Coover Controls “Quickness” in Briar Rose: Forty-two Motionless Tales

In Calvino’s memo on “quickness,” he discusses at length about literature time. He explains the sense of time a literary work has falls to the desires of the author. The writer can end a story whenever he or she wishes. It seems worthy to note, literature is one of the only, if not the only medium where humans are able to control time. Really, time is not promised to you or me; in reality, we are controlled by the sense of time. A writer has the freedom to choose whether their work is delaying, cyclical, motionless, or follows Calvino’s fluid and flowing “quickness.”

Coover demonstrates his skill of motionless writing. Coover takes the age-old tale of Sleeping Beauty which does indeed have a sense of time within it. The original story follows a flowing story line, and like every good story, contains a digression with the princess pricking her finger on a spindle, delaying her happily ever after ending. Coover’s retelling twist on the story contains no sense of time at all. The only sense of time the reader has when reading Coover’s Briar Rose is the prior knowledge that the princess has been sleeping for one hundred years. Each spin off takes place within the princess’s dreams where she is conversing with an old crone. She finds herself returning back to the “door that is not a door” that leads to a hidden corridor; she frequently returns to the kitchen or parlor, the prince is usually always married, she has bared children, and she never remembers the stories the old crone has told her before. It is impossible for Coover’s retelling of the story to have a definite ending. Many of the 42 tales begin the same way, and it is difficult to think each one has an ending when the tales end with the crone saying “once upon a time…” and the next tale beginning with her once again asleep.

The alternate tales being told of the prince trapped in the briars illustrate Coover’s motionless sense of time. The prince is trapped in the snarling briar bush that multiplies and multiplies. He slashes and cuts through the briars and never seems to progress through the branches. If by chance, one of the spin offs does end in him escaping the briars, he is either back where he started, or unable to reach his princess easily; then the next tale of the prince begins with him trapped in the briars again.

It seems as if each story is written from the exact same moment in the 100 years of Beauty’s sleep, as if time is at a standstill while she is waiting for her prince. Perhaps this motionless time best reflects the state of mind in sleep and this is why Coover chose to tell the story this way. When we are sleeping, our minds and bodies have no sense of real time. Coover has skillfully used the feeling of no time as a literary tool.