American Folk Laughter in Robert Coover's "The Public Burning"

Abstract

Robert Coover has shown a continuing interest in the sociological significance of folklore and in the techniques of folk narrative. In Universal Baseball Association (1968), the ball players are an occupational folk group complete with legendary heroes and their own ballads, maintaining their sense of identity partly through the folklore Coover has invented for them. In Pricksongs & Descants (1969), the retellings of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood show his interest in the plots, motifs, and narrative strategies of the European Marchen, and The Magic Poker is an unconventional fairy tale of Coover's own devising from a variety of traditional tale types and motifs.1 Another piece in the collection, Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl, pays some attention to the folk narrator's performance style and the context of a well-told tale. In this case Ola's story about the night her father shot her cat is technically a memorate, one of those narratives of personal happenings that abound in family folklore. By omitting some details from the original experience, she fashions an account ending with a punchline that becomes a family favorite. final section of Coover's story raises metafictional questions about this traditional form of closure, which is one of many structuring patterns that control the contents of folk narratives and, according to him, may prevent them from encompassing the full mystery of experience and the imagination. Coover's use of folklore is most extensive in Public Burning (1977), where almost every genre of verbal folklore appears: folk songs and ballads, tall tales, legends, jokes, folk similes, puns, proverbs,