Marianne DeKoven
MRS. HEGEL-SHTEIN'S TEARS
In contemporary fiction, the impulse to recreate form is at
loggerheads with the impulse to tell about everyday life. Grace Paley is
a rare contemporary who feels both impulses, and in her work they
cohere. It would be easy to read her stories without recognizing that
they give two very different kinds of pleasure-the intellectual, aes–
thetic pleasure of inventive language and form, and the emotional,
moral pleasure of deftly handled, poignant theme- without realizing
that one was having the best of two historically sundered fictional
modes.
Though Paley has published only two collections of stories,
The
Little Disturbances of Man
and
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,
she is nonetheless an important writer-important in the significance
of the fictional possibilities she realizes rather than in the uniform
merit of her published work. She is not always at her best. But when
she is, Paley reconciles the demands of avant-garde or postTnodern form
for structural openness and the primacy of the surface with the
seemingly incompatible demands of traditional realist material for
orchestrated meaning and cathartic emotion.
"A Conversation With My Father," in
Enormous Changes,
makes
of this seeming incompatibility an argument between father and
daughter, from which emerges the statement, crucial to Paley's ·work,
that traditional themes can no longer be treated
truthfully
by formally
traditional fiction: formal inven tiveness and structural open-endedness
not only make fiction interesting, they make it "true-to-life." Paley's
concern is not mimesis or verisimilitude, but rather the problem of
creating a literary form which does not strike one as artificial; which is
adequate to the complexity of what we know. Her narrator in "A
Conversation With My Father" calls traditional plot "the absolute line
between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary
reasons, but because it takes away all hope. Everyone, real or invented,
deserves the open destiny of life." Her father, arguing that plot is the
truth of tragedy, wants her to write like Chekhov or Maupassant:
