Free Pricksongs & Descants by Robert Coover Page B

heart-shaped and blood stone-red, its burnished surface gleaming in the sunlight. Oh, what a thing is that door! Shining like a ruby, like hard cherry candy, and pulsing softly, radiantly. Yes, marvelous! delicious! insuperable! but beyond: what is that sound of black rags flapping?

 

     
     

    SEVEN EXEMPLARY FICTIONS
    Ded i cator ì a y Pr ó logo a don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
    Quisiera yo, si fuera posible (maestro apreciadisimo), excusarme de escribir este pr ó logo, not merely because the temerity of addressing you with such familiarity and attaching your eminence to t hese ap prentice fictions is certain—and quite rightly—to bring on my head el mal que han de deci r de m í m á s de cuatro sotiles y almidonados , but also because here we are in the middle of a book where pro logues seem inappropriate. But just as your novelas were “ exem plary, ” in the simplest sense, because they represented the different writing ideas you were working with from the 1580 ’ s to 1612, so do these seven stories—along with the three “ Sentient Lens ” fictions also included in this volume—represent about everything I invented up to the commencement of my first novel in 1962 able to bear this later exposure, and I felt their presence here invited interpolations.
    Ejemplar e s you called your tales, because “ si bien lo miras, no hay ninguna de quien no se pueda sacar un ejemplo provechoso ,” and I hope in ascribing to my fictions the same property, I haven ’ t strayed from your purposes, which I take to be manifold. For they are ejemplares , too, because your intention was “ poner en la plaza de nuestra rep ú blica tin a mesa de trucos, donde cada uno pueda llegar a entretenerse sin da ò o de barras, Digo, sin da ò o del alma ni del cuerpo, porque los ejercicios honestos y agradables antes aprovechan que da ò an ” — splendid, don Migue l! for as our mutual friend don Roberto S. has told us, fiction “ must provide us with an imaginative experience which is necessary to our imaginative well-being ... We need all the imagination we have, and we need it exercised and in good condition ” —and thus your novelas stand as exemplars of responsibility to that most solemn and pious charge placed upon this vocation; they tell good stories and they tell them well.
    And yet there is more, if I read you rightly. For your stories also exemplified the dual nature of all good narrative art: they struggled against the unconscious mythic residue in human life and sought to synthesize the unsynthesizable, sallied forth against adolescent thought-modes and exhausted art forms, and returned home with new complexities. In fact, your creation of a synthesis between poetic analogy and literal history ( not to mention reality and illu sion, sanity and madness, the erotic and the ludicrous, the visionary and the scatological) gave birth to the Novel—perhaps above all else your works were exemplars of a revolution in narrative fiction, a revolution which governs us—no t unlike the way you found your self abused by the conventions o£ the Romance—to this very day.
    Never mind whether it was Erasmus or Aristotle or that forget table Italian who caused your artist ’ s eye to focus — not on Eternal Values and Beauty—but on Character, Actions of Men in Society, and Exemplary Histories, for it was the new Age of Science dawning, and such a shift was in the air. No longer was the City of Man a pale image of the City of God, a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosm, but rather it was all there was, neither micro-nor macrocosm, yet at the same time full of potential, all the promise of what man ’ s mind, through Science, might accomplish. The universe for you, Maestro , was opening up; it could no longer be described by magical numbers or be contained in a compact and marvelously designed sphere. Narrative fiction, taking a cue from Lazarillo and the New World adventurers, became a process of discovery, and to