Metafiction

[Walter Cummins]

When I first read Robert Coover’s story “The Babysitter” in his 1969 collection Pricksongs and Descants, I found it revolutionary. It appeared at the height of the dominance of the well-made story in which the fiction was supposed to be a self-contained reality, fully believable in itself. The author was meant to be invisible, as James Joyce had him or her, an offstage presence ignored by the reader because the story was an end in itself.

In radical contrast, “The Babysitter” exposed the artifice of story making by shifting among several plot alternatives and telling multiple story versions through a series of what could happen nexts. Unlike the well-made story with its essential assumption that what happened was the only thing that could happen, in his open telling Coover exposed the role of the author in making decisions among alternatives. What happened next had many possibilities. The author’s imagination had a range of choices in plot development. That’s what took place in all story writing even though the author worked to keep it hidden. 

In his story Coover puts several of those possible choices on the page by including multiple options for what could happen next once the young female babysitter appeared for her child-minding assignment. The flexible characters are the sitter, the kids, the parents at a nearby house for a party, and two teenage boys with lustful thoughts about the sitter. A bathtub plays a central role—the kids having a their bath and the sitter indulging in her own. Each bath scene has a different version, as do all the other scenes in the story. Sexuality runs through most.

She likes the big tub.  She uses the Tuckers' bath salts, and loves to sink into the hot fragrant suds. She can stretch out, submerged, up to her chin.  It gives her a good sleepy tingly feeling.

How tiny and rubbery it is!  She thinks, soaping between the boy's legs, giving him his bath.  Just a funny jiggly little thing that looks like it shouldn't even be there at all.  Is that what all the songs are about?

She's no more than stepped into the tub for a quick bath, when Jimmy announces from outside the door that he has to go to the bathroom.  She sighs: just an excuse, she knows.  `You'll have to wait.'  The little nuisance.  `I can't wait.'  `Okay, then come ahead, but I'm taking a bath.'  She supposes that will stop him, but it doesn't. In he comes.  She slides down into the suds until she's eye-level with the edge of the tub.  He hesitates.  `Go ahead, if you have to,' she says, a little awkwardly, `but I'm not getting out.'  `Don't look,' he says. She: `I will if I want to.'

His little hand, clutching the bar of soap, lathers shyly a narrow space between her shoulderblades.  She is doubled forward against her knees, buried in rich suds, peeking at him over the edge of her shoulder.  The soap slithers out of his grip and plunks into the water. `I... I dropped the soap,' he whispers.  She: `Find it.'

‘Dolly!  My God!  Dolly, I can explain!'  She glowers down at them, her ripped girdle around her ankles.  `What the four of you are doing in the bathtub with my babysitter?' she says sourly.  `I can hardly wait!'

“The Babysitter” takes its raw material in multiple directions, exposing authorial choices. 

A more compressed metafiction example is Margaret Atwood’s 1983 “Happy Endings” that begins this way:

John and Mary meet.

What happens next?

If you want a happy ending, try A. 

This work of metafiction is much more direct than the Coover by admitting the author’s dilemma of coming up with something to happen next, specifically how the Jahn-Mary relationship will culminate. Ending A is clearly happy. They love one another, are financially secure, have successful children, a good sex life, friends, pleasant vacations, hobbies after retirement, and eventually die. In ending B, John doesn’t return Mary’s love and just uses her sexually, never marrying her as she hopes, falls in love with Madge, leading to Mary’s suicide. Then he marries Madge and has the identical happy life he had with Mary in Ending A. 

Atwood goes on to offer summaries of several alternative endings, adding other characters in some cases, illnesses, and a tidal wave. But ultimately she dismisses all fictional endings:  “You'll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don't be deluded by any other endings, they're all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.”

The experience of reading a work of metafiction undermines the illusion of encountering a “real” situation, one the reader can engage in as if it were something that was really happening. That’s what most readers seek, immersion in a convincing actuality. Those who find satisfaction in metafiction are more interested in exploring the philosophy of creation, a version of what Atwood exposes as a form of trickery. Here the reader participates with the author in confronting the possibilities of making up. It demands consideration of a process beyond the depicted action.