APF

like creator of a fictional world that is ostensibly a make-believe baseball league but that de facto
represents an alternative reality in which Henry can emotionally and intellectually invest apart
from his unsatisfying and humdrum job as an accountant. Indeed, his investment in this reality
becomes so all-encompassing that at the novel’s conclusion it would seem he has disappeared
into it—albeit as the now withdrawn and omniscient deity who contemplates his creation without
intervention.
Although a book like The Public Burning, probably Coover’s best-known and most
controversial work, would not at first seem to feature the same sort of concerns informing The
Universal Baseball Association—it is, after all, a novel about weighty issues related to politics
and history, not about an obscure accountant dreaming his life away—but in fact The Public
Burning is not really about politics and history—not directly, at least—but politics as
representation, and the distorting effects the sensationalized and distorted forms of representation
in America have on American history and culture. In both UBA and The Public Burning, we are
shown how easily, even eagerly, human beings shape reality into fictions and subsequently insist
on taking those fictions as reality, with predictably disastrous consequences. J. Henry Waugh
exemplifies individually what American culture at large evidences more generally: the desire to
refashion a recalcitrant reality into a simple, more manageable creation, in which we must force
ourselves to believe or that repressed reality will disagreeably return.
A novel like The Public Burning eludes designation as a strictly “political” novel—and
thus avoids seeming a dated artifact of a fading Cold War controversy—because it is not finally a
representation of the Rosenberg case per se but a representation of the representations to which
the Rosenberg case and its legacy have been submitted, an evocation of American depravity
through the discursive forms—exemplified by the New York Times and Time magazine—and
manufactured imagery—embodied in “Uncle Sam”—that shape and circulate the specific content
of that depravity. If J. Henry Waugh retreats into his private invented reality to fill his own inner
(and outer) void, in The Public Burning the emptiness is felt as a social loss, an absence of
meaning, to be counteracted through the invented reality provided by Media myths and fantasies,
myths that at their most destructive must be reinforced through the ritualized spectacle into
which the Rosenbergs’ death is organized.
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