
story.
• Repetition of “suddenly” lends a sense of endless
circularity to the text. It refuses the linear progression of
plot which is one of the primary conventions of narrative.
• Once upon a time, suddenly, while it still could, the story began. For the hero,
setting forth, there was of course nothing sudden about it, neither about the setting
forth, which he’d spent his entire lifetime anticipating, nor about any conceivable
endings, which seemed, like the horizon, to be always somewhere else. For the dragon,
however, who was stupid, everything was sudden. He was suddenly hungry and then he
was suddenly eating something. Always, it was like the first time. Then, all of a sudden,
he’d remember having eaten something like that before: a certain familiar sourness …
And, just as suddenly, he’d forget. The hero, coming suddenly upon the dragon (he’d
been trekking for years through enchanted forests, endless desert, cities carbonized by
dragon-breath, for him suddenly was not exactly the word), found himself envying, as
he drew his sword (a possible ending had just loomed up before him as though the
horizon had, with the desperate illusion of suddenness, tipped), the dragon’s tenseless
freedom. Freedom? The dragon might have asked, had he not been so stupid, chewing
over meanwhile the sudden familiar sourness (a memory … ?) on his breath. From
what? (Forgotten.)
 Two key words pop up at the end
• Freedom
• Forgetting
• These words have POLYVALENT meanings (poly=many; valent =
valid)
• They also are metafictional – they raise metaphysical/philosophical
questions beyond/outside the fictional story.
• For the first time the knight is envious of the dragon!? The dragon is
‘tenseless’ – he is a creature and not burdened by intellect. He as a
‘stress-free’ existence. His one concern is filling his tummy.
 Forgetting

• “With regard to the plural text, forgetting a meaning

cannot therefore be seen as a fault. Forgetting in
relation to what? What is the sum of the text? […].
Forgetting […] is an affirmative value, a way of
asserting the irresponsibility of the text, the pluralism
of systems […]: it is precisely because I forget that I
read.” (Barthes, S/Z p. 11)
• Reading should be an endless process. ‘Forgetting’
allows space for new interpretations.
(Forgotten)
 Forgotten?
• In
“A Sudden Story” you need to ask what is forgotten
and why?
• Who does the forgetting? The Dragon? And/or an omniscient
narrator? Coover?
• Why does the Dragon forget do you think …?
• Hehas gold-fish memory. He has suddenly forgotten that he
has just devoured the knight (that “familiar sourness” of
human flesh).
• Or,has the dragon been slain by the knight and is
“forgetting” because he is dying and is losing consciousness?
Reading the ending through the lens of
Barthes
• Forgetting allows space for the ‘plurality’ of the text.
• Thestory self-consciously points to the ‘tiredness’ and
overuse of literary conventions and genres. It overtly
parodies fairy tales (“Once upon a time”) and medieval
romance quests (the allusion to George and the Dragon).
Thus the word “forgotten” may also be the narrator’s (and
Coover’s) refusal to offer a clichéd or overused ending, so he
has the Dragon ‘forget’ the ending.
• If we read Coover through the lens of Barthes, forgetting
may be necessary to keep the text open (writerly), rather
than closed and predictable (readerly). It is better to
forget the already written endings so new ones can be
imagined. The ending may also be forgotten to put the
onus of meaning-making on the reader. We have to do the
work of constructing a possible ending .
 Postmodern love of Fairytales
• The word forgotten also points to a genre that is
forgotten, ignored and treated as irrelevant by more
‘adult’ or academic readers: the fairy tale.
• Why is the fairy tale a treasured genre by postmodern
writers?
• Metafictional writers, frustrated by overdone realist fiction, revert
back to more ancient modes of story-telling – modes that
originated in the oral tradition and form a part of our collective
unconscious.
• Fairytales, legends and myths (with their oral roots) are
flexible forms. Traditionally oral storytellers would meld the
tale to suit their purposes.
• They are simultaneously universal and specific.
• Coover re-invigorates the fairy tale through playing with our
expectations of it.
 Themes?
• Freedom?

• Why does the hero yearn for freedom? Freedom from what?
• Freedom from the tyranny of the dragon? But the dragon
doesn’t seem like the villain anymore.
• Freedom from the prison of fixed forms – he is forever bound to
repeat the same plot-line and become a stereotype: the knight
in shining armour on a quest to save the damsel in distress
from the dragon.
• Is
Coover challenging the western master narrative of ‘freeing’
society from its dangerous others?)
• As this is metafiction – a story that turns the mirror on the art
and artifice of narrative construction – freedom may imply the
liberation of the text? … the writer? … the writerly reader?
 Themes contd.
• Memory? Forgetting?
• Isthis a petition to forget all we know about story and
begin again. The story began “while it still could”? Is
Coover anticipating its end and anticipating a space
for rebirth of something new.