Death of the Author - A Tribute. Aspects of Postmodernism in Jack Behrens's Homages for Piano Solo

This privileged vantage point disappears gradually in Coover's second and definitively postmodern novel, The Universal-713- Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968). This work not only synthesizes the major Coover themes and strategies — the origins and developments of religious belief, the affinities between historical and fictional narrative, the reinscription of folklore and myth into convention-disrupting forms — but carefully explores the potentiality of the novel, defining the genre accretively as a game, a ritual, a system evolving its own tendencies and trajectories and ultimately subject to the same entropy as any closed physical system, an analogue of history (particularly history conceived as the sort of totalizing teleological and rule-governed system that postmodern theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard calls a master-narrative of legitimation), and finally as encompassing and constituting a putatively "outside" or "real" world. The author and God-figure of this system John Henry Waugh (JHWH — part of an elaborate structure of Judaeo-Christian allusions in a story that manages to bring such providential events as the flood, the Covenant, and the betrayal and death of Christ into a tabletop game modeled on baseball) changes his relation to the embedded Universal Baseball Association, until in the eighth and final chapter he has disappeared entirely into the game/novel/world that was presented as his creation ...»