Scott Rettberg and Robert Arellano's collection of interviews "with critics, creative writers, students, and friends of Coover" to commemorate the passing of one of the pioneers in electronic literature.
Robert Coover was one of the most important American novelists of the 20th Century, the author of more than twenty books including novels, short story collections, plays and other writings. He was also a leading figure in the field of electronic literature, the teacher of many digital writing workshops at Brown University, the co-founder of the Electronic Literature Organization, and a tireless promoter of the field and of innovation in digital writing.
Robert Coover passed away on October 5, 2024, in the company of his family in Warwick, England, listening to “Penny Lane” by the Beatles as he drew his final breath.
This collage of voices, adapted from a simultaneously released Off Center podcast, is part of a larger project based on interviews that Robert Arellano and Scott Rettberg have been conducting with critics, creative writers, students, and friends of Coover in 2023-24, including many of the people who knew Coover’s work best. We also include a segment of a lecture titled “A History of the Future of Narrative” that Coover gave at the University of Bergen in 2008, and segments of interviews Larry McCaffery conducted with Coover in 1979 and 1999. The project will eventually include a work of interactive hypermedia and a book. The project is in progress, and more interviews are already scheduled.
In order of first appearance, the speakers include Robert Coover, Scott Rettberg, Robert Arellano, Larry McCaffery, Lance Olsen, Nick Montfort, Stéphane Vanderhaege, Caitlin Fisher, Thomas A. Bass, Tom LeClair, and Alvin Lu.
Robert Coover
Don Quixote, obsessive reader of books, sallied forth from his library on his genre established in adventures, a full century and a half after the invention of movable type and after a massive amount of other published writing once heralded, now largely forgotten, but probably necessary for Rocinante to get his footing. In America, book publishing had to wait nearly two centuries for the definitive American novel to appear, sending the nation out to sea on a doomed Nantucket whaling ship that it might find itself. And even then, it took better than another half century while Melville’s reputation languished before its value was finally understood. The new computer technology of our age is still developing and may well need another half century to achieve some sort of maturity, assuming humanity’s creative appetites outlasted destructive ones, and we get that far. Meaning that even if digital novelistic masterpieces are improbably already being created, it will likely take at least that long for them to be widely recognized as such. Meanwhile, as readers, we live in a rich and enviable time. We have at our fingertips, more accessible than ever, an unparalleled abundance of great writing, including great novels, with new works of print literature appearing by this shelfful every day. Suddenly, as the book takes to its sickbed, everyone wants to write one. And at the same time, we are also witnesses to the emergence of the new, exciting, new writing medium of the future. Able, if we wish, thanks to the very technology making it happen, to write our way into the ongoing worldwide discourse in the globalized digital era, it will be increasingly difficult to speak of national literatures or even located about that medium’s development and its future impact on such treasured historic art forms as the traditional American novel.
Scott Rettberg
I knew Bob Coover mostly through electronic literature and starting the Electronic Literature Organization with him. But you know, one of the amazing things is that for all that he contributed to that field, both through, you know, the writers’ workshops at Brown, and along with you, the hypertext workshops, but also the ELO and really investing in getting that started and organizing events and sort of trying to bring other people into the fold, to show them what hypertext was, sort of going on these speaking tours that weren’t really focused on his own work, but focused on hypertext at the same time as he, yeah, you know he’d just published his last novel, Open House, which was his twentieth novel?
Robert Arellano
Yes, twenty. Twenty novels.
Scott Rettberg
So that’s an amazing production. And these are, most of these aren’t like, you know, they aren’t feathers. They’re tomes.
Robert Arellano
Sort of the bookends on that career, to me, even though there were a couple of novels that followed The Brunist Day of Wrath, which came out about eight years ago, nine years ago, I remember him being on a reading tour and stopping through my university in Southern Oregon. And then that first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, that won the William Faulkner Foundation award for a first novel. Those are, gosh, I mean, between those two, it’s got to be at least 2,000 pages, yeah. And that’s, you know—
Scott Rettberg
And then short stories. I mean, in a way, some of his work that I think will be most taught, or remembered, are the short stories. I remember when I was in graduate school doing my master’s, reading Pricksongs and Descants and my mind being opened to a new way of writing, a new focus. It really drove an interest in postmodern fiction for me that continued and that eventually drew me into digital writing as well.
Robert Arellano
Yeah, Pricksongs and Descants and “The Babysitter,” the centerpiece of that collection that has been anthologized all around and translated into so many languages.
Larry McCaffery
To start with, Pricksongs and Descants is a major book for me. It was, it is, it was a kind of collection that was but done by a very ambitious writer with a lot of different kinds of stuff. He was basically throwing down the gauntlet, I think, to American fiction writing with all these kinds of different exemplary fictions. He has a section in the book just called exemplary fictions. And he wrote the introduction in the middle of the book, “Prologue,” that he dedicated to Cervantes, and he laid out a lot of Bob’s main things, about struggling against dogmatic perspectives. It really was a great introduction to that. I still think that’s a great collection. I’ll never forget starting “The Magic Poker” and realizing that this is Borges, Bob’s homage to Borges, I think, but that book, it had so many different kinds of stuff in there. And a lot of the pieces were there, like “The Babysitter” and “The Elevator” and “The Gingerbread House.” They were so many different perspectives, and they were all discontinuous in a way. They were all relevant to the main thing, but none of them would be considered the real thing. In other words, they were all stuff that he was making up, and this was a different perspective than most writers that I was aware of.
Lance Olsen
So, I did my undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, and a friend and I would always hang out. We’d find an empty classroom on Friday evenings and read stuff to each other. And I was taking a short story course. “The Babysitter” was on it, and I started to read that. And it just absolutely blew me away. I mean, I know this is a sort of typical story that everybody knows about Coover, but you know, I had been raised on pretty traditional, you know, normative kinds of narrative, and this just was completely otherworldly. So a couple things drew me in immediately, you know, this, this idea of sort of contradictory universes going on in the same story, as everybody says, the sort of proto-hypertextual elements to the story, the sheer narrative energy, momentum, both at the level of sentence and at the level of a story that had no, you know, what we usually think of as story arc, but rather just sort of jumped all over the place in many wonderful ways. And in a sense, it’s playing with a genre, the domestic realist genre, but exploding the genre, which is, you know, the heart of one of the things that Coover did, right? So I ran out and got Pricksongs and Descants, where it had originally appeared. And what was wonderful for a, you know, what was I was like, 18 years old, seeing this guy take these genres, and completely sort of misform them, reform them, rethink them, whether it’s the fairy tale or a magic act, or this domestic realist sort of thing. I was just captivated. And this would have been, you know, in the mid 70s, and I started to read everything I could get my hands on by him.
Nick Montfort
Obviously “The Babysitter” is a classic. More recently, “Going for a Beer” is one I also teach. And it’s, you know, it’s super short. And you one of the things that’s great about it, because, you know, I’m teaching people narrative theory, not to be like super-deep PhD-level literary scholars, but in order to open up their own writing practices, to learn more about writing through narrative theory. And so we learn a little bit about this. We learn some about theory, fictionality, narrative theory, and so forth. And then I give them something like “Going for a Beer.” And then I’m like, “Well, what do we make of this?” Right? And so, students are perplexed in a lot of ways.
They’re like, “This is a parable about the dangers of alcoholism.”
“I’m not sure, I don’t know if that’s really what’s going on here.”
But we start talking about it. And it’s a sort of story in which, before the narrator has finished narrating what’s gone on, like, that’s, it’s already happened, and, you know, the next event is transpiring in his life, right? And, and so we start talking about him. We’re like, wow, you know, we’re able to actually understand this a lot better and learn a lot more about it by applying what we figured out in narrative theory. But there’s still a lot more we don’t understand.
So, it’s great. It’s a good example of something where you can dig into it, but there’s always more.
Scott Rettberg
Yeah, there are always layers of complexity.
Nick Montfort
Similarly, with “The Babysitter,” theory of fictionality and narrative theory. At first you think these are alternative things that could be happening, but then you find no, they’re going on in sort of different universes, like they’re different ontological spaces that this is happening in and they’re not consistent with one another. And yeah, so the stories are great.
Robert Arellano
The thing that we don’t always say first when we talk about Robert Coover’s writing, but that is right there in the minds of everyone who knows him, is his attention to language and to the sound of a language, his precision at the level of the phrase, you know, the sentence. It’s highly crafted. And he, more than anything, I think, although I’ve been a fan of his longer arcs and his playing with nonlinear time, line, and point of view and stories that recursively fold back upon themselves, those larger structures. But it’s just down to the level of gosh, just every, every word being the essential one for that point in the story, in the sentence. And so, I would say that he’s definitely burned his way into my central nervous system, as a writer. I probably—since I was 19, when I met him, I haven’t written a sentence without him looking over my shoulder in one way or another.
Robert Coover
I still like best storytelling. Perhaps it’s because I feel more self-confident that I’ve been doing it longer and with more success, but I had the feeling all the time that storytelling is something that can be done a thousand different ways. It doesn’t have to be done with words on a printed page or even spoken words. It can be done lots of ways. And all of us were brought up in an age when we were more than made aware of this by our every Saturday morning religious experience in the local 10 cents cinema. So, the possibility of story revealing itself in a lot of different ways has been part of our common experience, and being, not so interested in language and manipulation of language as in the potential story itself, the exciting story, the self-revealing qualities of story, how story leads us along through the world and so on. I’ve never pulled back from all the possibilities in terms of materials and what we might use instead of words?
Caitlin Fisher
One of the first times I was ever a visiting professor anywhere was at Brown University and hosted by Robert Coover. And it really did. It had such a major impact on me, both that Robert Coover was just a genius and so generous, but also what I felt at that time, and that I often try to try to model is at that point in his career, being able to say because, you know, having had, you know, many conversations, it wasn’t, at least from my perspective, it wasn’t so much that Robert Coover all of a sudden wanted to do only electronic literature. It was that he leveraged his, his celebrity, really, to champion a small cause. And I remember being in the Brown CAVE and realizing also that it felt to me like it was run like a radio station that, you know, the cardiologists and the archeologists got it during the day, because it was a multimillion dollar facility, and Robert Coover was like having, in the interstitial spaces, like getting poets and writers in and just doing some phenomenal pioneering work, just recognizing the opportunity: the prescience of that. I think Robert Coover really single-handedly elevated the field at a time when it could have gone either way.
I remember as a graduate student reading “The End of Books,” and, you know, there were only going to be, like 12, you know, examples. And you know, suddenly just everything is blown up. And I think, of course, the field would have grown in that absence. But I think having somebody with that, with those credentials, believing that you can sometimes invest your energies in the new, and there’s a whole generation of writers that are that were inspired directly from Robert Coover and what he built at Brown, and the multiplier effect of that generosity and that capacity to see potential and to just be a bit risk-taking. What does it mean when you, when you get to the point in your career when you can risk things in the service of helping an emerging field?
Stéphane Vanderhaeghe
I wasn’t very well-read at the time. I’m still not very well read by all means but I really had the impression that I was learning how to read by reading Coover. And it was very important to me at the time. You know, when I chose the topic of my dissertation that I really wanted—because in France, I mean it’s probably the same in the US—but we have to devote three years, you know, but in reality, more like five, to someone or some topic. And I really wanted to have fun, you know, I didn’t want to be that much—I mean, of course, it was work—but I was careful to choose a writer who could entertain me and could make me think, and that could somehow make me learn about literature. And actually, when you read Coover, you often feel that you’re reading everything, you know. I mean, the whole of western literature is in Coover somehow, all the myths, the stories, the Bible, modernism and Melville and everything is there, because he read it all. It was really a great experience in that regard. So, yes, it’s very much imprinted in my in my brain. I learned to read with him, and I probably tried to at least learn to write from him.
Larry McCaffery
The Public Burning is still, I think, Bob’s major book.
Scott Rettberg
Masterpiece?
Larry McCaffery
It’s a masterpiece. You can’t say enough about it. But The Public Burning was, it was a book that was very interesting. It was very into Nixon and so forth, but mainly it was about the language that we spoke in, American idioms. And that’s always been Bob’s greatest gift, I think. He, maybe it’s not quite as true now, but he had an ear for American lingos and a lot of variety of lingos, and he got that all down in The Public Burning. In a way, the Uncle Sam voice was a composite of American presidents and other figures in American literature, like the huckster. So, all of those things, Bob did it and did it better than anybody else has, still, has ever done it.
Thomas A. Bass
The Public Burning comes out in 1977, and through that a remarkably important book. You know, Richard Nixon was a was a crook, a con man, a grifter, a killer. And you know, Roy Cohn. We got the Roy Cohn connection straight from Richard Nixon to the—I refuse to use his name—the orangutan, the orange person who became the 45th president of the United States. There’s a direct line, from Richard Nixon to the 45th president of the United States.
Scott Rettberg
Yeah, unfortunately. When, when I realized that that Cohn was the family lawyer… History doesn’t work in these kinds of immediate movements, does it? It sort of loops on for a long time, and we’re still living with the same phenomena that that Coover was writing about.
Thomas A. Bass
Oh yes, indeed. Coover put his finger on this. That’s why he’s such an incredibly important writer. One of the most important writers of the 20th century. He, he tuned right into the insanity that was going to consume us. And it’s in The Public Burning with a kind of manic brilliance and astounding perspicacity. And of course, then, Coover such is a great writer that he you know, Richard Nixon was supposed to be a kind of carnival barker, he was just supposed to kind of move the narrative along. The pathos in the narcissism of that man…. But The Public Burning, it’s an essential book. It’s a brilliant book. It’s why Coover is so important. He was able to put his finger on our ailments, on the zeitgeist, on the paranoia, the apocalypse, belief in the apocalypse, the End Times that are going to save us from our current grief. How many people are yearning for the End Times?
Robert Coover
Apocalyptic is a misnomer for an awful lot of contemporary fiction in that it borrows from Christian mythology and the notion of cyclical time to suggest something moving toward final cataclysm. Short of apocalypse, there’s always disaster, which we have visited upon us from day to day, and we have had, in that sense, an unending sequence of apocalypses long before Christianity began and up to the present. To anybody who was being carted off Auschwitz a few years ago, apocalypse had already happened.
So, in that sense, I don’t think of myself as an apocalyptic writer. I’m not borrowing on some phony mythology talking about final judgments and all, but I am, like anybody has to be, incredibly, terribly worried about the potential for horrible disaster that exists in all worlds at all times, but certainly right now in ours, with this insane political situation we now have. It’s obviously inviting something pretty awful, and so there is a sense of boding disaster, which is part of the times, just like cowboy stories and self-reflective fictions.
Tom LeClair
The best I can do is to think of him as a novelistic anthropologist. I believe he studied anthropology at the university. And I don’t think he ever got over that, that idea that contemporary Americans are just part of another primitive tribe. And so all of this stuff about festivals and anarchy and atavism that marks his fiction, both the novels and the short stories, I think, comes out of that. But if anthropologists are supposed to be extremely neutral in their collection and sorting data, then I would say Coover satisfies that requirement.
Scott Rettberg
But maybe to come back to postmodernism, let’s say. Where did he fit within that, and I don’t know, maybe, did postmodernism make sense anyway, as we look at it retrospectively?
Tom LeClair
Well, if you think of the modernists like Joyce and Elliot, going back to archetypes and earlier myths, then Coover is more in line with them, in his interest in prehistory, in festivals and prelinguistic activity, as a matter of fact: sex and death, murder, eating and drinking.
So, in some ways, he’s sort of modernist, but almost all his works are about themselves too, as far as I can tell. So, in that way, he’s extremely postmodern, self-conscious and playing with conventions, and then saying, “Well, I’m playing with conventions,” and then you don’t know. I mean, this is in the work itself. And you don’t know how exactly he’s playing with the convention, satirizing it or whatever. So, I see him as being really an odd, bifurcated figure, in this regard. I can’t think of other people who would be as interested in primal emotions and behavior as Coover was.
Scott Rettberg
I had an interesting conversation with Tom LeClair last night, and he talked quite a bit about the atavism that’s present in Coover text, and the sort of, kind of decadence. And I was, I was just thinking about the id and Robert Coover. The sort of mix of the very low and the very high. I’m just coming out of reading Gerald’s Party, where you have this, you know, this pornographic imagination going on for a great deal of it, and yet you have these moments of philosophy and clarity and warmth mixed in, amidst this kind of charnel house, you know, however you want to describe that party. Yeah, so, so what do you think, if you’re kind of just to think back to this melodrama of cognition, where do some of those obsessions, you think, or interests, or ways of conceiving the world that are more id-based in Coover come from, or how do they highlight other aspects of, of the human, beyond the base?
Stéphane Vanderhaeghe
Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t really know. I mean Coover as always interested in in the novel as a form, as a genre, and fiction as such, and as I said earlier, I think he’s very much aware of where everything comes from. So, of course, he’s always referred back to Cervantes, for instance. But there is something of that, and this is something that Pinocchio in Venice exemplifies, what you describe as the mix of the low and the high, high culture and low culture. And it’s something very much from inherited from the carnivalesque tradition in the Bakhtinian tradition. I think there’s something there.
And then, yeah, I don’t know how much, I was born in 1977, and I mean, Bob started writing in the 1960s, at the end of 1950s and 1960s. I’m not very much aware, I mean, I am aware, historically speaking and culturally speaking, of what happened at the time, but I didn’t live at the time. So, I don’t really know how much that may have been a part of this, the kind of agent provocateur, you know, and a tendency to write and dive into topics and subjects that the novel somehow did not want to consider at some point, the kind of the Beauvoir novel, you know, so, so, I don’t know. I mean, there might be something there.
Scott Rettberg
Yeah, probably something to do with the rejection of bourgeois values during the turn the 1960s, 70s. I think that’s definitely there. Or even the sort of establishment of language, I guess, right? I think of the Dada there, you know, that kind of gesture.
Stéphane Vanderhaeghe
I was going to say, it is very much pleasure driven. He’s, I mean, that’s one of the great things that I appreciate in Coover, you sense that he’s having fun and, and it’s— I think it’s all about the fun. I mean, it’s a huge jest. I mean, I’ve read Open House, his latest, and it’s danse macabre to the end. It’s a great, probably his final, novel. It’s a kind of a farewell to it all. And it’s great. I mean, the way he treats that. And again, you find this, this high and low mix. And there’s something very carnivalesque, and very funny, and very dark, at the same time. And very clever.
Larry McCaffery
See, he did a book, A Night at the Movies. I think that was another masterpiece. And that’s there again. He did all kinds of different voices, but all grappling with the American cinema and the cinema, that was his big influence. I think that he was, he grew up with the cinema and watched it, and yet he wanted to break it apart and look at the elements that it was made out of. That’s an interesting book, because that was the art form that probably appealed to Bob more than any that he grew up on. More than television, because he wasn’t much of a television person, until later on.
Scott Rettberg
So, yeah, one thing just to comment on there—I think this was sort of a characteristic of quite a bit of his work, that he was very interested in the materiality of these different forms, but also how they are taken apart, how they tell stories differently, yeah, then against again, working against that, taking one medium of storytelling and putting it into another. You know, he did this. I would say he did this with theater, and to some extent, with painting and with the digital as well.
Larry McCaffery
Do you know that that Bob studied painting? He doesn’t talk about this very much, but I believe he studied at the Art Institute for a while with LeRoy Neiman. The sports painter. He did a lot, he did a lot of things, before he before he became known.
Scott Rettberg
And he did films too. I mean, he had that film in the 60s.
Larry McCaffery
Yeah, at the University of Iowa. I always wondered what would have happened if, if Bob had had more encouragement in that. Though it’s probably just as well that he didn’t.
Scott Rettberg
Well, he said, you know, he said that the FBI confiscated a lot of the best parts of the film. I actually ran across—because I was looking for, I was just trying to create in my head, a kind of chronology—and yeah, the University of Iowa library has a video cassette. You know, I know he wasn’t happy with the documentary at the end of it, but they have a video cassette of the film he made in 1968 about the about the protests.
Larry McCaffery
Wow. I would love to have seen that. Well, you know, I remember that one of the early articles that I published about Bob was about his relationship to Cubist painting as I was using analogy, and I don’t know how good my article was, but that I was again pointing out the way that Cubist painting had similar, similar impulses as Bob’s fiction, In the sense that they would present all the different perspectives at once, and none of them were considered the real thing.
Robert Arellano
I rolled up on Bob in his office hours in the fall of 1990 and he was just back from a sabbatical, and as a result, I hadn’t had a chance to take a workshop with him yet. I was an undergrad in the creative writing program, and I’d gotten to take workshops with just about all the full-time faculty and several grad students. And I approached Bob, I’m sure other undergrads did as well, in the hopes that he might be my thesis advisor. It was up to students to make an arrangement with a faculty member to be their first reader, and maybe there would also be a second reader. And within a few minutes, chatting in his office, he in a very friendly kind of letting me down gently way, explained he was not taking any undergraduate students, that there was enough demand, naturally among the MFA students to work with him, that he wasn’t going to be able to advise any undergrads. And fortunately, I think more than anything, just out of uh, just out of kind of shame, I didn’t leave right away. I perhaps was trying to console myself. And so, I asked him what else he was working on. And he mentioned a couple of writing projects. And then he said, plus, “I want to teach this new workshop using the computer to make stories that can be read in maybe a variety of, infinite numbers of different orders and sequences that you determine as the reader.”
And I said, “Oh, you mean hypertext?” And his eyes lit up, and he looked at me, and he said, “You know about this stuff?” And I said, “Yeah.” And I soon, in my own mind, became an expert. I had taken George Landow’s survey, literary survey, course in the English program.
Scott Rettberg
You were already thinking about writing fiction in hypertext, then?
Robert Arellano
I was writing in a way that had been influenced by taking that course and spending three and a half months on Intermedia, the homegrown hypertext software that George Landow and the folks at IRIS really developed out—IRIS being the Institute for Research and Information Scholarship—on some grants in the 1980s and I say that as a way of—I didn’t necessarily think I was going to go back to intermedia, and we didn’t think of anything, I hadn’t heard about Storyspace yet, although it was in development, and I don’t think anybody had foreseen what would happen with web browsers, like Mosaic becoming Netspace and the World Wide Web. The thesis I was working on was kind of a nonlinear print novel at the time, my undergraduate thesis, and Bob, at the end of the at the hour of his office visit, I made an arrangement with him that he would read my thesis if I would be his teaching assistant for that first hypertext fiction workshop, which was planned for winter or spring semester we called it, starting in January ‘91.
Alvin Lu
Yeah, for a young, I was a young writer, maybe a little bit on the fence about, you know, making the commitment, as it were. And he spoke very—there are several phrases that, you know—we didn’t have, I wouldn’t say we had, like, deep, long, all-night conversations, but there were things that he said that definitely have stuck over the years. You know, just being very encouraging. I think it was actually in the hypertext class, you know, it was very early on for me, just letting me know that, like I needed you know, that I had something and that I but if I was going to do anything, I needed to stick with it. And that was very encouraging coming from him and some reiterating that kind of later on, when I came back for the MFA. The interesting he was, he told me that when he said that, um, and you know actually, I always wondered how to interpret this, he says, “You know what, things are gonna get tough at some point, and just remember James Joyce.” And I was like— I don’t know exactly what he meant by that. I mean, I never thought of, I mean, obviously Joyce has a huge influence, but I never thought of Coover as a particularly Joycean author, nor did I talk to him about Joyce a lot.
Robert Arellano
Interesting. Wow, you’re gonna make me puzzle over that one.
Alvin Lu
The other time was when I was thinking about coming back and applying for the MFA. I was in Taiwan. I was barely getting by. I’m just having fun, but I didn’t really have funds or anything. And, um, he was just encouraging me to just come back broke. And I thought yeah, and that’s what, uh, what I should be doing in my twenties, I guess.
Robert Arellano
That means a lot to hear, Alvin, because we were there around the same time. It was kind of like our stories wove a little because, you know our years, our graduating years, got kind of off, which means we weren’t in the same workshop for the most part after that first hypertext fiction workshop, but we would probably go to the same readings. And I know I got to see you, and I’m remembering that too, and it’s a good reminder to those of us, like you know, who are parenting, that it’s so easy to make a positive influence on someone who’s feeling a little adrift in their early twenties.
But it was the same thing with me when I came back. Because I did come back. I took a year, a gap year, I guess, in retrospect, after the undergrad, before coming back for the MFA and I know I can’t remember the exact moment or where we were, but I know that it was Robert Coover saying you should do this. And it’s, because I had enough sort of just affection as well as respect for him, that I said, if this person is saying I should do it, and look at his writing and, you know, look at how he continues to do it. That’s, I guess, my next two years, yeah. Happened to me, yeah.
Alvin Lu
And the other thing, in terms of just what I took away from this, less about Bob personally, but more about the hypertext class in particular, was my first novel. I did not, I deliberately did not, attempt to write a novel in a standard novel structure, because having gone through the Brown writing program, why would you do that? But I was also having difficulty dealing with a book-length manuscript. And in the end, what I went back to was all the structural stuff that I struggled with in that hypertext class. And that helped me really clarify and structure that novel.
Robert Arellano
Wow, right? I wonder probably a lot of Bob’s former students, and just you know others too, who took hypertext workshops with grad students who came, and faculty who continued, would say that. And I remember, and I paraphrase this really sort of clumsily, but I like my clumsy East Coast kind of Jersey paraphrase here, Bob used to say something like, “We don’t expect to be churning out 20 or 40 new great American hypertext novelists every year. Instead, it’s what writers of any genre and any you know kind of platform are going to take away from having thought this way for a while, from having broken out of the box or the line” and I feel the same way. It was liberating for my first and other novels since to be like, “Oh, I don’t. I don’t have to worry about what sequence all these fragments are going to end up in. That comes last.”
Larry McCaffery
So I would go with Bob into the classroom when he first started doing those classes in electronic literature, and that was mind-blowing for me, to listen to him talk about electronic literature. And I remember one of the things, one of the things always was, “Tell me what this tell me what you guys are going to do. But what can you do with electronic literature that you can’t do with regular literature?” And that was always, always, the point, and that was very meaningful to me, that that meant something that made sense to me, that you try to emphasize what it can do. Well, you know, one thing that I also remember about the same time was wondering: why wasn’t Bob writing more electronic literature? Why wasn’t he experimenting with this? And I said, for example, “The Babysitter” in Pricksongs and Descants seems like a perfect hypertext story. And he said the whole point was that had to be written in a book form. Though it was, it was not, it was not a hypertext. It was—I was struggling against these constraints that I had, and I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t have been struggling if I had hypertext to do it. So, I thought that I don’t even know if Bob has ever done any? Has he done any?
Scott Rettberg
A little bit, sort of hidden in various things, the two pieces that come to mind are well, there’s The Hypertext Hotel. There were, you know, a few scenes here and there that he wrote, and then Screen, the 3D one in the in the CAVE that was, it was collaborative, but much of it was his writing, a big part of that, did you ever go to that piece where it sort of, no, comes out of the walls and—
Larry McCaffery
No.
Scott Rettberg
Oh, you missed that. That’s, it was a really, really, interesting experience, great use of the medium. Yeah, and The Hypertext Hotel, which, you know, was a thing that he that they did with the students at Brown. It was actually lost. And then a few years back, Bobby got ahold of, well Coover sent Bobby, an old laptop he had that happened to have a copy of a version of this thing on it. And then Bobby had to hack the laptop and now he’s sort of, he’s recreating, you know, he’s, he’s transferring it over from Storyspace to Twine. And during the workshops he was doing with our students, he’s like, getting people to write new rooms, you know, so well. So that’s terrific.
Larry McCaffery
I remember him talking about that piece. Well, to me, you wouldn’t have had, you wouldn’t have had the same kind of excitement about hypertext and electronic literature without Bob. I remember he wrote that article from The New York Times. What was it? The end of literature?
Scott Rettberg
“The End of Books.” That was the first one.
Larry McCaffery
Well, it struck me then that Bob was not primarily— he was very interested in teaching electronic literature. And he did a great job at it. He got it kick-started. But he himself was not— He was always writing fiction. He was writing the regular type of fiction.
Scott Rettberg
Yeah, yeah.
Larry McCaffery
Well, that’s why I asked if he’d written some other things too.
Scott Rettberg
Yeah, a couple little things, and he did some, I mean, he’s done some combinatory things. He did “Heart Suit,” this fiction that you sort of mix up on playing cards. And I know he said that he’d experimented with doing things with punch cards, with computer cards, you know, back very early in his career. But none of that ever saw the light of the day. But I think, actually I recently read a transcript of the interview you did with him in the 90s, where he said he was sort of trying to work against the line and linearity in a lot of his pieces. But the form of the book that was the right medium for that. Right? And then, I know he told me once that he thought the most important thing about those electronic writers’ workshops were to sort of push people out of their comfort zones. And then, he always thought that the most interesting thing was to work against the medium, whatever medium you happen to be working in.
Robert Coover
As for hypertext, of course, that book would not have been hypertext, not in my mind anyway. Somebody else might work it that way. But to me, it had to do with, in part, with the ticking clock. I mean, we are, this is a countdown. The Rosenbergs are going to die, and the reader knows that. And so, there’s a kind of that thing that’s in that “do oo oom of high noon” song, is sort of each chapter. It is that there’s a beat pounding through there, and Nixon himself is running against it. He’s throwing it up over and over, and he’s running out of time when he can sort things out, until he gets really desperate and pulls his final act. So, there’s a need for this, this rush toward, toward the catastrophe, the disaster again, but ah—
Larry McCaffery
Again, not hypertext, by the very fact that you lose that ability to move the reader forward in hypertext, in that way, right? Or at least some of some of them.
Robert Coover
I would say this is also true of books like John’s Wife or Gerald’s Party. I’m showing, perhaps in some cases, as I did from before I knew what hypertext was, back in the earliest short fictions in Pricksongs, ways in which the line can be substantially disturbed. The trouble with moving anything, even like “The Babysitter,” into hypertext, is that part of the way it works is by a resistance to something that exists in it. That is to say: the line is there because it’s built into the technology of it. And so, you cannot. You could tear the pages out, and that I have done works like that, on playing cards and that sort of thing. But this was as long as you put it inside this print-bound form, there is the implicit forward motion of the line. And so, part of the way some of these other pieces work is by acknowledging the presence of it and disturbing its power and impact. I mean creating ways in which it’s resisted as well. So that resistance to the line is part of the nature of the system. When you take the line out, move it into hypertext, the feeling of that resistance vanishes. We have a different kind of experience. I think all good writing tends to resist the limitations of its form, and its technology is implicit in the form, and that this is going to be true of hypertext too, so that the best hypertexts are going to be ones that find those characteristics of the form that are troublesome and either exploit or resist them in ways that you feel when you get into the piece itself and resisting the line out there ain’t what you do.
Lance Olsen
I was at a lecture of Coover’s at one point, he was talking about the history of narrative, and that’s what I focused on during my PhD. And he was talking about that when we read the history of narrative, unlike when we lived the history of narrative in the 18th century, the 19th century, what we really are doing is seeing the anomalies. Like we’re studying the anomalies of narrative. We’re studying, you know, Ulysses, or we’re studying Tristram Shandy, or we’re studying, you know, Cervantes, and because those are the things that are actually important to the life of narrativity. And so, when I was in my PhD program, I realized that I was unconsciously exactly doing that, that indeed, there are two ways to read literary history. One is as a series of continuities, and the other is as a series of disruptions and I was very much intrigued by those moments of disruption in literary history. And I think I just had this sort of built-in gene to like to gravitate toward texts that did that. And Coover, of course, was one of those, you know, living, breathing examples of that.
Scott Rettberg
When we were starting the ELO, of course at one point there was kind of an active antagonism to digital literature. I think culturally this was sort of, you know, seen as destroying the book. And I forget the guy who wrote the book about the dangers of digital writing—Sven Birkerts, right? I mean maybe he was right, the digital likely has been sort of dangerous to a certain type of reading. But I always sort of said, well, and I thought of FC2, where there’s a community of writers who are actually—and there are people reading it who aren’t those writers—but the sustaining community there is this community of writers who are interested in these ideas. And then you sort of see how the culture develops around it.
I’d say that electronic literature has remained this sort of small field. But it’s strange, because it’s become a small, but increasingly international field. So, while the readership is not something I’d describe as massive, you know, there are people doing databases of Arabic electronic literature and African electronic literature. There’s this kind of pull towards it, both kind of at an experimental level, but also, you know, I think about it as being as much about interrogating the culture of the digital and of platform culture. Sort of both kind of, “Oh, okay, what is this new environment for writing or for multimedia creation?” but also, like, “How do we understand what’s become of our language and thought?” and that some of these works can be objects through which we process those changes.
Yeah so, I think Coover, when we first started the ELO, his initial dream was that he wanted to see this explode, and he wanted to see, you know, Stephen King writing a hypertext novel and, you know that’s….
I mean, one of the things I’ll say about Coover, and I said this to him once was, you know, he’s written about the end of books, the end of print literature. And of course, he kept writing books. He wrote only minor little, little e-lit projects, dabbling a bit into some of the digital stuff. But he kept on, you know, he kept being, you know, a big cheerleader for this work. And at the same time as he was just writing books continuously, and I said, “Well, you know, I think that in a way you want to be the author of the last book,” you know?
“And then it’s done.”
[Laughter]
Sources
Coover, Robert. “A History of the Future of Narrative.” Keynote address, The Electronic Literature in Europe Conference, University of Bergen, Norway. Sept 13, 2008. https://vimeo.com/1765099
Arellano, Robert, and Scott Rettberg. Personal interview. August 22, 2023.
Arellano, Robert. Interview with Alan Lu. Personal interview. Sept 13, 2023.
McCaffery, Larry. Interview with Robert Coover. Personal interview. November 15, 1979. https://digitalcollections.sdsu.edu/do/c5f6339d-500e-417f-af67-f3dac94d7f16
McCaffery, Larry. Interview with Robert Coover. Personal interview. October 10, 1999. https://digitalcollections.sdsu.edu/do/1d4972ff-c8a8-4ed6-a11d-afa54025c622
Rettberg, Scott. Interview with Thomas A. Bass. Personal interview. September 28, 2023.
Rettberg, Scott. Interview with Caitlin Fisher. Personal interview. August 11, 2023.
Rettberg, Scott. Interview with Tom Leclair. Personal interview. September 7, 2023.
Rettberg, Scott. Interview with Lance Olsen. Personal interview. September 8, 2023.
Rettberg, Scott. Interview with Larry McCaffery. Personal interview. August 29, 2023.
Rettberg, Scott. Interview with Nick Montfort. Personal interview. August 18, 2023.
Rettberg, Scott. Interview with Stéphane Vanderhaege. Personal interview. September 8, 2023.
Contributor Bios
Scott Rettberg is the cofounder, with Jeff Ballowe and Robert Coover, of the Electronic Literature Organization. He is an award-winning digital author and electronic literature theorist, the Director of the Center for Digital Narrative, and the host of the Off Center podcast.
Robert Arellano is an American author, musician and educator from Talent, Oregon. His literary production includes pioneering work in electronic publishing, graphic-novel editions for Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint, and five novels published by Akashic Books. He taught the first hypertext writing workshops with Robert Coover at Brown University. He is a professor in the Emerging Media / Digital Arts program at Southern Oregon University.
Larry McCaffery is an American literary critic, editor, and retired professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. His work and teaching focuses on postmodern literature, contemporary fiction, and Bruce Springsteen. He also played a role in helping to establish science fiction as a major literary genre. He wrote his PhD dissertation, completed in 1975, on the early work of Robert Coover.
Lance Olsen is an American writer known for his experimental, lyrical, fragmentary, cross-genre narratives that question the limits of historical knowledge. He is the author of seventeen novels, one hypermedia text, six nonfiction books, five short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and two anti-textbooks about experimental writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction.
Nick Montfort is a poet and professor of digital media at MIT, where he directs a lab called The Trope Tank. He also holds a part-time position at the University of Bergen where he leads a node on computational narrative systems at the Center for Digital Narrative. Among his publications are seven books of computer-generated literature and six books from the MIT Press, several of which are collaborations. His work also includes digital projects, many of them in the form of short programs.
Stéphane Vanderhaege is an Associate Professor at the University of Paris 8 where he teaches American Literature and Translation. His research deals mainly with contemporary American fiction—especially with regards to its experimental aspects—and sits at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and the digital humanities. He is also a translator and novelist. His PhD dissertation evolved into his first book, Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page (2013).
Caitlin Fisher is a Canadian media artist, poet, writer, futurist and Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at York University in Toronto where she also directs the Immersive Storytelling Lab and the Augmented Reality Lab and was co-founder of York’s Future Cinema Lab. She was the creator of some of the world’s first AR poetry and long-from VR narratives and a pioneer of research-creation who defended Canada’s first born-digital dissertation.
Thomas A. Bass is an American writer and professor in literature, journalism, and history. He taught at the University of Albany, State University of New York. He is the author of numerous articles for Wired, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Smithsonian, Discover, and other magazines.
Tom LeClair is a writer, literary critic, and was the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati until 2009. He has been a regular book reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, The Nation, and others. He is the author of seven novels and five books of nonfiction.
Alvin Lu is a San Francisco-based novelist. He is an MFA recipient from Brown University and winner of the John Williams Prize for Prose and was a student in Robert Coover’s hypertext writing workshop.