Language and Power: Robert Coover's The Public Burning

Depending on which page you open it to, Robert Coover's sprawling 1977 novel The Public Burning may appear to be any one of a great many things: an expose of a miscarriage of injustice; a fictional memoir of Richard M. Nixon; an analysis of occult elements in public space and government rites; a historical novel about the Eisenhower era; a comic-book battle between a fantastic superhero and supervillain; or a far-reaching critique of a nation so caught up in its own fears and hysterical rhetoric that it can no longer honor its own ideals. It is testament to Coover's immense skills as a writer that his novel succeeds at being all of these things, and ends up, in fact, transcending the sum of its formidable parts.

The Public Burning takes as its topic the execution of ``atomic spies'' Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The book covers their arrest, trial, and conviction in some depth, and it is a sobering and instructional story. The prosecution's flimsy case was based primarily on the testimony of convicted spies and known liars, many of whom reversed their pre-trial testimony once a plausible story began to emerge from their coordination sessions. The FBI frequently alluded to concrete evidence that implicated the Rosenbergs, but none of this ever materialized in court. No matter: the Rosenbergs had once been Communist sympathizers, and given the prevailing mood of national hysteria, that was enough. In order to be convicted of treason -- a capital offense -- hard evidence would have been required, but the Rosenbergs' history of resistance managed to get them convicted of espionage. Convicted on the lesser charge, they were nevertheless sentenced to death on the stronger charge (a move which that later lead Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to attempt to order a stay on the executions). All of this, coupled with atomic physicist Harold Urey's public protestations that there was no ``secret'' to the atomic bomb, led to a massive international clemency movement, including such figures as Albert Einstein and Jean-Paul Sartre, a movement which in many ways prefigures the Mumia Abu-Jamal movement of today.

This story, just by itself, is gripping reading. The Rosenbergs were a pair of minor-league radicals, unwillingly thrust into the hot national spotlight, and their bewilderment, desperation, and protestations of innocence are profoundly moving, terrifying really -- it is all too easy to imagine that the same situation could happen to any of us with a progressive record. But Coover isn't content to merely play the history of the case completely straight -- he uses the case to launch a satirical attack on the entire deranged circus of America. In Coover's version of events, the Rosenbergs' execution does not take place in Sing Sing Prison, but rather in the center of Times Square (``the ritual center of the Western world'') as part of a grotesque, Disney-orchestrated public spectacle. While reviewing the case, Vice-President Nixon falls in love with Ethel Rosenberg, going so far as to masturbate over her picture. The Poet Laureate of Coover's America is TIME Magazine. And America itself appears as a lewd, trash-talking, racist superhero -- Uncle Sam! -- who is engaged in a global battle with the embodiment of Communist ``villainy'': The Phantom! Coover's acid caricature of America is clever, astute, and, I would argue, necessary: when the justice system and the federal government make straightfaced, yet absurd, assurances that justice is being served in the face of blatant injustice, they unwittingly turn themselves into agents of self-parody. Coover merely picks up where they leave off.

This is not to say that Coover skimps on the research. The book teems with historical detail. Coover has clearly reviewed a vast corpus of documents in preparation for writing this book -- court transcripts, Nixon biographies and memoirs, journalistic coverage of the case, letters written by the condemned Rosenbergs, and the public papers of President Dwight Eisenhower -- but these documents end up in the book in transmogrified form. Nixon narrates his biographical details in the first person. TIME's coverage of the case and the war in Korea are lineated like poems. Transcripts of Ethel Rosenberg's plea for clemency and Dwight Eisenhower's denial of that plea are written like a two-character experimental theatre piece, complete with stage directions. Wrenchingly poignant excerpts from the Death House letters are performed as a skit by the Marx Brothers. And the Rosenbergs' stirring final refusal to ``confess'' to this frame-up in order to spare their own lives is transcribed here as an opera libretto.

(It'd be a moving one, too. Try these lines on for size: ``We will not be intimidated / by the threat of electrocution / into saving their faces! / Nor will we encourage the growing use / of undemocratic police-state methods / by accepting a shabby, / contemptible little deal / in lieu of the justice / that is due us as citizens!'')

All this monkeying with language makes The Public Burning a ``postmodern'' book -- a charge to which Coover would assuredly confess -- but in his case, postmodernism isn't equivalent to mere gamesmanship. What Coover is doing when he combines linguistic forms in unexpected ways is highlighting the way that that language functions, the way it determines how we perceive reality. When you read words that are lineated, like poetry, you accord them the attention you'd accord poetry, and the mechanisms that power them stand out more clearly, whether they be driving Eisenhower's jingoistic manipulations:

``Here, then, is joined no argument
between slightly differing philosophies -
for this whole struggle, in the deepest sense
is waged neither for land
nor for food nor for power
-but for the Soul of Man himself!

or driving TIME's seductive ideological biases:

the rows of servicemen
held fast to their seat-
belts as the plane lurched
and swayed towards the
air base . . .
they were
returning to korea to defend
the embittered koreans against
the great conspiracy that
the rosenbergs had served

These points that Coover makes aren't merely academic; in a very real sense, the Rosenbergs were electrocuted because the people in power could control and manipulate the language that defined the case in the public's mind. Those who control language control reality: Coover treats this, rightly, as serious power, a contemporary form of magic. This is the book's master theme: the concept that takes the book's many facets and organizes them into a diamond: sharp, brilliant, and incredibly valuable.