Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter”
Here’s the post where you can leave your comments. I just read this in a book about Coover that I thought could get you started – do you agree with these statement or not?
Thomas E. Kennedy in Robert Coover: a study of the short fiction (pp. 64-67) writes:
[Richard] Anderson finds this story technically fascinating but… lacking in human emotion and thus in literary merit. [However,] “The Babysitter” certainly does deal with human emotion–with fear and delight, with idle desire and raw lust, and with the entire range of tamed yearnings that seethe beneath the narcotized surface of suburban life. The story enacts a flushing out of fear and of fictions (“mythic residue”), a turning of the suburban stone to reveal the teeming fictions of the quotidian.
[…]
The reality here is everything, the sum total of it all–that which happens, that which is only imagined, that which is watched, wished for, dreamed, planned, enacted, felt, and thought; a great internal-external spiral, half-real/half-imagined, is certainly not realism, but the reality that realism conceals in the interest of literary convention.
BTW, it seems that I have to approve your first comment, and then after that, you can comment without my approval. So your comment won’t appear immediately this first time, only after I have read it.
Comments(7)
Alright, i just finished the babysitter and i feel that the story is interesting, a very good short story plot. that being said i have mixed feelings about the medium. the broken time and scene works to make the story interesting and lends itself to dramatic twists, but i think the plot is interesting enough…, i would like to see a really boring story written this way it would definitely keep my attention and afterwards i would feel tricked because i would be very in to something that gives nothing back plot wise, but then i would think ‘woah’ i was tricked and, well, did in fact get that, which is something back. do you get what i am poorly saying…
anyway i agree with the Kennedy statement the only character i felt for was the baby, when it died (the one from the news story i suppose, its confusing on the first read) . i didn’t feel connected enough to the wife to feel bad for her fear of aging, or jack with his peer pressure or the babysitter with all she went through. perhaps if this was written traditionally this would not be the case
The story goes randomly everywhere, in time and space, in reality and dreams, in one person and out another. For everything that happened, it seems like there are multiple realities that might have happened all at the same time, and these parallel dimensions all lead to different endings depending on what horrible choices the characters make. The repetition of themes is messy and obsessive, which I guess reflects how the characters think and feel.
The style of this story is very action oriented and in the present. Often the beginning of a section is in the middle of an action sequence, where things are happening fast and everyone’s confused. Here the language is terse and makes little effort to distinguish the players, making me try to sort it out. The writer never bothered to describe the surrounding scenes, or divulge much about the characters’ background, unless they happen to think about it. The story is always focused on what they are doing right now.
I can’t say much about literary merits, but I can agree with Anderson’s comment on the lack of emotions in the piece. It does seem like the characters rarely feel anything but lust, fear and anger, which are not the best of all human emotions. Jack probably has the only relatively noble emotion in the story when he tries to protect Jeanne. The lack of backstory also contributes to the lack of character depth.
I get the feeling that this story could lend itself pretty well to hypertext fiction, where the story is focused in the now, although “now†could be in anywhere in time. This way only one branch from all possible simultaneous branches of story is revealed at any time.
“The reality here is…the sum total of it all”
The thing about the story I found most interesting was that blurring of lines, the difficulty I had in sorting out what was “real” from what was only imagination. Because every daydream or fantasy in the story has a hint of reality, the suggestion that it COULD have happened, under the right (or wrong) circumstances, the question of what is real at all doesn’t seem to matter as much. Some things happened, others could have, and the sum total of all possibilities, good and bad, mundane or tragic, blends together through the disjointed paragraphs. I’m not sure I liked it, but it was very interesting.
Whatever happened, I personally felt a little more sympathy for the babysitter than jspechler, because no matter what path events take she seems to have a hard time of it. The wife’s fear didn’t impact me much, and I came to actually dislike Jack and Mr. Tucker, but the difficulties the babysitter faced and the moments where the children feel they are being neglected or mistreated (or when they’re dead) at least made me a little uneasy reading about it.
It seems to me that in the context of new media/electronic writing the question of “literary merit” (and most importantly its connection to “human emotion” ) has become something of a moot point. In this context, where it appears that the “human factor” is being upstaged by writing practices such as recombinant poetry or the computer generation of texts, I wonder whether a new “standard” of literary merit needs to be considered or if the literary, as it has been traditionally understood and practiced until the advent of conceptual and electronic writing, needs to be abandoned altogether. It appears at first glance that Kennedy might be getting at this when he argues that Coover’s text “is certainly not realism, but the reality that realism conceals in the interest of literary convention.” In “The Babysitter,” however, it appears that Coover isn’t breaking with traditional realism in order to liberate some primal “real” concealed by literary convention; he seems to turn, rather, to another convention that might more accurately reflect and articulate our contemporary (televisual) reality. “The Babysitter” strikes me as a “choose your own narrative” structured by the database not only of television content but perhaps more importantly television form – our path(s) through the multiple layers/realities that Alice points out seem to be guided by the fragmented realities that the babysitter encounters on the TV. I wonder, then, if, with the rise to prominence of new media/electronic writing, maybe the merit of writing should be judged not on its re-creation of emotional experience but instead on the basis of cognitive or psychic experience — or, in particular, the experience of fragmentation.
I want to stay far away from a discussion of “literary merit.” I don’t know what “literary” means. And I don’t want to know, either.
Kennedy is right, “The Babysitter” is certainly not realism. But to intimate that “The Babysitter” is somehow closer to “the real” than the texts of realism (by suggesting that “The Babysitter” exposes “the reality that realism conceals in the interest of literary convention”) seems stupid.
People should forget about “reality.” “Reality” is unthinkable!
I am interested in the way people conceived the structure of the story. What ARE these blocks of text? I thought of them as possibilities. Each frame is a potential event. So I wouldn’t try to string a series of these frames together choose-your-own-adventure style (though I considered it for awhile) because I think it is a bad idea to priviledge one potential over another. I feel like doing so would damage the larger structure of the piece. You have to realize that despite (because of?) the fractious and contradictory relationships among the individual frames, this story has a STRONG and UNIFIED arc. You might say that it has a meta-narrative structure.
Consider the final two frames of the piece– they contradict each other, right? If you were choosing a narrative path through the piece, you would not include both of them. One frame would be priviledged, the other would be marginalized. But consider what would happen then! Interaction between the two frames would be skewed and strangely muted. Would you be able to FEEL the snapping, the vital confusion of the final reversal?
I was thrilled by the way Coover showed the obsession of the various characters with the Babysitter. I was just about to write that this was despite the fact the she was boring, but it struck me that her one-dimensionality allowed helped create her as a better universal character and object of the plot.
I liked the fragmentation of the story,as well as the repetition of lines and scenes. I liked the sad wife, the butter and the girdle.
The ‘lack of emotion’ in this story seemed to me an appropriate parallel to the dry, emotionless suburbia that Coover draws. I don’t think the absence of emotion was accidental–empathy would be out-of-place.
I got antsy just a couple pages from the end, the structure became too familiar and the ending seemed somewhat obvious (possibly because I watched the Alicia Silverstone movie at a slumber party in middle school…very exciting at the time).
I liked The Babysitter a lot.
I don’t get all the talk about “lack of emotion” in the story. This story is loaded. I thought a couple of the segments were pretty devastating. Sure, the characters have all sorts of desires that they try to keep hidden from each other, but they are never hidden from the reader. I think the Kennedy quote is right on target in this respect.
Empathy is another thing. I can feel empathy for Jack’s insecurities– “everybody comes crowding in. Hopelessly, he has a terrific erection. So hard it hurts. Everybody stares at it.” But then what am I supposed to feel when he is contemplating/committing rape? Rape is terrible. Is Jack terrible? Yes and no.
Would your opinion of a murderer change if you knew that he had been beaten and abused for his entire childhood? Maybe.
You can see how vital circumstances are. Jack is Jack throughout the story, only sometimes he is human, and sometimes he seems like a monster. Can you really say he IS a monster, knowing that in other circumstances (outside of his control) things could be completely differrent? I don’t think that there is a good answer to that question.
The way the story is presented, cut up into these little fragments, we don’t get any sense that these characters possess free agency. The way they act seems to flow out of the conditions that they find themselves in, not from some internal mechanism, moral compass, or whatever. So yes, I think it is difficult to empathize with them– I also think it is difficult not to empathize with them.