Cooper's Emblems of History/Fiction

A series of Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury strips shows the all-together-too- historical Donald Trump ordering the decorating of the gigantic bathrooms on the Trump Princess. Wallowing in post-modernist kitsch, the Trump imagination moves unhesitatingly and without historical hang-ups from the parting of the Red Sea to the more recent coronation of Catherine the Great and (without pausing) to the almost contemporary eviction of his tenants. The depiction in the foyer to what is presumably the Grand Bathroom of the labors of Hercules in the manner "of Michelangelo. Or Picasso. One of those famous guys" adds entirely new meaning to the efforts of someone like Pope's Belinda. The truly magic realism of his proposed two-dimensional library is its apparent ability to transform all historical, philosophical, mythical and literary complexities into an image for public consumption. The unashamed vanity of the text is only matched by the even more unbridled egotism of the sub-text, which tells us that all art, and indeed all history, may be appropriated easily and instantly if you have enough money and enough chutzpah. Trudeau's brilliant pun, "Trump l'oeil," conflates the problem faced by any critic of historical novels in dealing with the relations among historical fact, fictional representation, natural and human emblems and ever-slippery "truth." It is a kind of conceptual cloverleaf, in which history, fiction, landscape and human artifacts intersect

Art · Art history · Coronation · Depiction · Emblem · Kitsch · Literature · MAGIC (telescope · Meaning (existential · Politics · Realism · Representation (politics · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Themes in Literature Analysis