218
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Tragedy! Plain tragedy! Historical tragedy! No hope. The end."
Paley's narrator-surrogate, arguing for open-ended hope and change,
clearly bests her father in the conversation. But in the story, Paley gives
him the last word: the setting is his hospital room, and he speaks from
what we may assume is his deathbed. His lecture on writing is "last–
minute advice," and the closing speech, from father's pain to daugh–
ter's guilt, is his: "'How long will it be?' he asked. 'Tragedy! You too.
When will you look it in the face?'"
The assertion of hope through change and open-endedness is
therefore neither easy nor unambiguous. As the literary father sees, an
inevitable component of optimistic belief in saving the situation
through "enormous changes at the last minute" is evasion of genuine
and unavoidable horror, the father's tragedy. As Faith herself says in
"Living"
(Enormous Changes),
"You have to be cockeyed to love, and
blind in order to look out the window at your own ice-cold street."
Paley herself, though endorsing in the structure of her fiction the
narrator's point of view, is increasingly
ambiva~ent
about traditional
storytelling. She discusses that ambivalence, which she divides in this
story between the narrator and the father, in a "Symposium on
Fiction" (reprinted in
Shenandoah
Vol. XXVII , No.2,
3-31):
When you talk about new forms or different forms, it seems to me
this non-linearity has really run its course, played its game out. I
understand it, it has been my way of working too. I haven't moved
dead ahead except once in a while in that sense, and I wonder about
our need for storytelling in its most simple linear sense of
what
happened then, and then what happened, and what came next .
.. .
People ought to live in mutual aid and concern, listening to one
another's stories. That's what they ought to do. I'm not doing that,
I'm very much a person in my time.
Though linear storytelling is attractive to Paley's moral-political
sensibility, and she feels guilty that she doesn't write that way, the
marrow of her fictions remains "enormous changes at the last minute."
Her narrator in "A Conversation With My Father" claims that she does
not hate plot "for literary reasons." But Paley's narrator is either
misrepresenting or misunderstanding the "literary reasons" of Paley's
fiction. Traditional plot does not necessarily preclude the possibility of
hope; or, in cruder terms, the possibility of a happy ending. The
narrator confuses the closure of traditional plot with the closure of
despair, and once we acknowledge her mistake, we can go on to see her
very "literary" reason for making it: it is the "enormous change"
as a
phenomenon of literature
that is life-giving and hope-giving. In
