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Schiefer 1 Anna Schiefer Professor Holtkamp Introduction to Literary Studies December 4, 2011 The Facticity of Language in Robert Coovers

Going for a Beer What I find most striking in this text, is the creative power of language, which is used to literally create evidence, oscillating between past and future, thought and deed, the actual and the potential. This Essay attempts to discuss the way language operates in Robert Coovers short story Going for a Beer. The discourse of the story is based on repetition and jumps in time and space. The third person narrator seems disoriented, the narration is dominated by questions like: Did he finish his beer? or Did he enjoy his orgasm? etc. It seems as if the narrator was looking at some photographs, randomly arranged, trying to interpret the situation the person on the photograph might have been going through: ...as he sits on the edge of her bed with his pants around his ankles. Is he taking them off or putting them on? On the one hand the narrator seems confused, trying to reconstruct a narration from bits and pieces of information, which themselves are not very trustworthy. On the other hand this slight irritation promotes a different quality, which is based on the power of language as such. Coover's metafictional approach creates a discourse, where the potentiality of thoughts melts together with the course of actions: Perhaps he`ll have another one, he thinks, as he downs it and asks for a third. It is not just the jumps in time, which make the story this striking, but the coincidence of the possible and the actual, the materialization of words as soon as they are written, spoken or even thought. The vocabulary of potentiality is strongly linked to factual statements: ... not exactly good-looking but good-looking enough, and probably good in

Schiefer 2 bed, as indeed she is or later on: .. they both carry Kewpie dolls that probably have some barely hidden significance, and indeed do. One could argue, that the thoughts of the focalized drunk are always a step behind his actions, but it is also possible that his thoughts, expressed in language, immediately become evident and thus create reality. A whole lifetime is compressed into a single paragraph. Years are bound by a sentence: He decides that its time to call the affair off shes driving him crazy but then the brawny dude turns up at their wedding and apologizes for the pounding he gave him. Here one can see the structural primacy of language over actual events, which are marginalized to mere skeletons of stereotyped conventions (bar, bed, marriage, job, bar, bed, death, bar and so on and so forth). Coover takes it even further, the potentiality of thoughts is not only immediately actualized through actions but sometimes even materialized into objects, as in the case of the Kewpie dolls, which he mentions repeatedly throughout the story. The name Kewpie doll is derived from cupido, the Roman expression for beauty and erotic love. So the dolls probably stand for erotic experiences, or orgasms as Coover puts it, little trophies, banalized, collected and put on the shelf when the babies started coming. Even the most negligible things the hero considers, are turned into actions, things, material evidence of the power of language. In this story life is structured by rules of fiction where the time is out of joint; through repetition of the same situations, only slight variations are possible, where the position of the subject is interchangeable, for this reason no proper name is ever mentioned. The relationship of life and discourse is a hierarchical one, the individual (if there ever was one) is dying, but the story continues in the same manner with his or another's son: I went for a beer dad, things happened.

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