MARIANNE DeKOVEN
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everyday life. Because she feels deeply Mrs. Hegel-Shtein's common–
place pain, Paley reaches a moment of potential sentimentality, her cue
for magnificent writing: "On deep tracks, the tears rolled down her old
cheeks. But she had smiled so peculiarly for seventy-seven years that
they suddenly swerved wildly toward her ears and hung like glass from
each lobe." The image of Mrs. Hegel-Shtein's tears swerving along
deep tracks, formed by seventy-seven years of peculiar smiling, to hang
from her ear lobes like crystals, is so striking that it appropriates most
of"our attention as we read, preventing us from noticing particularly
the pathos which we nonetheless feel. The fate of Mrs. Hegel-Shtein's
tears is exactly the fate of our own. They fall, but they are "wildly"
diverted along literally comic tracks to become something other than
tears, something not at all commonplace; in fact, something transcen–
dent: they crystallize into literary epiphany.
Pathos is neither transformed nor displaced by language: it
remains intact, registered at a more or less subliminal level. But it
combines with the startling, comic-bizarre language and imagery to
make a profound literary moment which we experience simultaneously
as a unity beyond both pathos and language, and also as a concatena–
tion of the two separate elements, each maintaining its integrity.
For Paley, "life" need not be rescued from sordid insignificance by
"literature." She does not translate or transform one into the other, but
rather allows them to coexist in her work, partly separate, partly
clashing, partly fused. We do not look
through
her images to find the
meanings behind them; instead, the arresting, startling language and
imagery comprise one element of the fiction, the feelings and meanings
they communicate another. We receive them with different kinds of
attention:
"I was popular in certain circles," says Aunt Rose. "I wasn't no
thinner then , only more stationary in the flesh. In time
to
come,
Lillie, don 't be surprised-change is a fact of God. From this no one
is excused. Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she
don't notice how big her behind is gelling and sings in the canary's
ear for thirty years. Who's listening?"
That opening establishes the story's central contrast between Aunt
Rose's painful, unconventional, but authentic life and her sister's
conventional but empty life. While we focus on the excessive, absurd
comic image of the fat woman standing on one foot singing in a
canary's ear, and on the inventive language, we absorb, almost sublimi–
nally, the essential geography of a conventional thematic terrain.