Robert Coover’s oft-anthologized (and ofter-taught) story “The Babysitter”
begins unremarkably. The babysitter arrives at the Tuckers’ house. It’s
7:40. She’s ten minutes late. After that, it’s a little hard to
describe. Over the course of the story, told in 106 fragments separated
by white space, the babysitter will invite her boyfriend Jack over, and
not invite him over. Jack will call her and it will go well and it will
go poorly. Jack will come to the house with his friend Mark and they
will watch television together, and they will rape her, and Jack will
prevent Mark from raping her, and the babysitter will seduce them
into a threesome, and they will be interrupted by Mr. Tucker, who has
come home to seduce the babysitter. They will be outside looking through
the window when Mr. Tucker comes, and they will be inside on the couch
with the babysitter when Mr. Tucker comes, and they will run away and
Mr. Tucker will kick them out and rape the babysitter himself, and they
will peacefully watch television while Mr. Tucker goes to the bathroom.
Mr. Tucker will get there first and they’ll find him, and Mr.
Tucker will not find them at all. Everyone will take a bath, and will
not take a bath. On the television, one of a number of programs will
play: people will fight and murder each other and make love. The
babysitter will drown in the bath and the baby will choke on its diaper
pin and the babysitter will do the dishes before Mr. Tucker drives her
home at the end of the night. In the end, the babysitter will be dead,
along with all three of the children, and she will also be just waking
up after dozing in front of the television at the end of an uneventful
evening. You see what I mean.
As you might imagine, the story is terrifying. Sometimes it is also
funny. But it’s so widely beloved for two main reasons: it says
something profound about experience and it says something profound about
storytelling.
The magic is this: you don’t know what happens in the story. It is
told by a third person narrator, but close behind the consciousness of
multiple characters: the babysitter, Mr. Tucker, Mrs. Tucker, Jack, the
children, even the television. Fine, we’re used to this. But the story
as presented doesn’t make sense. Things move forward
quasi-chronologically—we are given periodic time stamps, which do not
double back; this is a thrown bone—though sometimes simultaneously
(reading it again this week, I couldn’t help but think of “Jeremy
Bearimy”). But Coover keeps revising the turn of events, presenting
multiple possibilities for every character and every moment, without
weighting one over another. Everything that could happen with these
scattered characters over these few hours does happen. Which also means it does not happen—because of course not everything can. (Are we sure about that?)
Furthering the overall confusion is the fact that some of
what we read is clearly marked as fantasy, and some isn’t. Mr. Tucker
fantasizes about the babysitter while he’s at the party, and then he
goes back to his house to act on his fantasies. Or not, because there’s
no real indication in the text that the fantasy has ended. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/on-the-destabilizing-brilliance-of-robert-coovers-the-babysitter/
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