Narratives of Possibility in Robert Coover’s The Babysitter
Hi, I’m Nathan, the British side of Villanelle. I bring pretentious Anglo-spellings and unlike Athena, I don’t pronounce my consonants.
What we shall call a narrative of possibility is something that is distinctively postmodern in flavour, and, if we are to believe that “the dominant of postmodern fiction is ontological”, then this certainly rings true.
What I mean by the term narrative of possibility, is a text that is grounded in ontological doubt; multi-layered or multi-dimensional, it is unclear or impossible for the reader to distinguish which ‘layer’ of the narrative that they should be perceiving as the ‘true’ one. For me, it is a distinct form of metafiction; when we introduce a ‘fictive fiction’ within a story, we have to begin evaluating how fictive certain narratives within it are, it follows then that we are also examining how real certain narratives are.
The most perfect example of this narrative structure can be found in the short story masterpiece, The Babysitter (1964) by Robert Coover. Coover offers a narrative that walks the boundaries between personal thought and personal reality; written in a fragmented fashion, the short story creates multiples: multiple narratives, multiple happenings, multiple imaginings, multiple possibilities. I don’t wish to speak for all of you when I write this, but the standard reaction for the reader of a narrative possibility is one of bewilderment, not so much a disconnect, but perhaps a sense of overwhelmment in the face of so many divergent narrative structures and possibilities. In a narrative of possibility, doubt reigns.
Okay. so where’s your hero now? Is he in reality or is he in fiction?
His family’s in reality. and he’s in fiction.
But isn’t fiction real?
Why?
Well. you can see it in the movie. right?
Of course.
Well. then it’s just as real as reality…because you can see it too. right?
Bullshit.
Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997/2007)
The overriding sense that a reader of The Babysitter gets is a sense of confusion. Imagine that you are writing a short story and you have your characters all worked out, you have your setting, but you also have a problem: you can’t decide which of the three possible plots that you have drafted you want to use. So you write three short stories using each of those plots. And then you still can’t decide. At this point you lose your temper and cut these short stories into tiny little fragments of text, throwing them into the waste bin. Later on in the evening, regret washes over you; you shouldn’t have done that. So you return to the wastepaper basket and try and reassemble your stories, but you can’t — there are too many fragments. Instead, in one last desperate attempt to create something, you try your hardest to put these assorted fragments of different plots into some single homogenous chronological order. You read over the resulting text. The experience of reading this text is essentially the experience of reading The Babysitter.
You see, every time you read a fragment of Coover’s short story, you find yourself having to answer the necessary question: is this what actually happened? Of course the trick here, is that nothing actually happened, but metafiction bla bla bla. And it’s clever, it’s very cleverly constructed. Because not only do we have to distinguish between the fragments that make up the story but also the stories that make up the fragments. Contributing to the whole narrative of possibility running throughout the story is the omnipresence of pop media.
Have two more quotations:
The emergence of something called metafiction in the American sixties was and is hailed by academic critics as a radical aesthetic; a whole new literary form unshackled from the canonical cinctues of narrative and mimesis and free to plunge into reflexivity and self-conscious meditations on aboutness. Radical it may have been, but thinking that postmodern metafiction evolved unconscious of prior changes in readerly taste is about as innocent as thinking that all those students we saw on television protesting the war in southeast Asia were protesting only because they hated the war. They may have hated the war, but they also wanted to be seen protesting on television. TV was where they’d seen this war, after all. […] Metafictionists may have had aesthetic theories out the bazoo, but they were also sentient citizens of a community that was exchanging an old idea of itself as a nation of do-ers and be-ers for a new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of self-conscious watchers and appearers.
David Foster-Wallace, E Unibus Pluram
When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings-figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior. Since the spectacle’s job is to use various specialized mediations in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special preeminence once occupied by touch: the most abstract and easily deceived sense is the most readily adaptable to the generalized abstraction of present-day society.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
How then are we supposed to read the scenes that Coover gives us where the lines between fictive fiction and the real fiction are even more blurred. We can’t even trust the ‘real’ narrative to speak ‘the truth’, because it has been thoroughly penetrated by a subversive media power.
“On the screen there’s a rattle of hooves, and he and Bitsy are rolling around and around on the floor in a crazy rodeo of long bucking legs.” — Oftentimes, it appears as if the Tucker family’s TV set is more than just the standard fixture of the family home, remember that by 1960, the average American household was watching at least, 5 hours a day. — “Artificial reds and greens and purples flicker over the child’s wet body, as hooves clatter, guns crackle, and stagecoach wheels thunder over rutted terrain.” — In these small extracts, we see that the spaghetti western on the screen begins to act as definer and disseminator of the plot: not constrained to reference or simile, instead, as metaphor, they define the direction of the scenes that Coover presents to us. Life imitates art as the babysitter and the Tucker children truly become part of the “crazy rodeo” signalled by the “rattle of hooves on screen”. Later, Bitsy is shrouded in the television’s “artificial reds and greens and purples” as the spaghetti western sound effects disseminate into the ‘real’, seemingly without reference to a televisual/aural mediator — the on-screen genre, the fictive fiction, once again begins to define the plot, preempting a real-life chase scene between child and babysitter.
The horror in Coover’s story comes from the privileging of the fictive as real. If we could easily distinguish between the fictive and real then there would be no need for concern — unfortunately we cannot. To quote David Foster Wallace a final time: television — let me extend this to pop media — is “an unprecedented powerful consensual medium that suggests no real difference between image and substance”. The narrative of possibility is generated then when an author does the same — truly a postmodern hallmark then, for does this not resonate so much more today than it did when Coover was writing in 1964, or even Foster Wallace in 1993? We live in postmodern times, it is not earth-shattering to suggest that the media world is any less real than the organic world. And as Guy Debord identifies:
Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides.
And this is what the metafiction in Coover’s short story tries to achieve. The narrative of possibility works in such a way as to force us to privilege the fictive and the real with equal respect; between the fiction within the fiction, the fiction itself, the fiction outside the text, and the fictions that we live, Coover raises our awareness to these competing narratives. And when we don’t know what is ‘real’, that is which one to privilege, perhaps we can see each narrative as inherently becoming; each one a possible narrative to be privileged as the main. But until we can actually distinguish between them, until we can distinguish real from fake, they remain nothing more than part of a narrative of possibility, characterised by the concerning realisation that ‘objective reality is present on both sides’.
I intend to write about narratives of possibility in Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), and Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), at some point at least. So watch this space.
