MARIANNE
DeKOVEN
219
"Life" (the conversation between father and daughter), the father in his
hospital room not only propounds but represents the tragic vision: he
is dying testimony to the inevitability of what the narrator, meaning
hopelessness, calls plot.
In
"Literature" (the story-within-a-story the
narrator invents about a redeemed junkie), the narrator insists not so
much on a happy ending for her character but on sudden and total
change interrupting what would bea tragic trajectory toward doom in
the kind of traditional fiction her father wants her to write. Life, unlike
the narrator, has no pity: it is about to deprive her of her beloved father.
The locus of the "open destiny of life," where hope and "enormous
changes at the last minute" are possible, is fiction itself.
Paley places the tragic material which interests and moves her
within an antitragic structure of sudden, abrupt transformations,
"enormous changes," but the tragic material is nonetheless left intact.
There is none of the hollow laughter, the mocking, alienated distance
from pathos that is characteristic of serious modern fiction. But
transformation undercuts tragic inevitability-fictional structure be–
comes tragedy's antidote rather than either its vehicle or its negation–
and, equally important, as we will see, transformation undercuts the
sentimentality that so easily trivializes pathos.
The people Paley's narrator in "A Conversation With My Father"
would accuse of having merely "literary reasons" for rejecting tradi–
tional plot might explain the "enormous change" as an interesting
substitute for outworn, tedious literary convention (linear plots are
stale and boring), infusing new life into fiction. But Paley's structures
are more than that. They are rooted not only in an assertion of open–
endedness and possibility, and in a nonlinear vision of life's events,
but also, ultimately, in a profound commitment to freedom as a
primary value (nonlinearity is not as alien to Paley's politics as it
might appear). For many postrnodernists, that freedom is problematic;
tangled with fear of chaos on one hand and of authority on the other
(see Tony Tanner's
City of Words).
But the freedom implied for Paley
by "enormous changes," the freedom from inevitability or plot, is
synonymous with hope; hence her larger assertion that open-endedness
in fiction is the locus of "the open destiny of life," to which everyone is
" entitled " -a
strongly political statement. Paley's phrase "enormous
changes at the last minute" is the speech of a hippy cabdriver–
songwriter-motherlover who assures middle-aged Alexandra, childless,
whom he fills with hope in the form of a baby, that his generation will
save the world:
The kids! The kids! Though terrible troubles hang over them, such
