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65 | Autumn 2015 Special Issue: Grace Paley Guest Editor: Paule Lévy

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1626 ISSN: 1969-6108

Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes

Printed version Date of publication: 1 September 2015 ISBN: 978-2-7535-5056-8 ISSN: 0294-04442

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword Michelle Ryan-Sautour and Gérald Préher

Introduction Paule Lévy

Some Thoughts about Grace Paley Judith Arcana

Grace Paley’s Urban Jewish Voice: Identity, History, and “The Tune of the Language” Victoria Aarons

Voice and Generations in Grace Paley’s “Goodbye and Good Luck,” “The Immigrant Story” and “Dreamer in a Dead Language” Régine Camps-Robertson

“The Grand Storyteller[s]”: Debt and Emancipation in Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father” Clément-Alexandre Ulff

Grace Paley’s Revisiting Fathers Laura Muresan

“I don’t understand how time passes”: The Experience of Time in Grace Paley’s “Wants” and “Ruthy and Edie” Tanguy Bérenger

Grace Paley’s Poetics of Discontinuity Anne-Laure Tissut

Knowing and Inventing New York: The Neighborhood in Grace Paley’s Fiction Nathalie Cochoy

“Faith in a Tree”: The Roots of Commitment Paule Lévy

Grace Paley, l’intrépide : un talmud féminin Geneviève Brisac

“Loved, invented and endured”: Jogging along with Language in Grace Paley’s Short Stories Sylvie Bauer

Being Jewish: Bonds and Boundaries in Grace Paley’s “The Loudest Voice” and Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” Ada Savin

New York Affinities: A Poetics of the City in the Writings of Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme Claire Fabre

Grace Paley and Dawn Raffel: Writing on the Edge of Disaster Brigitte Félix

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Foreword

Michelle Ryan-Sautour and Gérald Préher

1 We are very pleased to present this special issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English devoted to Grace Paley’s short stories. Paule Lévy, Professor of American literature at the University of Versailles, France, is the guest editor of this issue and has brought together an impressive array of scholars. The articles are sensitively written, and pay homage to an author whose work in the realm of the short story could be qualified as “legendary.” The editorial staff of the Journal are particularly sensitive to the impact of this volume, as we have fond memories of Grace Paley’s visit to Angers in 1998, when she was the guest writer at a conference on Jewish Identity and Otherness in the Modern Short Story, the proceedings of which were edited by the conference organizers: Emmanuel Vernadakis (co-editor of the JSSE at the time) and Jean-Francois Dreyfus, and published in JSSE 32 (1999). While in Angers, Paley was particularly moved by a theatrical reading of “The Loudest Voice,” performed by the San Francisco based theatre company “Word for Word,” and her vibrant spirit was remarked by all in her interview at the conference (also featured in JSSE 32 and reprinted in JSSE 41 in 2003). Grace Paley’s death in 2007 was a sad moment for many friends, critics, and fellow writers. This collection of articles in many ways serves as an additional tribute to an author who has fundamentally affected our perception of what it is possible to do with the short story form. We are grateful to Paule Lévy for her rigorous preparation of a series of articles which celebrate Paley’s writing through nuanced criticism and close textual readings.

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AUTHORS

MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR JSSE Editor

GÉRALD PRÉHER JSSE Associate Editor

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Introduction

Paule Lévy

1 Despite her relatively limited production, Grace Paley has left her imprint on the literature of her time and made a significant contribution to the art of short story writing in the last decades of the twentieth century. Throughout her life and literary career, Paley considered herself a story-listener as much as a story-teller, one attuned to the multiple voices and variegated tongues of the world she lived in and which she endeavored to reinvent—through her passionate commitment to the great political causes of her time1 and through her life-long dedication to literature.

2 “Two ears, one for literature, one for home, are useful for writers,” declares the author in the introduction to her Collected Stories (x), thus summing up the peculiarities of her writing, which is solidly grounded in the everyday life, language and politics of her time (“I write about the lives of women and men of our time” [Interview Hulley 24]), yet widely open to purely abstract speculation, be it of an ontological, moral or purely aesthetic nature. These “two ears” eventually converge in the discontinuous yet ongoing flow of voices, in the wide array of characters and discourses that build up her miniature, yet widely expanding fictional universe.

3 Her stories, most of which are delicately etched vignettes of family and urban life in the Bohemian New York of the nineteen sixties and seventies, appear as never-ending conversations between the various characters they feature, between narrator and reader, as well as between the world and words: “so that art and life cross imperceptibly into another in an erotic exchange and interchange” (Hulley 16). Highly unpredictable and provocative, the stories combine realism and metafiction, comedy and tragedy, optimism and a deep sense of anxiety and loss. Likewise, they alternate prolixity with an uncanny talent for leaving the essential unsaid, while ceaselessly exploring the troubled relation between self, language and the world.

4 Extraordinarily compressed and condensed, somewhat resistant to commentary in its remarkable fluidity and deceptive surface simplicity, Paley’s work appears in fact as a remarkable blend of techniques borrowed from the oral tradition (in particular those inherited from her Jewish immigrant background) and the most daring avant-garde experiments. A minimalist rather than a realist in the conventional sense of the term, the author views writing as exploration and experimentation first: “the possibility is

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that what we need right now is to imagine the real” (Just as I Thought 171). Though intent on rendering its texture, colors and rhythms, she defamiliarizes the familiar and allows all referential illusion to dissolve. Likewise, she shows little interest in characters and plot. She dismisses causality and determinism on both moral and aesthetic grounds: “Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented deserves the open destiny of life” (“A Conversation with my Father,” Collected Stories 231). Mimetic on its own terms, her art strives to render the complexity, mutability and transience inherent to human existence and to celebrate its infinite possibilities. Paley deconstructs all social or cultural mythologies; she derides the illusions, platitudes and clichés on which ordinary people tend to build their lives. Yet she rehabilitates the dross and the mundane, suffusing them with unexpected poetry. Above all, she revels in the diversity, malleability and extraordinary plasticity of the English language (“you just throw the words all over the place and you have a whole new language almost” [Interview Batt and Rocard 128]), which she is able to perceive from the perspective of her plurilingual background.2 This background also taught her that talk is vitality, life itself, and that it is the best antidote to solitude, disarray or existential anguish: “In the grave it will be quiet!”, the narrator recalls in the story “The Loudest Voice” (Collected Stories 34).

5 The present volume aims to explore the multiple facets of Grace Paley’s short fiction with a special focus on her language and style as well as on the never-ceasing dialogue which the author maintained both with the authors of the past (at once revered and revoked in her best metafictional pieces) and with the most innovative voices of her own generation. This collection contains a wide array of scholarly contributions as well as two short pieces of a more personal nature.

6 The volume opens with a short biographical sketch in which Judith Arcana, Paley’s literary biographer and friend, evokes Paley’s fortitude and firmness of purpose as she took part in the major protest movements of her time. It is from this passion for social justice and freedom that the author drew most of her energy and artistic inspiration.

7 Victoria Aarons delineates the main characteristics of Paley’s “characteristically post- war American-Jewish” urban voice: that of a diasporic people struggling to make sense of their lives mostly through the transmission of the stories that allow them to define themselves and their place in history. Language in Paley’s stories is not only declarative. It is both “strategically preemptive and unexpectedly transformative.”

8 In Paley’s universe, still poised between the Old and the New World (at least in her early pieces), parents and children rarely speak the same language. The three articles that follow deal with Paley’s bittersweet depiction of intergenerational relationships. Régine Camps-Robertson proposes “a dynamic interpretation of voice and generations” in “Goodbye and Good Luck,” “The Immigrant Story” and “Dreamer in a Dead Language,” three pieces in which she views the interplay of voice and age as a pretext for “measuring death against the individual’s potential of renewal within the space of the short story.” Clément Ulff analyses the dialectics of tradition and subversion, debt and emancipation, fiction and metafiction, ethics and aesthetics in Paley’s famous “A Conversation with my Father.” Laura Muresan dwells on a piece not included in the Collected Stories, “My Father addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age,” an ironic sequel to

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“A Conversation with my Father” with which it creates “an antiphonal effect,” as it explores more encompassing issues, such as gender relationships and the burden of history.

9 “I don’t understand how time passes,” declares one of Paley’s narrators (“Wants,” Collected Stories 129). The two articles that follow address the dialectics of continuity and discontinuity as well as the relationship between time and language in Paley’s short fiction. Tanguy Bérenger proposes a thematic and structural analysis of “Wants” and “Ruthy and Edie,” which he perceives as reminiscent of philosopher Henry Bergson’s conception of duration as a continuous flow in which past, present and future are interwoven. Anne-Laure Tissut, on the other hand, prefers to speak of “Paley’s poetics of discontinuity,” as she evokes the tensions between solitude and communication, hope and despair, life and death in Paley’s stories, particularly in “Dreamer in a Dead language.”

10 It is in the microcosm of Paley’s half-real, half re-imagined urban neighborhoods that these fundamental tensions are played out. Nathalie Cochoy shows that Paley’s “chorus of voices concur to delineate a new map” of New York, where the city landmarks tend to remain abstract while precedence is given to the life-sustaining and highly poeticized daily rituals of the community. While focusing on “Faith in a Tree,” a story that takes place in Washington Square, Paule Lévy highlights Paley’s constant shift from anecdote to history, from the local to the global, from the individual to the collective, from politics to aesthetics.

11 These shifts are ascribed to Paley’s feminism and to her Jewish heritage in the short, meditative piece proposed in French by the writer Geneviève Brisac. Whatever the case may be, Paley’s stories can be read “as a sort of encyclopedia of life turned into language,” as Sylvie Bauer explains in an analytical panorama of Paley’s stories. Bauer chooses to view Paley’s stories mostly as linguistic experiments, concerned above all with the problematic relationship between life and art, between language and death.

12 The pieces that follow open onto links between Paley and some of her contemporaries. Paley is studied in relation to Philip Roth in Ada Savin’s analysis of their respective stories, “The Loudest Voice,” and “The Conversion of the Jews,” which “treat religious matters on a playfully serious tone” and pave the way for the thematic and stylistic developments of the two authors’ later fiction. Grace Paley’s peculiar perception of city life is compared to Donald Barthelme’s surreal collages in Claire Fabre-Clark’s article. New York is a common ground for the two authors who, despite their fundamental differences, view text and town as “made of the same material.” In the last article in this collection, a parallel is drawn between Grace Paley’s very short piece “Mother” and Dawn Raffel’s “Steam,” two stories centered on absence and death, which Brigitte Félix reads in the light of Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster and The Space of Literature. Paley, unlike Dawn Raffel, positions herself “on the edge of disaster” only, since death, “that terrible limit against which we are spoken” (Blanchot), will be counteracted by talk.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hulley Kathleen. “Grace Paley’s Resistant Form.” Grace Paley. Ed. Kathleen Hulley. Spec. issue of Delta 14 (1982): 3-18. Print

Paley, Grace. Collected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Print.

---. Interview with Noëlle Batt and Marcienne Rocard. “An Interview with Grace Paley.” Caliban XXV (1988): 119-37. Print.

---. Interview with Kathleen Hulley. “Interview with Grace Paley.” Grace Paley. Ed. Kathleen Hulley. Spec. issue of Delta 14 (1982): 19-40. Print.

---. Just as I Thought. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Print.

NOTES

1. Paley, for instance, actively campaigned against the Vietnam War and against the development of nuclear weapons. She was also an environmentalist and an ardent feminist. 2. “My childhood languages were English and Russian and Yiddish” (Interview Batt and Rocard 132).

AUTHOR

PAULE LÉVY Paule Lévy is Professor of American literature at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin, France. Her research focuses on women’s writing, ethnicity in literature and Jewish American literature, on which she has written extensively. Her recent publications include American Pastoral: La Vie réinventée (PUF, 2012), American Pastoral: Lectures d’une oeuvre, ed. (PU Rennes, 2011), Autour de Saul Bellow, ed. (PU Angers 2010) and Mémoires d’Amériques, co-ed. (Michel Houdiard, 2009).

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Some Thoughts about Grace Paley

Judith Arcana

1 In the following lines, Judith Arcana, Paley's friend and biographer, evokes Paley’s fortitude and firmness of purpose as she took part in the major protest movements of her time. It is from this passion for social justice and freedom that the author drew much of her energy and artistic inspiration. 1

2 Grace Paley, who died in August of 2007, was one of the great masters of the short story form; she also wrote poems and essays that tell us, in her startlingly clear voice, things we need to know. A lifelong activist, she focused on anti-militarism, the conditions of women’s lives, and urgent environmental issues.

3 Though Grace did not repeatedly confront the armed thugs of domestic terrorism in the USA, as Fannie Lou Hamer did, or as Susan Wicklund does now, she was a street activist all her life—beginning literally in childhood. She was tough and she was solid, saying the way to be of use on marches and at demonstrations is to “sit down and stay down.”

4 I don't think Grace made her decisions in relation to considerations of danger. She was both romantic and realistic, pragmatic and hopeful; she had (as in the title of one of her best-known stories) an “interest in life.” In her last decade, that interest remained so fierce she continued to undertake political action (and write a little, too) while using the various severe poisons of chemotherapy for her cancer. She was willing to take even experimental drugs because she wanted to live—to be alive. Pain was not an issue for Grace, nor was exhaustion—except in so far as they might, like little else, keep her from action.

5 If Grace were alive, she would tell you her life was one of privilege, even luxury, compared to the lives of most women in the world, in the USA, in her home states of New York and Vermont. Her part in the struggle for freedom and justice was consciously chosen, not forced upon her by unavoidable external conditions like, for

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instance, the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. She chose to act from a position of privilege to resist oppression.

6 She took great pleasure from action in the streets; she did what she wanted to do, not what she thought she ought to do. She needed to be the way she was, having recognized from childhood the inequity she inherited. A Jew, she learned from parents who had fled Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, and from her own observations during the Great Depression, what life is like for most people. She understood by age fifteen that she would need to live against the current.

7 She was arrested many times and didn’t mind going to jail. No doubt that attitude was at least partly rooted in the facts of the case: she hadn’t the great likelihood of being raped and tortured and maybe murdered. That kind of experience was unlikely for a white middle class woman in the USA. Rather, she understood the symbolic political importance of being arrested, and she welcomed its educational value for herself.

8 She certainly understood she was putting herself in danger on some occasions (and she knew her children, who told me so, decades ago, were afraid for her). She understood there were situations in which she might be maimed or killed. Grace was no martyr; she did not seek danger. In the streets, sometimes the cops or soldiers were angry enough to be cruel and violent; sometimes physical danger was right up in her face (for example: read about the use of crowd-control horses in her stories and essays, and about her trip to VietNam with the peace movement for prisoner exchange).

9 Nevertheless, though she was indeed a principled citizen, she wasn’t acting “on principle.” Grace was for the actual, not the virtual; not for the ideal, but for the real. She said, “I don’t think the thing for me has been civil disobedience so much as the importance of not asking permission.” And, “non-violence does not mean personal safety. Pacifism is not passive-ism.”

10 Grace Paley wanted and needed to make a statement; her two kinds of work, so often intertwined, are writing and political action. She used both her body and her words as signs, emblems, markers—words and action that would contradict the given, resisting acceptance of orthodoxy to seek truth along with justice. The conditions of her life called for, she believed, steady resistance to the sociopolitical machinery that granted her privilege by restraining and afflicting others. The moral compass she developed over the years of her life was set to the “north” of that understanding.

NOTES

1. An earlier version of this article appeared in On the Issues in 2010.

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AUTHORS

JUDITH ARCANA Judith Arcana is the author of Grace Paley’s Life Stories: A Literary Biography. Her most recent publications are Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture (fiction, 2015) and the forthcoming poetry collection Here From Somewhere Else. Other recent works are a set of three lyric broadsides, The Water Portfolio (2014); a fiction zine, Keesha and Joanie and JANE (2013); and a poetry chapbook, The Parachute Jump Effect (2012).

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Grace Paley’s Urban Jewish Voice: Identity, History, and “The Tune of the Language”

Victoria Aarons

1 Grace Paley once described the textures and sounds of language, those “world- inventing words,” to borrow a phrase from one of her characters, as “the tune of the language,” a melody bequeathed through time and “the shoals of every day,” those strains and intonations that are vehicles of history, identity, community, and memory (“Ruthy and Edie,” Later the Same Day,1 126; Interview with Aarons 50; “Faith in the Afternoon,” Enormous Changes in the Last Minute2 32). Language is, for Paley and her characters, malleable, fluid, and alive: “I would just throw words up in the air,” Paley tells us, “and see where they fell” (qtd. in Darnton). Language carries Paley’s characters to places both recognizable and unknown to them. Driven by words, Paley’s garrulous characters determinedly advance into the silence and make it verbal. Her short, economical fiction moves by way of dialogue. Paley’s short stories depend upon dialogue as a means of fashioning and amplifying character. Her characters are driven by the words that precede them: resolute, purposeful, relentless, and distilled. Like her characters, “as a user of words,” Paley is “merciless” (Interview Dee, et al. 1). Plot, for Paley, is always subservient to character. As Paley has said, “I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first” (Interview Dee, et al. 3). And from the sound emerges character, which Paley treats as a cluster of tones and thus of affects. One of Paley’s characters will say to another “You don’t have to tell stories to me in which I’m a character” (“Listening,” LSD 203). She does not because character is the story for Paley. Language is the means by which her characters negotiate their way through their ordinary worlds of husbands and wives, children, and neighbors. With eloquent, concentrated simplicity, Paley’s characters move about in the delimited spaces of their narrating lives, their lives opening up to them and to others through talk and through the transmission of stories that define them. Ordinary and largely undistinguished, Paley’s narrators transform themselves and the worlds they inhabit with words. Her characteristically dialogue-

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driven stories are peopled with sound, her characters propelled forward in significant acts of courage by, as Paley has suggested, “the ordinary language of your time—which, though I use the word ‘ordinary,’ is always extraordinary” (qtd. in Ulaby). It is so because the ordinary, quotidian, and declarative language of Grace Paley’s post-war urban Jewish landscapes is, very simply, both strategically preemptive and unexpectedly transformative. “I want to go on with the story,” one character will say to another, “Or perhaps begin it again” (“The Story Hearer,” LSD 134). The language of Paley’s post-war America, like the cityscapes she writes about and the people who inhabit them, is packed, compressed, thick with nuance, and filled with sound, with the sounds of people living and talking. Her playgrounds, city streets and parks are, as one character happily affirms, “full of noise. Everybody got something to say to the next guy” (“Zagrowsky Tells,” LSD 173). It is the noise of a diasporic people living, imagining, and struggling to make sense and keep control of their lives.

2 As one of Paley’s characters says to another, “I like your paragraphs better than your sentences” (“Listening,” LSD 205). What he really likes, in other words, is the ongoing rush of words strung together, the continuous, steady momentum and rhythms of sound, the “tune,” that holds the promise of movement, of passage from the otherwise constrained and narrow worlds of city blocks and neighborhoods, stoops, windows, and doorways from which her characters’ voices expansively spill out into the streets. As Paley put it, it is “the tune of the language” that is “in your ear […] you suddenly realize you know… and that is the most important thing” (Interview Aarons 50). And it is so because this persistent tune, a “sad melody,” as one of her narrators insists, a “song… learned in her mother’s kitchen,” links her characters to a community and inheritance of suffering and possibility, loss and gain, the twin counterparts and complements of diasporic Jewish history (“Politics,” EC 139). Paley’s characters are, in many ways, the voice of the diaspora, the rhythmic psalm of reinvention: determined, strong-willed, and indefatigable. To be miserly with words is, for Paley, a failure of imagination, and, as the narrator of the short story “Listening” admits, “a great absence of yourself” (LSD 210). Word stinginess is viewed by Paley’s characters as an abdication of one’s ethical responsibilities, of one’s obligation to others, as well as a failure to imagine possibilities and secure a future, as the narrator of the story “Friends” concedes, the “roots of the littlest future, sometimes just stubs of conversation” (LSD 83). Paley’s characters are attuned to each other and to their shared place in the communities in which they live and work and play and dream. But the “tune of the language” also connects them to a history of communal melody, a Jewish lament that her characters always come back to with “their ears to the ground, listening to signals from long ago” (“Faith in the Afternoon,” EC 31). Thus they are also tuned into a counter narrative of suffering, one that takes into account “that dark ancestral grief” (“The Immigrant Story,” EC 171). The densely distilled dialogue and ongoing flow of words that shape Paley’s fictional narratives—characters who form and reaffirm communities through talk—acknowledge and extend a distinctly Jewish history of suffering, one that has implications for the immediate worlds her characters inhabit.

3 For Paley, the “tune of the language”—the sounds that shape memory and identity—is passed along intergenerationally, from, as she says, “our great grandfathers […] through my father and mother and grandmother,” and invokes a “speech and a life” intrinsic to and defining of both character and, in Paley’s words, “social feelings,” of continuity and survival (Interview Aarons 53). As with her recurring character Faith,

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like Paley, the child of immigrants, who “feels herself so damply in the swim of things that she considers crawling Channels and Hellesponts,” Paley’s characters, “asweat with dreams,” navigate the world through talk, through the efficacy of articulated expression that gives presence to what otherwise might be absence (“Faith in the Afternoon,” EC 33). For, as one of her characters cautions, “in the grave it will be quiet” (“The Loudest Voice,” The Little Disturbances of Man3 55). This is an admonition not to be taken lightly. Up against “the tendency […] to forget,” as another character warns, is, for Paley, the resiliency of language to carry the weight of memory (“Friends,” LSD 72). For, as one of her characters assures another, “Though the world cannot be changed by talking […] it may at least be known” (“Friends,” LSD 78). In this way, Paley’s characters will attempt to navigate the conditions of their collective history and individual histories through an articulated presence that calls upon a conscious and gritty self- reckoning. To this end, Faith’s immigrant father will tell her a story that she should take to heart: There’s an old Jew. He’s in Germany. It’s maybe ’39, ’40. He comes around to the tourist office. He looks at the globe. They got a globe there. He says, Listen, I got to get out of here. Where you suggest, Herr Agent, I should go? The agency man also looks at the globe. The Jewish man says, Hey, how about here? He points to America. Oh, says the agency man, sorry, no, they got finished up with their quota. Ts, says the Jewish man, so how about here? He points to France. Last train left already for there, too bad, too bad. Nu, then to Russia? Sorry, absolutely nobody they let in there at the present time. A few more places…the answer is always, port is closed. They got already too many, we got no boats…So finally the poor Jew, he’s thinking he can’t go anywhere on the globe, also he can’t stay where he is, he says oi, he says ach! He pushes the globe away, disgusted. But he got hope. He says, So this one is used up, Herr Agent. Listen—you got another one? (“Dreamer in a Dead Language,” LSD 19)

4 Paley’s characters will, in the face of antagonism and catastrophe, construct their own, knowable worlds, and they will do so through shaping the language of their experience, an insider’s language that is protective of and fortressed by collective good-will, a project of being consciously attuned to the privations and anguish of others.

5 Paley’s characters are committed truth-tellers, believing, as does Faith, that “A few hot human truthful words are powerful enough” to defend against obscurity (“Friends,” LSD 73). As one outraged character, brandishing herself in the face of an unforgivably remiss storyteller, protests, “you’ve just omitted me from the other stories and I was there. In the restaurant and the train, right there […] Where is my life? […] Why have you left me out of everybody’s life?” (“Listening,” LSD 210). To be left out of the cultural “life” of the Western world is the historical plight of the Jew. To be left out of the representation of a “life” of one’s own making is a symptomatic anxiety resulting from the fear of erasure, of being moored in a diaspora without agency and hope. From this fear emerges the communal character of Paley’s fiction and its emphasis on storytelling. Paley’s stories, the ways her characters live and talk in the world, are brutally honest about the fear of isolation and the vulnerability that comes with it. The public articulation of sorrow, grief, pleasure, and want is, for Paley, a measure of the determination to mitigate loss, revealing the post-war Jewish paradox of the sheer pleasure of being in America as measured against a looming history—both distant and proximate—of shared suffering. Thus Paley’s narrators will make emphatic the lives of others whose histories they share—if only by imagined consanguinity—so that “those names can take thickness and strength and fall back into the world with their weight,”

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in other words, to insist on a future even if manufactured—sutured together—by the threads of memory and story (“Friends,” LSD 79).

6 The “tune of the language” is, for Paley, an inheritance that draws upon a narrated past, a melody with origins in the Jewish tradition of both lamentation and midrashic responses to it, rupture and continuity. This inheritance responds to the obligatory conditions of the shared transmission of narratives and individual testimony. As one of Paley’s characters insists, one must “tell stories […] in order […] to save a few lives” (“Debts,” EC 10). Paley’s fiction is a matter of talking lives, the making of character through the defining space of the sounds and textures of language, a language that draws from the inflections and cadences of the past, of shared history and myth, an inheritance that takes pleasure in the sounds of invention and self-fashioning and that draws upon the celebrated achievements of self-expression. As one of Paley’s characters satirically and with interpretive, even midrashic, “interlinear intelligence” maintains, “that Isaac, Sarah’s boy—before he was old enough to be taken out by his father to get his throat cut, he must have just lain around smiling and making up diphthongs and listening” (“The Story Hearer,” LSD 144). That is, the sound and shape of language, its design and presence, is an act of serial, interpretive creation in the face of vulnerability to catastrophe. The refusal to participate in the ongoing, generational discursive project becomes in Paley’s stories a potential “assault” on the preservation of Jewish identity, for, as Faith’s immigrant father, with deep conviction, reminds her, “to a Jew the word ‘shut up’ is a terrible expression, a dirty word, like a sin, because in the beginning […] was the word!” (“Faith in the Afternoon,” EC 41).

7 This context comprised of the intersections of speech, history, and identity is, of course, the immigrant’s “story” in harmony with the self-asserting narratives of the first generation American-born children, those who with anxious dispatch, as the narrator of Paley’s “The Immigrant Story” purports, “grew up in the summer sunlight of upward mobility” (EC 171). Many of Paley’s stories are narrated by the children of immigrants who straddle a Jewish immigrant past and an ascending Jewish American middle-class. In many ways, Paley’s fiction is on the threshold of a generational divide, an exchange of existences, escorting out a generation for whom self-formation “is of great consequence,” as an immigrant parent will remind his daughter in the story “A Conversation with My Father” (EC 232-237), and ushering in a generation of Jews—the children of immigrants—for whom an ironic assessment of American life is for the first time an indulgence (163). As Paley says of her writing, “I hardly ever write of a single generation […] I’m interested in intergenerations—the young people and the old— because I’m more interested in history than I am in psychology” (qtd in Darnton). We see in Paley’s short stories the urban landscape of America through the eyes of both the immigrant in the early years of the twentieth-century and through the competing perspective of the children of that immigrant generation, whose view of America was circumscribed “from Coney Island to the cemetery […] the same subway […] the same fare” (“The Loudest Voice,” EC 55). Paley’s fiction, especially her early stories, gives voice to this intergenerational dialogue, conversations among those who reinvented themselves as Americans, having “shot like a surface-to-air missile right into the middle class” under the auspices of “the American flag on wild Ellis Island” (“Enormous Changes” 122). But this transition from immigrant to middle-class American is fraught with complication, as it is for Paley’s “Faith,” who “really is an American […] raised up like everyone else to the true assumption of happiness,” but who “is absolutely miserable,” a “willful unhappiness,” of which she, “in the middle of

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prosperous times,” should, as her mother admonishes her, “do your life a little better than this” (“Faith in the Afternoon,” EC 33, 34, 36). After all, as the ailing father reproaches his daughter in “A Conversation with My Father,” “a person must have character” (EC 167). That is, a person must not squander opportunities for cultural assimilation.

8 The stories in Paley’s first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man, published in 1956, were written in the direct aftermath of World War II and reflect the expansion of socio- economic opportunity as well as the diversity of ethnic immigrant neighborhoods comprising America’s bourgeoning urban landscapes. Very few of Paley’s stories address the fate of Europe’s Jews, and it is surprising that someone with Paley’s commitment to social activism and to tikkun olam (“repairing or healing the world”) would turn from an explicit reckoning with and response to the Holocaust in her fiction. However, despite this absence of direct engagement with the Holocaust, the Holocaust is palpably present in Paley’s early fiction. It is present in the specter of loss, in a felt sense of anxiety in Jewish and other immigrant neighborhoods, in ethnic discourses of protected and vested interests that define and circumscribe shared suffering, in an insider’s intuitive knowledge of the tenuousness of place, and in a deeply rooted, felt connection to history. Paley’s stories of these protective immigrant communities are post-Holocaust narratives, stories written against—however implicitly —a landscape of loss. Her characters have, as it were, a finely tuned ear for trouble. As such, her communities are fortressed by characters who intuitively recognize danger when untethered from their communities and who share their experience of living on the margins of a refugee culture. As one of her characters says, “I hate to be in the hands of strangers” (“Enormous Changes” 127). Paley’s characters are most secure when buttressed by those who share a common history and finely tuned sense of their present precariousness. Talk becomes a defense against intrusion, as characters perceive the intrusiveness of a stranger, an interloper who would trespass on the vulnerability of one of their own. In the short story “Zagrowsky Tells,” for example, Paley’s small but persuasive gathering of neighborhood women, although seemingly preoccupied with the promise of gossip, will sense the unwelcome intrusion of a stranger, and although they stand at “a considerable distance” from the projected effrontery, “lucky they got radar. They turn around sharp like birds and fly over to the man. They talk very soft. Why are you bothering this old man, he got enough trouble? Why don’t you leave him alone? [...] I seen you around here before, buster, you better watch out. He walks away from them backwards. They start in shaking hands” (LSD 174).

9 Paley’s urban characters come to life against the backdrop of “the cruel history of Europe,” an acute memory of loss and grief, a tacitly acknowledged “sorrow […] due to history,” both remote and all-too-proximate (“The Immigrant Story” 171) Thus Paley’s characters emerge into “the summer sunlight of upward mobility” with a reckoning of the perils and possibilities of their moment and place in history (“The Immigrant Story” 171). As one of Paley’s characters, with magnanimous optimism, affirms: “I thank God every day that I’m not in Europe. I thank God I’m American-born and live on East 172nd Street where there is a grocery store, a candy store, and a drugstore on one corner and on the same block a shul and two doctors’ offices” (“The Immigrant Story,” EC 173). Her enthusiasm for such good fortune is a measure of just how far and how close her own relation to that “cruel history” is. For such wildly unrestrained buoyancy is ironically calculated against its niggling antagonist: a willful obliviousness to a legacy

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of suffering. To his companion’s conviction of happiness and self-determination, the adult child of immigrants in “The Immigrant Story” can only accuse her of a deliberate “rotten rosy temperament” and a puerile, naïve denial of the clear antecedent of events and the weight of their lingering, formative shadows: “You fucking enemy, he said. You always see things in a rosy light […]. You were like that in sixth grade. One day you brought three American flags to school” (EC 173). Paley here dramatizes the opposing sides of “the immigrant story” and the ways in which the American-born view their place in the inheritance of history. To the narrator’s disclaimer that “Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world,” her antagonistic companion can only respond with the fear and imperiled vulnerability of one who grew up, as he insists, “in the shadow of another person’s sorrow” (EC 171). And here the competing perspectives are made emphatic in the paradox between the simple, direct, and uncensored language of Paley’s characters and the complex nuances that underlie their expression. Her characters play against the shades of both proximate and historical sorrow, dancing to the tune of “the summer sunlight of upward mobility” on the urban streets of their making (“The Immigrant Story,” EC 171).

10 Paley’s talking communities speak in a characteristically Jewish urban tongue. Theirs is a language of the streets, a vernacular of city dwelling, where “every window is a mother’s mouth” (“Loudest Voice,” LDM 55). The landscape of Paley’s urban fiction, “with its widening pool of foreign genes,” is home to a lively and raucous street drama, a theatre of disposition and temperament set against an array of linguistic resonances (“The Story Hearer,” LSD 135). As Paley explains, “In the city, there’s a sudden density of population, and there is a constant communication of people […]. [O]utside in the street there is a thickness of life that’s stimulating, constantly stimulating and constantly exciting, so it’s quite marvelous” (Interview Aarons 57). For Paley, both the vernacular of the streets and the city itself are places—and discursive topoi—of possibility. Here for Paley is the connection between the urban environment and the language that both defines it and arises from its confluence of sounds, generations, and cultures: this convergence of city life and speech makes possible the promise of reinvention, “the happy chorus of my inside self,” as one character puts it (“The Loudest Voice,” LDM 55). The interplay and overlapping of the languages of the diaspora become, in Paley’s craft, a vernacular of city dwelling that defines self, class, and communal cultural inheritance. Paley’s characters speak in a shorthand colloquialism filtered through the languages of its ancestry. Her fictive settings are neighborhoods peopled with immigrants and the children of immigrants, all speaking to the tune of, as one character puts it, a “remembering tongue” (“The Loudest Voice,” LDM 62). It is, for Paley’s characters, an insider’s language that emerges from an explosion of linguistic conditions and backgrounds. Paley’s characters instinctively draw upon the nuances of an array of languages. As Paley suggests, “our parents, grandparents, a few of us as babies, had probably spoken Russian, Yiddish, Polish, German. We had those languages in our ears—those tones, inflections, accents” (“Foreword” 7).

11 Jews historically have negotiated more than one language in their daily and religious lives. Hebrew, the loshn koydesh, the holy tongue, has traditionally been the language of scripture and prayer. For the majority of Eastern European Jews before the Holocaust, Yiddish was the language of daily life, the mame loshn, the mother tongue of domesticity, the language in which one loved and labored, the voice of mothers calling children, of navigating a circumscribed yet precarious life as a marginalized, targeted

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people. In addition to Hebrew and Yiddish, the increasingly mobile and secularly educated Jews of Europe, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, also spoke the languages of their “host” countries: Polish, Russian, German, and so forth. Thus the majority of Jewish emigrants to America from Eastern and Western Europe arrived equipped, not only with multiple languages, but with a penchant, a history and a necessity, of acquiring the languages of refuge and inclusion, a well-honed “capacity for survival” (“Faith in the Afternoon,” EC 32). In America, acquiring English was, of course, the price for the immigrant of the ticket to middle- class ascension and cultural assimilation. In Paley’s story “Enormous Changes,” acquiring English is a mark of character for the immigrant father who, “working like a horse, he’d read Dickens, gone to medical school,” and emerged into the middle-class of American opportunity (122). Yiddish, the language of the diaspora and the mark of difference, is viewed, not entirely uncomically and not without irony, by many of Paley’s immigrant characters as a vestige of dispossession. In assessing his wife’s attempts to “Americanize” herself, one of Paley’s characters ironically appraises the wisdom of her linguistic self-reinvention: “She says, Ai ai. She doesn’t say oi anymore. She got herself assimilated into ai […] Don’t think this will make you an American, I said to her […] Naturally it was a joke, only what is there to laugh?” (“Zagrowsky Tells,” LSD 159-60). Here the comic gives way to the precarious conditions of the diaspora: a measure of loss, displacement, and an exilic uncertainty and longing. Zagrowsky is, after all, right: “What is there to laugh?” On the other hand, Paley’s characters, for the most part, move to the rhythms of their self-fashioning lives, reaching back, when the moment calls for unmediated and unequivocal expression, to the language of their not- so-distant pasts: “Ach,” to borrow a phrase from another character, an expression of “absolute digestive disgust” (“Faith in the Afternoon,” EC 49). Once safely in the lap of status as a successful “American,” one can then, as another one of Paley’s immigrant characters maintains, make claims to a past: “I have spoken altogether too much English in my life,” and so, finally ensconced in America, “safely among her own kind in Coney Island,” she will learn “real Yiddish […] and as soon as all the verbs and necessary nouns had been collected under the roof of her mouth, she took an oath to expostulate in Yiddish and grieve only in Yiddish, and she has kept that oath to this day” (“Faith in the Afternoon,” EC 32, 33). Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazic Jewry, becomes in the “next generation,” no longer the mark of threatened outsider status, but a vehicle of the linguistic reaffirmation of the history of that threatened existence, an embrace of historical identity in the midst of historical change brought on by the successful immigration to America.

12 Thus Paley’s urban landscapes reflect the presence of Yiddish and its gesticulated orality as well as the resonances of other linguistic influences on her characters’ speech. But this inheritance is more than a carry-over of the “verbs and necessary nouns” of a language; rather Yiddish and a culture of linguistic fluidity and suppleness was, for the post-war Jews of Paley’s urban neighborhoods, a way of approaching the worlds they inhabit. The texture of the language is both an ethic and a defining characteristic of identity, collective memory, and consanguineous alliance. On the streets of immigrant America for Jews, Yiddish existed alongside English, creating the character of those urban settings. As Paley has said of the influence of such a legacy on her own developing prose, “I understood I’d found my other ear. Writing […] stories had allowed it—suddenly—to do its job, to remember the street language and the home language with its Russian and Yiddish accents, a language my early characters knew

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well, the only language I spoke” (“Two Ears” x). Indeed, the recognition of the rich and elastic fusion of languages is not lost on her characters: “They debated a little in Yiddish, then fell in a puddle of Russian and Polish” (“The Loudest Voice,” LDM 62). And although Paley’s neighborhoods are, to a large extent, circumscribed and insular, the infusion of languages is widening, enlarging the scope of their worlds.

13 The language, like the city, reflects the elasticity of change and possibility. As Hana Wirth-Nesher correctly suggests, this melding of languages, like the generational blending of immigrants and their American-born offspring, is intuitive, existing often beyond the reach of memory but part of the texture of life. She writes: [F]or many Jewish American writers subsequent to the immigrant generation, Hebrew and Yiddish are sources of self-expression and identity even if the authors cannot “remember” them in the sense of ever having possessed them as a means of communication. Their understanding of what these languages signify is always the result…of both descent, a continuous cultural legacy, and consent, an embrace of American English that also structures their sense of those Jewish languages and accents. Their remembering, therefore, is not the result of an essential Jewishness that hearkens back to some racial memory but the result of socialization where practices, expectations, and assumptions about the entanglement of language and identity linger in their consciousness. (5)

14 Paley’s characters speak a secular, evolving urban tongue, a voice that calls to them from the doorways, stoops, and windows of their lives, a richly compressed expression of place and belonging. As Wirth-Nesher proposes, the language of Paley’s characters and narrators makes claims for the pull of history and the intersection of generations and “illustrates not only traces of the immigrant generation’s Yiddish but also continued traces of accent in the writing of native-born Americans, through syntax, tone, volume, and register” (23). Rather than a rejection of one language—one history— for another, Paley’s wordsmiths embrace the languages of the diaspora in the sounds of the streets, demonstrating, as they speak, a polyglot, a babel, a happy confusion of sound. As Wirth-Nesher further suggests, Paley’s “American-born speaker retains the transposed syntax, vocal markers, and literary allusions of the immigrant generation to showcase the new ethnic American voice coming into its own with such verve […] her Americanization lies not in her rejection of these languages, but rather in embracing and bending them for her own purposes” (29). Such speech acts, for Paley’s characters, happen in the open, from windows, in parks and playgrounds, in shops, standing behind counters, in cluttered kitchens, on subways, and on the streets of their neighborhoods. As Paley acknowledges, “My Yiddish […] is that sort of street Yiddish more than anything else, like people yelling at each other or calling the children, or my grandmother saying ‘you never eat enough’” (Interview Aarons 50). In other words, their talk is communal, a seemingly endless stretch of talk and meandering conversation, one story ending where another begins, stories nestled within one another like Russian dolls but also expanding outward in creative gestures of self- representation.

15 Thus, the stories they tell are the narratives of the diaspora, but also the narratives of emergent mid-century American city life. And while, as one of Paley’s characters contends, “There is a long time in me between knowing and telling,” their stories erupt with the force of discovery (“Debts,” EC 9). Their capacity for ironic and self-parodic pronouncement always defensively ready, they do not stay silent for long, as one character, exhibiting a characteristic self-conscious assessment of their hold on talk, acknowledges: “Oh, the way words lie down under decades then the Union of Restless

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Diggers out of sheer insomnia pulls them up” (“Listening,” LSD 206). Word gluttons, Paley’s voluble characters tell the story of America’s urban performance. Murray Baumgarten, in an essay on “Urban Rites and Civic Premises,” aptly suggests that “Out of the small forms with which she works, from these lyric stories, Paley proffers a large and redeeming effort […] Through this dramatic encounter and theatrical voicing of the ethnic accents of contemporary city life, Paley proposes no less than the articulation of the language of America. It is an urban tongue, quick, explosive, intersected, meditative and honest, steady and direct in facing its respondents […] What Grace Paley thus provides us is a language by which to conceive our urban selves” (406). Indeed, the city is the perfect place for self-fashioning and for the animated, sensory collisions of self-expression. As the narrator of the short story “Listening” characterizes post-World War II urban diversity, “our own beloved city [is] crowded with day and night workers, shoppers, walkers, the subway trains […] so handsomely lined with pink to dark dark brown faces, golden tans and yellows scattered amongst them” (LSD 204).

16 Surrounded by the sounds of people talking, their demands and entreaties intersecting, colliding, and colluding, Paley’s characters will insist on both recognition and reckoning made possible through talk. “My voice,” the young Shirley Abramowitz in the story appropriately titled “The Loudest Voice,” will make abundantly clear, “was certainly the loudest” (LDM 63). There is a kind of abundance, a profusion of plenty, in the freedom and openness with which Paley’s characters and narrators talk their way through their days, in and out of kitchens and libraries, old-age homes, and taxi cabs, pursuing ordinary domestic life as if continuous speech will give them the time and opportunity they need to create the conditions of their determined project of living well. As one of Paley’s characters insists, “Since I already began to tell, I have to tell the whole story. I’m not a person who keeps things in. Tell! That opens up the congestion a little—the lungs are for breathing, not secrets […] [I]f you want to breathe, you got to tell” (“Zagrowsky Tells,” LSD 161). Storytelling, for Paley, is both structural and thematized in her fiction. And it is no surprise that she depends on the short form, which, in its brevity, density, and sharply purposeful dramatic overtures, compresses action so that voice gives rise to the making of character. A typical story in Paley’s oeuvre begins and concludes with talk, talk that forms and coalesces character. Thus, the opening line of the story “Ruthy and Edie” sets the stage for the kind of dialogue that places character and conflict in motion: “One day in the Bronx two small girls named Edie and Ruthy were sitting on the stoop steps” (LSD 115). Other stories begin similarly: “A lady called me up today,” opens the short story simply titled “Debts” (EC 9); “I saw my ex-husband in the street,” begins the story “Wants” (EC 3); “You would certainly be glad to meet me,” introduces the story “Distance” (EC 16); and so forth. Typically Paley’s stories begin with the possibility for discourse, the conditions for lives to intersect and, very simply, for her characters to talk to one another. “I wanted to tell,” one character, with absolute certainty, will proclaim (“Zagrowsky Tells,” LSD 167).

17 The beginning of the story, for Paley, is the beginning of lives lived and shared, and collectively braved, where tenements and doorways and stoops give way to stories that engage the broadest circumstances of Jewish and American history. “Plot” for Paley, if overly conceited, misses the point of the way speech structures the trajectory of individuals and communities. As the character Zagrowsky insists, “You have an opinion. I have an opinion. Life don’t have no opinion” (“Zagrowsky Tells,” LSD 159). For Paley, the emphasis is always on how something is talked about, not on what

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happens, and so her reading of the experience of Jews in post-World War II urban America is fashioned through the performance of language that, not only replaces plot, but makes plot. Plot, for Paley, is merely “the absolute line between two points,” as one of her contentious characters ironically asserts to her dying father in defending her own speech centered stories, stories that insist on possibility and compassion (“A Conversation with My Father,” EC 161-2). Plot, for this character and, I suspect, for Paley herself, can be constrictive of storytelling, to the formation of character, and an impediment to its ethical possibilities. Indeed, as the narrator of this story maintains, “I had a different responsibility” to characters who are her “knowledge and invention” (EC 167). Her quarrel with plot is not based on “literary reasons,” but on intuitive, affective, and imaginative grounds: “because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life” (EC 162). That is, Paley’s optimism hopes to create lives fashioned in defiance of endings. After all, conversation implies openings, a conceivable, expressible future, “gabbing into evening” (“Friends,” LSD 87). Speech, for Paley, as so many of her stories show, is empowering across generations of 20th century Jewish experience. It is especially so for the immigrants and their children in her stories, who live on the urban edge of the process of assimilation into mainstream, middle-class American life and who do so with the weight of Jewish history fully on them. Thus, deeply invested and “interested in [their] own courage,” they talk (“In the Garden,” LSD 44).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baumgarten, Murray. “Urban Rites and Civic Premises in the Fiction of Saul Bellow, Grace Paley, and Sandra Schor.” Contemporary Literature 34.3 (Fall 1993): 395-424. Print.

Darnton, Nina. “Taking Risks: The Writer as Effective Teacher.” The New York Times on the Web, 13 April 1986. Web. 15 August 2013.

Paley, Grace. 1974. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. Print.

---. “Foreword.” Apples from the Desert: Selected Stories. By Savyon Liebrecht. Trans. Marganit Weinberger-Rotman, Jeffrey M. Green, Barbara Harshav, Gilead Morahg, and Riva Rubin. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1998. 7-8. Print

---. Interview with Victoria Aarons. “‘The Tune of the language’: An Interview with Grace Paley.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 12 (1993): 50-61. Print.

---. Interview with Jonathan Dee, Barbara Jones, Larissa MacFarquhar. “Grace Paley, The Art of Fiction No. 131.” The Paris Review 124 (2013). Web. 15 August 2013.

---. Later the Same Day. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1985. Print.

---. The Little Disturbances of Man. 1959. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985. 53-63. Print.

---. “Two Ears, Three Lucks.” Grace Paley: The Collected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. ix-xi. Print.

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Ulaby, Neda. “Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies at Age 84.” All Things Considered. 23 August 2007. Web. 19 August 2013.

Wirth-Nesher, Hana. Call It English: The Languages of Jewish American Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Print.

NOTES

1. The abbreviation LSD will be used in references to this collection. 2. The abbreviation EC will be used in references to this collection. 3. The abbreviation LDM will be used in references to this collection.

ABSTRACTS

Dans ses nouvelles minimalistes et expérimentales, Grace Paley construit un monde urbain d’après-guerre typiquement juif américain. C’est avant tout par le dialogue qu’elle donne vie à ses personnages qui sont toujours décrits dans des lieux de convivialité et de rencontre (perrons, cours d’école, rues ou squares du quartier) et dont la place dans l’histoire est définie par le langage. L’intrigue pour Paley est purement secondaire : c’est par le langage et la transmission des histoires qui les définissent que les personnages déterminent leur rapport à eux-mêmes et au monde. Diverse, compacte, nuancée et éloquente dans sa simplicité même, la langue de l’Amérique d’après-guerre de Grace Paley, de même que le paysage urbain qu’elle évoque, est tissée des voix d’une population diasporique s’efforçant d’apprivoiser un réel toujours récalcitrant. Ce qui importe chez Paley, ce n’est pas tant ce qui arrive que la façon dont on en parle. Le langage tout à la fois explique et transforme le monde.

AUTHORS

VICTORIA AARONS Victoria Aarons teaches American Jewish and Holocaust Literature at Trinity University. She is the author of A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction and What Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction, both recipients of a Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book. Her work has appeared in a number of scholarly venues, including The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists, and The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction After 1945; Studies in American Literature, Modern Jewish Studies, Contemporary Literature, Philip Roth Studies and Shofar. She is a contributor to the two volume compendia Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work. She is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow, and the forthcoming collection, Bernard Malamud: A Centennial Tribute.

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Voice and Generations in Grace Paley’s “Goodbye and Good Luck,” “The Immigrant Story” and “Dreamer in a Dead Language”

Régine Camps-Robertson

I'm interested in generational relations I'm interested in how people live at this particular moment in time and history. Grace Paley (Interview with Kathleen Hulley 36)

1 An American born of Jewish Russian parents, Grace Paley writes with an acute sense of her place in history, which has led her to engage actively with contemporary issues through political action as well as in her artistic work. Her voice resonates through her short stories as a sustaining strength amid “little disturbances” and “enormous changes” alike1—a paradox in a work where showing prevails over telling. Indeed, even in dialogues leaving apparently little room for authorial comments,2 a sense of voice is created by the somewhat systematic juxtaposition of contrasting elements. As Ronald Schleifer aptly observes: [T]he play of voices in Paley’s stories offers what could be called, following Socrates and Kierkegaard, the maieutic function of discourse, the role of the midwife in the dialectic of (in Paley’s words) “two events or two characters or two winds or two different weathers or two ideas or whatever bumping into each other in stories.” (Schleifer 42)

2 The reader is in fact led into a universe poised between past and present, between Old World and New World, between the burden of history and the dream of a brighter future. As young and old keep conversing with each other, or as a person is shown and heard at different periods in his/her life, it becomes clear that they carry the traces of their past (or of the past of others) which influences their present with the subtle, fascinating force of a mystery.3 Meanwhile silence creeps between the lines as if to point out the difficulties of intergenerational dialogue.

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3 The aim of this article is to look into the links between voice and silence on the one hand, and old and young on the other hand in order to show how their “bumping into each other” makes for a dynamic interpretation of voice and generations. We will focus on Paley’s very first story, “Goodbye and Good Luck” (LD4 3-13), “The Immigrant Story” (EC 238-41) and “Dreamer in a Dead Language” (LS 265-83), three narratives which, though written over two decades, published in separate collections, and different in terms of length, point of view and characters,5 have a lot in common. All three stories stage a problematic dialogue between generations, one full of omissions, understatements or ironic allusions where the said matters as much as the unsaid. In “Goodbye and Good Luck” Grace Paley draws on her Jewish heritage to create the memorable character of Aunt Rose, a middle-aged woman who tells her young niece (who remains silent throughout the story)6 about her romance with Volodya Vlashkin, an actor of the Yiddish theatre she is about to marry. In “The Immigrant Story,” an argument between Faith Darwin and her boyfriend, Jack, about their respective outlook on life opens onto a poignant evocation of the tragedy that once befell the young man’s parents as they immigrated to the United States. As for “Dreamer in a Dead Language,” it opposes three generations since it evokes Faith taking her children to visit her parents now living in a retirement home.

4 First the contrast between speech and silence as well as between young and old will be analyzed in structural terms. Then the linguistic marks that point to the links between voice and generations will be traced. Finally, the interplay of voice and age will be viewed in the broader context of Paley’s representation of a daunting challenge: measuring death against the individual’s potential for renewal, within the space of the short story.

The Shadow Voice as Structural Pattern

5 In her dedication to the Collected Stories, Grace Paley evokes her friend Sybil Clairborne’s very last words before she died: “Grace, the real question is—how are we to live our lives?” The question will keep ringing in the memory of the reader who feels invited to anticipate a possible answer. Likewise, in the stories, it is always as if one voice were rising against the backdrop of another. Thus Rose Lieber’s address to her niece in “Goodbye and Good Luck” turns out to be a response to her sister’s condescending comment, “poor Rosie” (3), as she seems to pity her for having long remained unmarried. The reader is led to imagine the conversation that took place between the two sisters before the story starts, as if Rose’s voice allowed the echo of another voice to resonate through her own words.7 Besides, as the niece, Lillie, is never to be seen or heard in the course of the story, one can infer what she says only through her aunt’s reactions: “don’t laugh, you ignorant girl!” (6); “Now Lillie, don’t be surprised” (10). These function like stage directions referring to a voice “off stage.”

6 The theatrical quality of Lillie’s totally transparent presence is part of Paley’s forceful dramatization of the link between speaker and listener, as well as between speech and silence. The locale of the story, the Russian theatre, provides a metaphoric framework for the representation of silence within a speech situation: during a performance, the actor’s voice is silenced as he speaks for another while the audience sits in silence like a witness overhearing the characters’ conversation. At one point in the story, however,

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the situation is reversed as an enthusiastic tumult in the public causes the actors to fall silent (6).

7 A theatrical situation can be suggested indirectly too. In “The Immigrant Story” Faith’s voice suddenly stops as she listens to Jack recalling his parents. This passage is detached from the rest by a blank on the page, imitating the curtain being lifted on the scene from the past. Not only is Faith silent, but Jack, who takes over telling the story, has become strangely quiet, and no longer screams or argues. His voice is hushed as he first etches the sharp silhouettes of two solitary figures on either side of the ocean, separated by the threat of violence and death: My father decided to go to America [...]. In America [...] he put his money away for the day he could bring his wife and sons to this place. Meanwhile, in Poland, famine struck [...] Famine ate up the bodies of the little boys pretty quickly. My father met my mother at the boat. He looked at her face, her hands. There was no baby in her arms, no children dragging at her skirt [...] He took her by the hand and brought her home. (241) Without any transition Jack then draws the contours of a family scene glowing with warmth in the midst of darkness, a scene which has remained engraved in his memory as it seems to epitomize his lonely childhood (“in the shadow of another person’s sorrow” [238]). They [my parents] are sitting at the edge of their chairs. He’s leaning forward reading to her in that old bulb light. Sometimes he smiles just a little [...]. Just beyond the table and their heads, there is the darkness of the kitchen, the bedroom, the dining room, the shadowy darkness where as a child I ate my supper, did my homework and went to work. (241)

8 As if through a series of mirrors cutting across time, everyone features in this silent picture: Jack as a child and as an adult; Faith as listener and the reader as an overhearing listener.8 This powerful effect gives depth to silence, like an echo suggesting the never-ending repetition of a sound and deceiving the ear into confusing sound and silence. Another echo comes from the parallel between the two couples in the story. Paley offers a reading of past and present by confronting them and leaving the reader to make sense of this dual representation. Two generations enter into a kind of silent dialogue, about love and about the impact of history on individual destinies.

9 Similarly, old and young often seem to merge in Paley’s description of her main characters. Like the heroine of the following story in the collection (14-25), Rose is, “a woman, young and old,” depending on whom she relates to. She is much younger than Vlashkin, who calls her “little girl” (7), yet much older than Lillie. Generational roles are ironically reversed, however, since Rose is the one getting married, rather than her young niece. Likewise, Vlashkin is all the younger for being old and experienced: “What youngest man knew enough about life to be as young as him?” (9). Old people are endowed with the same vitality in “Dreamer in a Dead Language”: Faith’s eighty-year- old father is still writing poems and dreaming to start life anew while the old often outlive the young in the ironically branded “Home for the Golden Ages.”

10 Throughout the stories, speaking and listening, and being young and being old seem to be interwoven, so that any attempt at interpretation calls for a dynamic approach of their links and of the way the story-teller dramatizes them. A case in point is Faith’s reaction (in “Dreamer in a Dead Language”) to her son’s remark that if she felt any sense of responsibility towards her parents, she would immediately take them away from the retirement home:

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She wanted to scream, Help! Had she been born ten, fifteen years later, she might have done so, screamed and screamed. Instead, tears made their usual protective lenses for the safe observation of misery. (283)

11 While Paley is here referring to women’s lately acquired freedom of expression, she turns silence into an even more powerful signifier than a scream, through the periphrasis opposing voice to silent tears on the one hand, and Faith’s older and her younger self on the other; and through the inclusion of a potential witness, safely observing Faith’s despair through protective lenses. While the character remains speechless, the narrator’s voice is perceptible in her poetic understatement of strong feelings and in the bitter-sweet tone conveyed by the juxtaposition of the prosaic (“protective lenses”) and of the tragic (Faith’s sense of vulnerability and injustice). The implicit narratorial intrusion functions like an aside overheard by the reader, along with the words uttered by the character, so that the final impression is that of a voice being “shadowed in,” just as the shadow of another self, either younger or older, or the shadow of another person, is made to be seen or felt alongside a character.

A Rhetoric of Echoes

… the word does the dreaming for you. The word. Grace Paley (“Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” 213)

12 The dynamic link between voice and generations is also at play in Paley’s rhetorical use of language. Each character is in fact depicted as a potential story-teller likely to pass on a story or a message (whether explicit or implicit) to an older or to a younger generation. In “Goodbye and Good Luck,” a metonymy, “young mouth” (13), turns the character of the listening niece into a mouthpiece similar to a mask in a Greek tragedy: “So, now, darling Lillie, tell this story to your mama from your young mouth. She don’t listen to a word from me” (13). Throughout the story, in fact, Rose seems to draw an implicit parallel between young age and listening. This parallel is stressed in her humorous remark that, when younger, she herself “had friends among interesting people who admired [her] for reasons of youth and that [she] was a first-class listener” (7). It is this capacity to listen and observe which enables Rose (now a middle-aged woman and a story-teller rather than a listener) to resurrect for the sake of her young niece (and that of the reader) not only the various stages of her life-long romance with Vlashkin but also the good old days of the Yiddish Theater, now forever gone.9

13 In “The Immigrant Story,” the very title points to the need for each generation to understand the story of the preceding generation. The use of the singular rather than the plural in the title makes the story of Jack’s parents emblematic of that of many other immigrants forced to leave behind a whole chapter in their life when they migrated to the US. The rejection of other potential syntactic forms, such as “the immigrant’s story” or “the immigrants’ story,” places “immigrant” and “story” on the same level, as if one defined the other, and, as if to highlight the story of deprivation and loss which, whether he likes it or not, infiltrates—almost “migrates” into—the life of the immigrants’ son, Jack, forever preventing him from seeing things “in a rosy light” (239).

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14 In “Dreamer in a Dead Language,” a rhetorical question stresses from the start the links between speaking and bringing together the young and the old. The opening scene takes place in a tavern where Philip and a group of friends are discussing old age: Now, why at that lively time of life, which is so full of standing up and lying down, why were they thinking and speaking sentences about the old. Because Faith’s father, one of the resident poets of the Children of Judea, Home for the Golden Ages, Coney Island Branch, had written still another song. (265, emphasis in original)

15 Though it is the very topic of the conversation, the song appears only in the second part of the story (“later that same night in Faith’s kitchen” [266]) when Philip, Faith’s boyfriend, reads it aloud to her. Voices thus merge in a spiral pattern that constantly displaces the origin of the words uttered, alternating the voice of the young and that of the old in an incremental effect giving even more substance to the exchange of voices. A similar process is at work in “Goodbye and Good Luck” when Rose, upon watching Vlashkin perform The Father-in-Law by Tchekhov (“an older man in love with a darling young girl” [10]), recognizes the same loving words he would lavish on her in real life. Language is duplicated from reality to the stage, and this deepens Rose’s feelings for her lover.

16 The link between the young and the old is also highlighted by the image of the body as a language. Rose reads quite an explicit message on her mother’s face in “Goodbye and Good Luck”: “the rotten handwriting of time, scribbled up and down her cheeks, across her forehead back and forth—a child could read—it said old, old, old” (10). In “The Immigrant Story,” Faith recalls that, as a school girl she used to speak out her gratitude for America and even had an American flag tattooed on her arm: “it has gotten dimmer but a lot wider because of middle age” (240). While replicating her spoken assertions of her patriotic creed, the inscription on her body introduces an ambiguous note: has her faith in America diminished (“gotten dimmer”), despite the implicit promise that her very name may evoke, or increased (“wider”)? Body language is just as expressive in “The Immigrant Story”: it conveys aggressiveness and violence between Faith and Jack (who points a finger at her and calls her an enemy, [239]), but tenderness and a sense of mutual need in the old couple (“[he] takes both her hands in his as if they needed warmth” [241]). Body language may be quite puzzling and oxymoronic at times: Jack claims that one day he saw his father asleep in the crib, “scrunched like an old gray fetus” (“The Immigrant Story” 239)—as if in a symbolic yet preposterous attempt to occupy the place left empty by the missing children. In the old people’s retirement home where “people’s brains, I notice are disappearing [...] everyday” (“Dreamer in a Dead Language” 275), bodies tend to function as ambiguous sites of memory, as they try to compensate for the impossibility of reaching meaningful verbal exchange (“There was no way to talk” [273]). The soft, tender touch of Faith’s hand first reminds her mother of the mischievous little girl her daughter used to be (“Ach! What I know about this hand ... the ways it used to eat applesauce, it didn’t think a spoon was necessary” [273]). Yet the mother is soon appalled by a boil on her daughter’s wrist, which she ascribes to lack of hygiene. Mrs Hegel-Shtein, a hilarious caricature of the sententious Jewish old lady, then proposes a psychosomatic interpretation (“Sickness comes from troubles” [273]), soon followed by a long litany of her own ailments, which ends, however, on pure tautology: “If that’s what I mean, that’s what I mean” (274). As Katherine Hulley aptly observes, the disseminating effects of Paley’s writing are “produced [...] by the dislocated presence of voices and bodies, surfaces which mutually

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displace one another at the level of narration and hold open the possibility for indeterminacy which permits multiple levels to exist” (12).

17 Much of the comedy in Paley’s stories stems from the characters’ eager, yet soon defeated attempts to make sense in a world replete with clichés (be they linguistic, political, psychological or pseudo-scientific). As if, dimly aware of the inadequacy of all signifiers, Paley’s “dreamers in a dead language” kept repeating themselves, in their urgency to be heard and understood. The extensive use of repetitions contributes to the sense of a common voice emerging from all stories. “Listen!”: this is the pressing call to be found under various forms in all three stories—whether in a direct question (“who is listening?”; “Goodbye and Good Luck” 3), as a reminder (“Rosie, are you listening?”; “Goodbye and Good Luck” 9), as an insistent invitation (“listen,” “just listen”; “The Immigrant Story” [238, 240]), or as an attempt to sound more convincing: “Listen, I’d love to meet your daddy and your mom” (“Dreamer in a Dead Language” 267). The urge to listen is, of course, inseparable from the need to tell. Such verbs as “tell” and “talk” function as leitmotifs in “The Immigrant Story” and “Dreamer”: “I’m trying to tell you something, he said” (“The Immigrant Story” 238), “Who told you that?”; “I’ll tell you”; “anyone could tell you”; “tell me what?”; “who told you that?” (“The Immigrant Story” 239); “when will I talk to my girl?”; “Boys, stay here, talk to your grandma. Talk to her friend” (“Dreamer in a Dead Language” 274). Sometimes this makes for a dense cacophony: “Tell her, Sid, she has to be more sensible.” […] “Please, don’t tell me what to tell her, Celia” […] “I have to tell you a fact.” (275)

18 Another striking example of repetition is Rose’s parting address to Vlashkin, “goodbye and good luck”(13), which constitutes the title of the story and which follows the ups and downs of the lovers’ relationship (“goodbye, good luck” [8]; “we said only hello and goodbye” [8]; “I thought, ‘Goodbye, dear friend” [11]), or recalls Rose’s father’s flitting existence (“goodbye and good luck” [6]) and ties in a final flourish the end of the story to its beginning: “Hug Mama, tell her from Aunt Rose, goodbye and good luck” (13). These words seem to find an echo in other stories: in Faith’s jibe at Philip for example (“Well, goodbye, said Faith. I’ve known you one day too long already” [266]), or in Mr. Darwin’s reaction to Heligman, the old man losing his mind (“goodbye, my dear friend, my best enemy, Heligman, forever goodbye” (“Dreamer in a Dead Language” [276]). Paley’s stories are so saturated with repetitions and “incantatory verbal echoes” (Perry 9) that despite the abundance of terms referring to communication (“listen,” “talk,” “tell,” “goodbye”), meaning is no longer the centre of the dialogue. Instead a musical effect is created by the echoing words, as they imprint a rhythmic and sound pattern to the ear.

“In the grave it will be quiet”

19 The ongoing verbal performance uniting the young and old is also a means to counteract finitude and death. This is most striking in “A Conversation with my Father,” where the daughter’s stories provide oxygen to the dying father. Most striking also is Shirley’s and her father’s relentless prolixity in “The Loudest Voice,” which, when begged to be quiet, they justify as follows: “In the grave it will be quiet” (34). This sentence itself reads as a mimetic act of dying: the impersonal pronoun “it,” evokes a

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disappearance of the subject and a trade-off between voice and silence, between life and death. As for the implied pronoun, “we,” it acquires universal value.

20 This ironic, yet anguished statement does not call for an answer. What counts is that the young and the old should unite (both being reassured in the process, as the young see in the old a sign of continuity while the old long for renewal) in a vibrant assertion of vitality and hope as they become aware of their common frailty. This is the meaning of the father’s songs in “Dreamer in a Dead Language” (“you could call them songs or poems, whatever, I don’t know” [269]), an apt reaction to the omnipresent disintegration of body and brain at work in the retirement home—an antechamber of death from which Faith flies in horror after a disheartening conversation with her father: “you look black, her mother said. Breathless, Mr Darwin gasped” (281). There, death strikes the old and the young alike. Old people sit on benches dedicated to the memory of those who died at a young age (275), and the third floor is reserved for “the incurables,” who exemplify death’s extended reach in the midst of the living: thirty-year-old people in the ward, with healthy hearts and satisfactory lungs. But they lay flat or curved by pain or they were tied with shawls into wheelchairs. Here and there an old or middle-aged parent came every day to change the sheets or sing nursery rhymes to her broken child. (272)

21 As Faith’s father puts it, however, “incurable did not mean near death necessarily, it meant, in most cases, just too far from living” (272). These sick people may exemplify a condition of living death, which terrifies the old man and which, to a certain extent, he recognizes in his own daughter who, in his opinion, has “suffered so much from changes” (278) and has just been wasting her life ever since her divorce.

22 Mr and Mrs Darwin’s obtuse misunderstanding of Faith points to the apparently unbridgeable gap between generations, a gap which is reiterated in Richard’s cruel remark that his mother has fallen short of her duty to her parents whom she ought to take away from that dreadful place. The story ends on Faith’s mock burial on the beach which used to be her “territory” (282) when she was a child and which she now shows to her children, as if to teach them a lesson about love and transmission. So bury me, she said, lying flat as a corpse under the October sun. Tonto immediately began piling sand around her ankles. [...] I mean bury me only up to here, like this, under my arms, you know, so I can give you a good whack every now and then when you’re too fresh. (283)

23 This powerful dénouement is both a vibrant assertion of life and a moving homage to all those “just too far from living” and condemned to “silence in unrecorded time” (Sorkin 5)—be they young or old. One of them is Faith’s Russian grandfather, this fascinating figure skating on the Baltic Sea “for miles and miles and miles along the shore” with a frozen herring in his pocket, without ever making it to America: “There was no boat. It was too late” (282). Another “Long-Distance Runner,”10 the man was no “crazy old nut” (282), contrary to what young Tonto is tempted to believe, but the very embodiment of obstinacy and perseverance in the face of hostile circumstances. “That’s why I never laugh at that story when Grandpa tells,” Faith reproachfully declares (282).

24 The grandfather’s tragic fate—dying on a distant shore, cut off from his family—equates distance and separation with death. It is of course reminiscent of the poignant vision of the mother, in “The Immigrant Story,” stepping off the boat cloaked in the shadow of her dead children. Will she ever be able to return to life, as hinted by the final image of

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her forever holding hands with her husband? Will Faith and Jack learn from the old couple and prove able in turn to preserve, whatever happens, a bond which is the very source of life and meaning?

25 More often than not, Paley merely hints at the possibility of closeness and reunion between human beings. Couples are seen at various stages of being separated or contemplating divorce, like Mr. Darwin, who sees it as the only chance to survive the stifling life he leads at the Home for the Golden Ages. Most stories highlight the characters’ awakening to a sense of their own helplessness, and of the distance which separates them from those they love most. Viewed from that perspective, the echoes of “goodbye and good luck” take on a deeper resonance. Rose Lieber evokes long periods of estrangement from her beloved Vlashkin, during which she could envision only solitude and death for herself: “Finished. This is your lonesome bed. [...] From this lonesome bed you will finally fall to a bed not so lonesome, only crowded with a million bones” (“Goodbye and Good Luck” 11). Her dialogue with her niece also gives a measure of her estrangement from her own sister, whom she views as blind to her own version of happiness. As for the silence of the “listening young ear” throughout the story, it leaves open the question of whether Lillie will be able to draw meaning from her aunt’s story. “Dreamer in a Dead Language” highlights the difficulties of intergenerational dialogue; solitude and longing seem to prevail (“My lungs are full of water. I cannot breathe” [266]), while love, companionship and peace amount to a dream “in a dead language.”

26 Even though the young girl imagined by the father in his poem (“wait[ing] in a special time and place/ to love me, to be my friend and lie beside me all through the night” [266]), functions as a purely symbolic entity—as shown by Faith and Jack’s comic debate about who she might be (266-67)—she does appear as a protection against helplessness and death. Youth is to be embraced and celebrated as the source of creativity, story-telling, and poetry, lifting the individual out of the crushing consciousness of his limited span of life. Does not the grandmother in “Ruthy and Edie,” another story in Later the Same Day embrace her granddaughter so as to keep her from “falling out of her brand-new hammock of world-inventing words onto the hard floor of man-made time” (334)?

27 Youth also partakes in the dream of the individual entering into a form of communion with his family and the community around him, as Rose witnesses when Vlashkin acts and she “was given the pleasure together with cousins, in-laws, and plain stage-struck kids to be part of a crowd scene and to see like he saw every single night the hundreds of pale faces waiting for his feelings to make them laugh or bend down their heads in sorrow” (“Goodbye and Good Luck” 6). The voice of the actor and that of the storyteller counter the silence of that crowd of “a million bones” so dreaded by Rose. Likewise, Faith’s children on the beach allow her “lots of room for wiggling and whacking” (283), despite the layers of sand covering her. This final scene points to a similar opposition between voice and silence on the one hand, and movement and obstruction to movement on the other.

28 “That woman lives across the street. She is my knowledge and my invention. I’m sorry for her. I’m not going to leave her there in that house crying,” declares the narrator in “A Conversation with my Father” (237). Giving characters of her invention room to

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change—“in order, you might say, to save a few lives” (“Debts” 133)—is at the heart of Paley’s literary choices. Allowing room for her characters to shape the story through their own voices is yet another facet of her sense of responsibility. When referring to the composition of “The Immigrant Story,” Grace Paley remarks: “I knew the story for maybe twenty-five years, but I didn’t know how to tell it. One day, I was going through my papers and I found this dialogue between two people, and I realized that I had the form for the story” (Paley, Interview with Hulley 20). When Paley’s stories are read in continuity, the prevailing impression is that of a unique voice insistently calling out to a listener and eager to tell its story. In its pattern of rhythmic and vocal echoes, it confronts the young and the old in an ongoing dialogue which is part and parcel of the act of narration and which parallels the dialogic relation between author and reader. When distance, separation and death threaten to cut off the bond that links the individual to his community, family and friends, the narrative voice compellingly weaves a network of echoes between generations,11 and makes it possible for each voice to be heard against the background of another voice, even a shadow voice. “Remember dat?,” keeps asking the little girl, who is such a source of appeasement among the group of old friends arguing about the past on Ruthy’s fiftieth birthday in “Ruthy and Edie.” “The child, you know, is the reason for life” (204), writes Paley in “Imagining the Present,” one of her essays in Just As I Thought.

29 The child’s “world-inventing words” allow the adults to turn their awareness of time and death into a dream, which opens onto an intent form of silent listening. The answer to the opening question, “how are we to live our lives?” may be found in Paley’s describing the task of the story-teller as synonymous with that of the story-listener, since “a lot of people cannot begin to speak out of their own throats until they have listened enough, and heard enough the stories of others” (Interview Michaels 6).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aarons, Victoria. “Talking Lives: Storytelling and Renewal in Grace Paley’s Short Fiction.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 9.1 (1990): 20-35. Print.

Arcana, Judith. Grace Paley’s Life Stories: A Literary Bibliography. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Print.

Hulley, Kathleen, “Grace Paley’s Resistant Form.” Grace Paley. Ed. Kathleen Hulley. Spec. issue of Delta 14 (1982): 33-18. Print.

Paley, Grace. The Collected Stories. 1994. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

---. Interview with Kathleen Hulley. “Interview with Grace Paley.” Grace Paley. Ed. Kathleen Hulley. Spec. issue of Delta 14 (1982): 19-40. Print.

---. Interview with Leonard Michaels. “Conversation with Grace Paley.” The Threepenny Review 3 (1980): 4-6. Print.

---. Just As I Thought. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Print.

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Schleifer, Ronald. “Grace Paley, Chaste Compactness.” Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies. Ed. Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Print.

Sorkin, Adam. “‘What Are We, Animals?’: Grace Paley’s World of Talk and Laughter.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 2 (1982): 144-54. Print.

NOTES

1. See the titles of Paley’s two collections of short stories: The Little Disturbances of Man (1985), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1979). 2. “I was interested in that idea of using my own voice to make someone else’s voice. Or actually using someone else’s voice to get to my own” (Paley qtd. in Arcana 84). 3. See Grace Paley’s “The Value of Not Understanding Everything”: “In the end, probably all I’ll have to show is more mystery–a certain juggled translation from life, that foreign tongue, into fiction, the jargon of man” (Just As I Thought 189). 4. For the sake of convenience, references to the collections have been abbreviated here: LD for The Little Disturbances of Man, EC for Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and LS for Later the Same Day. 5. While Faith Darwin seems to be the first-person narrator in “The Immigrant Story,” “Goodbye and Good Luck” does not belong to the cycle of stories related to her. As for “Dreamer in a Dead Language,” it involves Faith but it is told in the third person. 6. It is as if the silence of the reader were mirrored in this character. Silence is written into the narrative as on a musician’s score. 7. The voice of the fictional character is an echo of the author’s personal experience since Grace’s old aunt did pronounce the first sentence of the short story, as the author recalls in an interview with Leonard Michaels: “that is an example of a story which began with an absolute true sentence spoken to me by a person” (qtd. in Michaels 5). 8. As Judith Arcana observes, the impression of overhearing someone is frequent in Paley’s stories (104). In “The Immigrant Story” Jack replies to Faith: “You fucking enemy” (239) as if Faith, the narrator, had actually pronounced the sentence that precedes this statement: “He lunged at me as though I was an enemy.” Another interesting example is “The Seneca Stories” in which Paley recounts a conversation she has overheard between a young woman and her mother on the phone (Just As I Thought 156). The author’s evocation of the scene reads like the seed of an unwritten story, reminiscent of Rose’s one-sided dialogue, and it highlights the author’s keen interest in the intricate interplay of the said and the unsaid in dialogues. 9. The lot of each member of the theatrical company is summed up in a series of factual statements: “First the company fell apart. The theater ended. Esther Leopold died from being very aged. Krimberg had a heart attack. Marya went to Broadway. Also Raisele changed her name into Roslyn and was a big comical hit in the movies. Vlashkin himself, no place to go, retired” (10-11). 10. “The Long-Distance Runner” is the last story in Enormous Changes in the Last Minute. 11. See Victoria Aarons: “In her commitment to the saving of lives, Paley, both structurally and thematically, emboldens her characters with the strength to stave off death—if only fictionally— through the telling of stories” (33).

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ABSTRACTS

Dans “Goodbye and Good Luck”, “The Immigrant’s Story” et “Dreamer in a Dead Language”, trois nouvelles centrées sur les rapports difficiles entre les générations, le lien intergénérationnel s’affiche avec une insolente vivacité, dans un registre mêlant empathie et ironie, humour et tendresse, colère et curiosité tandis que les personnages endossent tour à tour le rôle du conteur. L’échange se conçoit alors comme une dynamique associant les jeunes et leurs aînés dans une mise en scène du dire sans cesse renouvelée où le silence a pourtant toute sa place. Si la communication échoue, les flottements énonciatifs et le rapprochement des voix opèrent pourtant un renouveau salutaire. L’écriture ouvre un espace de liberté où le sens exacerbé de la finitude, d’une part, et la fougue créative de la jeunesse, d’autre part, sont portés par une voix forgée à l’écoute des autres.

AUTHORS

RÉGINE CAMPS-ROBERTSON Régine Camps-Robertson is a former student of the “Ecole Normale Supérieure.” She is currently Associate Professor at the Paris-Dauphine PSL Research University. She wrote her doctoral dissertation at the University of Paris III on Saul Bellow’s fiction and has, since then, published extensively on Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, as well as on various authors. She is particularly interested in tracing the creation of a voice in contemporary fiction.

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“The Grand Storyteller[s]”: Debt and Emancipation in Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with My Father”

Clément-Alexandre Ulff

1 One of Grace Paley’s most celebrated short stories, “A Conversation with My Father” (1974), relates a passionate argument between a dying father and his daughter about the art of storytelling. Though the tale deliberately strips the two characters to the status of pure “voices from who knows where” (238), it captures a convergence of ethical, political and aesthetic positions which are unmistakably Paley’s. Indeed the author claimed that the dialogue unfolding in the story was representative of many of the conversations which she had with her father: “It’s not that it happened, but that it could have happened. And parts of it did. It’s close to what happened. It really is the body of our running argument on art and the possibilities of life” (Interview Pool and Roses). The reader is thus presented with a conversation neither quite autobiographical nor altogether fictional between two unnamed voices, yet clearly identifiable as Paley’s and her father’s.

2 In this short, yet tightly constructed narrative, the author plays on the boundaries between art and life while offering a reflection on tradition and subversion, debt and emancipation. Family, literature and politics are discussed at length while conflicting definitions of truth, justice and compassion are being examined. The result is the coalescence of a unique ars poetica attesting to the author’s passionate desire to secure an authentic and autonomous voice.

3 The narrator first gives minimal expository details: “My father is eighty-six years old and in bed. His heart, that bloody motor, is equally old and will not do certain jobs anymore. […] Sitting on one pillow, leaning on three, he offers last-minute advice and makes a request. ‘I would like you to write a simple story just once more,’ he says” (237). Eager to please her afflicted and bedridden father, the daughter complies. The embedded micro-story, which the reader gets in its integrity, is her account of the life of a neighbor living “right across the street” (237): a Manhattan lower-class single mother whose teenage son has become a drug addict. The woman decides to use drugs

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too so as not to become alienated from her boy. When the son eventually gets clean, he turns into a health food freak and abandons his mother, to her great despair: “the boy gave it all up and left the city and his mother in disgust. Hopeless and alone, she grieved” (238).

4 The narrator’s father, however, criticizes his daughter’s story for its lack of background and its jolty, disconnected tone. He asks for a longer, revised version, which his daughter reluctantly provides. Again, he harshly voices his dissatisfaction: “I see you can’t tell a plain story. So don’t waste time” (241). Father and daughter eventually argue about the ending of the revised, extended version of the embedded story. Should the forsaken mother know a tragic end, as the father suggests in the name of logic and literary realism, or a new, redeemed life, as the daughter proposes? The framing story, which had begun with a cooperative daughter and a gentle father, now ends in a comic impasse with the father vehemently urging his daughter to face the “tragic” dimension of existence, while she flounders in her attempts to convince him of the validity of a more optimistic outlook on life (243).

5 The plurality of lenses through which “A Conversation with my Father” can be read is remarkable. Characteristic of most of Paley’s stories, this constitutes one of the main challenges for the critic, as Noëlle Batt remarks in her study of the author’s short fiction: In order to grasp some meaning and relevance for this labile fiction [...], the critic ought to fancy himself or herself not simply as the two-headed Roman God Janus but as a triple Janus. No less than six heads would perhaps allow him to understand and to explain, aptly and succinctly, what Paley’s work actually deals with […]. (16-17, my translation)1

6 In order to engage with the literary complexity of the story, I will examine it from various perspectives. I shall maintain as my guiding line the central conflict opposing the daughter to her father. First I will focus on the ironic portrayal of the generational gap and of Oedipal conflicts. Then I will analyze the feminist dimension of the story and the way in which it indicates broader American cultural changes. Finally, I will read the tale as a metafictional anecdote concerned with the issues of literary realism and poetic voice.

7 “A Conversation with My Father” proposes a humorous representation of family dynamics. The story in fact depicts not one but two families, in two different plots: the storytelling daughter and her critical father in the framing story, the single mother and her drug-addicted son in both versions of the embedded story. In these narratives, major difficulties arise between a parent and his / her child. Generational roles are comically reversed as the elderly, bedridden father “request[s]” a “story” very much as a young child would before he goes to sleep. His vulnerability, his exacting demands and harsh judgments align him with the personality of a difficult young boy, while his appeasing daughter is unwillingly cast as a caring mother figure: “I say, ‘Yes, why not? That’s possible.’ I want to please him” (237). This unusual parent/child configuration is echoed and displaced in both versions of the embedded story, in which there is an understanding mother and a difficult, judgmental son whose rigidity recalls that of the father in the framing story: “the boy gave it all up and left the city and his mother in

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disgust” (238), “He was in fact […] an ideologue” (240), “[The boy and his girlfriend] were very strict” (241).

8 As a matter of fact, the two stories function in a constant interplay of echoes and symbolic reversals. The father’s declining health seems to reflect that of the drug- addicted son and of his mother, which is later reversed into the son’s “radiant, splendid” conversion back to full health and eventually into the mother’s new career as a receptionist in a community clinic (241). The self-sacrificing mother mirrors the cooperative daughter, whose palliative storytelling becomes too gruelling for her father, just as the mother’s copycat use of drugs soon gets out of control: “the mother tried several times to give up […] This effort only brought it to supportable levels” (241). Common expectations are derided as the devoted mother decides to imitate her son, while a negative mother figure appears in the person of the boy’s girlfriend, a “stern and proselytizing girl” whose sharp personality, unlike the permissive mother, accomplishes wonders (240). Likewise the conspicuously absent father in both versions of the embedded story echoes the absent or dead mother—and wife—in the framing story, a pattern which emphasizes vulnerability and a growing anguish over the precarious nature of family ties. Moreover “Chekhov and Maupassant,” the literary masters the father recommends as valuable sources of inspiration in the framing story, are paralleled in the embedded story by another couple of writers whom the young drug-addict and his friends seem to emulate: “A few felt artistic like Coleridge and others were scientific and revolutionary like Leary” (240). The reader is struck not only by the comic discrepancy between the two pairs of writers, but also by that within the second pair: Coleridge, an 18th century lyrical and romantic poet, who was a notorious opium addict, and Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychologist who became a leader—or father figure—of the hippie drug culture in the 1960s and was eventually sentenced to jail.

9 In its complex architecture the story raises a series of pressing questions about family duty and legacy. How can you pass on to the next generation a cultural, intellectual and spiritual heritage? What is a daughter’s duty? A mother’s? A father’s? A son’s? Competing plots, disruptions and revised versions in “A Conversation” suggest not only the complementarity of all possible attitudes but also the utter difficulty to be in a fixed, universally validated family role.

10 Whether in the framing or in the embedded story, the characters’ behavior is rather ambiguous from a moral point of view. The daughter fiercely argues with her dying father; yet she stands by his side until the very end, and complies with his demands, at least to the best of her ability. As for the father, he denies his daughter’s status as an artist by asking her to merely write in imitation of his literary masters, and then he lambastes her efforts as a “waste” of time (241). Yet, he devotes the little energy he has for “last-minute advice” (237), and for what he views as the benefit of his daughter’s art. Likewise, the devoted mother in the embedded story may be viewed as just foolish, while her son is at least doing his best to pull through. As “A Conversation with My Father” refuses to posit any prescriptive model, the question of family duty is ultimately displaced onto the reader, whose task it is to explore the ethical intricacies of family relationships in the troubled context of cultural changes.

11 The usual hierarchy between the generations and the sexes is further undermined by the ironic subversion of the Oedipal triangle (father/mother/child). Owing to the absence of the mother in the framing story and of the father in the embedded one,

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what we have instead is an unmediated suffocating scenario whose pattern is reduced to a single “line” between two points. Is it incidental that the daughter should evoke her distaste for plot as “the absolute line between two points” (236)? Is it incidental that she should eventually resist her father’s penetrating “request” for the type of narrative he wishes? One that would arouse the old man’s intellectual and imaginative capacities, and provide him with what Philip Roth, another Jewish American writer and a great admirer of Paley, describes as the erotically charged pleasure of the listener (the écouteur)2 of a good story: “an audiophiliac […] a fetishist. […] It is erotic” (Deception 42). In some respects the father dying for a good story and symbolically castrated as a bedridden patriarch also resembles Philip Roth’s Zuckerman in The Counterlife who, suffering from debilitating impotence, seeks alternative sources of pleasure: “My carnality is now really a fiction […] and language and only language must provide the means for the release of everything. Maria’s voice, her talking tongue, is the sole erotic implement” (184). This is of course reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s discussion of the eroticism of the literary text in his famous essay “The Pleasure of the Text”: Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts [...] brings to a crisis its relation with language. (14)

12 In Paley’s story, however, the father, whose sick heart “still floods his head with brainy light” but “will not do certain jobs anymore” (237, emphasis mine), obviously reaches no metaphorical jouissance or bliss when listening to his daughter’s tale. Neither does he show any sign of pleasure. The daughter, though willing to “please,” instinctively senses she cannot satisfy his awkward demand: “I don’t remember writing that way” (237). No phallic narrative and no straight “line between two points” for the father, whose listening experience turns into flaccid frustration instead: “You misunderstood me on purpose. You know there’s a lot more to it. […] You left everything out” (238). While the framing story deals with the daughter’s refusal to provide her father with his narrative “fix,” the embedded story focuses on the mother’s inability to get herself or her son off the “fix.” Her attitude is also presented as somewhat incestuous as she disrupts traditional family ties in a trans-generational mix: “to maintain her close friendship with him, she became a junkie too. She said it was part of the youth culture, with which she felt very much at home” (238). Actually, she recreates a new home, or rather a new womb, by having her kitchen transformed into a haven for her son’s and his friends’ addiction: “Her kitchen was famous for a while—a center for intellectual addicts who knew what they were doing. […] she would rather be with the young, it was an honor, than with her own generation” (240). The Oedipal fusion between mother and son is, however, broken by the recreation of a full triangle when the strict, reforming girlfriend makes her appearance.

13 Though Oedipal tensions are eventually resolved, the claustrophobic atmosphere remains in both stories. In the daughter’s revised version of the tale, the addicted mother is left in solitude and despair: “We often crossed the street to visit and console. But if we mentioned any of our children who were at college or in the hospital or dropouts at home, she would cry out, My baby! My baby! and burst into terrible, face- scarring, time-consuming tears. The End” (241). As for the framing story, it ends with daughter and father still arguing, running around in circles, with no possibility of a classic dénouement. The sense of tragic claustrophobia is broken by the daughter’s ultimate version of her story—an open door, so to speak—in which the addicted mother

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has become able to transmute her pain into useful professional experience: “Of course her son never came home again. But right now, she’s the receptionist in a storefront community clinic in the East Village. Most of the customers are young people, some old friends” (242).

14 The father’s rejection of this new narrative option, and his daughter’s lasting opposition to him, highlight the asymmetrical nature of gender relations. In the framing story, the father constantly infantilizes his daughter. By regarding a middle- aged and perhaps married woman as a naïve and immature little girl unable to perform a simple narrative task (“With you, it’s all a joke” [238]), the old man attempts to reassert his authority and legitimacy as a mentor and fine literary connoisseur. As for the daughter, she adopts a strategy of indirect yet winning opposition. With her careful responses, cunning cooperation and comic comebacks, she is able (for a while at least) to appease him (238-39). However, she feels entitled to reject the literary genre he prescribes (“[T]ragedy. The end of a person” [242]), and chooses instead to keep room for the unpredictable: “Not for literary reasons but because it takes all hope away” (237).

15 The father’s frustration with his daughter’s tale stems from his being trapped in a resolutely male perspective from which he cannot understand his daughter’s narrative choices. While she insists that the mother in her story is not only a fictional character but also her neighbor and friend across the street (“She’s my knowledge and my invention” [242, my emphasis]), he fails to grasp that shared fictional and non-fictional space from which his daughter’s story has emerged. Just as he fails to understand the sense of “responsibility” that ties his daughter to her character: “I had promised the family to always let [my father] have the last word when arguing, but in this case I had a different responsibility. That woman lives across the street. [...] I’m sorry for her. I’m not going to leave her there in that house crying” (242). Likewise he is blind to the discreet yet persistent sense of female solidarity in both versions of the embedded story (“Hopeless and alone, she grieved. We all visit her” [238] / “We often crossed the street to visit and console” [241]). To him, the absence of a father in the embedded story smacks of liberal excess: “Doesn’t anyone in your stories get married? Doesn’t anyone have the time to run down to City Hall before they jump into bed?” (239). He is shocked by his daughter’s bold intimation that the mother’s situation depends little on whether or not there is a ring on her finger (“it’s of small consequence” [239]). His prejudices are also highlighted by his surprise that the head doctor of the community clinic should admire the mother’s competence: “If we only had three people in this clinic with your experiences . . . ” (242). In the daughter’s imagination, the woman has proved able to bounce back with praise and recognition from a prominent male, while the father is convinced that deserted by her husband and her son, deprived of all stabilizing phallic presence, she will remain an amorphous, slowly disaggregating failure of a woman: “She will slide back. A person must have character. She does not” (242).

16 Notable is also the fact that none of the artists mentioned in “A Conversation with My Father” is female. Whether it be the writers the father views as absolute models (Chekhov, Maupassant and Turgenev), the allusion to Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, the odd coupling of Coleridge and Leary, or the veiled echoes of Walt Whitman’s vigorous “Song of Myself” (1885) suggested by the son’s self-celebratory poems in the embedded story,3 the artistic and intellectual references Paley

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deliberately projects onto the female canvas of her story are uniformly male. Thus the author stigmatizes the male monopoly on the American literary canon as well as on the great foreign “classics.” The male masters referred throughout, however, are far from being targets of hostility. If anything, the story is fed by the tension between Paley’s life-long feminist engagement and her reverence for the male-only literary models her own father had taught her to admire. As Paule Lévy remarks, the story amounts to a reconsideration of cultural inheritance: Contrary to what often happens in Jewish literature, the Daughter and the Mother have the upper hand, here. In the same way, the issue of the body, of its needs and instincts, usually associated with the feminine, eventually dominates the whole narrative in which, through a process of ironic reversal, it becomes an essentially masculine preoccupation. The male bodies represented in the story—the weakening, sick father and the grotesquely fit son—may be viewed as mocking allusions to a literary corpus confiscated by men and characterized by ossified patriarchal codes. (Lévy, Figures 120, my translation)4

17 Viewed from a larger perspective “A Conversation with My Father” in fact proposes a humorous depiction of the deep cultural changes that affected American society in the second half of the twentieth century. The story, which may be broadly situated in the late 1960s or early 1970s stages three generations: the father, a Russian immigrant5 born in the 19th century, his daughter, born in America in the early 20th century,6 just like the mother in the embedded story, and her baby-boomer son, born after the Second World War and a teenager in the 1960s. The son’s fads and his mother’s cult of youth illustrate the radical shift from the 1950s’ model of unblemished domesticity and wholehearted belief in the conformist and consumerist American “way of life,” to the free-thinking, alternative outlook of the youth culture which denounced the American Dream as a mirage (see Roszak). However misguided and dangerous, the widespread use of drugs was not only recreational for the new generation, it corresponded to an emancipatory agenda, an attempt to gain a fresh perspective on the world, a quest for new values and experiences as well as an increasing awareness of the way institutional practices were shaped—on all levels of American life—by racism, sexism, cupidity, warmongering militarism and authoritarianism.7 Through the story-telling daughter, however, Paley also dramatizes America’s incredible potential for change and personal reinvention—something the father tends to forget, as he cannot see any possibility of redemption for the drug-addicted mother. According to the daughter, this bold ending does not stem from pity, it is just emblematic of life’s unpredictability in a fluctuating world: “I’m not going to leave her there in that house crying. (Actually neither would Life, which unlike me has no pity.) […] It’s a funny world nowadays” (242). The term “nowadays” of course refers to the troubled and somewhat theatrical American 1960s and 1970s, a period when the American myth of the self-made man had been historically verified, while that of the American self-(re)made woman was gradually emerging (see Castro).

18 How could a storyteller (here, the daughter) translate this new, explosive reality into her own artistic form, while still acknowledging the precious legacy from the previous century? Is it possible to tell the “plain” story the father demands in a world that has become so unrecognizable and unintelligible? Philip Roth addressed the same issues in a speech delivered at Stanford in 1960: The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to

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one’s meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents. (Reading Myself and Others 167)

19 What Roth refers to is very much the daughter’s challenge in Paley’s story. On the one hand, the European masters, adored by the Russian émigré patriarch, come knocking on her door, followed by a dark, indistinct mass of unknown geniuses (“There are in fact Russian writers you never heard of, you don’t have an inkling of, as good as anyone, who can write a plain ordinary story” [238]). On the other hand, American reality, contemporary and ubiquitous, is the direct environment for the daughter’s “House of Fiction,” to use Henry James’s metaphor.8 Perhaps the reason why her story seems so disjointed and anarchic is that it remains split between two worlds, two visions, two literary possibilities—or simply that it strives to deride the fads of her times.

20 Rather than providing details about what the father calls the heroin’s “stock” (“What were her parents like, her stock? That she became such a person. It’s interesting, you know” [238]), the storyteller prefers to focus on the son in an ironic accumulation of arbitrary explanations or incongruous clichés: “She had a son whom she loved because she’d known him since birth […]. In order to keep him from feeling guilty [she too became a junkie] (because guilt is the stony heart of nine-tenths of all clinically diagnosed cancers in America today, she said)” (239-40). In a feuilleté of voices, Paley systematically deconstructs the absurdity of hyper-logical, trendy or institutional discourses: “So that’s never just language,” Paley explains in an interview, “Language doesn’t live its own little syntactical life. It’s part of the whole thing” (Interview Batt and Rocard 132).

21 Thus “A Conversation with My Father” is in fact a metafictional anecdote concerned with the notion of literary realism. Is it a coincidence if the father constantly refers to the great realists of the Old Continent? The embarrassed daughter and the parochial father are fighting over what may realistically happen to a literary character. What is lifelike enough to pass as a valid fictional possibility? What the father hastily identifies as either preposterous “jokes” or incontrovertible “truth” (242), the daughter approaches with more circumspection. At stake is the supposedly indispensable “suspension of disbelief”9 which the daughter deliberately jeopardizes with her eccentric narrative. Paley points out the relativity of all literary criticism as well as the importance of preserving both a listening ear (which the daughter does) and an autonomous vision.

22 Both father and daughter are artists with strong opinions: the daughter is a seasoned writer, one of whose stories is mentioned in the narrative10 while the father himself has been “a doctor for a couple of decades and then an artist for a couple of decades” (239). The old man, however, is “interested in details, craft, technique” (249), thus aligning himself more with the artisan than with the artist, while the daughter focuses on vision, elaboration as process and fictional possibilities. How can craftsmanship be elevated to the rank of art? When and how does the artisan become an artist?

23 While no blueprint is given, preliminary “conditions” may be delineated. Just as the daughter in the framing story is urged to rewrite until she gets to something (“Tell the story again. See what you can do this time” [239]), Paley often expressed her dismay

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over her poor early drafts (whether in poetry or in prose) and her ardent, tenacious rewriting. Far from clamoring “out with the old and in with the new,” she acknowledges with love and humor her debt to her predecessors, starting with her father, whose influence as a passeur was paramount: “He was the grand storyteller. […] He wrote a lot of stories. Some of them were really marvellous” (Interview Pool and Roses).

24 Yet Paley insists on the ethical imperative to respect the radical autonomy of all individuals, be they real or fictional: “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life” (237). This can be read as the author’s s own Declaration of Independence, one granting “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to her fictional characters. Are those three “inalienable rights” not the very things at stake in the tripartite architecture of the story? Also, is the ravaging “absolute Despotism” not rejected in the Declaration of Independence humorously displaced in “A Conversation with My Father” into the adamant father’s almost tyrannical demand for “tragedy […] the end” (242)? The daughter recovers her own form of self-governing storytelling as she decides to alter or abolish the forced ending she had birthed earlier (241), thus intertextually feminizing the American democratic ideals and weaving them into an ethic of art and life.

25 Wedged at the end of a discursively complex paragraph (237), the “open destiny of life” deceptively passes for an afterthought whose “truth” the narrator holds to be so “self- evident” that it requires no further elaboration. It is no coincidence, however, that in its programmatic, matrix-like quality this ethical stance should be spelt out in the very first page. For it is no ethereal vue de l’esprit: it enables the mother’s redemptive new beginning in the revised ending (242), while, on another level and with much grace, it allows the ailing father to live on, though bed-ridden and intubated, beyond the open ending of Paley’s short story. Thus both the story-teller and the story-hearer share hope, pleasure—and frustration. Perhaps this frustration is encapsulated by the dialectic tension between the terms “open” and “destiny,” replicating respectively the daughter’s and the father’s vision of fiction-writing. Is life to Paley, then, a palimpsest of sorts, a written destiny constantly rewriting itself new and open? As Paule Lévy observes: “Both writer and reader are taught to admit discontinuity and loss, to defuse the tragic and to view disruption as a mode of signification” (Péril 83, my translation)11. I would nuance this analysis by noting that the tragic is nonetheless allowed the privilege to chime in—or, perhaps more accurately, out—conspicuously in the excipit: “Tragedy! You too. When will you look it in the face?” (243). In ending the framing story with these words, Paley makes it possible for the unnamed narrator to keep her promise (“I had promised the family to always let him have the last word when arguing” [242]), while she invites the reader to loop back into a full circle with the incipit’s plain wording of the framing story’s manifest tragedy: “My father is eighty-six years old and in bed” (237).

26 Ultimately, the daughter keeps her father on his toes (at least figuratively) as much as he keeps her on hers. With much empathy, the story dramatizes the eternal—and mutually enriching—conflict between art and life, between tradition and modernity, between Self and Other. If there is a “loudest voice,”12 it is not that of fixed discourses, whether old or new, but the alert, hybrid and eminently dialogical voice of the Self who patiently accommodates within itself the voice of the Other: It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman [...]

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It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman to keep an eye on this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be listened to this time. (Paley, Begin Again 56)

27 Granted, the reader never gets to the “end of the story,”13 but it is all the better: the narrative stops but the voices keep on talking in the reader’s now emancipated imagination.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Print.

Batt, Noëlle. Grace Paley: Conteuse des destins ordinaires. Paris: Belin, 1998. Print.

Castro, Ginette. American Feminism: A Contemporary History. Trans. Elizabeth Loverde-Bagwell. New York: New York UP, 1990. Print.

James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. Rockville: Serenity Publishing, 2009. Print.

Lévy, Paule. Figures de l’artiste: identité et écriture dans la littérature juive américaine de la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2006. Print.

---. “Péril en la demeure: Grace Paley ou l’écriture dépaysée.” Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 96 (May 2003): 74-88. Print.

Paley, Grace. Begin Again: Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001. Print.

---. The Collected Stories. London: Virago Press, 1999. Print.

---. Interview with Noëlle Batt and Marcienne Rocard. “An Interview with Grace Paley.” Caliban XXV : Le roman juif américain aujourd’hui. Toulouse, France: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 1988. 119-37. Print.

---. Interview with Gail Pool and Shirley Roses. “An Interview With Grace Paley.” Boston Review (Fall 1976). Web. 15 Feb. 2014.

---. Just As I Thought. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998. Print.

Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. Print.

Roth, Philip. The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1986. Print.

---. Deception. 1990. London: Vintage, 2006. Print.

---. Reading Myself and Other. 1975. London: Vintage International, 2001. Print.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Vol. 1, poems 1855-1856. Ed. Sculley Bradley et al. New York: New York UP, 1980. Print.

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NOTES

1. “[P]our entrevoir quelque chose du sens et de la pertinence de cette fiction labile [...] le lecteur se prend à rêver d’être non pas seulement Janus mais un tripe Janus. Six têtes, pas une de moins, lui permettraient peut-être de capter et de transmettre, d’une manière juste, en quelques pages, ce qu’il en est de l’oeuvre de Grace Paley.” 2. In French in Philip Roth’s novel. 3. “The son’s poem “the fingers of my flesh transcend/my transcendental soul/the tightness in my shoulders end/my teeth have made me whole” (241) may be viewed as a parodic version of Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” (1855): “O my body! [...] I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that you are the soul,) [...] Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth [...] forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails, [...] O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul” (131). 4. “A l’inverse de ce qui se passe si souvent dans la littérature juive, la Fille et la Mère paraissent prendre le dessus. De même la question du corps, de ses instincts et de ses besoins, si volontiers associée au féminin, finit par dominer l’ensemble du récit où, suivant un processus d’ironique inversion, elle devient une préoccupation essentiellement masculine. Dans les corps masculins amoindris et malades (le père), ou tout au contraire grotesquement musclé (le fils) dont il est question ici, on peut voir un renvoi à un corpus littéraire confisqué par les hommes et sclérosé par des codes patriracaux obsolètes, systématiquement tournés en dérision. ” 5. Significantly, the story following “A Conversation with My Father” in the Collected Stories is entitled “The Immigrant Story” (244-47). 6. “I grew up in the summer sunlight of upward mobility. This leached out a lot of that dark ancestral grief,” declares the narrator in “The Immigrant Story” (244). 7. This led to massive demonstrations, sit-ins, protests, and other forms of political activism to change the face of an America whose establishment no longer elicited patriotic admiration, but indignation and shame. 8. The term is originally from Henry James’s preface to The Portrait of a Lady: “The house of fiction has […] not one window but a million […] they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from any other” (11). 9. The earliest known occurrence of the term is from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817). 10. The father’s rejection of fictional characters “sitting in trees talking senselessly, voices from who knows where” (238) is an explicit allusion to Paley’s “Faith in a Tree” published in the same 1974 collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (179-98). 11. “[L’] apprentissage de la vie et de l’écriture consiste à admettre la discontinuité et la perte, à désamorcer le tragique et à faire de la dispersion un mode de signification.” 12. See Paley’s “The Loudest Voice.” 13. How could the loving daughter propose a tragic ending to her dying father? She will never feel ready for that sort of closure.

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ABSTRACTS

Entre fiction et autobiographie, Grace Paley développe dans “A Conversation with My Father” une réflexion sur les tensions qui animent sa création artistique : entre tradition et subversion, entre dette et émancipation. Dans l’intimité d’un dialogue intergénérationnel cocasse mais poignant, la nouvelle aborde en un feuilleté des discours les enjeux et les écueils de la politique et de la littérature, de la justice et de la compassion. En résulte l’élaboration d’un art poétique érigeant l’autonomie et l’authenticité de l’artiste comme valeurs capitales.

AUTHORS

CLÉMENT-ALEXANDRE ULFF Clément-Alexandre Ulff teaches literature and English at the University of Rouen, France. He is writing his doctoral thesis on the links between history, myths, and fiction in Philip Roth’s novels. His main areas of interest include ethnicity as well as the construction of identity and memory in American literature.

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Grace Paley’s Revisiting Fathers

Laura Muresan

1 In 1972 Grace Paley published “A Conversation with My Father,” an autobiographical and widely acclaimed story which takes the form of an argument between a woman writer and her father about the style of her fiction. The father advises his daughter to return to the kind of stories she “used to write,” that is to say to plots with “recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next” (Paley, The Collected Stories 232). 1 The type of plot and characters that the father longs for is, however, subverted by the author–narrator who is in search of a form free of patriarchal dominance.

2 In 2002 Paley returns to the “real” father with the publication of “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age,” a short story that first appeared in The New Yorker2 and was then republished in Here and Somewhere Else (2007). “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age” elaborates on themes already present in “A Conversation with My Father” while also exploring more encompassing issues, such as intergenerational gaps, sexuality, memory, politics, or historical and personal tragedy. To a certain extent, “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age” may be seen as a sequel to the earlier story, creating a sort of antiphonal effect.3 The events appear to be dated by the suggestive hints about the father’s age and condition: in “A Conversation with My Father” he is eighty-six and sick; here he seems to be older and approaching death. While the chronotope is quite similar (in both stories the daughter visits her aging father in hospital or at home), thirty years have elapsed between the two publications.

3 The rather long and seemingly self-explanatory title already hints at the sort of “conversation” the reader is to expect as it posits the father’s intention to give his daughter a lesson and to correct inappropriate behavior and attitude.4 The title may actually seem paradoxical in that it juxtaposes terms belonging to the private sphere (“my father,” “old age”) with more formal or neutral language (“addresses,” “facts”). Misleading as it might be, the title introduces the gaps opening between daughter and father. To the child/parent conflict, however, are added other oppositions: between man and woman, subservience and patriarchy, self and other, freedom and conventions, outside and inside, past and future.

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4 The focus of this article will be on the paradoxical attempt at subverting the paternal figure while at the same time using his voice in an effort to unearth the family’s history so as to comprehend its meaning. By employing the concepts of logocentrism (Derrida) and “the Name-of-the Father” (Lacan) to refer to the function of patriarchal masculinity, I will attempt to show how the semiotic (Kristeva) comes to menace and displace the symbolic order, as represented by the father. I will first analyze the father’s endeavor to hand down advice, assuming from the very beginning the position of a sage, denying his daughter any opportunity of intervening or defending herself. I will then examine how the daughter-writer challenges patriarchy and manages at last to reclaim her voice by creating a space where her voice could at last be heard. The third part will focus on how the father comes to revisit his haunting past, bringing to light painful memories and suppressed truths. By restoring her own voice, the daughter also reclaims an intense desire to repossess her father’s memories. The last section will thus analyze the process through which the father’s story becomes in fact the daughter’s.

“THE LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN”5

5 “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age” is a first-person narrative in the form of a fragmented dialogue, suspended by the father whenever he feels too tired to talk and then resumed upon his daughter’s next visit. However, it soon becomes apparent that it is a one-sided conversation (the word “addresses” is suggestive in this respect): the master is addressing his pupil so that the latter should acquire knowledge. The story begins with the father telling his daughter that he wants to teach her how to grow old and that they had better start as soon as possible: I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And, besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come. (65)

6 This incipit introduces the interplay between the three dimensions of time: past, present, and future. The father uses his personal experience to guide his daughter and prepare her for what may befall her in the coming years. With somewhat cruel humor, he recommends strategies to counter the effects of time: You’d be surprised. You can do little things–putting cream on the corners of your mouth, also the heels of your feet […]. But I must mention squinting. DON’T SQUINT. Wear your glasses. Look at your aunt, so beautiful once. (65) You’ll see, in thirty, forty years from now, you’ll get tired often. It doesn’t mean you’re sick. This is something important that I’m telling you. Listen. To live a long time, long years, you’ve got to sleep a certain extra percentage away. (71)

7 The father, much to his daughter’s surprise, also tackles the subject of sexuality and “its troubling persistence” (74): He said that might happen to me, too, eventually […] Then, a little accusingly, After all, I have been a man alone for many years. Did you ever think about that? […] Actually, I had thought of it now and then, his sexual aloneness. I was a grownup woman. But I turned it into a tactful question: Aren’t you sometimes lonely, Pa? (74)

8 Is the father’s confession a veiled reference to masturbation? Or is it just a way of making his daughter aware of his lack of intimate relations? The sexuality inherent here never becomes fully explicit, relying on allusion and metonymy while the narrative quickly moves on to the father’s evocation of his dead wife:

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Your mama was planting all kinds of flowers every minute. Trees were growing. Your grandma, your babushka, sat on a good chair on the lawn. In back of her were birch trees. I put in a nice row of spruce. Then one day in the morning she comes to me, my wife. She shows me a spot on her left breast. I know right away. […] I know in that minute, in one minute, everything is finished, finished–happiness, pleasure, finished, years ahead black. (75)

9 The passage turns from the description of an idyllic existence exuding life and vitality, underscored by such words as “planting,” “flowers,” “trees,” “growing,” “spruce” (an evergreen tree), to the rapid realization of his wife’s imminent death, emphasized by the repetition of the verb “finished” and the use of the color “black.” The transition from the past continuous (with its emphasis on progression) to the past simple (implying stasis) and then to the present tense contributes to conveying a sense of immediacy, with the past contaminating the present.

10 For the daughter, however, the mother’s illness constitutes a moment that can be neither apprehended nor represented. Her voice is reduced to a simple “No”: “That minute had been told to me a couple of years ago, maybe twice in ten years. Each time it nearly stopped my heart. No” (75). In an interview with Kathleen Hulley, the author refers to her own mother’s death in the following terms: My mother’s death was really hard…and very terrible… And it’s hard for me to deal with […] I mean she’d been sick since I was about 13. You know, really sick. And I think that’s where a lot of my pain comes from. That long period when I kept trying to think of something else all the time. (37)

11 This difficulty in dealing with her mother’s death is reflected in Paley’s entire fiction. Unlike the father, the mother cannot really be a subject of conversation/in conversation, but rather a site of the unsayable. She is reduced to what Virginia Woolf called “one of the invisible presences who after all play so important a part in every life” (80).6 Paley’s short story “Mother” inevitably comes to mind: At the door of the kitchen she said, You never finish your lunch. You run around senselessly. What will become of you? Then she died. (Collected Stories 325)

12 Here again the mother’s death is eluded, as if the daughter had no words at her disposal to refer to it. This is highlighted by the absence of transition, of quotation marks, and of description. These ellipses serve to epitomize the abyss opening between life and death, between now and then, between daughter and mother.

13 While muted when it comes to the mother’s death, the narrator succeeds however in voicing the pain caused by her father’s suffering in old age and his impending death. This is partially due to the fact that, unlike the mother’s, the father’s demise comes as a natural process. As he evokes his “little disturbances,” the father hands down to his daughter his personal experience of getting old while trying in retrospect to instill humor and meaning into painful aspects of his own life.

14 Although well-intentioned, the father fails to establish true communication with his daughter. Instead, he systematically reduces her to silence. She tries in vain to take control of the narrative by redirecting its stream or changing the subject: “Please don’t start in. I’m in the middle of telling you some things you don’t know” (72). What strategies does the daughter have at her disposal to disrupt her father’s dominance and recover her own voice?

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RECLAIMING THE SILENCED VOICE

15 In “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age,” as in “A Conversation with My Father,” the father is the one who reinstates conventions, protesting at the daughter’s attempt to free herself from social constraints. He does not understand the new generation and their attitude toward life. When his daughter tries to slip in the news of her imminent divorce, he has a violent reaction: “What? What? Are you crazy? I don’t understand you people nowadays. I married your mother when I was a boy […] and you know I stayed married till the end” (70). The father overshadows his daughter, allowing her to exist only as a reflection of himself and in the margins of the text. As a mentor, he dominates the story (and the story’s conclusion), forcing the narrator into submission.

16 In that respect the father appears as the very embodiment of what Jacques Derrida calls “logocentrism,” the belief in the power of speech endowed with divine qualities and absolute meaning. One is also reminded of Lacan’s view of the father as promulgator and protector of the Law, and of his concept of “the Name-of-the-Father” (a continuous permutation of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary father) as “primordial signifier.”7 After a while, the daughter no longer tries to respond through speech, as she understands that her father will simply not listen. In order to assert her own “power” she resorts to another strategy of resistance: she focuses on her own writing as a way of “counter[ing] logocentric repression” (Derrida 51) and, in so doing, she disrupts the father’s authority and law.

17 Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic and the symbolic proves useful to our analysis of Paley’s strategies of subversion.8 While the symbolic designates language in its normative usage, the semiotic represents the pre-linguistic state of language. According to Kristeva, “we have to move out of the enclosure of language in order to grasp what is going on in the genetic temporality which logically precedes the constitution of the symbolic function" (140). For Kristeva, writing may become a way of acknowledging the semiotic which, unlike the symbolic, represents heterogeneity of meaning and may be expressed through deviations from grammatical or syntax rules, lack of punctuation, ambiguity, use of metaphors, etc. The symbolic, on the other hand, is clear, logical language, where conventional grammar and syntax dominate, providing the formal means for communication. As Ruth Robbins points out in Literary Feminisms, [The Symbolic] is the language of transparency, power and conformity, and, as such, is aligned with patriarchal functions in culture–le non/nom du père–which signals the father’s name and the father’s prohibitions in social and psychic formations. [...] It is traditionally the language [...] into which authority is written. [...] [T]he developing child [...] inserts him/herself into culture by submitting to the father’s ‘no,’ by conforming to the linguistic rules of grammar, syntax and propriety in vocabulary [...] [which], therefore, necessitates a submission to masculine functions and a farewell to the feminised pre-Oedipal space of the mother-child bond. (128)

18 Paley’s struggle against the “myth” of the Father is therefore “against the language of the myth contained in language itself,” as Joyce Meier suggests (119). Paley locates the origin of writing in the mother’s body while capturing “the rhythms and intonations of speech before it captures meaning” (Hulley 8). It is no accident that women and (their) children are the protagonists of most of her stories. Motherhood is central to Paley, shaping and modifying her women’s relationships with the surrounding world. The

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discrepancy between “mother” and “father” culture is reflected in the former’s use of language characterized by an abundance of dialogues, free direct speech, narrative ruptures, a compressed style, or open-ended structures.

19 In Paley’s fiction, indeed, the symbolic is relentlessly menaced by the intrusion of the semiotic. Her stories are decentered, showing no linear progression or hierarchical structure, breaking patriarchal fictional forms. The choice of themes also constitutes a way of subverting traditional structures. Significantly, Paley’s stories deal with issues rarely included in patriarchal discourses. She writes about ordinary people living ordinary lives. She discovers the power of one’s own (auto)biography, of unremarkable events, and unsophisticated feelings. In “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age,” she does not hesitate to tackle the issues of aging and dying which, “when presented referentially, are taboo topics within phallocentric discourse” (Marks 187).

20 Another instance pertaining to the semiotic is the complex use of silence, a recurrent motif in Paley’s stories. As Bach and Hall remark in the introduction to Conversations with Grace Paley, “her characters fall silent, either because they are muted by forces of unkindness and abuse–verbal or physical–or because they know the power of the word not spoken” (xiv). When it “follows unkindness in which little truths growl” (Paley, “Listening,” Collected Stories 381), silence is a refusal to participate in any kind of communication, a mutism with purely negative implications. But for Paley, it may also have creative and regenerative powers. Does not silence precede creation itself in most religious traditions, as if it were an opening, a prelude to revelation, a great ceremony of preparation? (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 883).

21 Significantly, in “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age,” the daughter, before falling silent, remains open-mouthed several times in the course of the story: “I said, Oh, but then said, Well, thanks.” (67; emphasis mine) “Oh, Pa.” (69; emphasis mine) “No hope, Pa.” (71; emphasis mine)

22 The use of one-syllable words ending in vowels gives the impression that her mouth literally remains open. Discursive arguments are replaced by a sort of child’s language, a language of “babble, incoherence, rhythm and sound, which are not exactly meaningless, but which are not susceptible to rationalistic systemic analysis” (Robbins 128).

23 While the father’s “logocentrism” occupies practically the entire space of the dialogue, the daughter is striving to exist in the blanks, in the interstices of the text, and in the narrator’s commentaries. The scene is therefore symbolically divided into inside and outside. The father, while being the most vociferous character within the text, never manages to take possession of the narrative voice; he remains on the outside. Conversely, and strangely enough, the daughter, although maintained outside this pseudo-conversation, does manage to communicate, yet only for the sake of the reader. Also, while the aging father is at all times confined to his apartment, the daughter is allowed movement as she pays him visits whenever she likes. Her comings and goings attest to her freedom, while the father is confined to passivity and immobility.

24 The opposition inside/outside is blurred towards the end of the story: “I stood near the door holding my coat. A space at last for me to say something. My mouth open” (77). The doorway, a place where daughter and mother are conjoined again,9 carries the potential of a liminal space, being neither inside nor outside. It is a symbol of passage and transition, which may take on multiple meanings: is it a space for mutual

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understanding or does it reinforce the gap between father and daughter? Does it symbolize entry into a private space where the daughter could at last acquire the status of insider? Or is it a metaphor for dying? The door may also symbolize the passage from life to art, a passage which in turn generates life so that “art and life cross imperceptibly into another in an erotic exchange and interchange” (Hulley 16). Indeed, the daughter’s “open mouth” recalls the open door (or open page) itself, inviting new (narrative) possibilities, for “[e]veryone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life” (Paley, “A Conversation with My Father” 232). At the end of the story, however, the narrator seems to miss a unique opportunity to verbalize her emotions: “A space at last for me to say something” (77). The narrator here keeps the promise she once made to her family that she would never deny her father the last word (“A Conversation with My Father” 237). By ultimately choosing silence she places herself at the very limits of language. Silence is a sort of new language, the purest form of enunciation, creating an interlocution of “plenitude” which, accompanied by an unbearable “emptiness,” necessarily gives rise to an effect of implosion. (Van Den Heuvel 84; translation mine)

25 To the daughter’s (imploded) silence corresponds the father’s explosion of feelings and memories triggered by the pretext of offering useful advice for the years to come. The narrator soon realizes though that more important issues preoccupy the father. Going back to the historical reality of the 1920s, the father revisits the ghosts of his past in an effort to find an answer to the meaning of his life.

GHOSTS

26 The father, arrogant as he may be, is in fact a frail old man, thick with anxiety. Gradually, his fear of dying and his inevitable regrets come to dominate the narrative: “[...] you’ll remember everything you did, didn’t, what you omitted, whom you insulted, betrayed–betrayed, that is the worst” (68). The daughter is also puzzled by the tendency of her once atheistic father to bring up God in his conversation. Do people become more religious as they age? Or is it just an exploration of the ultimate meaning of life? Faith may offer solace and acceptance of death while also providing meaning to otherwise inexplicable tragedies.

27 One of the most poignant moments in the story is when the father advises his daughter to take her heart into her hands every morning and massage it. At first he cannot bring himself to talk about it, so he drops the subject for a while (“Forget it, he said sadly” [65]), yet proves able to make his point in the next paragraph: Then you must talk to your heart […] Say–maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember. (66) This is good for the old heart–to get excited–just as good as for the person. Some people go running till late in life–for the muscles, they say, but the heart knows the real purpose. The purpose is the expansion of the arteries, a river of blood, it cleans off the banks, carries junk out of the system. (67)

28 The comic juxtaposition of the literal and the figurative, the scientific and the absurd, highlights both the father’s helplessness and his resilience as well as his determination to counter “the facts of old age.” He, a doctor, knows all too well that with time the body becomes threatening and ungovernable, turning into an unrecognizable Other:

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“the body is your enemy. I must warn you it is not your friend the way it was when you were a youngster” (69). The “heart” then would rather “carry” memories (of others) than purify (“carry junk out of”) the system. The body becomes a site of rememoration, a source of knowledge, and a privileged locus for the construction of meaning. It is precisely the vicissitudes of old age that spark the dialogue in the first place and allow the narrative to expand further, becoming a pretext for ever more urgent issues.

29 The father is at last able to articulate the guilt and the concerns tormenting him. He is assailed by unanswered questions: first of all, what happened to his brother who was deported back to Russia in 1919? Why didn’t he ever try to find out? These days I think often, especially after telling you the story a couple of months ago, about my brother Grisha. I want to know what happened to him.[…] All the years not talking. Me seeing sick people day and night. Strangers. And not talking to my brother till all of a sudden he's on a ship. Gone. (76)

30 Addressing his daughter becomes an opportunity for the father to disclose suppressed truths, to revisit a haunting past, and to come to terms with ghosts, figments of memory, which are unlikely to be turned into fiction. According to J. Carlos Rowe, “Ghosts haunt precisely because we recognize them as impossible fictions, whose power we assume must derive uncannily from ourselves” (26). The father is in a stasis, petrified by old age, illness, and regrets. By now what remains of him is a disembodied voice: Go home now. I don’t have much more to tell you. Anyway, it’s late. I have to prepare now all of my courage, not for sleep, for waking in the early morning, maybe 3 or 4 A.M. I have to be ready for them, my morning visitors—your babushka, your mama, most of all, to tell the truth, it’s for your aunt, my sister, the youngest. She said to me, that day in the hospital, Don’t leave me here, take me home to die. And I didn’t. And her face looked at me that day and many, many mornings looks at me still. (76-77)

31 The term “babushka,” a Russian word meaning old woman or grandmother, tears the text apart, creating a sense of dissonance and strangeness. This is accentuated by the hectic rhythm and foreign inflections. The father’s anxiety and frailty are also reflected in the fragmentary form of his “address,” in the abrupt shifts from one topic to another, and in the regressive movement from the known to the unknown or unknowable. The conversation is also haunted by a “submerged non-conversation” (Hirsch, Introduction 17), by subjects that cannot be talked about, such as the narrator’s divorce, the father’s intimate desires, or his brother’s political life in Russia. Yet both the daughter and the reader are soon able to infer the links between personal destiny and history, as the father’s story reflects that of many immigrants in the 1920s.

32 Thus, in “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age,” the father seizes the opportunity to deplore the sacrifices imposed upon his wife as they first arrived in the New World. While they had both been active participants in Russia’s political and social life, only the father was able to succeed in the New World. Choices were made at the expense of the narrator’s mother: “It was a shame, everything went into me, so I should go to school, I should graduate, I should be the doctor, I should have the profession. Poor woman, she was extremely smart” (73). In an interview with Kathleen Hulley, Grace Paley recalls: My mother was very oppressed, yet my father never could have thought of himself that way […]. My mother was oppressed by her circumstances. Coming here to this country…who were they going to educate? They put all their money into my father, the male. […] He took care of everybody. But that meant my mother didn’t get to do

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any of the things she wanted to do. But that wasn’t his fault. (28; emphasis in the original)

33 In Paley’s universe, “there are some important connections to be made between female and Jewish experiences of subordination” (Taylor 59). Despite the emancipation movement of the 1920s, and despite the matrilinearity of Jewishness,10 women were confined to a marginal role. The father was the sole head of the family and the sole transmitter of cultural values.11

34 Even for the father and other first-generation immigrants for whom the American dream seemed to have come true,12 full integration was impossible. Although now in his late eighties, the father must admit he is still an outsider living on the fringes of American society: “Well, I suppose you do know a number of Gentiles, you’re more in the American world. I know very few” (72). Paley herself affirms that in terms of mentality and values her father has remained until the very end “just a ghetto Jew” (Interview Perry 102).

35 While having fled anti-Semitism and the constant fear of pogroms, many immigrants were confronted in America with prejudices, which, though less virulent, deprived them of equal chances of integration: “Anti-Semitism in the American blood from Europe–a little thinner, I suppose” (76), contends the narrator’s father. American anti- Semitism became even fiercer in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Russian immigrants–especially if they were Jewish–were viewed as supporters of bolshevism. As he evokes the prison term he himself served as a political activist in tsarist Russia,13 the father draws an implicit parallel between the political repression in his native land and the climate that prevailed in America during the post-World War I Red Scare. The father recalls the violence of the Palmer Raids and the memory of those who, like his own brother, were sent back to Russia: Even after the Palmer Raids–that was maybe 1919–they kept deporting people. They picked them up at home, at the Russian Artists’ Club, at meetings [...] They thought that these kids had in mind a big revolution–like in Russia. Some joke. Ignorance. Grisha and his friends didn’t like Lenin from the beginning. More Bakunin. Emma Goldman, her boyfriend [...] Berkman [...] They were shipped [...]. (76) 14

36 In the end, the dying father assigns his daughter a mission: explore the archives, take advantage of whatever useful connections she might have to find out about Grisha. This, claims the father half-seriously, half-humorously, will help her give a sense of purpose to her own life while saving her from the regrets and remorse he himself has experienced.

37 The father’s “address” gradually turns into a kind of self-justification and into a confession, which itself becomes a kind of testament: “[y]es, but I'm supposed to tell you a few things, give advice, a few last words” (72; emphasis mine). According to Ulric Neisser, “Parents cannot help interpreting the world for their children; indeed, they must do so if culture is to be transmitted to the next generation” (12). What position should the daughter assume so as to become, in Marianne Hirsch’s words, “a space of transmission” (“The Generation of Postmemory” 103)?

“I AM THE FATHER!”15

38 It is noteworthy that Paley was eighty years old when she wrote “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age.” Her father had been dead for more than thirty years. Why

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should she decide to revisit him? Had she reached an age when she was at last able to understand her father’s preoccupations in his old age? Or is the story an “address” that she would have needed to give some decades before? Whose voice then is it? The father’s or the daughter’s? A voice one hears is a heard voice, as critic Neil D. Isaacs aptly observes (9). The story-hearer’s16 voice is thus as important as that of the storyteller. Paley explains that before finding a voice she needs to listen first. Listening, like silence, provides creative power: “I can’t find my own way of speaking until I have other voices. It’s almost other voices that give me the strength or the permission or whatever to go through with it” (Interview Taylor 163). But isn’t the daughter both the story-hearer and the story-teller with the father turning into a sort of ghost writer in “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age”? Isn’t this story Paley’s own testament in old age? The author confesses: “I think when people get older, they really think about the past a lot. They think about the wide future and the narrow past, really the tunneled past, way back. There’s more to be said yet” (Interview Taylor 174).

39 Picking at the threads of the text, the narrator (re)weaves herself into the texture of the narrative, writing herself between the lines, unspinning the threads of her (father’s) life so as to bring back those left behind: her parents, other relatives, as well as all the colorful world of Russian Jewish immigrants of the early twentieth century. Her position inside the story is therefore also characterized by nostalgia and regression.

40 “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age” then turns into a narrative of (her) self in search of the ghosts whom she might also have felt tempted to forget or reduce to silence. In various interviews Paley acknowledges that it is the real father and herself who are the characters in some stories such as “Debts” or “A Conversation with My Father”: “You know in ‘A Conversation with My Father,’ that’s really very much him. My father and me” (Interview Hulley 37; emphasis in the original). Significant too is Paley’s epigraph that appears in the first edition of her second collection of stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974): “Everyone in this book is imagined into life except the father. No matter what story he has to live in, he’s my father, I. Goodside, M. D., artist, and storyteller” (n.p.). Joyce Meier analyzes the ambiguous use of the initial “I” as follows: “The inclusion of the pronoun ‘I’ implies that Paley too is the Father, or that the Father is within Paley as writer” (Meier 125). By authoring the voice of others, the narrator takes over the father’s position, and, thus, places herself in a position of power: “By becoming a narrator, one plays the role of the dead so as to allow them to be heard. […] All literature is a dialogue with the dead, for one has to die along with them so they could come alive again” (Sallenave 176; translation mine).17

41 Let us now return to the “heart” metaphor, which constitutes in fact the pivot of the narrative. This is how the father encourages his daughter to talk to her heart: “Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember” (66). By helping the heart to beat ad infinitum, one can eschew time and mortality. It is, however, not the man’s heart but the heart of the tale that will continue to beat so as to “memorialize certain things and people” (Interview Taylor 96), because, as Philip Roth puts it in his moving autobiographical account of his father’s death, “[y]ou must not forget anything”18 (Roth 118; emphasis in the original).

42 Through the process of recording these snippets of conversation, the author forges connections between herself and the family members who only live in her father’s narratives. Thus “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age” seems to be a

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perfect example of “postmemory,” as it was first coined by Hirsch in her essay “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning and Post-Memory,” and developed in her later work. She defines postmemory as “a structure of inter―and trans–generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience” (106). Here, the traumatic experience first comes in the shape of her lost uncle, whose story remained unrecorded by the official historical archives of the 1920s. It is now the task of the daughter to reconstruct the process of remembering through the writing of the father’s narrative.

43 By assuming the role of the father, the narrator reverses her position of being “addressed” into a position of power. There is, however, a certain ambiguity to the daughter’s attempts at challenging patriarchal esthetics. On the one hand, she succeeds in reclaiming her voice by writing and thus becomes the author of her father’s “address.” On the other hand, she still needs the voice of the father to reanimate her own (hi)story. The narrative is ultimately not so much a conversation with her father as it is a conversation with herself.

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Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-memory.” The Emotions, Gender, and the Politics of Subjectivity. Special issue of Discourse 15.2 (1992-1993): 3-29. Print.

---. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29.1. Photography in Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008. 103-128. Print.

---. Introduction. Here and Somewhere Else. Stories and Poems. Grace Paley and Robert Nichols. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2007. 1–18. Print.

Hulley, Kathleen. “Introduction: Grace Paley’s Resistant Form.” Grace Paley. Ed. Kathleen Hulley. Spec. issue of Delta 14 (1982): 3-18. Print.

Isaacs, Neil D. Grace Paley: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. Print.

Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. Writings on Glass, Essays, Interviews, Criticism. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Print.

Kristeva, Julia. “The Subject in Process.” The Tel Quel Reader. Eds. Patrick French and Roland François Lack. London: Routledge, 1998. 133-77. Print.

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Marks, Elaine. “Transgressing the (In)cont(in)ent Boundaries: The Body in Decline.” Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 181-200. Print.

Meier, Joyce. “The Subversion of the Father in the Tales of Grace Paley.” Grace Paley. Ed. Kathleen Hulley. Spec. issue of Delta 14 (1982): 115-27. Print.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.

Neisser, Ulric. “Self-narratives: True and False.” The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-narrative. Ed. Ulric Neisser and Robin Fivush. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 1-18. Print.

Paley, Grace. The Collected Stories. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994. Print.

---. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute : Stories. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1974. Print.

---. Interview with Kathleen Hulley. “Interview with Grace Paley.” Grace Paley. Ed. Kathleen Hulley. Spec. issue of Delta 14 (1982): 19-40. Print.

---. Interview with Ruth Perry. Conversations with Grace Paley. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Blaine H. Hall. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997. 95-116. Print.

---. Interview with Jacqueline Taylor “Grace Paley on Storytelling and Story Hearing.” Conversations with Grace Paley. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Blaine H. Hall. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. 163-76. Print.

Paley, Grace and Robert Nichols. Here and Somewhere Else. Stories and Poems. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2007. Print.

Preston, William, Jr.. Aliens and Dissenters. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1963. Print.

Robbins, Ruth. Literary Feminisms. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Print.

Roth, Philip. Patrimony: A True Story. 1991. London: Vintage, 1996. Print.

Rowe, J. Carlos. “Screwball: The Use and Abuse of Uncertainty in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.” Henry James. Spec. issue of Delta 15 (1982): 1-31. Print.

Sallenave, Danièle. Le don des morts. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Print.

Taylor, Jacqueline. Grace Paley: Illuminating Dark Lives. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Print.

Van Den Heuvel, Pierre. Parole. Mot. Silence. Pour une poétique de l’énonciation. Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1985. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Sussex: The University Press, 1976. Print.

Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. 1925. New York: Persea Books, 2003. Print.

NOTES

1. All quotations from this collection as well as from the short story “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age” refer to the editions mentioned in our works cited list. 2. Published in The New Yorker on June 17, 2002. 3. Richard Kostelanetz defines antiphonal effects as “the alternating back and forth of sound from one side of the room to the other” (88). 4. The verb “to address” means to make a formal speech. Etymologically it comes from the Anglo-French word “adrescer,” meaning “to straighten” (Merriam Webster Dictionary).

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5. The Little Disturbances of Man is the title of Paley’s first collection of short stories published in 1959. 6. It is interesting to note that Woolf’s mother died when the former was thirteen, the same age Paley was when her mother became seriously ill. 7. For an analysis of Lacan’s concept of “the Name-of-the-Father,” see for example Fink. 8. For a discussion of Kristeva's concept of the semiotic in Paley's writing, see Hulley. 9. In the short story “Mother,” the mother is described as always standing in the doorway (325). 10. According to Jewish tradition, to be Jewish, one only needs to have a Jewish mother. The father is not taken into consideration. 11. See Ertel 332-33. One is also reminded of Anzia Yezierska’s autobiographical novel Bread Givers, a testimony to the difficulties encountered by Jewish women at the time in their search for self-assertion: “Heaven and the next world were only for men. Women could get into heaven because they were daughters of men” (11). Like Yezierska, Paley associates America with a sense of optimism and freedom. In a 1985 interview, she speaks in favor of creating new traditions that might help reshape Jewish identity: “That word identity has been hard for many women who live secular lives and maybe harder for religious women and also feminists. But the women’s movement has made a big difference […] It’s given a lot of Jewish women courage to stay Jewish and fight… for those ordinary rights. R-i-t-e-s. Rights to have rites” (Interview Bach and Hall xii). 12. Here is how the father comments on the family’s achievements in America: “But finally with us, everything was all right, ALL right, accomplished. Do you understand? Your brother and sister finished college, married [...] I was working very hard, like a dog. We were only fifty years old then, but, look, we bought the place in the country” (74). 13. This put an end to his political activism: “Then no more, no more, I said to myself, no more saving imperial Russia, the great pogrom-maker, from itself” (69). 14. The raids were aimed at radical groups seen as threats to the US which feared that a “red” influence might grip the American population. The Red Scare was exacerbated by the class and labor conflicts taking place at the time. The year 1919 was marked by the organized labor’s struggle to obtain better working conditions. Labor leaders, radicals, and foreigners were soon labeled Bolshevik instigators. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, probably America’s most famous anarchists, were among the victims of the Palmer raids. Although no crime was leveled at the “instigators,” they were rounded up and deported back to their country of origin in what the then Assistant US Secretary of Labor called “the deportations delirium” (Preston 2). 15. This phrase appears in “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” (218). 16. This is an allusion to Grace Paley’s short story “The Story Hearer” (337-45). 17. “Se faire narrateur, c’est jouer le rôle du mort pour permettre aux morts de se faire entendre. […] Toute littérature est un dialogue avec les morts, car il faut se faire mort avec eux afin de les rendre vivants.” 18. These are the last words of Patrimony.

ABSTRACTS

Trente ans après la publication de la célèbre nouvelle “A Conversation with My Father” (1972), Grace Paley reprend la discussion avec son père dans “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age” (2002). Il s’agit à nouveau de subvertir la figure paternelle, comme le suggère cette

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étude qui en analyse les modalités : de quelle façon la fille s’emploie-t-elle à défier le père pour trouver un espace où elle aura enfin la possibilité de faire entendre sa propre voix ? Ce faisant, comment parvient-elle à s’approprier l’histoire / l’Histoire du père ? Parler avec le père est en fait prétexte à l’introspection et à une réflexion tout à la fois ironique et angoissée sur la mémoire et sur la transmission intergénérationnelle.

AUTHORS

LAURA MURESAN Laura Muresan is a Ph.D. candidate and adjunct lecturer at the University of Versailles Saint- Quentin, where she is currently teaching medical English as well as courses on American Literature. Her research project deals with the notion of the body in the fiction of Philip Roth. Her main areas of interest include the construction of identity, memory, illness, liminality.

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“I don’t understand how time passes”: The Experience of Time in Grace Paley’s “Wants” and “Ruthy and Edie”

Tanguy Bérenger

1 The titles of Grace Paley’s last two collections of short fiction–Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and Later the Same Day–highlight the ubiquity of time in her stories. They point to the different temporalities she engages with while also hinting at the elasticity of time in her writings. Paley’s short stories may focus on a single afternoon or span over the course of years; sometimes, however, whole lives are collapsed into a single paragraph or sentence–a feat which the author acknowledges as a possibility offered by short fiction writing itself: “I think you can cover a lot in a short period of time. It’s one of the gifts of the short story” (Interview Hulley 50, emphasis in original). Thus in Paley’s very first story “Goodbye and Good Luck,” the narrator, “Aunt Rose,” relates in only a dozen pages her lifelong and complicated love affair with the actor Vlashkin, who for years remained married to another woman. When reminded by her somewhat guilty lover that “A woman should not lose her time,” Rose retorts: “Oi, Vlashkin, if you are my friend, what is time?” (10).1

2 The question echoes throughout Paley’s fiction, in which “time” refers in fact to a vast array of meanings: “clock time,” “life,” “mutability,” “speed,” “rhythm,” “history,” and so on and so forth. Many of her characters find themselves wondering at the passing of time or bemoaning the brevity of life, particularly after the death of a relative: “whatever you do, life don’t stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream” (“Goodbye and Good Luck” 9); “haven’t we said that it had become noticeable that life is short and sorrowful?” (“Listening” 381). Furthermore, the private lives Grace Paley depicts often intersect with history on a larger scale, such as the “cruel history of Europe” which haunts the narrator of “The Immigrant Story” (238); or the Vietnam War protest that unsettles Faith at the end of “Faith in a Tree” (192). None of her characters or narrators, however, can provide a definite answer to the question “what is time?”

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3 Viewed in narratological terms, the notion of “time” covers a range of different concepts–reading time, narrated time, narrative time2–whose interaction produces additional categories, such as those Gérard Genette has identified as “order,” “duration,” and “frequency” (77-182). Paley tends to subvert traditional narrative time or to expose its artifice with phrases such as “Then, as often happens in stories, it was several years later” (385) or “Once upon a time, as they say” (135). While time is a recurrent theme, it also shapes the very structure of her narratives, thereby raising the question of temporality in the short story. In an essay entitled “Suspended Narratives: The Short Story and Temporality,” Michael Trussler argues that the way we apprehend time in narratives has been shaped by the temporality at play in the novel: “One problem explicitly manifested by the short story pertains to the complexity of negotiating temporal experience through narrative. All narratives engage temporality in some way, but short fiction intimates how thoroughly our apprehension of historicity has been conditioned by sequential narrative forms such as the novel” (577). In the novel, the complexity of events and characters is generally conveyed through their juxtaposition and evolution in the course of the narrative, while short stories tend to focus on a single event, often a single time frame, which requires readers to imagine the larger context. This article seeks to address Grace Paley’s treatment of time in “Wants” and “Ruthy and Edie,” two stories written eleven years apart, in which temporality is problematized both as a theme and as a structural device.

4 In “Wants,” the unnamed homodiegetic narrator3 describes a casual encounter with her ex-husband as she goes to the library in order to return books she has been keeping . . . for eighteen years. Although the story is set at that specific moment, the conversation between the two characters as well as the narrator’s internal thoughts invariably hark back to their shared past as the characters argue over the demise of their marriage. As Paley commented in an interview, “[‘Wants’] really is about time, it’s a time story” (Interview Vernadakis and Dreyfus 350). This is apparent from the opening, which condenses a whole life in a few pithy sentences: I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified. He said, What? What life? No life of mine. I said, O.K. I don’t argue when there’s real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them. The librarian said $32 even and you’ve owed it for eighteen years. I didn’t deny anything. Because I don’t understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away. (129)

5 From the very beginning, the narrator is placed between two juxtaposed temporalities (“ex-husband,” “new library”). She is poised between past and present, old and new–a liminal situation which is also underlined by her sitting on the steps of the library, halfway between inside and outside. She is figuratively both out of time and out of place, neither in nor out, in a static intermediate position. Furthermore, the opening of the narrative is interspersed with figures: “twenty-seven years”; “$32”; “eighteen years”; later on, the narrator mentions “how life in the United States in New York changed in twenty-seven years fifty years ago” (130). Such accumulation has a numbing

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effect as these quantities seem to detach themselves from the realities they point to. Expressing time through numbers is indeed meaningless for the narrator, as she readily admits (“I don’t understand how time passes”) even though she remains acutely aware of temporality.

6 In fact the story seems to present readers with two different conceptions of temporality: a linear, external measurement of time, on the one hand, a more fluid and subjective perception, on the other. This dual conception is discussed by Henri Bergson in Time and Free Will. The philosopher opposes mechanical, scientific time, which is measured by the clock and expressed in quantities, to the human perception of time as duration (durée). While scientific time has the appearance of objectivity, it misses in fact the very essence of time, which can be grasped by consciousness and intuition only. In Bergson’s opinion, scientists do not actually measure time, but space (the intervals between the hands of the clock), whereas “real” time lies in “pure duration,” which the philosopher defines as “the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states” (100).4 In “Wants,” the narrator’s admitted failure to understand time may only reveal her rejection of mechanical time, as numbers fail to convey the experience of true duration. This is made manifest by the incongruous exchange that ensues between the two ex-lovers about what caused their marriage to end: In many ways, he said, as I look back, I attribute the dissolution of our marriage to the fact that you never invited the Bertrams to dinner. That’s possible, I said. But really, if you remember: first, my father was sick that Friday, then the children were born, then I had those Tuesday-night meetings, then the war began. Then we didn’t seem to know them anymore. (129)

7 The man’s preposterous and simplistic explanation points to a linear conception of time to which the narrator’s own chronology stands in stark contrast. Although the anaphora “then” in her reply tends to suggest a clear chain of events, the juxtaposition of punctual and durative events, the mingling of the personal and the national, of the commonplace and the remarkable, all contribute to a representation of the experience of time as flux, as interrelation between different periods and events. According to Bergson, our memories of past events and our perception of the present interpenetrate since our consciousness apprehends both at the same time. Therefore, when in the opening of Paley’s story the ex-husband retorts “What life? No life of mine” (128) to his ex-wife’s amiable greeting (“Hello my life,” 128), he deliberately ignores this state of flux, whereas the narrator acknowledges that it is impossible.

8 The characters’ opposite conceptions of time go hand in hand with radically different “wants.” The man accuses his ex-wife of not wanting anything, while he “wanted a sailboat” (130), and still intends to buy one. This materialistic desire is incomprehensible for the narrator, who casually dismisses possessions: “we had nice red pillows and things” (130). His wants are things you can own and measure while she has aspirations of a purely intangible nature: I want, for instance, to be a different person. I want to be the woman who brings these two books back in two weeks. I want to be the effective citizen who changes the school system and addresses the Board of Estimate on the troubles of this dear urban center. I had promised my children to end the war before they grew up. I wanted to have been married forever to one person, my ex-husband or my present

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one. Either has enough character for a whole life, which as it turns out is really not such a long time. (131; emphasis in the original)

9 These three paragraphs juxtapose many different tenses and aspects: enunciative present (“I want”), simple present to express the future (“the woman who brings these two books back in two weeks”), pluperfect (“I had promised”), simple past to express the future in the past (“before they grew up”), simple past with a passive perfect infinitive (“I wanted to have been married forever”), and gnomic present (“a whole life, which as it turns out is really not such a long time”). This suggests the range of the narrator’s “wants” while simultaneously plunging the reader into a whirl of antagonistic time frames, mimicking the complex way in which temporality is perceived by consciousness. Paley’s narrator proposes a perception of time characterized by a continuum defying chronological logic, which is most striking in this bittersweet musing: “I wanted to have been married forever to one person, my ex- husband or my present one.” Such confounding blending of past, present and future is reminiscent of Bergson’s conception of “pure duration,” which is “characterized by variety, even contraries, since it contains the whole past and present of the person experiencing it—unity and multiplicity” (Rohrberger 76).

10 “Wants” also reveals a constant oscillation between change and permanence, evolution and stagnation, which, again, can be felt in the very titles of Paley’s collections of stories–Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and Later the Same Day. Just as the author subverts linear chronology, she challenges the notion that change and permanence are mutually exclusive. When the protagonist returns her books to the library, eighteen years of overdue penalties are ostensibly obliterated with a check: “I gave the librarian a check for $32. Immediately she trusted me, put my past behind her, wiped the record clean, which is just what most other municipal and/or state bureaucracies will not do” (130). Yet the narrator’s inability to draw a line between past and present as well as her refusal to consider her ex-husband as forever “behind her” lead her to borrow again the very books she has just returned: “I checked out the two Edith Wharton books I had just returned because I’d read them so long ago and they are more apropos now than ever” (130). The telescoping of past and present, change and continuity thus creates a strange narrative loop. A sense of a cyclical time is instilled at the end of the story as the narrator is back on the library steps, in the liminal space where everything started and where she now reflects on what brought her to the library in the first place: Just this morning I looked out the window to watch the street for a while and saw that the little sycamores the city had dreamily planted a couple of years before the kids were born had come that day to the prime of their lives. Well! I decided to bring those two books back to the library. Which proves that when a person or an event comes along to jolt or appraise me I can take some appropriate action, although I am better known for my hospitable remarks. (131; emphasis in the original)

11 Once again the reference to different temporalities expresses a subjective perception of duration which emphasizes the elasticity of felt time: “how it went like nothing, you know, the tree grew, the husband’s gone,” declared Paley as she commented on the story (Interview Vernadakis and Dreyfus 351). At first glance, these last two paragraphs seem to express the narrator’s newfound determination to make “enormous changes” in her life. But she is actually reflecting on a moment situated before the events depicted in the narrative (“Just this morning”).5 Far from illustrating an evolution in the story, the dénouement actually marks a cyclic revolution. The narrator finds herself

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exactly where she started, on the steps of the library, with the same two books she wishes to return again. Text and plot thus loop back on themselves, while change and permanence paradoxically describe one and the same thing. As Paley stated in an interview: “[A story] can curl around on itself, it can just fall down and slip out through one of the spirals and go back again. That’s the way I see. I see us all in a great big bathtub of time just swimming around; everything’s in this ocean called time and it’s a place” (Interview Lidoff 87). Time in “Wants” exemplifies this sense of a liquid temporality, which both narrator and reader experience as they are led back to the beginning of the story.

12 “Ruthy and Edie” is also a “time story”; or, following Paul Ricoeur’s definition, a “tale about time”: “All fictional narratives are ‘tales of time’ inasmuch as the structural transformations that affect the situations and characters take time. However only a few are ‘tales about time’ inasmuch as in them it is the very experience of time that is at stake in these structural transformations” (Time and Narrative II 101). 6 The story has a twofold structure. In the first section, the narrator recounts a scene that occurred “one day in the Bronx” (327): the two eponymous characters, who were still children at the time, are arguing about boys and bravery when a dog suddenly shows up and frightens them. In the second section, set “many years later” (329), friends are gathered for Ruth’s fiftieth birthday. The celebration is fit for a reflection on life and the passing of time. Now middle-aged, Ruth and her friends evoke anecdotes from the past and deplore the generation gap with their children. The first section is then revealed to be a memory that Ruth has been reminiscing about, since Edie remarks, alluding to the incident with the dog: “Ruthy, it wasn’t like that. We both ran in and out a lot” (330). While the characters recall the past, they are also concerned about the near future: [Ann] was patting a couple of small cases and a projector on the floor next to her chair. Was she about to offer a slide show? No, she had already been prevented from doing this by Faith, who’d looked at the clock two or three times and said, I don’t have the time, Jack is coming tonight. Ruth had looked at the clock too. Next week, Ann? (330)

13 Just as in “Wants,” “clock time” is seen as an external constraint over which the characters have no control. Later in the story, Ruth declares: “We have only a couple of hours. (It was four o’clock. At six, Sara and Tomas with Letty, the first grandchild, standing between them would be at the door” (331). Paley instills a sense of anticipation in her story, as the ticking clock reminds the characters of how little time they have together. She brings into focus the ending of her story, which coincides with the arrival of Ruth’s granddaughter. As Susan Lohafer has noted, the short story is claimed to be “the most end-conscious of literary forms” (50) and “readers of short fiction . . . the most end-conscious of readers” (94). Paley, for whom “art is too long and life is too short” (Allen 130), chose the short story form for its concentration of events and perspectives. “Ruthy and Edie” juxtaposes the experience of time of middle-aged women with the naive perception of a very young child, Letty: They would all love her new shoes and her newest sentence, which was Remember dat? Because for such a long time there had been only the present full of milk and looking. Then one day, trying to dream into an afternoon nap, she sat up and said, Gramma, I boke your cup. Remember dat? In this simple way the lifelong past is

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invented, which, as we know, thickens the present and gives all kinds of advice to the future. (331)

14 Here again, the narrator emphasizes the interrelatedness of past, present, and future. In addition to this, she equates the acquisition of time with that of language. Letty is still struggling to pronounce words correctly, yet the phrase “remember dat?” allows her to conjure up the past. Time and language are thus intrinsically connected, as Letty is creating with language a time and a place that she can share with others.

15 The act of remembering is indeed prominent in the short story. The women gathered for Ruth’s birthday are playing their own game of “remember dat?”, rejoicing in their shared memories and recalling, for example, a demonstration they took part in years ago: “And then the goddamn horses started to rear and the cops were knocking people on their backs and heads—remember?” (333). It is language which shapes the way the characters experience memories: “If you said the word ‘city’ to Edie, or even the cool adjective ‘municipal,’ specific children usually sitting at the back of the room appeared before her eyes and refused to answer when she called on them” (332). Here words seem to conjure up the past in much the same way that specific sensations trigger “involuntary memory” for Proust’s narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu. However, Paley describes the social power of language only to expose its deceptive nature later in the story. Bergson also elaborated on this idea, arguing that language allows us to communicate our free-flowing inner state, but in an inaccurate and rigid way only: “our perceptions, sensations, emotions and ideas occur under two aspects: the one clear and precise, but impersonal; the other confused, ever changing, and inexpressible, because language cannot get hold of it without arresting its mobility or fit it into its common-place forms without making it into public property” (129).7 Language is therefore both necessary for social life and fundamentally misleading, as the rest of Paley’s story demonstrates.

16 At the end of “Ruthy and Edie,” Letty arrives with her parents at six o’clock, just as her grandmother had predicted. The child makes a prediction of her own–“I’m gonna sleep in your house, Gramma” (334)–before playing the game of “remember dat”: “Gramma, I slept in your bed with you. Remember dat?” (334). But Letty soon realizes that something is amiss: her aunt Rachel, who was supposed to be there, is not present at the party. Ruth gives her granddaughter a hug and tries to explain: Letty, she said as lightly as she could, She is supposed to be here. But where can she be? She certainly is supposed. Letty began to squirm out of Ruth’s arms. Mommy, she called, Gramma is squeezing. But it seemed to Ruth that she’d better hold her even closer, because, though no one else seemed to notice—Letty, rosy and soft-cheeked as ever, was falling, already falling, falling out of her brand-new hammock of world-inventing words onto the hard floor of man-made time. (334, emphasis in original)

17 The use of the past progressive and the repetition of “falling” seem to stretch that moment in time. The last sentence of the story is also its longest, which contributes to this effect and gives it additional weight. In this pivotal moment, which amounts, in fact, to a fall from innocence to experience, language and time become dissociated. No naive belief is possible any longer in a sort of Adamic tongue based on the perfect coincidence between words and world. So far the little girl’s words for time had seemed to correspond to the specific events they described: “She was still happy to have found the word ‘remember,’ which could name so many pictures in her head” (334). Now she is made aware of the divorce between signifier and signified. The shock that ensues is

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underlined by Paley’s suggestive choice of sonorities. In the final sentence, the gliding of the semivowel [w]–“world-inventing words”–gives way to the slowing-down effect of the nasal alliteration in [m]: “man-made time,” while the fluidity suggested by the —ING form and the paronomasia “world”/”word,” evoking interaction, gives way to the rigidity of the past participle “made.”

18 The last paragraph is of course an epiphany, a device that Paley usually eschews in her stories. Jean Pickering sees epiphanies as one of the constituents of the form, which she defines as “the moment of revelation that stands at the heart of the short story, the moment of insight that comes before language, constitutes a discrete moment of certainty in a nebulous universe” (53). Here, on the contrary, certainty is undermined as language breaks down. While this comes as a tragic realization concerning the child, the story nevertheless proves that “world-inventing words” shape its very structure. Paley chronicles the failure of language while demonstrating its power. Bergson remarks that although language solidifies into a fixed image our personal sensations and ideas, writers try to reverse this phenomenon: “We estimate the talent of a novelist by the power with which he lifts out of the common domain, to which language had thus brought them down, feelings and ideas to which he strives to restore, by adding detail to detail, their original and living individuality” (164).8 He argues that this effort is vain, however, for language cannot ultimately account for the life of the mind. Paley’s story explores this tension between the seemingly endless possibilities of “world-inventing words” and the limits of language.

19 According to Ricoeur, all narratives create a “fictive experience of time,” which he defines as “the temporal aspect of this virtual experience of being-in-the-world proposed by the text” (Time and Narrative II 100).9 Through the act of reading, the fictive world of the text and the actual world of readers collide, which ultimately alters the way readers perceive time, provoking what Ricoeur calls “refiguration.” In “Wants” and “Ruthy and Edie,” Paley’s use of tenses, rhythm, sonorities, and structure, combined with an underlying reflection on temporality, present us with a thought- provoking representation of the experience of time. She challenges our understanding of time by highlighting its fluid and fleeting nature and by exposing its inadequate and misleading expression through language.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Bruce. “Grace Paley: Ave Atque Vale.” The Sewanee Review 116.1 (2008): 130-31. Print.

Bergson, Henri. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. 1889. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007. Print.

---. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Trans. F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910. Print.

Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Print.

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Lohafer, Susan. Coming to Terms with the Short Story. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Print.

Paley, Grace. The Collected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Print.

---. Interview with Kathleen Hulley. “Interview with Grace Paley.” 1982. Conversations with Grace Paley. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Blaine Hall. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. 36-55. Print.

---. Interview with Joan Lidoff. “Clearing Her Throat: An Interview with Grace Paley.” Conversations with Grace Paley. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Blaine Hall. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. 72-94. Print.

---. Interview with Emmanuel Vernadakis and Jean-François Dreyfus. “Grace Paley―b. 1922.” Journal of the Short Story in English 41 (2003): 345-51. Print.

Pickering, Jean. “Time and the Short Story.” Re-Reading the Short Story. Ed. Clare Hanson. London: Macmillan Press, 1989. 45-54. Print.

Ricoeur, Paul. Temps et récit II: La configuration dans le récit de fiction. Paris: Seuil, 1984. Print.

---. Time and Narrative II. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Print.

Rohrberger, Mary. “Strange Loops: Time in the Short Story.” Visions critiques VI. Le temps/Time (1991): 71–81. Print.

Trussler, Michael. “Suspended Narratives: The Short Story and Temporality.” Studies in Short Fiction 33.4 (1996): 557-77. Print.

NOTES

1. All quotations from Paley’s short fiction are taken from The Collected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994. 2. “Narrated time” refers to the succession of events within the story whereas “narrative time” is the temporal structure of the narrative itself. 3. According to Genette’s classification, a homodiegetic narrator is also a character in the story he or she tells (252). 4. “La durée toute pure est la forme que prend la succession de nos états de conscience quand notre moi se laisse vivre, quand il s’abstient d’établir une séparation entre l’état présent et les états antérieurs” (Essai 74-75). 5. Even this simple chronology is challenged, however, as Paley uses both “this morning” and “that day” in the same sentence. This creates a subtle dissonance, simultaneously bringing near and distancing the same period of time. 6. “Les œuvres que nous allons étudier sont de telles fables sur le temps, dans la mesure où c’est l’expérience même du temps qui y est l’enjeu des transformations structurales” (Temps et récit II 151). 7. “[N]os perceptions, sensations, émotions et idées se présentent sous un double aspect : l’un net, précis, mais impersonnel ; l’autre confus, infiniment mobile, et inexprimable, parce que le langage ne saurait le saisir sans en fixer la mobilité, ni l’adapter à sa forme banale sans le faire tomber dans le domaine commun” (Essai 96). 8. “Nous jugeons du talent d’un romancier à la puissance avec laquelle il tire du domaine public, où le langage les avait ainsi fait descendre, des sentiments et des idées

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auxquels il essaie de rendre, par une multiplicité de détails qui se juxtaposent, leur primitive et vivante individualité” (Essai 123-124). 9. “Ce que nous appelons ici expérience fictive du temps est seulement l’aspect temporel d’une expérience virtuelle de l’être au monde proposée par le texte” (Temps et récit II 151).

ABSTRACTS

“Wants” et “Ruthy and Edie” sont deux « fables sur le temps » qui mettent en jeu la temporalité sur le plan thématique et structurel. Dans ces nouvelles où l’acte du souvenir est omniprésent, Grace Paley manipule les temps grammaticaux, le rythme et les sonorités pour étirer ou condenser la narration, créant au passage une représentation fluide de la temporalité. Elle donne à voir au lecteur une perception du temps caractérisée par un flux continu où passé, présent et futur s’entremêlent, rappelant la conception bergsonienne de la durée. Elle interroge également la relation entre temps et langage, ce dernier étant perçu comme un outil nécessaire mais fondamentalement trompeur.

AUTHORS

TANGUY BÉRENGER Tanguy Bérenger is a PhD candidate at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin, France. A graduate of the “École Normale Supérieure de Lyon,” his current research focuses on voices and polyphony in Philip Roth’s fiction.

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Grace Paley’s Poetics of Discontinuity

Anne-Laure Tissut

1 Suzanne Ferguson proposes an enlightening analysis of the discontinuous structure of the Faith stories in her article “Resisting the pull of plot: Paley’s antisequence in the ‘Faith’ stories.” While the stories could have been made into a novel, Paley subversively kept them separate, as a protest against “the ‘minority’ or ‘subaltern’ status of her female Jewish alter ego,” according to Ferguson. She further develops the link between story structure and Paley’s identity as a Jewish feminist writer: “Paley’s resistance to developing the themes in a novelistic way [...] has to do with a need to subvert the novel’s often-noted tendency to justify ‘things as they are’: the culture according to its ‘mainstream’ rules and formulas. Unable to mount a full-scale war on the social norms, Paley sends up little explosive anecdotes that, even in themselves, almost always refuse to be traditional ‘stories’ with causal plots.”

2 In this article, Grace Paley’s poetics of discontinuity will be examined with special reference to “Dreamer in a Dead Language,” a story which, with its bittersweet humor and tender irony, stages impulsive, disorganized attempts at coping with the prospect of death, thus manifesting a powerful urge to live. Such an urge to live, as well as the ways in which humans relate to the prospect of death is by no means specific to this story, so let me admit that my attention was first caught, then arrested by the title. “Dreamer in a Dead Language”: language, death and dreams—life in a nutshell—is Grace Paley’s raw material and aesthetic playground.

3 So inspiring are Grace Paley’s titles that they actually provide an apt description of the successive moves this article intends to follow, The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Later the Same Day. I will try to show how the various forms of disruption at work in her stories actually reflect her specific vision of human relationships, itself grounded in a personal experience and a conception of time.

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The Little Disturbances of Life and Texts: Aspects of Discontinuity

4 As in all of Paley’s stories, the formal characteristics of “Dreamer in a Dead Language” match and reflect the main topics at stake: loss, dissatisfaction and anguish. The overall structure itself is revealing, as the narrative begins in medias res and stops with an open ending. Left suspended in mid-air, the story seems to have been deliberately designed to puzzle the reader, playing on frustration through various forms of disjunction or evasion so that he/she progressively loses most of his/her certainties and gives himself/herself over to the surprises held by the story itself. Even the return of some characters from one story to another—of Faith Darwin, Paley’s fictional alter ego, in particular—creates a sense of fragmentation and continuity. Some parts are missing in the characters’ lives, of which only broken episodes are randomly given: “[...] plot, the absolute line between two points, which I’ve always despised,” declares the narrator in “A Conversation with my Father” (237).

5 Within each story, the structuring principle between scenes seems to be one of juxtaposition more than of logical relation. In “Dreamer in a Dead Language,” for instance, there is a gap between Faith’s conversation with one of her three alleged lovers, Philip, about a poem her father has written, and her later visit to the old people’s home where her parents live and where Philip eventually joins her. The reader is plunged into the new locus straight away. The narrative at this point seems to be told from Faith’s perspective, as she has been watching her father while drawing closer to him: “Faith’s father had been waiting at the gate for about half an hour” (276). Since Philip’s visit had been given as highly hypothetical in the preceding dialogue (“Now listen Philip, if you ever see my folks, if I ever bring you out there, don’t mention Anita Franklin […].” [276]), the abrupt change of scenery forces the reader to wonder what has led Faith to allow her lover to come. Such ellipses recur throughout Paley’s stories, giving them a realistic touch, as they reflect the fragmented nature of experience, with its omissions, misunderstandings, and distortions.

6 These ruptures in the narrative flow are rather destabilizing for the reader who can neither build on previous episodes nor anticipate what follows. They also create variations in rhythm that contribute to the overall effect of disjunction. As some episodes are deliberately skipped (one passes without transition from the retirement home to “the beach, the old Brighton Beach of [Faith’s] childhood” [290] at the end of the story, for example), the pace speeds up, while it slows down when others are described at length (Faith’s painful conversation with her tactless father, for instance, [283-89]). Similarly the broken rhythm of the characters’ trains of thought suggests disorder and instability: “What will I do, she thought. How can you talk like that to me Philip? Vengeance ….you really stink Phil. Me. Anita’s old friend. Are you dumb?” (276). Owing to a strategy of omission and condensation, the narrative sometimes comes close to a series of non sequiturs: In Faith’s kitchen, later that night, Philip read the poem aloud. His voice had a timbre which reminded her of evening, maybe nighttime. She had often thought of the way wide air lives and moves in a man’s chest. Then it’s strummed into shape by the short-stringed voice box to become a wonderful secondary sexual characteristic. Your voice reminds me of evening too! said Philip. (274)

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7 The elliptical rendering of the character’s stream of thoughts, immediately followed by the other’s reacting to a missing comment, creates a sense of acceleration, served by the format of the short story. Indeed as the narrative unfolds, accumulating wisecracks and incongruous metaphors or remarks, the reader is jostled about to such an extent that he/she is systematically taken aback, and may feel the logical grounds of the narrative collapse under his/her feet.

8 Owing to the abundance of repetitions, the dialogues reflect all-but desperate attempts to communicate, on the part of characters who seem to keep coughing and spluttering through the stories. Thus Mr. Darwin’s speech hardly makes any sense as he expresses his bold resolve to leave the retirement home: Pa, what are you leading up to? Leading. I’m leading up to the facts of the case. What you said is right. This: I don’t want to be here, I told you already. If I don’t want to be here, I have to go away. If I go away, I leave Mama. If I leave Mama, well, that’s terrible. But Faith, I can’t live here anymore. Impossible. It’s not my life. I don’t feel old. I never did. (286)

9 Logic is here replaced by tautology. Not “leading” anywhere, the father is brought back to where he started (“I cant’ live here anymore”/“I don’t want to be here”) while his distressed speech amounts to a frantic succession of modals (“I don’t want,” “I have to,” “I can’t”). This is reiterated in the lines that follow: If it were possible, the way I feel suddenly toward life, I would divorce your mother. Pa! … Faith said. Pa, now you’re teasing me. You, the last person to tease, a person who suffered so much from changes. No. I would divorce your mother. That would be honest. Oh, Pa, you wouldn’t really, though. I mean you wouldn’t. I wouldn’t leave her in the lurch, of course, but the main reason—I won’t, he said. Faith, you know why I won’t. You must’ve forgot. Because we were never married. (287)

10 Sometimes repetitions introduce a farcical element into the story, as with Mr. Heligman’s three phatic exclamations on the same page, “Oi, says Heligman”; “Oi says Heligman”; and “Ach, says Heligman,” a series that is brought to its rhythmic and comic conclusion with “Heligman, oi, Heligman, I say, what the hell are you talking about?” (284).

11 Far from developing as a continuous flow, the characters’ relations to each other and the world are hectic and their speech reflects their failure to control the course of their own lives as much as to draw meaning from experience. The beginning of “Dreamer in A Dead Language” is a case in point: The old are modest, said Philip. They tend not to outlive one another. That’s witty, said Faith, but the more you think about it, the less it means. Philip went to another table where he repeated it at once. Faith thought a certain amount of intransigence was nice in almost any lover. She said, Oh, well, O.K….” (273)

12 This incipit is loaded with meaning, yet remains in a budding state. The preposition “almost” leaves doubts as regards the stability of Faith’s relationship with Philip: could he be the exception among all her lovers? Or is Faith indulging in a broad-sweeping review of them? The reader’s attempts at making sense of the passage are discouraged by the second sentence which may well read as a metatextual comment: “That’s witty, said Faith, but the more you think about it, the less it means” (273). Despite the invitation to read on, rather than ponder over this puzzling beginning, the reader’s attention is still drawn to the mysteries harbored by language. Faith’s reaction to

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Philip’s statement (“Faith thought a certain amount of intransigence was nice in almost any lover. She said, Oh, well, O.K….”) comes as an illustration of the evasive nature of meaning in Paley’s stories. It feels as if only the end-point of Faith’s thought process were given—or does she simply give up the topic? The reader, confronted with sentences fraught with innuendoes and branching out in several directions, follows them to their inconclusive endings, and is left to wonder about the nature of the character’s emotions. Faith often cuts discussions short, as in her exchange with Philip about her father’s poem. Apparently annoyed by Philip’s maintaining that “What an old man writes poems about doesn’t really matter,” she prefers to call it a day: “Well, goodbye, said Faith. I’ve known you one day too long already” (274). In other cases she lets conversations dwindle away. In the absence of inverted commas, dialogues may also melt into the narrative, to the point that it becomes difficult to tell speech from thought or internal monologue, or even to determine the origins of enunciation.

13 Indeed Paley is fascinated by meaning processes, as Emily Miller Budick suggests: “Like other authors in the romance tradition, Paley produces a skepticist text. She focuses the reader’s attention not on what words mean (as if language were a symbolic code, which the reader could crack) but on how they mean, which is to say when and why they mean” (219). Such take on words does not indicate despair on the author’s part but rather an intense interest in the human urge to communicate, for all the faults and limitations of spoken language. It also has to do with the characters’ thirst for knowing themselves and the world. Much as happens in “Friends,” according to Alan Wilde, “what the story registers is precisely the difficulty of knowing the world, along with the still more urgent need to know it” (181). Despite anticipated difficulties and disillusionments, Paley still proves willing to “engag[e] the world in the dynamics of an ongoing dialogue” (Wilde 3), though she renounces absolute mastery so as to invite otherness in. Her characters fail to fully control the effects of their words, hence constant discrepancies and surprise effects. Meaning gets blurred so that the scenes are sometimes depicted in an almost impressionistic way in the absence of any apparent logic.

14 There are hardly any linking words between the sentences; most of the time, the depicted action is in progress, as shown through the use of such inchoative verbs as “to start” or “to begin,” as if the story resisted conclusiveness and endings. Meanwhile the conjunction “but” recurs, as a great favorite, reflecting antagonism, reservations and limits: the complexities and “disturbances of man” indeed. The relative absence of a connective tissue that might have provided the story with a linear pattern corroborates the effect of the previously mentioned repetitions, creating an overall impression of stasis or at least of indirection. Many characters remain stuck in repetition owing to their stubbornness, as underlined by Mrs. Hegel-Shtein’s bitter rejoinder: “If that’s what I mean, that’s what I mean” (282) after her statement, “Sickness comes from trouble” has been corrected by Faith into: “What you mean is […] life has made you sick” (282). The pleonastic turn of the final rejoinder debunks any alleged transparency in dialogue and speech. While Faith feels obliged to interpret the words addressed to her, Mrs. Hegel-Shtein, a caricature of the sententious Jewish old lady, prefers to stand her ground.

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Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: The Unpredictable

15 Communication seems problematic and limited between the characters, and most of the time conversation is not even structured as proper dialogue. The text, however, seems to achieve with its readers the communication that fails between the characters. Miller Budick explains: “Throughout her fiction Paley thematizes how and why and in what ways human conversations do not come into being. In the process she institutes the art of conversation that her characters fail to employ. She creates the relationships that they cannot establish” (221). Grace Paley’s fictional creatures often seem defensive, yet drawn towards others, bringing the latter’s concerns down to their own, even unconsciously so, as though everybody were engrossed in their own preoccupations. Maybe because of this self-centered trend, they dread identification with others. Thus Faith in “Dreamer in a Dead language” seems to fear any likeness between herself and her father: “In ‘Dreamer in a Dead language,’ Paley […] identifies an element in the problematics of parent-child communication that remains inchoate in her earlier stories: the daughter’s unwillingness to discover her own words and thoughts in her father’s discourse” (Budick 229).

16 The characters’ self-protective defiance shows in their systematically evading embarrassing issues, as illustrated by the following dialogue between Faith and Philip: How about I go with you tomorrow. Damn it, I don’t sleep. I’ll be up all night. I can’t stop cooking. My head. It’s like a percolator. Pop! pop! Maybe it’s my age, prime of life, you know. Didn’t I hear that the father of your children, if you don’t mind my mentioning it, is doing middleman dance around your papa? How about a nice cup of Sleepytime tea? Come on Faith, I asked you something. (275)

17 While Philip’s nervousness is conveyed through the hectic rhythm of his speech, Faith tries to cut him short by symbolically putting him to sleep with herbal tea. Throughout the story, selfish concerns pop up unexpectedly, as the characters keep trying to flee from the situations in which they find themselves or feel that they may get caught up in. Incongruous questions or exclamations are blurted out repeatedly, as though the speaker could no longer hold his fear or unease in check. Thus the insistent question of Faith’s little boy, Richard (“Is this a hospital?” [277-278]), as he comes to his grandfather’s retirement home for the first time; a question which is reiterated in exasperation (“Well, is this a hospital?” [278]), expresses his shock at finding himself confronted with old age and death and his attempt to euphemize the nature of the place. Faith’s gasping plea, let out breathlessly as if she were suffocating, conveys a similar panic: “I want to get the boys. I want to get out of here. I want to get away now” (288). As she repeats the phrase with a slight variation (“I want to get the boys. I want to go now. I want to get out of here” [289]) some kind of magical power seems to be attributed to language. The characters’ denial of, or escape from harsh realities may sometimes be suggested a contrario, through Mrs. Hegel-Shtein’s invitation for the boys to literally look at old age “in the face”: “Mrs. Hegel-Shtein smiled and invited them. Look it in the face: old age! Here it comes, ready or not. The boys looked, then moved close together, their elbows touching” (283).

18 Most of the time, however, Paley’s stories play on euphemisms and allusions. As the characters fail to express their emotions straightforwardly, they tend to convey them

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indirectly, working on a language screen, behind which they hide their pain or onto which they project their naive longings and delusions. Has Faith’s father not written dozens of poems so as to affirm and preserve his vitality? My lungs are full of water. I cannot breathe. Still I long to go sailing in spring among realities. There is a young girl who waits in a special time and place to love me, to be my friend and lie beside me. (274)

19 His explanation of the “sixth floor” of the retirement home, where the very old and the very sick are relegated, proceeds from the same grounds: “He explained that incurable did not mean near death necessarily, it meant, in most cases, just too far from living” (280). The semantic field of closeness and distance runs throughout the story, mapping the text as a zone of high sensitivity, in which the most minute move bears massive and durable effects. After her father tells her of his enthusiasm for her ex-husband Ricardo, Faith physically expresses what she cannot say, shrinking or recoiling with pain combined with a sense of injustice: “He’s not so young, said Faith. She moved away from her father—but not more than half an inch” (285). The improbable addendum conveys much kindness on the narrator’s part towards characters whose vulnerability seems proportionate to their perceptiveness. Attitudes of evasion are exposed, not condemned, and with mild humor and compassion despite the bitterness that crops up at times.

20 Denial of life’s harsher realities is also operated through irony. In “Dreamer in a Dead Language,” Faith’s father shows the ironical turn of mind that is characteristic of Paley’s narrators throughout the stories. “What a beautiful sight,” he exclaims, affecting sarcasm and indifference as he faces a “wall of wheelchairs that rested in the autumn sun [and] furious arguers [...] leaning—every one of them—on aluminium walkers” (278). Sometimes, however, one cannot but wonder whether he has come to believe in his own selfish circumlocutions. For instance, he answers Faith’s worried inquiry: Pa, I’ve got to get this straight. You are planning to leave Mama. No, no, no. I plan to go away from here. If she comes, good, although life will be different. If she doesn’t, then it must be goodbye. (287)

21 Deliberately or not, the characters avoid giving justifications or even explanation. As one reads Paley’s stories, “straight” and open exchange become increasingly improbable. The only way of speaking is via detours, or silence, with the body’s taking up the expressive task, either because the characters are overcome by emotion, or because they are unable or unwilling to face their responsibilities. Miller Budick sees responsibility as a crucial issue in Paley’s “art of conversation,” making her an heiress to the Romance tradition: “For Paley, as for Hawthorne, conversation has to do with acknowledgement. It involves speaking words to other people, assuming responsibility for those words once spoken, and assuming the responsibility of listening” (220). Paley’s male characters in particular are often depicted as totally irresponsible. Both angry and amused, Faith derides the attitude of her three lovers: Oh sure, they pay me all right. How’d you guess? They pay me with a couple of hours of their valuable time. They tell me their troubles and why they’re divorced and separated, and they let me make dinner once in a while. They play ball with the boys in Central Park on Sundays. Oh sure, Pa, I’m paid up to here. (288)

22 As weak or cowardly as they may seem, double-talk and pretence also are creative in their own way. Do not lying or “telling slant” require as much talent as telling things

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straight? Is it not a strategy to avoid inflicting pain on oneself and others, to mitigate alienation or despair? Paley’s ironic characters are escapists, endowed with powerful imaginations.

23 While liars or pretenders often pursue their own interests, Paley’s fictional creatures hardly ever seem to defend theirs, or not efficiently, and a form of truth—a “floating truth”1—does seep through their cagey or deluded attitudes. Answers always seem to fall beside the point, beneath or above, but never with a view to embellish or exculpate. As they ironically elude other people’s inquiries or comments, the characters in fact unwittingly acknowledge their own sense of guilt and low self-esteem. Much as Faith’s father may be earnestly fighting for his life, all characters develop strategies of survival rather than offensives to gain power. An intense, though clairvoyant love for people can be felt in Paley’s short fiction—love even for people’s foibles and failures. With fondness rather than resignation, Grace Paley evinces a no-nonsense attitude to the world, taking it as it comes, and embracing as much of it as she can. Faith, her fictional alter ego, makes fun of idealists as she brings her father back to “the real and ordinary world” with which she fills his “innocent ear” (287). This “real and ordinary world” is indeed what Grace Paley is interested in, as she herself stated “I write about the lives of women and men of our time” (Paley, Interview Hulley 24). Such interest must have earned her work its “realistic” label, despite her original style, characterization and narrative strategies. The reader can no more anticipate them than she can anticipate his/her existence to come. As Alan Wilde suggests, the world “continues to be for Paley ‘the interesting world,’ [“Faith in a Tree”] as open and unpredictable as the digressive techniques she characteristically uses to express it” (184). Paley’s work may thus be called realistic from a phenomenological viewpoint, or an insider’s viewpoint, as indeed the text reflects a speaker-listener’s experience, with its lacks and blurred or mute points. No omniscient narrator intervenes to organize the reader’s perception into a coherently structured whole. Yet her characters, however disconcerting they may seem at first sight, are in fact strangely resembling versions of ourselves.

24 By staging surprise throughout her stories—“enormous changes at the last minute”— the author aims in fact at offering a true-to-life picture of a world in which things do not last and where the only certitude is change. Ferguson sees in the specific, fragmented structure of the Faith stories, which Paley chose not to bring together into a novel, the reflection of a dominant culture “crumbling from its own inconsistencies and inattention.” While Paley strives to preserve a measure of hope, since “everyone real or invented deserves the open destiny of life” (“A Conversation with my Father” 237), her characters’ puzzling behaviors, as well as the devices through which they are represented, stem from an acute awareness of the ephemeral nature of life and from the anxieties generated by human finitude. Hence the sense of loneliness that may arise from the stories despite all-but constant interactions between characters. Such sense of loneliness is enhanced by the disruptions in the dialogues as well as by the occasional resort to metafiction: taking the narrative itself as their object, metafictional narrators leave the characters to their isolation as textual creatures, keeping them partly remote from the readers. Yet the readers, who live in language, who are language, are likely to feel both the potentials and limits of language, as the characters struggle to make themselves understood and find support. The pervasive tension and unease perceptible in the stories do not spring from estrangement so much as from the reader’s sense of kinship with all too human characters. Anguish and pain can be felt in the blanks and

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silences of the narratives. Paley’s characters have all been hurt, and their strategies of evasion are a tentative response to deeper anxieties and existential fears.

Later the Same Day: Postponing Death

25 In most cases, the characters’ lack of purposefulness or resolution owe little to sheer frivolity or off-handedness. Rather, their wavering courses reflect their being caught in an absurd plight, and their awareness of human frailty in the face of an indifferent cosmos. The unpredictable quality of life conveyed by Paley’s stories is turned into an opportunity for moral developments, as argued by Alan Wilde: she “invites us […] to perceive the moral, as well as the epistemological, perplexities of inhabiting and coming to terms with a world that is itself ontologically contingent and problematic” (4). Stranded in a finite world, the characters seek continuity from the heart of separateness and isolation, and they prefer emotions, be they painful to vacuity. Tears offer their soothing veil to Faith at the end of “Dreamer in a Dead Language,” as she falls prey to exasperation and outrage: She wanted to scream, Help! Had she been born ten, fifteen years later, she might have done so, screamed and screamed. Instead, tears made their usual protective lenses for the safe observation of misery. (291)

26 In the absence of transcendence there is some comfort to be found in such intense emotions, for they at least allow one to feel alive. Even as they strive to give sense to their lives, the characters are aware of the ultimate futility of their efforts. She had begun her worried preparations for death. [...] She said, Go to sleep for godsakes, you damn fool, you and your Communist ideas. We saw them already, Papa and me, in 1905. We guessed it all. At the door of the kitchen she said, You never finish your lunch. You run around senselessly. What will become of you? Then she died. (“Mother” 335)

27 Their haphazard ways and talk may well give the reader an impression of vain agitation, of desperate, pointless attempts to resist the passing of time: does Faith not unconsciously aspire to rehearse her own death, as she asks her sons to bury her under the sand—yet leave her enough space to move about a little (“so I can give you a good whack every now and then when you’re too fresh” [291])? According to Miller Budick, Faith here “plays out her own worst fears: that the parents’ life forces can be preserved only at the expense of the child’s, that their radicalism and idealism, like their very survival, diminish her own” (230). Is Faith not—even unconsciously—hoping to make death familiar so as to mitigate the anguish she and her children have just experienced in the old people’s home?

28 Writing and reading, and art in general, offer the possibility to experience the impossible—the experience of death, for one thing—through representation and imagination. Grace Paley’s strategies of resisting the inexorable passing of time include settling down in the ephemeral—making good use of time, kneading the immaterial structures it offers into rhythmic patterns in prose, or metric structures and beats in poems. Paley’s sensitivity to the music of language is apparent in the carefully chosen sounds and patterns of speech and narrative, as well-illustrated by the following

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paragraph, evoking both materially and thematically Faith’s ear for the sensuality of male voices: In Faith’s kitchen, later that night, Philip read the poem aloud. His voice had a timbre which reminded her of evening, maybe nighttime. She had often thought of the way wide air lives and moves in a man’s chest. Then it’s strummed into shape by the short-stringed voice box to become a wonderful secondary sexual characteristic. (274)

29 The steady beat and fluid continuity of the sentences aptly convey the motions giving birth to voice while repeated consonants (“r,” “m,” “t,” “w,” “s”) bring into the text the referred-to sensuality. While Paley’s characters try to keep everything short-lived or transitory, changing lovers or places, in a desperate attempt to avoid ending, as if repeated endings defused the agony of finitude, their creator develops a poetics of lightness, skimming the surface of things so as to feel and affect without leaving indelible marks, so as to preserve the possibility to disengage oneself without renouncing all responsibilities. Paley’s are fallible, vulnerable characters, sketched with enough kindness to arouse compassion and to call for identification.

30 The overall vision coming out of the stories is not of despair but rather of hopeful acceptance and endurance—as the heroine’s first name, “Faith,” suggests. Wilde comes to similar conclusions as he states that “what is at issue is not an effort to ignore or mitigate the fact of death but the attempt to accept it and, through that acceptance, to make possible the raggedly continuing activities of life” (183). The narrators’ discontinuous ways involve the reader in the creation of meaning, as he/she has to fill in the blanks to compose the characters’ portraits, within each story and from one story to another: “Well you just have to let the story lie around till some agreement can be reached between you and the stubborn hero” (“A Conversation with my Father” 239). Yet such collaboration keeps being challenged by suspension, surprise and detours: “the little disturbances” of reading progressively shape the reading practice into an image of living—a matter of perseverance and adaptation, which is difficult but rewarding. The readers’ efforts at making sense of the inchoate and the disjointed are all that matters, as they correspond to one of the main aspirations in life, contributing to the definition of what being human means: ever resisting the main stream of habits and norms as well as the repeated assaults of accident, so as to follow the flux of one’s and each others’ emotions. Even as he/she may be under the impression of being left in the margins or outskirts of the stories, like an outside observer looking on in silent emotion, the reader feels involved in the shared grief of being fallible and mortal. Whether it is “songs or poems” (277), little matters, as long as one goes on sending out to the wide world one’s message-in-a-bottle. From Milton’s poetry, alluded to at the beginning of “Dreamer” (276), to the “Poems from the Golden Age” (277) written in the retirement home and finally to “Dreamer in a Dead Language” (275), the gloss of tradition and antiquity is gone, but the beat remains, and the rhymes—the dynamic principles that keep propelling language forever ahead, the patterns that will stay with us, stamped in our memories but that will admit reshaping and amending over time.

31 “The real question is how are we to live our lives?,” Paley declares in her dedication to the Collected Stories. She leaves the question open, thus making her reading public aware how crucial it is. As they promote endurance and self-derision, her stories read as incentives to live intensely and imaginatively. Repetition, in her stories as well in her poetry, is turned into the vital impulse to live on. The poem “This Life” reformulates the author’s indomitable vitality:

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my friend was not interested he said you're always inventing stuff what I want to know how could he throw his life away how do these guys do it just like that and here I am fighting this ferocious insane vindictive virus day and night day and night and for what? for only one thing this life this life (Begin Again 162)

32 The eagerness perceptible at the end of “This Life” shifts to a more peaceful expression of acknowledgement or acceptance of the life of others in Paley’s poem “Here,” whose title is evocative of the author’s anchoring in the present, and of her desire to enjoy every single minute, whatever the conditions, in old age as much as in youth: Here I am in the garden laughing an old woman with heavy breasts and a nicely mapped face how did this happen well that's who I wanted to be (Begin Again 177)

33 The change indicated in the poem through the question—now devoid of anxiety—“how did this happen” is “the biggest surprise” of old age evoked in “Dreamer in a Dead Language” (286). In “Here,” it is presented as a willed-for surprise, expected and desired, both a part and a sign of life. Paley’s carefully wrought language deceptively conjures ordinary speech forms to draw a sophisticated literary textual object out of them, and invites the reader to embrace, not resist the course of time. Paley exploits the variegated resources and beauties of time, and of language, developing in time, as the writer’s privileged material. She offers “songs or poems” (277) on time and of time —the very condition of hope, pain and joy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ferguson, Suzanne. “Resisting the Pull of Plot: Paley’s Antisequence in the ‘Faith’ Stories.” Journal of the Short Story in English 32 (1999). Web. 15 August 2015.

Miller Budick, Emily. Engendering Romance. New Haven and London: Yale U. Press, 1994. Print.

Paley Grace. Begin Again. Collected Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Print.

---. The Collected Stories. London: Virago Press, 1988. Print.

---. Interview with Kathleen Hulley. “Interview with Grace Paley.” Grace Paley. Ed. Kathleen Hulley. Spec. issue of Delta 14 (1982): 19-40. Print.

Wilde Allan: Middle Grounds: Studies in Contemporary American Fiction. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. Print.

NOTES

1. See the short story entitled “The Floating Truth.”

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ABSTRACTS

Cet article analyse les formes de discontinuité, de surprise et d’instabilité dans les nouvelles de Grace Paley, en portant un intérêt tout particulier à “Dreamer in a Dead Language”, afin de mettre au jour la vision spécifique du langage, de la vie et de la mort que reflètent ces formes discontinues. L’instabilité et la pratique du détour délibérées semblent offrir le moyen de continuer à s’adresser aux autres malgré les échecs de la communication. Plus que tout, elles ouvrent la voie d’une réconciliation avec la perspective de la mort tout en exprimant avec humour et tendresse un puissant désir de vivre – aussi faillible que soit l’être humain qui se sait voué à la désillusion mais continue de « rêver » dans une langue qui, parce qu’elle est d’abord « morte » a pu être renouvelée.

AUTHORS

ANNE-LAURE TISSUT Anne-Laure Tissut is Professor of American Literature at Rouen University, France. Her research focuses on contemporary American literature, on aesthetics, exchanges between forms and media as well as on translation. She also translates American and English fiction and poetry into French (Blake Butler, Percival Everett, Nick Flynn, Laird Hunt, Adam Thirlwell, Steve Tomasula) and takes part in collaborative translations from French into American English. She is co-founder of the Percival Everett Society.

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Knowing and Inventing New York: The Neighborhood in Grace Paley’s Fiction

Nathalie Cochoy

That woman lives across the street. She’s my knowledge and my invention. I’m sorry for her. I’m not going to leave her there in that house crying. (Actually neither would Life, which unlike me has no pity). Grace Paley (“A Conversation with My Father,” Changes 167)

1 In “A Conversation with My Father,” Grace Paley exposes the principles of her art in which imitation and invention, realism and fantasy are closely intertwined. Quite significantly, in her foreword to the collection Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, she asserts that “[e]veryone in this book is imagined into life except the father” (my emphasis). Far from merely emphasizing the authenticity of the father figure in the collection,1 she thus indirectly claims and recalls that fiction is not so much an imitation of life as a performative means of giving life. Indeed, in Paley’s short stories, the metatextual comments on the art of writing do not alienate fiction from reality but on the contrary contribute to a revelation of the way in which words relate to the world—or even inhabit the world.

2 Although the backdrop of Paley’s fiction is undoubtedly New York, the city as a whole remains invisible in her stories. For Paley’s New York is actually the neighborhood, barely recognizable as the Bronx, Greenwich Village, Port Authority or Coney Island. As a microcosm, the neighborhood is not so much a place as a common place, ceaselessly recreated by a community of mothers and children who meet, move and mingle and above all “converse” with one another in various intermediary places (stoops or staircases, parks or piers, subways or sidewalks…). As a writer, as a mother, as a citizen, Paley thus intimates that her “knowledge” and her “invention” of her neighbors, in

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their daily existence (Changes 166), 2 are means of approaching the truth about urban life and of revealing the value of the trite and the transient in the community.

3 In Paley’s short stories, a sense of place paradoxically emerges from an interplay of voices “talking senselessly”—“voices from who knows where” (Changes 162, my emphasis). Indeed, Paley’s narrators recreate the experience of city life by elaborating on a network of echoes, embedded stories, recurrent anecdotes and vibrant ellipses. In this respect, they seem to redefine the art of storytelling. In his well-known essay, “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin bemoans the disappearance of the art of storytelling as a means of conveying practical knowledge, common sense and morality. He claims that in the aftermath of the atrocities of World War I, the novel lost its capacity to transmit practical knowledge to the community—“as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences” (83). According to Benjamin, only the narrator has the necessary authority for an intuitive “grasping” of the ungraspable meaning of life and for the transmission of this experience. Commenting on Benjamin’s essay, Giorgio Agamben remarks that this impoverishment of experience actually characterizes everyday life in our contemporary societies: Today, however, we know that the destruction of experience no longer necessitates a catastrophe, and that humdrum daily life in any city will suffice. For modern man’s average day contains virtually nothing that can be translated into experience. Neither reading the newspaper, with its abundance of news that is irretrievably remote from his life, nor sitting for minutes on end at the wheel of his car in a traffic jam. Neither the journey through the nether world of the subway, nor the demonstration that suddenly blocks the street [...] nor those eternal moments of dumb promiscuity among strangers in lifts and buses. Modern man makes his way home in the evening wearied by a jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will have become experience. (13)

4 In Paley’s stories, the narrators fail to translate the departure of their husbands, the vagrancy of their children, the disappearance of their relatives or friends into some morally enlightening experience for the community. Thus, conceding that her vocabulary is “absolutely useless for an active moral life” (Changes 85), Faith Darwin, Paley’s fictional alter ego, avoids passing judgment on her neighbors’ existences. However, the writer’s renunciation of the “authority” of the narrative voice does not mean she relinquishes all hope of converting rituals, misfortunes and losses into an experience that may serve the community at large. On the contrary, when interlacing various stories or memories in her narratives, Paley reveals her “craftsman’s relationship” to her material—“[o]ne can […] ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman’s relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience […] in a solid, useful and unique way” (Benjamin 107). Indeed, Paley’s interrelated stories succeed in translating the everyday lives of her characters into the “tongue of [her] undying carnal love” (Changes 77).

5 We will thus see how the author invents a new way of “mapping” her neighborhood, based not so much on lines, names or landmarks as on customs, constraints or blanks. We will then evoke the paradoxical role that daily events play in the reinvention of the past. Finally, we will consider the manner in which the author illuminates the “unseen in the seen”—the “invisible” inhabitants of the neighborhood as well as the poetic value of the prosaic. Indeed, as Faith asserts when she catches a “sniff of the man-wide world”

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in the park (Changes 77), the neighborhood still allows one to “accidentally take sweetness into one’s lungs” (Changes 79).

Mapping Daily Life

6 According to the historian and anthropologist Christian Jacob, a map is both a “rational construction,” ruled by the scientific demands of geometry, symmetry and knowledge, and “a privileged space of projection for the viewer’s desires, aspirations and affective and cultural memories” (2). In her stories, Grace Paley sketches out her own map of New York: though she refers to landmarks of the city—Central Park, where mothers and children “row on [the] lousy lake” (Changes 60), the Theater District, where Vlashkin, an actor of the Yiddish theater, becomes “the Valentino of Second Avenue” (Disturbances 10), Coney Island, where Faith visits her parents at the Children of Judea residence for the elderly, or the Bronx, Brooklyn, Broadway and Brighton Beach—these sites and toponyms remain abstract, undefined entities. On the contrary, the park, the library, the Methodist church, and above all, the street—with its benches, its grocers’, its butchers’, its delicatessen shops (where sandwiches strangely bear the customers’ names)3 and its chorus of voices concur to delineate a new map of the neighborhood. Indeed, Paley relies on daily rituals in order to reveal the urban setting of her stories and record its ethnic, racial or social alterations. Everyday life becomes a means of shaping an uncertain world, of creating familiar forms that allow men and women to transcend the misery of their condition (Bégout 313). For everyday life is not ordinary— it contains the lineaments of the extraordinary.

7 In “Faith in the Tree,” the narrator renounces two forms of representation of the city: a distant, omniscient, panoramic view and a chaotic, fragmentary, labyrinthine perception. “Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it”—to recall a famous poem by Walt Whitman (“Song of Myself” 32)—Faith is sitting on the branch of a sycamore from which she has a wide yet limited view of the park while she is able to catch glimpses of the people around and snatches of their conversation. Faith resorts to irony when she evokes God’s all encompassing vision of the Park, and of New York: He sees South into Brooklyn how Prospect Park lies in its sand-rooted trees among Japanese gardens and police, and beyond us north to dangerous Central Park. Far north, the deer-eyed eland and kudu survive, grazing the open pits of the Bronx zoo. (Changes 78)

8 This panoptic position merely leads to the discovery of a world of constraints and limitations—the imprisonment of trees, citizens and animals. On the contrary, Faith’s more down-to-earth perception casts light on a community of individuals craving for life and liberation. If the pool is dry, the sonorous phrase evoking it (“the thick snout of the fountain spout” [Changes 78]) heralds an alternative way of describing Washington Square, far from Henry James’s aesthetic descriptions of “lilies floating.” Unnamed in the story, Washington Square appears as an expanse of land where rumors circulate as naturally as children run and grow—“[a]mong the trees, in the arms of statues, toes in the grass” (Changes 77). The park is bustling with life and bristling with promises of renewal. But the interwoven stories that make up the community do not isolate its members from the rest of the world. Indeed, Paley conveniently resorts to a metaphor4 in order to associate Faith’s fond memories of her strolls with her son Richard on the riverside or across bridges with the coming and going of mothers in the park. If she

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used to observe barges, tugboats, merchant ships or the United States on the Hudson River, she also sees mothers evolving like boats in and out of the area: I can easily see Mrs Junius Finn, my up-the-block neighbor and evening stoop companion, a broad barge, like a lady, moving slow—a couple of redheaded cabooses dragged by clothesline at her stern; on her fat upper deck, Wiltwyck, a pale three-year-old roaring captain with smoky eyes, shoves his wet thumb into the wind. “Hurry! Hurry!” he howls. Mrs Finn goes puff puffing toward the opinionated playground, that sandy harbor. Along the same channel, but near enough now to spatter with spite, tilting delicately like a boy’s sailboat, Lynn Ballard floats past my unconcern to drop light anchor, a large mauve handbag, over the green bench slats. (Changes 78-79)

9 Beyond the narrator’s tender irony, recalling how the often abandoned mothers have no choice but to travel (or dream of traveling) in the park while fathers, with their “sly out-of-town-husband-in-New-York look” (Later 86) remain abroad, Paley undermines the essential function of daily rituals in the creation of an American citizen’s consciousness. Indeed, when she took her son for strolls on the riverside, Faith wanted him to “see the interesting world” (Changes 83). However, at the end of the story, when he copies an anti-Vietnam War slogan in the park, it is her son that makes her “[think] more and more and every day about the world” (Changes 100). The United States is not merely a cruise ship sailing away from the harbor—it is an everyday life concern of the community.

10 The park could be considered as a synecdoche for the neighborhood. In an interview, Paley resorts to the metaphor of a train in order to evoke her fiction: What I am against is thinking about plot. And it is not the way I write. I just sort of build up a train, and all of a sudden, I look at it, and it’s a track. I didn’t look for the track to put the train on. And plot does not move the story along. People pull you to the next event. Life pulls you. (Interview Hulley 33-34)

11 If stories can evolve in many unexpected directions, the recurrence of metaphorical or literal references to trains, boats or cars constantly reminds us of the foreign origins of the inhabitants of the neighborhood. However, some hints at Irish accents or culture (Mrs Raftery), African-American idioms or Puerto-Rican and Chinese customs also underline the multiethnic, multiracial nature of the city. Once again, the author relies on daily rituals in order to suggest the religious or racial identities of the inhabitants. Indeed, if Mrs Vlashkin’s Yiddish is sometimes “perfect, each word cut like a special jewel” (Disturbances 15), or if “the butcher pull[s] down black window shades to keep the colored lights [of a decorated Christmas tree] from shining on his chickens” (Disturbances 60), very little is said about the families’ experience of displacement, immigration or exile. Stories of starvation and humiliation are poignantly embedded in other stories, as if painful memories needed to be controlled by the reassuring rituals of everyday life so as not to become devastating—for it is “a terrible thing to grow up in the shadow of another person’s sorrow” (Changes 171). In “The Immigrant Story,” Jack resorts to some terse, minimal vocabulary to evoke his father’s meeting with his mother at the harbor and his sense of horror as he realizes that his children have died of starvation in the home country: “[m]y father met my mother at the boat. He looked at her face, her hands. There was no baby in her arms, no children dragging at her skirt” (Changes 175). Faith also remains very discreet about her own origins, merely recalling the ironic family anecdote according to which her grandfather, “scoring the salty sea,” skated for miles on the Baltic Sea with a frozen herring in his pocket

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(Changes 30-31). Mentioned twice in the stories, this trivial, reported story seems essential to Faith’s self-definition.

12 In Paley’s fiction, memories vibrate and reverberate in daily scenes or conversations. In the neighborhood, windows are open and partitions are porous. Secrets inevitably become rumors—when mothers “air” the children in the park (Changes 196), when a couple watches another through a hole in the back of the kitchen closet (Changes 4), when a mother expects the visit of her son and “s[ings] out loud in a girlish brogue that only came to tongue for grand occasions” (Disturbances 87). Staircases, windows, streets are vibrant with conversations, even though they may lead to nothing but misunderstanding (“What are you talking about?” [Changes 197]) or utter disbelief (“Blah blah […]. Blah to you” [Changes 85]). Paley often insists on her listening to others before writing: “[w]hatever I say comes from what I hear. It comes from the speech of my city. But that has to go through my American Jewish ear” (Interview Hulley 19). In her stories rumors contribute to the construction of identities and relationships: Richard “is known far and wide for his nosy ear” (Later 206, my emphasis), Faith and her mother unravel wool while weaving stories “[heard] from the neighborhood” (Changes 39), elderly people (Later 43) or “bossy youth[s] in need of repair” (Disturbances 149) sit and talk on stoops, addressing friends or kids as spectators. In Paley’s stories, “everyone knows” (Later 42) about the affairs, accidents, illnesses, departures or deaths of others. The narratives themselves become conversations with the reader: “This is common knowledge and well known or I’d never say it” (Changes 17). Replete with marks of spoken language, the narrative discourse is even brought at times to mere stammering or sound: “So many boys were out bumming, on the tramp, tramp, tramp” (Disturbances 152); “I didn’t like to worry worry worry him.” (Changes 18). Voices and noises resonate from one window to another, from one sentence to another: There is a certain place where dumb-waiters boom, doors slam, dishes crash; every window is a mother’s mouth bidding the street to shut up, go skate somewhere else, come home. My voice is the loudest. In that place the whole street groans: Be quiet! Be quiet! But steals from the happy chorus of my inside self not a tittle or a jot. (Disturbances 55)

13 As traces of endurance and existence, the rituals of everyday life allow the characters to overcome the hardships and tragic turns of fate. When they meet again in front of the library, the ex-husband and the ex-wife of “Wants” merely wonder if what caused their divorce was not the fact that they “never invited the Bertrams to dinner” (Changes 4). For in the neighborhood, daily customs and conversations are means of relieving the pains of the past.

Retracing One’s Steps

14 Paley’s characters know about the importance of the past in the shaping of everyday life: “[i]n this simple way the lifelong past is invented, which, as we know, thickens the present and gives all kinds of advice to the future” (Later 121). However, since nostalgia is constantly questioned in an ever renewed city, the present also becomes necessary to the re-“invention” of the past.

15 Paley’s characters live in the present, “which is happening now” (Changes 25). And when they inadvertently revisit the past, their reminiscences turn into unexpected encounters with otherness. In “The Long-Distance Runner,” Faith takes the

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“Independent subway” (my emphasis) and leaves her children on their own to go for a run in the neighborhood she used to live in as a child, Brighton Beach—“This was my territory,” she asserts in “Dreamer in a Dead Language” (Later 135). Faith’s running reveals her intuition that all static representations of beautiful scenery in an ever- decaying city are bound to be deceptive. She indeed chooses to harmonize the pace of her steps with the constant metamorphosis of her surroundings: I wanted to stop and admire the long beach. I wanted to stop in order to think admiringly about New York. There aren’t so many rotting cities so tan and sandy and speckled with citizens at their salty edges. But I had already spent a lot of life lying down or standing and staring. I had decided to run. (Changes 181)

16 Faith soon discovers that her former neighborhood is now inhabited by African- Americans. After befriending a group of young people, she suddenly feels threatened by them and seeks refuge in her former apartment, now occupied by Mrs Luddy and her children. At first welcomed as a stranger in her former home, Faith becomes a member of the family for three weeks. Entering the past (“It’s me! […] Mama! Mama! Let me in!” [Changes 187]) is a means of becoming acquainted with the present. Faith nevertheless discovers how sad, sordid and devastated her former neighborhood has become: The tenement in which Jack my old and present friend had come to gloomy manhood had been destroyed, first by fire, then by demolition (which is a swinging ball of steel that cracks bedrooms and kitchens). Because of this work, we could see several blocks wide and a block and a half long. Crazy Eddy’s house still stood, famous 1510 gutted, with black window frames, no glass, open laths. The stubbornness of the supporting beams! Some persons or families still lived on the lowest floors. In the lots between, a couple of old sofas lay on their fat faces, their springs sticking up into the air. Just as in wartime a half-dozen ailanthus trees had already found their first quarter inch of earth and begun a living attack on the dead yards. At night, I knew animals roamed the place, squalling and howling, furious New York dogs and street cats and mighty rats. You would think you were in Bear Mountain Park, the terror of venturing forth. (Changes 190)

17 Memories frame and shape a scene that is so ruined, scarred and empty that it seems indescribable. They soon give way to imagination and metaphors of war or wilderness. The boundaries between the inside and the outside seem to vanish as pieces of furniture are exposed in vacant lots. Anthropomorphic details (sofas lying “on their fat faces”) highlight the pathos of the scene. However, this outer scene of desolation adumbrates the absence of emotion Faith discovers when, summoned by Mrs Luddy to resume her role and responsibilities as a mother, she returns to her own apartment. If she hid under the children’s bed at Mrs Luddy’s, Faith also finds her son vacuum cleaning “under his bed” upon coming back home. He violently shakes her out of her need for protection: “What are you talking about? said Richard. Cut the baby talk” (Changes 198). Indeed, when visiting her parents’ former flat, Faith has not merely gone on a pilgrimage and regressed to childhood, she has also learnt that meeting otherness, in the present, is a means of coming to terms with the erasure of the past and the uncertainty of the future.

18 In “The Long-Distance Runner,” memory amounts to a re-creation of past events: “I felt a strong obligation as though remembering was in charge of the existence of the past” (Changes 186). In “The Expensive Moment,” it is the outer viewpoint of a Chinese visitor that casts a new light on the daily rituals of the neighborhood, and on the memories associated with each of its places. When guiding the Chinese woman through the streets of her neighborhood, Faith rediscovers the wonders of everyday life and the

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extraordinary beauty of the most ordinary, even sordid, areas of the city. She also sheds light on the community’s force of endurance in the midst of despair: They walked around the block a couple of times to get the feel of a neighborhood. They stopped for strudel at Art Foods. It was half past two and just in time to see the children fly out of the school around the corner. The littlest ones banged against the legs of teachers and mothers. Here and there a father rested his length against somebody’s illegally parked car. They stopped to buy a couple of apples. This is my Chinese friend from China, Faith said to Eddie the butcher, who was smoking a cigar, spitting and smiling at the sunlight of an afternoon break. So many peaches, so many oranges, the woman said admiringly to Eddie. They walked west to the Hudson River. It’s called the North River but it’s really our Lordly Hudson. This is a good river, but very quiet, said the Chinese woman as they stepped onto the beautiful, green, rusting, slightly crumpled, totally unused pier and looked at New Jersey. They returned along a street of small houses and Faith pointed up to the second-floor apartment where she and Jack had first made love. […] She showed her the church basement where she and Ruth and Ann and Louise and their group of mostly women and some men had made leaflets, offered sanctuary to draft resisters. They would probably do so soon again. […] They walked east and south to neighborhoods where our city, in fields of garbage and broken brick, stands desolate, her windows burnt and blind. Here, Faith said, the people suffer and struggle, their children turn round and round in one place, growing first in beauty, then in rage. (Later 193-94)

19 Faith’s walk with a stranger in the neighborhood is not merely a guided tour. The paratactic accumulation of fragments of vision or sensations amounts to an experience of the city—the women get “the feel of a neighborhood.” The use of generic names or functions (“teachers and mothers,” “a father,” “Eddie the butcher”…) gives way to terms of endearment (“our Lordly Hudson,” “our city,” “her windows”…). Likewise, the alliterative evocation of desolate areas (“broken brick,” “burnt and blind”) is interwoven with fleeting references to the “beauty” of some particular elements or inhabitants. Indeed, Paley’s stories also celebrate the wonders of everyday life in the neighborhood.

Saving Lives

20 In “Debts,” Faith underlines her wish to tell the stories “of [her] own family and the families of [her] friends” “as simply as possible, in order, you might say, to save a few lives” (Changes 10). Indeed, Paley’s stories relate tragic events that, far from being heroic and rare, constitute the daily life of the community. Mothers die, husbands disappear and children are kidnapped, abandoned or introduced to drugs: “What about this city? […] the whole thing is hopeless. Top to bottom, the streets, those kids, dumped, plain dumped” (Later 122). However, the writer’s responsibility is not simply to relate this misery but to contribute to the making of the neighborhood by showing how love still unites and saves the community and makes beauty shimmer in the midst of chaos: We must, I said, continue pointing out simple and worthwhile sights such as […] our own beloved city crowded with day and night workers, shoppers, walkers, the subway trains, which many people fear but they are so handsomely lined with pink to dark brown faces, golden tans and yellows scattered amongst them. It’s very important to emphasize what is good or beautiful so as not to have a gloomy face when you meet some youngster who has begun to guess. (Later 204)

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21 As Paule Lévy asserts, Paley’s credo is that the “artist must rehabilitate the ordinary and give visibility to the poor and the weak” (117). Now, this rehabilitation of the “invisible” often takes the form of streaks of vision or snatches of conversation that suddenly illuminate the narrative and the neighborhood. For instance, “a simple sunset happening outside [a] hospital window” seems to redeem in its lonely yet universal splendor the fall it adumbrates: “It was a red ball—all alone, without its evening streaking clouds—a red ball falling hopelessly west, just missing the Hudson River, Jersey City, Chicago, the Great Plains, the Golden Gate—falling, falling” (Changes 121). On the street, the characters find fragments of beauty that help them face the hardships of life. When in “Living,” Faith hears that her friend Ellen is dying, she runs down to the corner “for a quick sip among living creatures” (Changes 59). In “Love,” the narrator also finds inspiration in “the old earth of Vesey Street” where she notices how love “glides to solid invented figures from true remembered wraiths.” Shreds of memory and imagination blend in her evocation of the local bookstore or of the “kale in the grocer’s bin, crumbles of ice shining the dark leaves” (Later 6). More than mere samples, the fragments of vision, memory or imagination or the “stubs of conversation” (Later 83) that suddenly brighten the street reveal the metamorphic power of the neighborhood. Scenes of solitude, despair and decay can unexpectedly be endowed with a wonderful shimmer. In “Distance,” for example, the street is suddenly transformed by the arrival of the ice-cream truck: “I like the street anyway, and the hot night when the ice-cream truck brings all the dirty kids and the big nifty boys with their hunting-around eyes” (Changes 26).

22 The writer’s role and responsibility is to reveal the value of the trivial yet valuable rituals that make the neighborhood. Sometimes, this making only consists in naming “invisible” characters in order to save them from total disappearance. Because she knows that names “can take thickness and strength and fall back into the world with their weight” (Later 79), Paley gives the name of an African-American boy accidentally crushed by a subway train to her story, “Samuel.” The narrator never comments on the risky game of the boys who are “jumping and jiggling” on the platform. She merely reports the men’s boastful memories and the women’s indifference and fear of “embarrassment” as they watch the show from the inside of the car. The dramatic force of the story comes precisely from the detached perspective, from the mechanical precision of the description and from the neutral, journalistic tone of the evocation of the boy’s death and of his mother’s reaction. Samuel not only loses his life but also his identity as he is merely remembered as a son who can never be replaced: “never again will a boy exactly like Samuel be known” (Changes 106). If life erases the traces of the poor boys of the neighborhood, it is the writer’s duty to “save” them from oblivion.

23 Ceaselessly endeavoring to “show how mysterious ordinary life is” (Interview Hulley 35), Grace Paley thus attempts to make her characters escape the “[g]rayness” (Changes 172) of their lives and fleetingly enter a field of light and color. As the sounds, rhythms and inventiveness of her words suggest, writing then amounts to reinventing the world that she knows and revealing its extraordinary value. In “A Subject of Childhood,” the sun suddenly emerges from “among the water towers of downtown office buildings and suddenly [shines] white and bright on [Faith]” (Disturbances 145). In “The Pale Pink Roast,” Peter enters a field of sputtering greenness: “Pale green greeted him, grubby buds for nut trees” (Disturbances 43). And in “The Long-Distance Runner,” Faith challenges a group of young African-Americans with a blooming bunch of yellow flower

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names (Changes 183). New York, in Paley’s fiction, is the neighborhood—a place that she knows, loves, invents and, gracefully, illuminates.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. 1978. Trans. Liz Heron. New York: Verson, 1993. Print.

Bégout, Bruce. La Découverte du Quotidien. Paris: Alia, 2005. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” 1955. Illuminations. London: Fontana Press, 1992. 83-107. Print.

Jacob, Christian. L’empire des cartes. Paris: Albin Michel, 1992. Print. Trans.

Tom, Conley. The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. Print.

Lévy, Paule. Figures de l’artiste: Identité et Ecriture dans la littérature juive américaine de la deuxième moitié du vingtième siècle. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2006. Print.

Paley, Grace. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. 1960-1974. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. Print.

---. Interview with Kathleen Hulley. “Interview with Grace Paley.” Grace Paley. Ed. Kathleen Hulley. Spec. issue of Delta 14 (1982): 19-40. Print.

---. Later The Same Day. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Print.

---. The Little Disturbances of Man. 1970. London: Virago Press, 1980. Print.

Whitman,Walt. Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: Rees Welsh and Co, 1882. Print.

NOTES

1. Paley here uses the definite article “the,” instead of the possessive adjective “my” in the title of the story, thus emphasizing the unknown quality of the known, rather than a generic figure. 2. In “The Long-Distance Runner,” Faith recalls that, just like the father in “A Conversation with my Father,” Mrs Raftery “got liked by [her], loved, invented and endured” (Changes 180). The passive form, as well as the crescendo in the list of verbs, shows how invention is spurred by knowledge and affection. When admitting her failings, the narrator also indirectly underlines the process of creation: Mrs Luddy first appears as “[a] slim woman whose age I couldn’t invent” (188). 3. “With my coffee, I ordered a sandwich named after a neighbor who lives a few blocks away. (All sandwiches are so honored.) I do like the one I asked for—Mary Anne Brewer—but I must say I really prefer Selena and Max Retelof, though it’s more expensive. The shrimp is not chopped quite so fine, egg is added, a little sweet red pepper. Selena and Max were just divorced, but their sandwich will probably go on for another few years” (Later the Same Day 200).

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4. Etymologically the term metaphor (meta/pherein) means to carry over, transport from one place to another.

ABSTRACTS

Si les nouvelles de Grace Paley se déroulent à New York, la ville demeure néanmoins invisible dans les récits. New York, dans l’œuvre de Paley, est avant tout le quartier, lieu commun bruissant de conversations et de rumeurs. Dans leur évocation du voisinage, les narrateurs et les personnages de Paley réinventent la valeur de la vie ordinaire. Loin de toute autorité morale, ils recréent une expérience de la communauté. Ainsi, une nouvelle cartographie se met en place – celle de la rue, des parcs et des bancs publics. Une nouvelle temporalité, fondée sur la récurrence des rites quotidiens, rassemble aussi les voisins dans une même volonté de surmonter les souffrances de l’exil. La mémoire qui s’infiltre dans les conversations à la fois banales et intimes ne donne alors lieu à aucune lamentation nostalgique, mais exprime au contraire la nécessité d’une ouverture aux autres. Au cœur des descriptions, les moments poétiques qui naissent du prosaïque révèlent la manière dont la fiction dépeint moins le quartier qu’elle ne l’habite.

AUTHORS

NATHALIE COCHOY A former student of the “Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint Cloud,” Nathalie Cochoy is Professor of American Literature at the University Toulouse-Jean Jaurès. She is the author of Ralph Ellison, La Musique de l’Invisible (Belin, 1998), and of Passante à New York (PU Bordeaux, 2010). She co-directed The Art of the City (Anglophonia/Caliban, 2009) and directed City Instants (erea, 2010). She also wrote numerous articles on the representation of urban and natural spaces in American literature. She is the editor-in-chief of Transatlantica for literature and the arts.

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“Faith in a Tree”: The Roots of Commitment

Paule Lévy

1 “In the city, there’s a sudden density of population and there is constant communication of people [...] [O]utside in the city there is a thickness of life that’s stimulating, constantly stimulating and constantly exciting, so it’s quite marvelous,” declares Grace Paley (Interview Aarons 57). Born and educated in New York City, the author roots her art in her most immediate environment (“once across the street from us,” as Faith Darwin, her fictional alter ego, puts it in “A Conversation with my Father” [234]),1 that is to say in the vitality and diversity of the Bohemian and multiethnic New York of the sixties and seventies. Many of her stories can be read as delicately etched vignettes of urban life. The cityscape, however, is rarely described in its concrete aspects. The focus is laid rather on the human element, and city life is the vantage point from which Paley chooses to observe the fads and foibles of the society of her time.

2 Turning away from naturalism, however, the author rarely focuses on the city’s gigantism, anonymity and violence. Synonymous with social interaction and human bonding, inviting to “long walks and intimate talks,”2 the city (“our dear urban center” [“Wants” 131]) functions as a sustaining force in the lives of the characters. Alternately entering private and public spaces, exploring playgrounds, street corners, subway stations, house or school thresholds where people daily meet, Paley’s short stories design a peculiar topography, conveying a sense both of urban dangers (“Anxiety,” “Samuel”) and of warm neighborhood solidarity (“Friends,” “Ruthy and Edie”).

3 Based on an aesthetics of the mundane and the minute (“Le je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque rien,” to borrow Vladimir Jankélévitch’s phrase), Paley’s short fiction stages a variety of ordinary people (“I write about the lives of women and men of our time” [Interview Hulley 24]) absorbed in their petty concerns—in what the author calls “the little disturbances of life”—as they keep devising precarious strategies for their daily survival. A special place is made for the poor and the weak, for the underdogs roaming the city streets, for the immigrants, for women also, especially when they are left alone. For all the obscure and the neglected whom Paley chooses to move to stage

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center in an effort to lend them presence and visibility: “Stories illuminate. That’s the purpose of a story for me. To shine a light on what’s dark and give it light. And the balance is something else…It’s justice” (Interview Hulley 27). A highly committed writer, Paley thinks the artist should “go in and out of ivory towers and two-room apartments on Avenue C to learn the truth from the powerless” (New and Collected Poems 56).

4 In Paley’s case, however, observing people has more to do with hearing than with seeing: “What I say comes from what I hear. It comes from the speech of my city” (Conversations 36). Attuned to the variegated tongues of the city, to the inflections of oral speech, her fiction seems to delineate a politics as well as a “po-ethics” of hearing as it strives to capture the colors, texture and rhythms of everyday talk, the shrill discordances or unexpected harmonies that build up the ceaseless rumor of the city. Though her stories often return to the same endearing characters, they show little concern for characterization and plot (“plot, the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised” [“A Conversation with my Father” 232]). What they stage instead is a world of voices: Jewish voices, Afro-American voices, Irish voices, Hispanic voices, all recorded with the same empathy, tolerance and humor. Meanwhile, the strangely “defamiliarized,” landmarks of the urban setting recede in the distance. Likewise, Paley’s narrators often opt for self-effacement or self-derision as they foreground a city which they view, above all, as an intricate network of human motives, languages and relationships. As Daniela Daniele aptly points out: “In Paley’s stories, the modern urbanite turns from a male, self-centered flâneur into a woman who decides to stay in brackets to report, in a collage of voices a dense network of human relations” (157). This strategy of self-effacement is precisely what allows for a constant shift from the individual to the collective, from the local to the global, from the prosaic to the poetic.

5 This is particularly striking in “Faith in a Tree,” a story published in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), which stages a decisive city experience forever altering the narrator’s outlook on life. In this disconcerting narrative, Faith Darwin is perched on a tree in a city park, day-dreaming while watching the people under her feet. By the end of the story the harmony of the scene is broken by an altercation between the police and a small group of demonstrators against the Vietnam War. While the adult on- lookers remain passive, Faith’s eldest son, Richard, gives free rein to his indignation, thus triggering in his mother a new political awareness which, experienced as a sort of “epiphany” (in the Joycean meaning of the term) radically changes the later course of her life.

“See the interesting world” (“Faith in a Tree” 180)

6 As the story starts, Faith, who humorously recalls being sent alone on an airplane at a very early age (177), is still suspended in mid-air, so to speak, perched “on the twelve foot-high, strong, long arm of a sycamore, my feet swinging” (176). The scene is a city playground on a warm Saturday afternoon in spring. It is a leisurely interval, a moment of respite in the chaos and turmoil of urban life. As sociologist Pierre Sansot observes, the city playground, a hybrid locus, half-pastoral/half-urban, suited both for solitary reverie and for social interacting, functions as a blessed, albeit precarious refuge for city-dwellers: “The city playground is meant to be a haven, some kind of an Eden. It is

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but a poor version of paradise lost. It does somehow generate a sense of peace, however, in its sluggish immanence and suspension of time” (338).3 The city park, “that women’s pub,” as Sansot ironically points out (343), is also a gendered place, a den of females and children: A city [...] must provide pauses. Meant and constructed for adults, it needs an outlet for its surplus of children and housewives. Therefore it builds public playgrounds [...], sanctuaries for the seated but also areas allotted for the boisterous games of children. (339, 341)4

7 Indeed, few men people Paley’s narrative: reluctant “Saturday fathers” (they “have to go to a lot of parties. They are sleepy but pretend to great energy for the sake of their two-year-old sons” [178]), a few idlers and strollers, a couple of drug-dealers operating behind the bushes and a group of teenagers (“vitamin-enlarged high-school kids” [178]) playing the guitar under the suspicious gaze of “boy-faced policemen” (178).

8 Faith, however, has chosen to distance herself from her surroundings and to view things from above. A parodic version of the Tree of Life or the Tree of Knowledge, suggesting roots as well as transcendence, Faith’s tree allows for a panoramic vision from which she draws an exhilarating sense of empowerment and freedom, “the exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive,” as Michel de Certeau puts it.5 Thus she compares her position to that of the biblical God as her gaze wanders beyond the limits of the park, to the larger city around, a roaring universe of steel, asphalt and glass, which she prefers to see as an exotic jungle: One God, who was King of the Jews [...] can look down from His Holy Headquarters and see us all […]. He sees south into Brooklyn how Prospect Park lies in its sand- rooted trees among Japanese gardens and police, and beyond us north, to dangerous Central Park. Far north, the deer-eyed eland and kudu survive, grazing the open pits of the Bronx Zoo. (175)

9 Faith’s lofty existential (“what am I?” [177]) or pseudo-metaphysical considerations (“let man be in charge of God” [185]) are frequently interrupted, however, by the petty demands and clamor of the small world underneath, of which she provides at first only fleeting, impressionistic snapshots: “heads of girl, ponytails riding the springtime luck, short black bobs and an occasional eminence of golden wedding rings” (175). However reluctantly, she, “the creation of [God’s] soft second thought” as she humorously calls herself (175), is obliged to leave her perching-place to see to the children playing together or to join in the gossip of her neighbors and friends. Longing for companionship and affection she also shows deep interest in the “open-shirted and ambitious” (178) young men passing by, obviously in search of a girl to pick up.

10 Highly disjointed and elliptic, the story stages in fact two apparently unrelated micro- dramas, one of a strictly private nature, the other political. The first, which is about twenty-pages long, focuses on Faith’s comic frustration and chagrin as, distressed by her husband Ricardo’s recent departure to South America, she realizes that the young man she has lately set her heart upon is concerned only with her friend Anna. The anti- war demonstration and the reaction of Faith’s son are depicted only in the second, much shorter, part of the narrative—which constitutes in fact a two-page-long appendix to a prior version of the story, published in The New American Review in 1967 and restricted to the sole presentation of the playground world.6 In such a decentered and lopsided narrative priorities and meaning are difficult to locate. “Disperse, disperse!” (193): the policemen’s injunction to the demonstrators could almost be read as a guide for reading the entire story.

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11 Abrupt shifts in viewpoint, tempo and style, as well as the telescoping of the various levels of enunciation contribute to the sense of disruption and indeterminacy. The narrative keeps alternating the city scene itself with the narrator’s purely interior vision (“although I can’t see them I know . . . I can easily see” [176]); it juxtaposes the conversations in the park with Faith’s private musings as each word addressed to her immediately triggers unexpected personal recollections or humorous reflections on the state of the world. Likewise, the story oscillates between the view from above and that from beneath, between withdrawal and empathy, between monologue and dialogue, between direct and reported speech. As the narrative unfolds, all conventional distinctions are comically subverted. Eminently plural in the Barthesian sense of the term, “Faith in a Tree” amounts in fact to an iridescent exchange carried on by multiple voices, on different wavelengths and subject from time to time to a sudden dissolve, leaving a gap which enables the utterance to shift from one point of view to another without warning: the writing is set up across this tonal instability […] which makes it a glistening texture of ephemeral origins. (Barthes 41-42)

12 It is a loose verbal collage, or rather a motley web of voices which intersect, collude or collide with each other in a joyful cacophony, while it seems impossible to determine their motives or refer them to a specific speaker. Thus the narrator’s inner voice is constantly interrupted and her authority as omniscient narrator is undermined by the ironic comments of the characters who, though “some distance away” (181), seem to read into her thoughts. “That’s a typical yak yak out of you, Faith,” declares Richard mockingly (181), while Mrs. Finn, a self-righteous matron, shows even less consideration: “Blah blah [...]. Blah to you” (181). These narrative short-circuits as well as the extreme stylization of the setting (of the park itself, one hardly sees anything) facilitate the shift from microcosm to macrocosm, from the local to the global. Paley’s miniature is gradually enlarged to the greater city around. The comedy of urban life becomes a pretext for political and social satire.

“What a place in democratic time!” (“Faith in a Tree” 174): Paley’s “American Scene”7

13 The park, which is most probably Washington Square,8 as suggested by the explicit reference to Henry James (176), is no longer the bastion of an uptight and haughty WASP bourgeoisie. It has become “democratic” (174). Yet the pool has gone dry with no “lilies floating” (176); Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” have withered; everything now smacks of urban decay and social exclusion. The kids “hopped in and out of dog shit and dug tunnels into mole holes” (175); the women look shabby: one is “rumpled in a black cotton skirt made of shroud remnants at about fourteen cents a yard” (176), another is wearing a worn out skirt “in muddy cashmere” (176). Faith who once “grew up in the summer sunlight of upward mobility” (“The Immigrant Story” 238) has ceased to believe in the American dream of prosperity and equal chances for all. It is but pure illusion, she observes with lucid, pungent humor. Something is wrong with [...] Mrs. Finn, Mrs. Raftery, Ginnie, and me. Everyone else in our building is on the way up through the affluent society, putting five to ten years into low rent before moving to Jersey or Bridgeport. But our four family units, as people are now called, are doomed to stand culturally still as this society moves on its caterpillar treads from ordinary affluent to absolute empire. (182)

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14 Poverty is enhanced by solitude and spiritual vacuity in a fiercely individualistic nation where family bonds have disintegrated (Faith’s parents are left to themselves in a retirement home [180]),9 where people (men in particular) seem to have lost all sense of their responsibilities. Practically all the ladies in the park have been deserted by their husbands or boyfriends. As for the children, they seem to have lost count of their fathers: “She’s lost two fathers,” said Anna, “within three years.” Tonto stood up to scratch his belly and back […]. “Mostly nobody has fathers, Anna,” he said. [...] “My father is in the Equator. They never even had fathers,” pointing to Kitty’s daughters. “Judy has two fathers […].” (190-91)

15 It seems that American democracy has hardly improved the status of women, confined as they are to “low-level job(s)” (178) and domesticity. They are “forced to lounge in the neighborhood park” (175) while their companions, just like Faith’s husband, Ricardo, feel free to sail to broader horizons in amorous company. Here, as in other stories, Paley derides the cynicism and absurdity of masculine behaviors. Ricardo’s hilarious letter from South America is a case in point: The letter says: “I am not well. I hope I never see another rain forest. I am sick. Are you working? Have you seen Ed Snead? He owes me $180. Don’t badger him about it if he looks broke. Otherwise send me some to Guerra Verde c/o Dorothy Wasserman. Am living here with her. [...] Wonderful girl. Reminds me of you ten years ago [...].” (179)

16 No bitterness, however, in Paley’s female characters. For motherly love heals all the wounds and transfigures the world: “I kiss those kids forty times a day. I punch them like a father should. When I have a date and come home late at night, I wake them with a couple of good hard shakes to complain about the miserable entertainment” (177-78). The narrator’s impassioned hyperboles turn her boys into lords and princes: “Antony, you are prince of the day-care center for the deprived children of working mothers, you are the Lord of the West Side loading zone whenever it rains on Sunday [...] The Boss!” (183). The mock-epic style and the incongruous imagery contribute to broadening the perspective. In this respect the long-drawn sea-metaphor is particularly effective. I can easily see Mrs. Junious Finn, my up-the-block neighbor and evening stoop companion, a broad barge, like a lady, moving slow—a couple of redheaded cabooses dragged by the clothesline at her stern; on her fat upper deck, Wiltwyck, a pale three-year-old captain with smoky eyes, shoves his wet thumb into the wind. […] Mrs. Finn goes puff puffing toward the opinionated playground, that sandy harbor. Along the same channel […], tilting delicately like a boy’s sailboat, Lynn Ballard floats past my unconcern to drop light anchor, a large mauve handbag over the green bench slats. (176)

17 However ludicrous, these tropes uproot the fictional characters from their dreary environment (“this creepy slum” [181]) and project them onto a fabulous universe where, “obscure heroes of the ordinary” (de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life, vol. 2 14), they become magnified, embellished; they recover their full stature and visibility to be at last revealed in their poignant dignity and humanity (“so those names can take thickness and strength and fall back into the world with their weight” [“Friends” 308]).

18 Grace Paley’s generous imagination instills new colors in the quotidian; in the park where “the playing of fretted instruments is banned by municipal decree” (178), she strikes new notes, a melody of the soul (“a high note out of a wild clarinet” [178]).

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Without ever losing sight of the referential, she reinvents the real, she transforms the dross of the mundane and the sordid into literary treasure, she makes free and vibrant the grimy playground and fills it with promise. She proposes an alternate geography whereby characters and readers are allowed to catch glimpses of those dream-like “invisible cities” celebrated by Italo Calvino.

19 Here as in many other stories (it is made obvious by Richard’s rebellion in the second part of the narrative), the agents of this transformation are the children. One is reminded of Michel de Certeau’s assertion that the “childhood experience that determines spatial practices [...] proliferates, floods private and public spaces, undoes their readable surfaces, creates within the planned city a ‘metaphorical’ or mobile city [...] built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation” (de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life, vol. 2 110). This perception is to be related to Paley’s feminism and to her political vision, which she considers inseparable: “Feminism means political consciousness. It means that you see the relationship between the life of women and the political life and power around her. From there you can take any route you want” (Paley, Interview Hulley 32). In “Faith in a Tree,” men and “the man-wide world” (175) are relegated to the margins of the text. All the “transient fathers” (183) in the park are vain, vaguely ridiculous and obviously out of place. The masculine is also associated with the violence of the police and that of the ruthless world of war and power they stand for. To the “Law of the Father” whether it be expressed in aesthetic moral or political terms,10 Paley substitutes the ethos of “a radicalized maternal subjectivity” (Chaskes 142) antithetical to the nexus of affluence and destruction which—metaphorically at least—she associates with the world of men. 11 Such “maternal subjectivity” draws its spontaneity, wisdom and lucidity (“I often see through the appearance of things right to the apparition itself” [183]) from the very task it is confined to: that of child rearing which—this is made clear in the second part of the narrative–turns into the very source of moral and political awareness.

20 With the appearance of the small crowd of demonstrators, the little playground bustling with laughter and life is reminded of the violence and terror at work in the larger world. The demonstrators carry three posters denouncing the horrors perpetrated in Vietnam. The first showed a [...] well-dressed man about thirty-five years old next to a small girl. A question was asked: Would you burn a child? In the next poster he placed a burning cigarette on the child’s arm. The cool answer was given: WHEN NECESSARY. The third poster carried no words, only a napalmed Vietnamese baby, seared, scarred with twisted hands. (192)

21 It is as if the love of trees, children and the world professed by the narrator were suddenly shattered by the reference to napalm, that dreadful defoliant America had been spilling on the Vietnamese with an easy conscience. The people in the garden seem tempted by the same arrogance and indifference. Faith’s aloofness on top of her tree at the beginning of the story is hardly any better. I said, oh! Anna said to Philip, “They’ll only turn people against them,” and turned against them herself at once. (192) “What they’re doing is treason,” said Douglas. He had decided to explain and educate. “Signs on stick aren’t allowed. [...] It’s for their own protection too. They might turn against each other.” He was afraid that no one would find the real perpetrator if that should happen. (193)

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22 In their absurdity and sickening hypocrisy (“it’s for their own protection [...] they might turn against each other”), these remarks seem a comic echo of the official political propaganda justifying the war. “Luckily” (192), Faith’s boy teaches everyone a lesson and shakes his mother out of her self-centeredness and complacency. In a fury of tears and disgust, he wrote on the near blacktop in pink flamingo chalk —in letters fifteen feet high, so the entire Saturday walking world could see— WOULD YOU BURN A CHILD? and under it, a little taller, the red reply, WHEN NECESSARY. And I think that is exactly when events turned me around, changing my hairdo, my job uptown, my style of living and telling. Then I met women and men in different lines of work, whose minds were made up and directed out of that sexy playground by my children’s heartfelt brains, I thought more and more and everyday about the world. (194)

23 Richard’s determined gesture of re-inscription, the intrusion of another mode of expression (photography), as well as the parallel established by the narrator between “living and telling” divert the reader’s attention from the story being told to the art of telling, from the message proffered to the signifying practices, from the world depicted to the “world-inventing words” (“Ruthy and Edie” [334]), from politics to metafiction.

“Dreamer in a Dead Language”12

24 “[My stories] are all about language,” declares Grace Paley (Interview Hulley 26), while pondering with humor on what she calls her “verbalosity” (Interview Hulley 21). In fact, all her stories appear to be struggling with a language clearly conceived as “a transmission of orders, an exercise of power or of resistance to this exercise” (Deleuze 23): “So that’s never just language. Language doesn’t just live its own little syntactical life. It’s part of the whole thing” (Paley, Interview Batt and Rocard 132). For Grace Paley who describes herself as a story-hearer as much as a story-teller, language is undeniably a source of fascination, one that prevails over characters and plot: “Sometimes what it comes from is pure language. I can’t even tell you that I’m thinking specifically of any event of any kind and I may simply write two or three sentences that seem to me beautiful or right or true for the day” (Paley, Interview Michaels 27). Language, however, is also perceived as a hierarchic and imperative system, particularly for women, subjected as they are to a symbolic order dominated by men.

25 In “Faith in a Tree” the narrator expresses from the start her yearning for a language fit for self-expression and communication. It is in linguistic terms that she voices her sense of solitude and alienation: “Just when I most needed important conversation, a sniff of the man-wide world, that is, at least one brainy companion who could translate my friendly language into his tongue of undying carnal love, I was forced to lounge in our neighborhood park” (175). Faith’s gradual release from her omniscient faculties and authority may be related to her full awareness of what she humorously calls her “language limitations”—even as she displays amazing verbal virtuosity. My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster’s or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next. (182)

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26 There is not much point in trying to find that life-giving and liberating tongue in the dictionary. For it is not in words but between words, in the interstices of language, the interlacing of voices and the meandering of the syntax that Paley’s characters— especially her women (“by necessity and disposition [...] the soft speaking tough souls of anarchy” [Paley 306]) seek possibilities of emancipation. Just as they prove able to draw strength and meaning from their cramped quotidian, just as they manage to transcend the narrow limits of the park by establishing new bridges of compassion and solidarity, it is in the very language that alienates them that they try to capture fragments of an ever-“floating truth.”13

27 “The city is the stage for a war of narratives [...] For us the fraud narratives from television or advertising stamp out or atomize the small narratives of streets or neighborhoods,” observes Michel de Certeau (The Practices of Everyday Life, vol. 2 143). These “small narratives” are moved to center stage in Paley’s stories, for the author wages a war indeed against what she views as the “dead language” taught at school according to rigid grammatical and ideological norms, or against the lies and platitudes daily broadcast by the media: “There’s dead language everywhere. We’re cut off from the truth of our tongues” (Paley, Interview Hulley 25). As she reaches new political awareness, Faith realizes the limits of individualism and self-reliance, these corner- stones of American ideology much revered by her immigrant parents: “You are an American child. Free. Independent” (177). Or was it the remnants of their socialist ideals that once led Faith’s mother to make her daughter “the third commercial air- flight baby passenger in the entire world” (177)?: “Why would anyone send a little baby anywhere alone? What was my mother trying to prove? That I was independent? [...] That in the sensible, socialist, Zionist world of the future, she wouldn’t cry at my wedding?” (177). Faith now sees through all the socialist clichés, as shown by her tongue-in-cheek lesson to her son about the advantages of growing up in an underprivileged multicultural environment: “I dwell in soot and slime just so you can meet kids like Arnold Lee and live on this wonderful block with all the Irish and Puerto Ricans, although God knows why there aren’t any Negro children for you to play with. . .” (181). Feminist clichés are discarded in the same light-hearted manner: “‘[...] Independent.’ Now what does that mean? I have always required a man to be dependent on, even when it appeared that I had one already. I own two small boys whose dependence on me takes up my lumpen time and bourgeois feelings” (177). Likewise, images drawn from the realm of business and finance belie all romantic views of male-female relationships. As she evaluates the few men passing by (“squint-eyed speculators who come by to size up the stock” [184]) one of the lonely ladies in the park muses: “The trick [...] is to know the speculators from the investors…” “I will never live like that. Not I,” Kitty said softly. “Balls!” I shouted, as two men strolled past us, leaning toward one another. (184)

28 The story is replete with puns, double entendres and sexual innuendos which, at once furtive and audacious, override the codes of proper language and behavior and disrupt conventional meanings while they repaint the world in the colors of hope, laughter and desire: these allusions “detach with a finger the armor that protects the king in order to discover, through laughter his nakedness” (de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life, vol. 2 33). While looking after their children, the women in the park secretly “drea[m] of

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private midnight” (177). Faith’s empty philosophizing on top of her tree is undercut by saucy remarks revealing rather down-to-earth preoccupations. “Say!,” said Philip, getting absolutely red with excitement, blushing from his earlobes down into his shirt, making me think as I watched the blood descend from his brains that I would like to be the one who was holding his balls very gently, to be exactly present so to speak when all the thumping got there. (192)

29 As it ceaselessly juxtaposes jarring semantic registers, as it telescopes the private and the public, the abstract and the concrete, the serious and the burlesque, Paley’s rapid fire prose revitalizes worn out stereotypes and allows every day speech to vibrate with new intensity: [...] inside, always inside of sentences, phrases, paragraphs, meanings you know, so that they are not clichés. Think of what a cliché is, it’s one of the most accurate ways of describing something, and it’s just been used too much, but if you use it for its real meaning, you are always surprised at how good it is. But so then, if you move it a little bit, that’s where the play comes in. (Paley, Interview Chauvin-Plouzeau 163-64)

30 In her park, which also functions as an experimental scriptural playground, the author plants wild rhetorical flowers liable to grow into unexpected poetry. When politely asked about his occupation (“What’s your field”? [187]), one of the gentlemen in the garden answers: “‘Daisies [...] I happen to be in the field of daisies.’ [...] How often does one meet, in this black place, a man, woman or child who can think up a pastoral reply like that?” (188). Sometimes bouquets of incongruous associations point to the torments of the soul, as shown by Faith’s evocation of her husband’s affair with another woman in some exotic country. Ricardo even at the present moment when I am trying to talk with you in a civilized way, Ricardo has rolled his dove-gray brain into a glob of spit in order to fly secretly into my ear right off the poop deck of Foamline’s World Tour Cruiseship Eastern Sunset. He is stretched out in my head, exhausted before dawn from falling in love with an Eastern Sunset lady passenger on the first leg of her many-masted journey round the nighttimes of the world. (179)

31 Thus stretched to its utmost, and strangely “deterritorialized” (in the most literal sense of the word), language is free “to take flight along creative lines of escape” (Deleuze 26) or even “on a line of non-sense” (Deleuze 21). Owing maybe to her capacity, as a daughter of immigrants, to hear English from a distance,14 Paley is able to instill “a minor music” into the language (Deleuze 26), one that precludes all indifference or passivity in the reader, who is invited to establish new links between proximity and distance, between repetition and transformation, between world and text.

32 There is no wonder then if Paley’s park is also a self-reflexive terrain, a miniature version of the author’s larger fictional universe which, in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, her second collection of stories, the reader has grown familiar with. One meets again with Kitty, who was four months pregnant in “The Contest” (41-49); one catches glimpses of Mrs. Raftery, the imposing Irish Matron earlier seen in “Distance” (135) and “An Interest in life” (50-65); one hears once more of Faith’s parents and of Ricardo, the fickle husband whose shadow haunts all the Faith stories. Conversely, “Faith in a Tree” bears the seeds of future developments. Isn’t it precisely the type of story that will exasperate the father in “A Conversation with my Father”? “I object not to facts but to people sitting in trees talking senselessly, voices from who knows where” (233).

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33 As he/she listens to these voices (“a ladies’ murmur about life and lives” [“Faith in the Afternoon” 152]), the reader is taught to envisage the world from multiple and contrasted perspectives; he/she is encouraged to remain attentive to the disarming presence of the other and to the links that tie him to a larger community of stories and beings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans Richard Miller. London: Blackwell, 2002. Print.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974. Print.

Certeau, Michel de, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol. L’Invention du quotidien. Trans. Steven Rendall. The Practise of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Print.

---. L’Invention du quotidien. Vol. 2: Habiter, cuisiner. Trans. Timothy J. Tomasik. The Practise of Everyday Life. Vol. 2: Living and Cooking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Print.

Chaskes, Daniel. “‘Shout it Out Loud’: Grace Paley and the Radicalization of Maternity.” Journal of Modern Literature 36.2 (2013): 140-55. Print.

Daniele, Daniela. “‘I cannot Keep my Mind on Jerusalem’: Grace Paley’s Poetics of Hearing.” Intertextual Identity: Reflections on Jewish American Artists. Eds. Franco La Polla and Gabriella Morisco. Bologna: Patron Editore, 1997. 155-66. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans Dana Polan. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Print.

Issaacs, Neil D. Grace Paley. A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. Print.

James, Henry. The American Scene, Collected Travel Writings: England and America. New York: The Library of America, 1993. Print.

Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien. Volume 1: La Manière et l’Occasion. Paris: Seuil, 1980. Print.

Newman, Judie. “Napalm and After: The Politics of Grace Paley’s Short Fiction.” The Yearbook of English Studies 31 (2001): 2-9. Print.

Paley, Grace. Collected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Print.

---. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974. Print.

---. “Faith in a Tree.” New American Review 1 (1967): 51-67. Print.

---. Interview with Victoria Aarons. “‘The Tune of the language’: An Interview with Grace Paley.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 12 (1993): 50-61. Print.

---. Interview with Noëlle Batt and Marcienne Rocard. “An Interview with Grace Paley.” Caliban XXV. Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1988. 119-137. Print.

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---. Interview with Laurence Chauvin-Plouzeau. “Interview with Grace Paley.” TLE 5, La Représentation littéraire: Ecritures contemporaines I (Mai 1987): 163-74. Print.

---. Interview with Kathleen Hulley. “Interview with Grace Paley.” Grace Paley. Ed. Kathleen Hulley. Spec. issue of Delta 14 (1982): 19-40. Print.

---. Interview with Leonard Michaels. “Conversation with Grace Paley.” Conversations with Grace Paley. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Blaine Hall. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997. 26-37. Print.

---. Long Walks and Intimate Talks. New York: The Free Feminist Press, 1991. Print

---. New and Collected Poems. Gardiner, ME : Tilbury House 1993. Print.

Sansot, Pierre. Poétique de la ville. Paris: Klincksieck, 1988. Print.

Taylor, Jacqueline. Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Print.

NOTES

1. All the quotations from Paley’s stories refer to the Collected Stories. 2. Long Walks and Intimate Talks is the title of one of Paley’s collections of poems. 3. “Le Square voudrait être une oasis, une eden. Il imite mal le paradis perdu et, pourtant, il apporte d’une certaine façon la paix : par sa routine, par son immanence molle, par l’étirement digestif de son temps.” All translations of Pierre Sansot are mine. 4. “Une ville [...] doit ménager des pauses. Faite pour les adultes, il lui faut bien déverser en un lieu son surplus d’enfants et de ménagères [...] Alors elle construit des squares [...], sancturaire[s] des assis, mais aussi espace[s] alloué[s] aux mouvements désordonnés des enfants.” 5. See The Practices of Everyday Life, vol. 1: “His [the pedestrian’s] elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s feet. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a God. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more” (92). 6. According to Judie Newman, the second version, reprinted several years later in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, at the height of the Vietnam War, was written in the aftermath of Paley’s 1969 visit to Hanoi as part of a delegation of peace activists, an experience which contributed to her heightened moral consciousness (4). 7. The phrase is borrowed from Henry James’s essay. 8. Washington Square was Paley’s favorite city park (see Arcana 58-59). With a group of other women activists, the author even defended it against city planners who were trying “to push a road through [it] to serve the real estate interests” (Taylor 44). 9. Faith pays them a visit in “Dreamer in a Dead Language.” 10. See in particular “A Conversation with my Father,” 232-37.

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11. See Paley, Interview with Hulley: “Most men do think it is appropriate to take some kind of stand. They stick out either their fists, or their cocks, or their guns. The arms race was not created by women. Of the 40% of the scientists in this country working for the military establishment, maybe 95% of them are men. Not that women wouldn’t do it... But so far it is not the world of women…” (32). 12. “Dreamer in a Dead Language” is the title of one of Grace Paley’s stories (265-83). 13. See “The Floating Truth” (115-28). 14. See Paley, Interview with Batt and Rocard: “I had to fight to get into it, in a way” (131).

ABSTRACTS

Rarement perçue dans son gigantisme, son anonymat ou sa violence, la ville chez Grace Paley est synonyme d’interaction sociale et de relations humaines : c’est gdf gf2016-03-04T16:10:00ggle lieu par excellence où se tisse le lien entre le sujet et son environnement social et politique. Ainsi dans “Faith in a Tree”, le jardin public devient un microcosme de la Scène Américaine, l’arène où se rencontrent et s’affrontent le privé et le public, l’anecdote et l’Histoire, le local et le global. C’est le locus symbolique où s’ébauchent une esthétique du « je-ne-sais-quoi et du presque-rien » et une éthique fondée sur l’attention et la responsabilité pour autrui – en un mot, une nouvelle façon d’habiter le monde et les mots. C’est aussi un terrain d’expérimentation scripturale où foisonnent les figures inédites et où s’affirme, par-delà le labyrinthe des digressions et la broussaille des clichés, une volonté de faire cohabiter le poétique et le politique.

AUTHORS

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Grace Paley, l’intrépide : un talmud féminin

Geneviève Brisac

1 In the following pages, French writer and critic Geneviève Brisac discusses in a light, witty manner her personal view of Grace Paley, with special regard to her feminism and her Jewish heritage.

2 L’une des raisons pour que l’écrivain soit tellement plus intéressé par la vie que ceux qui se contentent de la vivre, c’est qu’il ne comprend rien à ce dont on pourrait le prendre pour le spécialiste, à savoir la vie. S’il écrit, c’est pour s’expliquer à lui-même de quoi il retourne : l’écroulement de l’amour-propre de son père, les aberrations de l’amour, la misère sans fond. Et il n’y parvient bien sûr jamais.

3 Cette merveilleuse leçon d’écriture : écrivez sur ce que vous ne comprenez pas du tout, si vous pensez détenir la vérité sur un quelconque sujet, passez à autre chose, est au cœur des livres de Grace Paley.

4 Elle est née en 1923 dans le Bronx, de parents juifs russes immigrants. Quoi d’autre à savoir ?

5 Dès mon plus jeune âge, dit-elle, j’ai su que mon père avait été interné dans des prisons locales de droits communs en Russie et en Sibérie, que ma mère avait été déportée, et qu’on les avait renvoyés chez eux juste à temps pour la révolution de 1905 et de nouveaux pogromes. Je regrette souvent de n’avoir pas su obtenir plus d’informations auprès de mes parents et de mes grands-parents. Ma sœur, mon frère et moi, nous sentions un peu isolés dans un monde où certains font remonter leur famille à une baronnie médiévale, nous aurions juste voulu savoir pourquoi les noms de Bahkmout, Bakou ou Mariopol revenaient de temps en temps dans des conversations décousues. Mais pour notre grand-mère et nos parents, le passé européen n’était qu’un fleuve fangeux de souffrance, un marais de désespoir où nous ne pouvions que nous noyer.

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6 Ecrire avec ce qu’on ne comprend pas : cela commence avec ce silence. Si toute une vie ne suffit pas à répondre, une vie de travail littéraire, une vie de questions constantes et avant tout honnêtes permet de lui donner une forme. On écrit, pour parodier Maurice Blanchot, avec ce que les parents ont oublié ou tu. Dans les histoires de Grace Paley, au contraire, on parle tout le temps. Ces flots de discussions souvent violentes, presque toujours politiques et moqueuses inventent une langue. L’héroïne s’appelle Faith, ou Faithful, ce qui n’est pas anodin, bien sûr, et cette Faithful écoute les voix qui s’élèvent autour d’elle.

7 Qu’écoute-t-elle ? Et pourquoi ?

8 Nous avons tendance, écrit-elle, à oublier que les nôtres ont réellement vécu avant la Shoah, et qu’ils avaient déjà connu bien des persécutions. Je l’ai compris d’une manière qui m’a marquée à jamais. Je devais avoir la hauteur de la table de la cuisine, mes yeux arrivaient juste au-dessus, ma mère s’est tournée vers mon père – elle lisait le journal, Elle a dit : « Ca recommence » ! Eh bien, à partir de ce jour, au milieu de mon enfance idéale, dans un quartier juif merveilleux avec des gosses par milliers, et malgré tout ce qui marchait tellement bien, cet incident de la table de la cuisine eut sur moi un effet si puissant que lorsque je me suis mise à écrire, je me suis demandé si je devais vraiment écrire en anglais, mais comme je ne maîtrisais aucune autre langue, je n’avais guère le choix. La mémoire et la langue sont barrées d’un point d’interrogation muet.

9 Une toute petite phrase avec un pronom impersonnel et un verbe flou : « ça recommence ! » inaugure une vie d’écrivain hantée par ce que cachent de douleur, d’injustices, de souffrance, les phrases les plus simples, les gestes les plus anodins, durant un repas tranquille à la maison.

10 C’était donc les années trente et çà recommençait, et une petite fille d’une famille russe juive socialiste et désormais américaine avait appris, juste en deux mots attrapés par hasard, l’inquiétude, l’insécurité qui menace jusqu’à la langue dont on sera peut-être obligé de changer, parce qu’il faudra encore partir. Et aussi, et c’est peut-être là l’essentiel, que ce qui se passe dans la cuisine est directement relié, d’une manière invisible et constante à ce qui se passe partout, tout le temps pour tous les autres hommes. Et enfin, une femme, un écrivain adulte, avait enregistré que les enfants entendent tout et comprennent tout.

11 Les histoires, les dialogues de Grace Paley mettent en scène des femmes et des enfants, dans la rue, au jardin, dans le train pour aller voir une amie mourante, des voisines qui discutent chez le marchand de légumes, une mère sur une plage.

12 « Bon alors on m’enterre ! » s’écrie joyeusement Faith sur la plage de sable glacée où elle a emmené ses deux garçons après une visite catastrophique à la maison de retraite « Les enfants de Judée » où vivent ses parents à elle. Et elle s’étend comme un cadavre sous le soleil froid d’Octobre, et Richard, son fils aîné ordonne : « Arrête ça tout de suite ! » à son petit frère qui s’est joyeusement mis au travail. Arrête, espèce de con ! crie Richard à son frère d’une voix qu’on imagine sans peine. Et Faith dit : « Richard cesse de tout prendre tellement au sérieux ! » Richard qui est l’aîné, a la bouche crispée et les yeux inquiets. C’est à lui, désormais, de penser que sa mère est trop résignée à l’ordre intolérable du monde. Et elle, elle s’inquiète de ce qu’elle lui a transmis d’intransigeance tendue, de difficulté à vivre, de radicalité ou alors, faut-il, dire de lucidité. Que va-t-il devenir, avec ce trop lourd fardeau d’intelligence ?

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13 « Il m’a longtemps semblé que c’était trop personnel, ces histoires de femmes et d’enfants, note Grace Paley, mais c’était cela qui m’intéressait : les choses révoltantes et incompréhensibles qui, jour après jour tissent nos existences. »

14 Un peu plus loin, Faith va voir son père, elle veut lui parler de ses ennuis. Il décide de lui expliquer ce qu’il faut prévoir de faire avant d’être vraiment vieux, afin de se préparer une vieillesse heureuse. Surtout laisse tomber les légumes verts, insiste-t-il. On s’embête toute la vie avec ça, et franchement ca ne sert à rien. Mange plutôt des bananes, c’est plein de magnésium et vraiment très précieux. Puis il lui révèle qu’un des problèmes sérieux du grand âge, c’est qu’on ne dort plus bien du tout, qu’on se réveille si tôt, à quatre heures du matin, qu’on erre dans les couloirs sans oser vraiment allumer la lumière et que les fantômes vous assaillent. Les fantômes de ceux avec qui on a mal agi.

15 Cette manière de partir des petits détails de nos vies pour déboucher soudain sur une allée de réflexion silencieuse m’a fait soudain songer que Grace Paley avait mis au point une méthode. Que ses histoires, ce puzzle déroutant et fascinant, si difficile à résumer mais si puissant, constituait une sorte de Talmud féminin, où les histoires anodines débouchent à tout coup sur des questions essentielles, où les questions spirituelles aboutissent sur le tas de sable du square. Où l’infime mène au grand et le grand à l’infime, où les conversations entre copines mènent aux problèmes les plus délicats de la pensée, une Torat Haïm. Un condensé de la vie réelle, un élixir.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Paley, Grace. Nouvelles:Les petits riens de la vie, Plus tard le même jour, Enorme changement de dernière minute. Trans Claude Richard, Sylvie Granotier et Catherine Texier. Paris: Rivages, 2009. Print.

Paley, Grace. C'est bien ce que je pensais. Trans. Suzanne Mayoux. Paris: Rivages, 1999. Print.

AUTEURS

GENEVIÈVE BRISAC A former student of the “Ecole Normale Supérieure,” an “agrégée” in French and a graduate in Philosophy, Geneviève Brisac is a renowned writer and literary critic. Her novels, which have been widely translated, include Petite (1994), Week-end de chasse à la mère (Prix Femina, 1996), Une année avec mon père (Prix des Editeurs, 2009), Dans les yeux des autres (2015). Geneviève Brisac is also the author of various book-length literary essays. She contributed to Le Monde des livres for several years and is now chief editor at “L’école des Loisirs.”

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“Loved, invented and endured”: Jogging along with Language in Grace Paley’s Short Stories

Sylvie Bauer

1 A rapid survey of the titles of Grace Paley’s short stories1 is both highly unsettling and uncannily familiar for they may well be illustrations of the “two ears” the author describes in her foreword to the Collected Stories: “two ears, one for literature, one for home, are useful for writers” (xiv). The “little disturbances” of everyday life stand out as what one of the ears is listening to; and some of Paley’s titles misleadingly encourage the reader to believe that he/she will be on familiar ground. Family life is conjured up in the mention of “pale pink roasts,” evocative of meals taken together, of “mothers,” “fathers,” “playgrounds,” “gardens” and “little girls.” Yet, the tokens of home life take on a somewhat tragic dimension, displaying loss rather than cohesion, rupture rather than harmony, estrangement more than anything else. The mother is dead (“Mother” 335-37), the father is dying (“A Conversation with my Father” 237-43), “the little girl” was raped and murdered, the “northeast playground” (228) hosts “eleven unwed mothers on relief, only four of [whom are] whores” (228), and the “pale pink roast” (27) refers to the cannibalistic relationships between men and women. As for the garden (“In the Garden” 293-96), it is a place for grieving the absence of two abducted little girls, evocative of the paralysis of a world that cannot be changed, ruled as it is by greed, disease and misplaced hope. Other titles seem to draw the reader toward the other “ear,” sometimes because they openly evoke other texts. “The Long-Distance Runner” (242-68), for example, brings to mind Alan Sillitoe’s 1959 story, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” both in its truncated title which highlights the character’s loneliness, and in the central image. Sometimes, they just hint at the very stuff literature is made of, as suggested by the recurrence of the term “story” in the table of contents.2 On the whole, the self-reflexive gesture of the titles and the metafictional hints tend to leave the reader off-balance, unsure as he/she is of the direct connection between these titles and the stories themselves.

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2 This being said, one cannot but acknowledge the artificiality of this attempt at identifying the “two ears” Paley mentions, first because they mingle into one single flow of voices, whether attributable to a specific character or not. But above all because the coexistence of apparently simple titles—just a word or a noun clause—and overtly more elaborate ones—whole sentences—gives the deceptive impression that the table of contents is in a way expository, a promise of the unfolding of what the titles announce. It is almost as though the reader were offered a sort of encyclopaedia of life turned into literature, the encyclopaedic aspect stemming from the use of deictics —“The Pale Pink Roast” (27-34), “The Loudest Voice” (35-41), “The Contest” (42-51), to give but a few examples. The literary ear is sollicited by the attention to words, which are singled out in the titles and thus become matter to be shaped by Paley’s art. For indeed, what those titles leave the reader with is a sense that language is what the stories are really about, a language both highly and oddly familiar. The sense of familiarity is not only conveyed by words that evoke the concerns that are part of everyday life: debts, wants, politics, friends, but also and mainly by the unusual way intimacy crops up. “Samuel” (199-202), “Lavinia: An Old Story” (307-11), “Ruthy and Edie” (337-45), “Zagrowsky Tells” (359-76) seem to open up glimpses at relationships with clearly designated protagonists: neighbors or relatives to whom, however, the reader is but elliptically introduced. In spite of the recurring characters (Faith, Mrs Raftery, Tonto, Richie) and the frequent first person narratives, the reader is left with a sense of watching things from the outside, of peeping at events from a distance, of intruding silently into a very noisy world from which he/she remains utterly alien though he/she may recognize some of its components.

3 Likewise, what keeps the reader at bay from an otherwise recognizable urban landscape is the impression of being led astray by certain words, as if their familiar meaning were being slightly shifted, slightly out of tune, as suggested for example by titles such as “Gloomy Tune,” whose homophonic closeness to “Looney Tunes” also known as “Looney Toons” clearly evokes the Warner Bros cartoons, a world of madness and glee at odds with the adjective “gloomy” chosen by Paley. In other words, what happens in the very titles of Paley’s stories is a circulation of meaning, a circulation akin to contamination in which words encapsulate a proliferation of sometimes contradictory meanings or, to put it differently, language is shown to be all but transparent, becoming, rather, a foreign tongue, as suggested by the title of yet another story: “In This Country, But in Another Language, My Aunt Refuses to Marry The Men Everyone Wants Her to” (357-58). This foreign language is not due so much to the fact that the stories are often sprinkled with foreign words as to the mixture between familiar words and the proliferation of meaning they create. The shifts, the misunderstandings, the loud voices preclude any form of understanding in the stories and emphasize instead the gap between words and the world. What prevails is a sense of rupture, as if the words were almost always parting words, as if the speakers and the listeners were always out of tune. Yet, language also appears as the only substance able to create “Dreamer[s] in a Dead Language” (273-92). So what seems to be at stake in Grace Paley’s stories is the issue of shaping reality through a language which escapes speakers and readers alike, yet which both sides engage in with obstinate relish.

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4 The first impression one gets when reading Paley’s stories is one of cacophony and restlessness despite the apparent continuity and stability suggested by the recurring characters. It seems as though the narrators’ quasi-monologues were attempts to grasp fleeting moments which, no sooner evoked, vanish into thin air. There are many time markers in Paley’s text, which are often easily recognizable as when the Vietnam War is mentioned3 or when Faith’s little boys become teenagers, then young adults in the course of the stories.4 Yet the fragmentary structure of the collection, and of the stories themselves, tends to disrupt all sense of temporal linearity. Or, to put it differently, the unfolding of time escapes the grasp of the protagonists, a little as when in Don DeLillo’s novel, The Body Artist, the narrative voice observes that “Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments [...]” (7). Paley’s various protagonists seem caught in a paradoxical stillness, left with their loss and unable to “understand how time passes” (“Wants” 133).

5 The incessant movement at work in the texts is but a sign, a symptom maybe, of the transience of life, and the many vignettes offered to the reader are but reminders and remainders of loss, summed up, perhaps, in what Dolly, the narrator of “Distance,” experiences: “Well, O.K. Farewell, certain years” (139). Similarly, in “The Pale Pink Roast,” Peter “[dresses] quickly because he [is] obligated by the stories of his life to remind [Anna] of transience” (33). The title of Paley’s first story, “Good Bye and Good Luck” (3-13), is emblematic of the movement of rupture and distance that characterizes her work. The fact that the collection opens on a gesture of farewell sets the tone, all the more so since the story itself covers the span of an adult’s lifetime, the narrator, Rosie, addressing her niece, Lillie, and telling her about all her “lonesome years” (9), until right “before the end of the story” (13). The words “goodbye, good luck” punctuate the story, giving it a tempo and constituting its backbone. Rosie keeps leaving—her job, her mother, her lover, her niece—which results in a loneliness nonetheless countered by the fact that each parting is also a new beginning.

6 Words evoking separation abound in the stories, always linked with the sense of irretrievable moments whose very truthfulness is at times doubtful. Men, for example, keep disappearing, “[...] all of them, all, all, all, each single one of them is gone, far away in heart and body,” states the Grandma in “A Woman, Young and Old” (17). They are, just like the children, “going, going, gone” (“The Pale Pink Roast” 30). This statement, pronounced by Peter, Anna’s former husband, almost in the form of a nursery rhyme, encapsulates much of what the collection is about. The variations on the verb go figure both restlessness and inexorability, the gerund evoking urgency as well as movement, a mixture of comedy (or even cartoonish onomatopoeia) and tragedy. The past participle leaves the reader with nothing but a trace: what is gone is present only in the word that conveys its former presence, and which has become the mark of its very absence. Only the word remains, as the result of the process of “going” whose transformation into a state of fact reveals nothing but absence. All the protagonists—especially the women—are left with “mouth-watering memories of another more gourmet time” (16), with a language that tries to recapture those memories, or at least to revive them. It is no easy task and the multiplication of stories told by the different narrative voices creates a patchwork whose pieces may connect or not, as suggested by the recurring protagonists. Several texts tell the same story from different points of view: Ginny’s (“Goodbye and Good Luck”) and Mrs Raftery’s (“Faith in a Tree”), for example. Far from reconstructing the past, which is what the narrators

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and the characters in most stories long for, the very proliferation of bits and pieces of life creates a blurry effect and highlights the characters’ lack of control over their own lives. More than anything else, the stories underline the inexorable passing of time, the idea that “change is a fact of God” (“Goodbye and Good Luck” 3), an almighty force men and women cannot master. While trying to re-connect with their lives through the process of memory, the characters fail to create links, as exemplified by the lack of communication and the antagonistic relationships to be found everywhere: children’s games turn into violent fights in “A Subject of Childhood” (91-99); most of the texts are, to use Rosie’s words, “deafening” (“Good Bye and Good Luck” 5) and, as a consequence, the characters “never listen to anyone else’s ideas” (“Gloomy Tune” 165).

7 “Wants” displays the chance encounter of a woman and her former husband and the gap between their respective remembrances of things past. The two aspects mentioned earlier—the passing of time and the inability to connect—converge in this text. The two characters’ encounter outside the library results in a somewhat absurd text, structured, so to speak, by ellipses and loose connections. As often in Paley’s texts, what first strikes the reader is the mixture of past and present through a double process of compression and acceleration of time. The woman, who is also the narrator, “[does not] understand how time passes” (133): she is bringing back to the library books she has owed for eighteen years; she “[has] once been married for twenty-seven years” (133) and she “[sees] that the little sycamores the city had dreamily planted a couple of years before the kids were born [have] come that day to the prime of their lives” (135). Here the passing of time is made visible, but it all happens as in a dream (“dreamily”), as if the narrator/protagonist were but the sleepy witness of a process totally beyond her control. The result is a paradoxical timelessness in which years and seconds are one and the same, and time seems to be compressed in the evocation of the couple’s memories—just as Cindy, the character in “An Irrevocable Diameter” (69-83) is described as compressing youth and old age: “All the exaggerated bones of childhood and old age were bedded down in a cozy consistency of girl” (71). Here, as in “Wants,” past and future are condensed in an impossible “consistency” which bears no recognizable substance or shape.

8 In “Wants,” the result of this blurring of past and present leads to exaggeration and aberration. Indeed, while the husband attributes the dissolution of their marriage to a mere detail (to his wife’s not inviting the Bertrams to dinner), his wife’s answer spans their whole life together: “That’s possible, I said. But really, if you remember: first, my father was sick that Friday, then the children were born, then I had those Tuesday night meetings, then the war began. Then we didn’t seem to know them anymore. But you’re right, I should have had them to dinner” (133). Far from reconstructing any causality or chronology, the succession of family and social events the woman evokes, merely points to specific moments (“that Friday,” “ the war,” “ those Tuesday-night meetings”) which, though they constitute the very texture of her life, fail to weave into any coherent pattern. Again, the use of deictics, while referring to identifiable and singularized occasions, also points to a gap between the narrator and what she recalls. As Faith observes in the second of the “Two Short Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life,” what prevails is a sense of being “discontinued” (96), which creates a distance akin to that perceptible between the characters. This discontinuity is foregrounded from the outset by the narrator’s words: “I saw my ex-husband in the street” (133, emphasis mine). The prefix “ex” crosses out, so to speak, the relationship between the man and the woman, and functions as a trace of what was and no longer is. In other

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words “ex” acts like an ax which figures, literally, on the page, what separates them. In most of Paley’s stories in fact, the characters, whatever their degree of intimacy, remain strangers to one another or are bound to become strangers, as suggested by the last lines of “An Irrevocable Diameter” in which, the moment he marries Cindy, Charley declares: “She will be a marvelous woman in six or seven years. I wish her luck; by then we will be strangers” (83). Parting words again. In a way, the two stories seem to echo each other, as if “Wants” depicted the outcome of “An Irrevocable Diameter,” the diameter placing the characters on the same plane or surface but as far as possible from one another with no chance of ever getting together again. Hence the unbridgeable gap between them and their speaking out of sync, the husband taking the words of his wife at face value, unable as he is to understand her. On their meeting, she greets him as follows: “Hello, my life.” He replies: “What? What life? No life of mine” (133). The liminary “what?” acts like a disturbance in the man’s life, as if he were troubled by the mere sound of his former wife’s voice, unsure of what he has heard. Just as his “wants” focus on material belongings (“I wanted a sailboat, he said” [134]), his choice of the word “life” betrays his literal use of language. Likewise his question —“What life?”—by replacing a personal pronoun with an impersonal interrogative pronoun, cancels out all remembrance of their life in common. The man’s language is frozen in a deadly correspondence between words and reality, while the woman’s use of words (“Hello my life”) is inclusive, all-embracing, at odds with the sense of negation provided by the man’s statement. The word takes on another dimension and widens perspectives not only because it introduces a sense of connection, but also because it mixes different possible meanings into a single word, thereby asserting her own sense of identity and memory, and echoing the statement made by the female narrator of “A Conversation with My Father”: “everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life” (237).

9 It is through words that the dreaming quality of the stories is achieved, and that the “open destiny of life” comes into being. What the confrontation between the two characters in “Wants” reveals is a sense of the circulation of words which stems from the intermingling of voices in the stories, from the interweaving of past and present, of here and then, as if talking were a driving force in a universe otherwise dominated by death. Even though “talk is cheap” (9) and “every day [is] noisy and full of experience” (38), there is talking going on, words filling the scriptural and sonorous space. While Shirley’s booming voice (“The Loudest Voice” 35-41) is at first perceived as a nuisance in the neighborhood, it is nevertheless the very expression of her identity and what prompts life within and around her: “In the grave it will be quiet!” (36), retorts her father to whoever dares to complain. Dizzying as it is, her voice singles her out as a unique speaking subject, unlike the undifferentiated crowd of those willing to hush her: “In that place the whole street groans: Be quiet! Be quiet! But steals from the happy chorus of my inside self not a title or a jot” (35). Her “inside self” is protected from the outside because her voice opposes articulate language to the mere sound of these hostile “groans.” In this case, however, articulate does not necessarily mean constructed speech, correct syntax and organized thought. What matters more is the “happy chorus” “reaching strictly for the sound barrier” (“A Woman, Young and Old” 15) toward pure language. Capable as she is to shift from trivial matters (“Campbell’s

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Tomato Soup, Campbell’s Vegetable Beef Soup, Campbell S-c-oth Broth” [35]), to fervent prayers or to her role in a Christmas play, the little girl seems to epitomize all the voices in the collection, as well as all the voices that make the world a fertile, boundless place for life, thus ensuring the free circulation of language and meaning, and reaching asymptotically if not toward the truth, at least toward the stuff the real is made of.

10 Language circulates in the stories because of its very nature, as ineffable movement. Just as Faith, in “The Long-Distance Runner” (248-68), runs around her old neighborhood, carrying with her the ghosts of the past, yet bringing together different worlds (her family, the new tenants of her childhood neighborhood, other joggers), all the voices in Paley’s stories converge to build up collective memory. In that sense, Paley humorously points to the sacred nature of language. In “At That Time, or The History of a Joke” (an ironic variation on the birth of Christ as related in the New Testament) “certain Jews who had observed and suffered the consequence of other virgin births” (327) wander “from town to town in order to say the most ordinary thing to a friend or a relative” (327), thus carrying the word: In their gossipy communications, they whispered the hidden or omitted fact (which some folks had hardly noticed): The Child WAS A Girl, and since word of mouth is sound made in the echo of God (in the beginning there was the Word and it was without form but wide), ear to mouth and mouth to ear it soon became the people’s knowledge, outwitting the computerized devices to which most sensible people had not said a private word for decades anyway. (327)

11 The impersonal nature of “their gossipy communications” conveys much more meaning than the no less impersonal “computerized devices,” designating the media and their “giant screens.” Two forms of impersonality are opposed here, along with two forms of revelation. While the media advertise an event, perpetuating myth “on the back of technological advancement” (326), the power of the rumor de-constructs the reiteration of the Christian miracle (the “holy news”) spreading the detail of “the hidden or omitted fact” and undermining official discourse. A widening chain of meaning is drawn here, as suggested by the concomitant presence of the adjectives “hidden” and “omitted,” the first pointing to the fact that “the baby [is] a girl,” and the second, perhaps, to its being “black as the night which rests our day-worn eyes” (326). The difference between the screens and the indeterminate rumor is that between a one-dimensional surface inviting a single image and a multi-layered reality opening up space and meaning. Sound precludes representation in so far as it is “without form,” that is without a frame likely to make it recognizable and interpretable as a resurgence of old myths. As enacted in the long sentence itself, what takes place here is the word wandering: “word of mouth” becomes sound and circulates “ear to mouth and mouth to ear,” constructing knowledge which cannot do away with language. “In the beginning was the Word,” re-written here as “the word”—the loss of the capital letter underlining the materiality of language—translates into a renewal of the idea of incarnation. It is perhaps not so much to be perceived as the word of God made flesh as rather the expression of the corporeality of language whose truth is not imposed by a transcendent force—God or the screens—but originates in word of mouth transmission, in the bodies of the speakers and listeners.

12 In Paley’s stories indeed, language is first and foremost a bodily experience, capable of ensuring the sense of circulation inherent to the creation of meaning. Words are akin to air and body. They become flesh and are a physical experience more than an

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intellectual one. In “Dreamer in a Dead Language” (273-92), a poem read out by Faith’s lover, Philip, reminds her of the vital force of air and induces something akin to sexual ecstasy: “his voice [has] a timbre which [reminds] her of evening, maybe nighttime. She had often thought of the way wide air lives and moves in a man's chest. Then it’s strummed into shape by the short-stringed voice box to become a wonderful secondary sexual characteristic” (274). Senses mingle in the man’s voice and the ethereal quality of the air it carries becomes consistent, both substance—it “lives and moves” —and shape, the awkward association between “strummed” and “shape” adding to the materialization of words which become visible on the page when the poem is quoted in the following paragraph, each letter becoming a body shaped by Philip’s voice. The reader himself/herself is made to experience this bodily relation with language, the long sonorities of the description combining with alliterations in [s] to instil not only rhythm but also the sensation of air passing, a breathlessness that affects Faith’s lover as much as it affects her.

13 In a way, words partake of the characters’ vital functions, as shown by their constant need of telling. Thus Zagrowsky tells and views the act as indispensable. Again, telling is associated with breathing: “I have to tell the whole story. I’m not a person who keeps things in. Tell! That opens up the congestion a little—the lungs are for breathing, no secrets. My wife never tells, she coughs, coughs. All night. Wakes up. Ai, Iz, open up the window, there’s no air. You poor woman, if you want to breathe, you got to tell.” (366)

14 Once more, the very matter of words—sounds, letters—is made palpable in the text. The poetry of Paley’s stories stems both from this physicality of language and from its deliberate “defamiliarization.” Variations abound on the same words whose immediate meaning is transmuted into a bodily experience, “each word cut like a special jewel” (8). Words have therefore a special power, disconnected from their meaning, or, rather creative of meaning beyond the limits of syntax and semantics. In “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” (209-24), Dennis, one of the characters, states: “Any word is good, it’s the big word today. […] It’s what you do with the word. The language and the idea, they work it out together” (218). As a song-writer, he enjoys picking out words from the dictionary: “I just flipped the pages and jabbed and the word I hit was ophidious. But I did it, because the word does the dreaming for you. The word” (218). The autonomy of language is stressed here and what “ophidious” means is not as important as what it does. Some sentences would require mental contortions to make sense and yet, by doing the dreaming for the reader, they trigger imagination through weird associations or sounds.

15 All this sometimes infuses the text with a peculiar atmosphere as when, for example, a character kicks aside “disappointed acorns” (“The Pale Pink Roast” 27), imbuing lifeless objects with feelings and thus mixing ontological levels. Strange associations may crop up, contributing for example to the eeriness of such a story as “In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All,” in which little boys “[prick up] their ears in tears” (101). The alliterative pattern justifies the association between “ears” and “tears” and highlights the creative power of language, its capacity to conjure up impossibilities. In many instances “sound rushes ahead of sense,” to use William Gass’s words (43), thus contributing to “delinearize” language and do away with chronological patterns.

16 The complexity of thought and language is often suggested by the rambling syntax. In “The Floating Truth,” the narrator is reproached with thinking in long sentences:

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“‘Anyway, you ought to think in shorter sentences,’ he suggested, although I hadn’t said a word. Old Richard-the-Liver-Headed, he saw right through the heart of the matter, my syntax” (122). It is not so much the length of her sentences that matters as their meanderings, as if they were an echo of the narrator’s rejection of “the absolute line between two points which I have always despised” (“A Conversation with my Father” 237). What prevails instead is a sense of dissemination, the collision of sounds and words contributing to the creation of a complex reality through language. Descriptions, for example, are never “transparent,” as if to insist on the opacity of language, to draw attention to the words, arrest the reader’s gaze on them, and create effects of “derealization”: “His eyes were pale as the moon. They drove here and yon, hip-flasked, unwatered and unsodaed, uniced and defrosted, looped in one another’s consonants. Lack of communication made them appear to be lovers” (“The Floating Truth” 122). The incongruous comparison (eyes “pale as the moon”) and the coined adjectives concur in creating a moving, unseizable image in which opposites coexist. Likewise, the characters’ erratic driving “here and yon” epitomizes the absence of a straight line which would leave no place for the imagination. This sense of indirection, along with the co-presence of opposites, contributes to the arabesques of meaning and foregrounds the infinite power of a language no longer reduced to mere communication and representation.

17 Such effects of defamiliarization seem to echo Gilles Deleuze who, in reference to Proust, emphasizes how writing amounts to speaking in a foreign language. What this points to is not so much the use of foreign words, even if the stories are interspersed with words from various idioms: English, Yiddish, Russian, Spanish, French whose mixture sometimes results in puns and partakes of the cacophony mentioned earlier. The texts at times evoke a Tower of Babel, inhabited by people estranged from their own idiom and sharing no common tongue with others. As for the readers, “the English language they know by heart from the beginning” (“The Loudest Voice” 41) sometimes resembles a puzzle, inscribing linguistic disruption within itself, requiring constant attention to words and letters and even calling for translation. Thus in “The Contest” a newspaper title, written from right to left (as in Hebrew), functions as an inverted mirror: ! SNIW NAMRESSAW YTTOD SREWSNA EHT LLA SWONK LRIG NYLKOORB (48)

18 The implausible succession of letters points to the very mystery of language. The reader is encouraged to relinquish his/her reading habits, to experiment other modes of deciphering the text and discover a new tongue comprised within the English idiom. By inverting the letters, the text not only pays tribute to other forms of writing and reading but also participates in the creation of what the narrator of “A Woman, Young and Old” calls “our derivative mother tongue” (17). A tongue, which for all the misunderstandings it bears, also carries a universal value since it is imbued with all the different idioms that compose it: “[...] I do like this language—wheat and chaff—with its widening pool of foreign genes, and since I have never had any occasion to say ‘comestible,’ it was a pleasure to think it” (349), declares the narrator of “The Story Hearer” upon reflecting on her use of the noun “comestibles” (349). The term “derivative” also signals the capacity of words to deviate from their standard meaning through circulation, contamination and misuse. The “widening pool of foreign genes” might therefore be what characterizes language and its expanding meaning.

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19 The meaning thus created here is neither given nor linear since, just as the black baby girl undermines founding myths (“At That Time, or the Story of a Joke” 326-28), “a few hot human truthful words are powerful enough […] to steam all God’s chemical mistakes and society’s lies out of […] life” (“Friends” 313). The succession of adjectives, with no commas between them, echoes the “widening pool,” conferring to language the capacity to create, invent and become reality, or at least “to fool time and distance” (“Friends” 317). It is therefore through language that knowledge exists, knowledge based more on words than on facts: facts are always questioned, debated, since they depend on voices and viewpoints and vary from one story to another. Words vary too and perhaps this is where knowledge lies, in the fluctuations of a labile language able to “keep people alive for years after death has set in” (“Friends” 216) or to create characters: “The woman lives across the street. She’s my knowledge and my invention,” says the story-teller in “A Conversation with my Father” (242).

20 Language is therefore also a way to try to grasp time when it escapes the protagonists, subjected as they are to the inevitability of decay and death. Again, it seems as though telling and writing stories would allow both to acknowledge time and to keep it at bay, by “[writing] the beautiful letters of the alphabet invented by smart foreigners to fool time and distance” (317). The “long-distance runner,” by running and remembering life in her childhood neighborhood, by superimposing her past and her present, and by mixing with the new tenants, acts in a way like the “beautiful letters of the alphabet”. These challenge time because they allow the construction of an individual and collective memory made of words which, though coming from “a widening pool of genes,” unite despite the sense of disconnection. It is also what allows the emergence of a speaking subject, a linguistic one, inventing or being part of a story, being inscribed in the endless flow of words that make up those talkative texts: “It’s all stories. It’s where we come from, who we are” (340), the only way, perhaps, to start finding an answer to the question asked several times in the stories: “After all, who am I?” (“Goodbye and Good Luck” 9).

21 Grace Paley’s short fiction may be read as a meditation on the powers of language and story-telling. Not much happens in those stories, or, more accurately, everything happens. No plot is to be found because each story is about life, and life is depicted as anything but “plot, the absolute line between two points” (“A Conversation with my Father” 237). From that perspective, a plot announces an end, contains it within itself. In Paley’s stories, on the contrary, it seems as though finality and death were paradoxically kept at a distance, the need for telling and writing participating in a celebration of life. Writing is presented as necessary “in order to save a few lives” (136), to ward off sickness and even to conjure up the dead, “[gliding] to solid invented figures from true remembered wraiths” (“Love” 271). Rather than signs of an end, it seems as though the parting words scattered throughout Paley’s stories were the driving force of voices which neither absence nor death can hush, voices and written words that manage to transform the trivialities and tragedies of life into poetic moments of love.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1996. Print.

DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist. London: Picador, 2001. Print.

Gass, William. Finding a Form: Essays by William Gass. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Print.

Paley, Grace. The Collected Stories. London: Virago Press, 1999. Print.

NOTES

1. “Loved, invented and endured” is a quote from “The Long-Distance Runner” (249). 2. See for instance “Two Short Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life” (84-92), “The Immigrant Story (244-47), “At that Time or the History of a Joke” (326-28), “An Old Man Told me the Story of his Life” (346-47), “The Story-Hearer” (348-56), “This is a Story about my Friend George, the Toy Inventor” (357-58). 3. See for example “Wants” (133-35) 4. “Faith in a Tree” (179-98); “The Long-Distance Runner” (248-65).

ABSTRACTS

Les nouvelles de Grace Paley, tout en s’inscrivant dans l’univers familier d’un quotidien reconnaissable, créent d’emblée un sentiment de déséquilibre, provoqué par l’autonomie et le foisonnement d’une langue qui refuse tout sens figé. Tout se passe comme si les mots, loin de construire un contexte rassurant parce que partagé, devenaient tout aussi étrangers qu’ils sont familiers, tant les effets de prolifération et de contamination mettent à mal tout sens unique et tiennent à distance toute forme de compréhension. Si l’écart entre le monde et les mots se fait visible dans ces nouvelles, la langue reste pourtant la seule substance tangible et capable de forger le monde.

AUTHORS

SYLVIE BAUER Sylvie Bauer is Professor of American Literature at the University of Rennes 2. She has written extensively on contemporary American literature (Percival Everett, Grace Paley, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Walter Abish, Colson Whitehead, Steve Tomasula...) and is the author of a monograph on Walter Abish (Walter Abish, l’arpenteur du langage, Belin, 2003). She is currently working on a book-length essay on the novels of Percival Everett.

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Being Jewish: Bonds and Boundaries in Grace Paley’s “The Loudest Voice” and Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews”

Ada Savin

1 It takes some audacity to write an essay on Grace Paley and Philip Roth, two writers with vastly different sensibilities and writing strategies. Roth is the masculine writer par excellence whose work leaves little room for the feminine. Paley, on the other hand, is Roth’s strong female counterpoint, as her short stories espouse a quintessentially feminine, at times feminist, perspective.1 And yet, some of their early writings show forth similar preoccupations: being Jewish in America, adjusting vs. rebelling within and without one’s community. Whether it is the “cosmic comedy” (Brody) of Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” or the re-creation of the Nativity by Jewish children in “The Loudest Voice,” the two short stories treat religious matters on a playfully serious tone.2 Moreover, the bouncy voices and the budding themes in both short stories signal, in hindsight, the thematic and formal concerns that characterize Paley and Roth’s later works.

2 A steady admirer of Paley’s work, Philip Roth was one of her first reviewers. “Splendidly comic and unladylike” says the blurb he signed on the cover of The Little Disturbances of Man. Roth alluded to his kinship with Paley’s “bouncy style” (Reading Myself and Others 120),3 to her reliance on spoken language, her ear for accents and turns of phrase as well as her “attempt to incorporate into American literary prose the rhythms, nuances and emphases of urban and immigrant speech…” (RMAO 120). He refers to Paley as a “genuine writer of prose, writing in a language of new and rich emotional subtleties, with a kind of back-handed charm and irony all its own” (RMAO 120). He ascribes the particular “illusion of intimacy and spontaneity [in her stories] to her inventing a whole new idea of what ‘being yourself’ sounds and looks like” (RMAO 197). In an interview published shortly after Paley’s death, Roth, interestingly, singled out “The Loudest Voice”:

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There’s the story of hers called “The Loudest Voice,” I think, about the kid in school who gets the part of playing Mary [she plays Jesus, in fact!] in the Christmas pageant, this little Jewish kid, because she has the loudest voice, and she did have a distinctive literary voice, a certain kind of breezy lyricism and a streetwise charm that was very appealing. (Interview Nissley)

3 As far as we know, Grace Paley did not make any public comment on Good-bye Columbus but she did remember her New School teacher advising her “to get off that Jewish dime in her short stories” to which Paley added: “The idiocy of that remark was that he was telling me this just as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth were getting more famous every day” (Paley, Interview Lidoff).

4 “The Loudest Voice” and “The Conversion of the Jews” open in medias res, with an abrupt, loud voice (one can almost hear the exhaled breath)–apt incipits since both stories are concerned with Creation, with myths of origin, with the Word. More or less naively, Ozzie and Shirley, the two “loudmouth” Jewish protagonists question the meaning of Jewishness by raising essential, hence embarrassing questions. This being said, the two stories differ vastly in their thematic argument and formal treatment. Occasional comparisons notwithstanding, I will discuss them separately and bring them together in my concluding remarks.

A Talk-Story

There’s an old joke: A Jewish boy comes home from school and tells his mother he’s been given a role in the school play. “Wonderful. What part is it?” The boy says, “I play the Jewish husband.” The mother scowls and says, “Go back and tell the teacher you want a speaking part.”

5 “The Loudest Voice” contains the first stitches of the large tapestry of voices that make up Paley’s oeuvre, “a human comedy of New York’s boroughs spoken in the local idioms by immigrant parents and their newly minted American children” (Dekoven Ezrahi 144). A sepia-toned story of many voices, past and present, individual and collective, couched in Paley’s terse poetic language, the short story captures the Jewish families’ mixed feelings about the casting of their children in the main roles of a Christian celebration (the “tra-la-la for Christmas” [58]). Owing to her particularly loud voice (“lots of stamina” [56]), Shirley Abramovitz, one of these kids, has earned the honor of playing the “remembering tongue” of the boy playing the part of Jesus. Understandably, the project gives rise to impassioned discussions within the (mostly Jewish) neighborhood as well as in Shirley’s family. My father couldn’t think of what to say to that. Then he decided: “You’re in America! In Palestine the Arabs would be eating you alive. Europe you had pogroms. Argentina is full of Indians. Here you got Christmas... Some joke, ha?” “Very funny, Misha. What is becoming of you? If we came to a new country a long time ago to run away from tyrants and instead we fall into a creeping pogrom, that our children learn a lot of lies, so what’s the joke.” (58)

6 As the story unfolds and voices emerge in counterpoint—as if by free association—the young girl, both protagonist and narrator, clearly appears as the conductor of this reconstituted orchestra made up of quasi greenhorn Russian-Jewish immigrants. Her memories, intertwined with the characters’ vivacious exchanges, at times interrupted by silence, provide the canvas for this nostalgic piece which also pays homage to her

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departed parents (“my mama, may she rest in peace” [58]; “I thank you papa for your kindness” [59]). Shirley’s private, solitary ruminations are externalized as a running series of remarks or wisecracks, which create “a superstructure of dialogue that the narrator maintains with the reader” (Perry 191).

7 Structurally, the whole story is framed between the “loud voices” and the noises of the incipit (“There is a certain place where dumb-waiters boom, doors slam, dishes crash” [55]) and Shirley’s repeated calls to silence (“ssh” [63]) in the closing lines. Ultimately, it is she, “the loudest voice” who admonishes her parents to quiet down. Somewhat at a loss after having diligently delivered her awkward role, the girl needs silence to regain her self which she seems to achieve by praying an all-inclusive “Hear, O Israel,” with her hands made into a little church (63). The narrative ends on a quasi-ecumenical note: “I was happy. I fell asleep at once. I had prayed for everybody: my talking family, cousins far away, passers-by and all the lonesome Christians. I expected to be heard. My voice was certainly the loudest” (63). Ironic reversals mark the appropriation of the Christian holiday by the numerous Jewish inhabitants of the neighborhood: the plight is in fact that of the “lonesome Christians” who “got very small parts or no part at all” in the pageant (62).4

8 Thematically, the story is concerned with the Jewish-American community experience, its interaction with the Christian Americans and its tentative acculturation: dialectics of sameness and difference are at play. This transplanted Eastern European Jewish community whose members feel American to various degrees, lives side by side with its Christian neighbors. In a few pages, Paley brings to life memorable cameos of children and adults, Christians and Jews. A day in the life of a motley, mixed community is brought to life: the Abramowitzes, other Jewish families, other children, the grocer; Mr Hilton, the Christian schoolmaster; the aptly named Miss Glacé, a student teacher. The mock-confrontational tone is tainted with discrete nostalgia while the reader becomes a virtual spectator of an unforgettable episode from Shirley’s childhood.

9 For the Abramowitz family, their daughter’s participation in the Christmas pageant is a means of sharing America’s “rites of assent”5 rather than a betrayal of Judaism. Consonant with both Jewish and American messianism as a deferred promise, a work in progress, the model of reconciliation suggested in “The Loudest Voice” has informed many other literary works addressing religious amalgamations.6 In Paley’s story it is embodied by Shirley’s father. His down-to-earth, no-nonsense attitude toward life, religion and human nature, betrays centuries of galut7 experience. His skepticism notwithstanding, the father entertains high hopes for his daughter. He is the one who encourages Shirley to “go for it,” to make use of the chameleonic gift Jews supposedly possess—that of “passing,” of impersonating the other (be it Jesus, a Jew himself, after all!).

10 Shirley is not her own self during her performance backstage—she has merely “lent” her voice with its pitch and volume, for the duration of the show. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (62)8 is the only line rendered verbatim, perhaps because it is the only which she, as a Jewish kid, can identify with. Her loud voice, however, has proved capable of transcending cultural and social boundaries and of reconciling supposedly antagonistic religions. Replete with pungent humor and subdued nostalgia, this episode of intercommunity divergence ends up in silent convergence. As Hana Wirth-Nesher points out, “Paley writes from a universalist concept of America that humorously ridicules Shirley for her naive yoking of Jewish and Christian religious

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practice but simultaneously applauds her spirit of accommodation” (219-20). The narrator’s “loud voice,” at once subversive, ironic, poetic and nostalgic encapsulates the unmistakable voice of the author, audible and discernible since the beginning of her career.

In the Beginning Was a Voice

11 Even though Paley’s narrative voices and themes grow more diverse in her subsequent short stories, the unique voice audible in “The Loudest Voice”—one that would render her prose forever recognizable9—as well as her deceptively simple, transparent style, make this short story possibly the best entrance into the author’s liminal fictional universe, poised between the Old World and the New, between the old language— Yiddish—and the new one, American English.

12 Paley’s Weltanschauung, her bittersweet humor, her idealism and her Yiddish-English all draw their roots from the old Eastern European shtetl of her kin. Bonnie Lyons has convincingly argued that Jewishness is central to Paley’s work: “tracing its role will enable the reader to see hidden patterns in the carpet” (30). Some of the patterns in Paley’s motley carpet betray the influence of Anzia Yezierska, the Jewish-American writer of Russian origin whose writings are set in New York’s Lower East Side, at the beginning of the 20th century. Most strikingly, Sara Smolinski the tough protagonist of Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers: A Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New (1925) eerily anticipates Shirley Abramowitz’s determined character and stamina down to her “loud voice.” Sara has to fight her way out of her Orthodox Jewish home, dominated by “a father of the Old World,” so as to be accepted by the New World. And it is precisely her “loud voice” that will carry her through, from her childhood years of peddling and house chores all the way to college: “My voice was like dynamite. Louder than all the pushcart peddlers, louder than all the hollering noises of bargaining and selling. I cried out my herring with all the burning fire of my ten old years” (21).

13 A generation removed from Yezierska’s representation of the Lower East Side, Paley’s “Jewish miniatures” (Lyons 26) portray the everyday life of dos kleine menschele,10 the idealism of first generation immigrants, their impassioned kitchen table political discussions—undoubtedly reminiscences from her own childhood woven into a “fictional carpet” (Lyons). Identity markers point to the Jewish origin of the main characters: the names are (still) unchanged (Abramowitz, Kornbluh); their English accents and peculiar syntax retain an unmistakable Jewish immigrant flavor (“Active? Active has to have a reason” [57]); homeland onomatopoeia (Nu! Ach! Oi, oi, oi”) punctuate their dialogues and their wry humored jokes (“lemon will sweeten your disposition” [62]).

14 Though Paley’s American Jews have evolved toward assimilation and appropriation of new ways, their language is still imbued with a Jewish-American cadence and tone. The author, who often admitted that she writes “with an accent” (Interview Lidoff 5), forges a new, unique idiom out of diverse linguistic sources: her American English is shot through with Yiddish, a transnational hybrid language and therefore not associated with a permanent homeland, and to a lesser extent, Hebrew, the ancestral, unifying component of Judaic civilization.11 The very rhythms of her prose and the oft-inverted

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syntax betray the presence of the old tongue without reproducing it on the printed page: “Ach,” explained my mother [...] after all why should they [the Christian kids who had only small parts in the pageant] holler? The English language they know from the beginning by heart. They’re blond like angels. You think it’s so important they should get in the play? Christmas ... the whole piece of goods ... they own it.” (62-63)

15 Paley’s genius is to evoke the phenomenological qualities of the oral by means of the written, often through deliberate grammatical irregularities that foreground the differences between written and speech standards. The Yiddish influence is felt on every verbal level; it is a matter of word choice, grammar, and a whole style of ironic phrasing. Sometimes it is not only a matter of English spoken with a Yiddish-knowing tongue; it has to do with metaphors ironically derived from Jewish life (a Christmas tree in a Jewish neighborhood is viewed as “a stranger in Egypt” [60]). Thus Paley’s style and themes form a new ethnic voice that slips comfortably into pluralistic, multicultural America.

16 Sometimes the author makes voice the very topic of her stories—perhaps because talking, remembering stories, be they from one’s childhood or from the Old Testament, are part and parcel of the Jewish mode of survival. As Mr. Darwin reminds his American-born daughter in “Faith in the Afternoon”: “To a Jew the word ‘shut up’ is a terrible expression, a dirty word, like a sin, because in the beginning, if I remember correctly, was the word!” (Enormous Changes 41). In a sense, Paley’ stories are a never- ending conversation12 which the author interrupts, almost haphazardly, only to take it up again, changing the setting, sometimes the characters. Many of Paley’s stories start with talk or intimate dialogue, so much so that even everyday objects can become interlocutors in her talkative universe. Indeed, in the often-quoted opening lines of “The Loudest Voice,” the aural/oral worlds are filled with noisy sounds, and mind and matter collapse: “There is a certain place where dumbwaiters boom, doors slam, dishes crash; every window is a mother’s mouth bidding the street shut up, go skate somewhere else, come home” (55). In Paley’s universe, talk is vitality, life itself: “In the grave it will be quiet,” claim Shirley and her father (55). This side of the grave, in America to boot, one is better off speaking up, be it playing the part of Jesus during a Christmas celebration. In many respects Shirley’s attitude in Paley’s story matches Ozzie’s performance on the roof of the synagogue in Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews.”

“The Conversion of the Jews” or Revising Jewish Lore

17 Compared to Paley’s story, the cast of characters in Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” is minimal: the confrontation is basically triangular, involving Ozzie, a thirteen-year- old Jewish boy, his mother and Binder, a counter-father figure, a caricature of a rabbi. Significantly, Ozzie’s father is absent from the story, which makes him possibly Roth’s first literary “ghost.” The predicament of the character, the antagonistic counter- posture marking the starting point of Roth’s every single work are already present in “The Conversion of the Jews, a short story with profound and lasting resonance, as Nathan Englander confesses.13 In novel after novel, from Portnoy’s Complaint to Sabbath’s Theater, the characters’ multiple identities are the writer’s way of questioning, on a dialectic mode, national, political or religious allegiances.

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18 Roth’s very first published short story14 "Her successes are intermittent, unpredictable, often unshapely and without wholeness; there is no progression of revelation, the stories do not build one upon another, they do not—as is abundantly clear in this new collection—create an emotional unity. On the other hand: Paley when she is good is so good that she is worth ninety-nine ‘even’ writers, and when one hears that unmistakable Paley voice one feels what can be felt only in the presence of a true writprovides an appropriate entrance into the writer’s elaborate fictional examinations of the Jewish Self. “The Conversion of the Jews” stages a quasi-Talmudic argument between Ozzie and his two authorities: Rabbi Binder and his mother. An unmitigated rebel, the boy challenges the Rabbi to admit that God, in his almightiness, was surely capable of bringing a child into the world “without intercourse.” Fleeing the Rabbi’s wrath, Ozzie ends up on the roof of the synagogue and preaches tolerance to his “subjects”: the Rabbi, his mother and the other children.

19 An adamant, unstoppable calling into question of imparted, taken-for-granted “truths,” coupled with the unabashed will to open his mouth and speak up are ingrained in Ozzie Freedman’s character. In the opening lines, the narrator eavesdrops on Ozzie and Izzie’s animated exchange, replete with slang, onomatopoeia and indications of body language: “You’re a real one for opening your mouth in the first place,” Itzie said. “What do you open your mouth all the time for?” “I didn’t bring it up, Itz, I didn’t,” Ozzie said. “What do you care about Jesus Christ for anyway?” “I didn’t bring up Jesus Christ. He did. I didn’t even know what he was talking about.” (127)

20 The kids mingle “theologizing,” sex (“he said intercourse?!!!” [128]) and brash questioning of the rabbi’s version of the Nativity. The dialogue between the two boys shows a marked kinship with the spontaneous, impromptu exchanges that pervade Paley’s short stories. Over the course of the story, the narrator turns into a side observer of the standoff between Ozzie Freedman and Rabbi Binder and he ultimately embraces the entire scene of the “conversion,” as if in a wide traveling movement of the camera: “By the time Mrs Freedman arrived to keep her four-thirty appointment with Rabbi Binder, the whole little upside down heaven was shouting and pleading for Ozzie to jump, and Rabbi Binder no longer was pleading with him not to jump, but was crying into the dome of his hands” (140). The provocative title notwithstanding, the short story does not stage a conversion per se but rather an individual’s rebellion from within the fold against the dogmatic Judaism embodied by the Rabbi.15 There are many ways of being Jewish, Ozzie intuits, and he knows the path that he does not want to follow, the one that leads to intolerance, tyranny of thought, imposition. Behind Ozzie’s spectacular gesture one detects an early manifestation of Roth’s adamant stance against any form of submission or silent acceptance.16

21 Ozzie’s questions target crucial issues such as the paradox inherent in the secular vs. sacred vision (Ozzie wonders “how Rabbi Binder could call the Jews ‘The Chosen People’ if the Declaration of Independence claimed all men to be created equal?” [129]); the Jews’ paranoiac singling out of Jewish victims goes against his common sense (his mother counts the Jewish casualties after a plane crash). But the question that slices at the heart of Judaic beliefs and values is the one Ozzie repeats doggedly: “if He could make all this in six days…why couldn’t He let a woman have a baby without having intercourse?” (128). With infallible logic the boy points to the hollowness of Rabbi

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Binder’s teaching, to his incapacity to engage in a dialogue, let alone sustain it. Ironically, Ozzie legitimizes the Christian version of the nativity by resorting to the Jews’ almighty God. His “outrageous” question has ostensibly nothing to do with Judaism or Jewishness per se. It is in Binder’s (and Ozzie’s mother’s) reaction that it takes on its humor and putative relevance to Jewish identity. In a Manichean struggle of sorts, Ozzie, the free spirit, literally brings to his knees a tyrannical rabbi (Binder). At this point the story turns into a fable of good vs. bad, freedom vs. coercion (as shown by the allegorical names: Freedman vs. Binder). Having been hit in the face by his mother and by Rabbi Binder, Ozzie’s final address to the entire “congregation” gathered at his feet, including his mother, is understandably a plea for tolerance: “Promise me, promise, you’ll never hit anybody about God” (145). “The Conversion of the Jews” culminates in a pyramidal structure with Ozzie “preaching” down to the “converted” Jews who in their turn ask themselves who they are, who they have become: “Rabbi Binder was on his knees, trembling. If there was a question to be asked now it was not ‘Is it me?’ but rather ‘Is it us?...Is it us?’” (142).

22 There is a magical, surreal quality to Ozzie’s defiant act (Ozzie, the wizard!); an Icarus of sorts, the Jewish boy who confronts his authorities, vents his rage and ultimately has his say.17 “The Conversion of the Jews” reveals a “budding concern with the binding ideas of religious exclusiveness” (RMAO 8) even as it is beckoning toward other possible ways of being Jewish which Roth would explore extensively in his subsequent writings.

The Rebel on the Roof

23 The story reaches its climax as Ozzie, on top of the roof, experiences a moment of existential doubt: Louder and louder the question came to him—“Is it me? Is it me?”—until he discovered himself no longer kneeling, but racing crazily towards the edge of the roof, his eyes crying, his throat screaming, and his arms flying everywhichway as though not his own. “Is it me? Is it me, ME…ME…ME…ME! It has to be me—but is it!’ (135)

24 The print from “me” in small letters to ME, from question mark to exclamation mark— suggests the apparent dissolution of his body, of his entire self, his incapacity to fathom the extent of his act, the impact of his daring words: the Rothian “counter” posture voiced in the nervously insistent voice is already there, boldly testing the forbidden. “Is it me?” also suggests his possibly impersonating a messianic identity: “Ozzie is not wondering if he is Ozzie, if what he is doing coincides with the identity of Ozzie Freedman as he has known it; he is wondering ‘Is it me?’ while thinking messianically, wondering if the identity of Ozzie Freedman coincides with messianic identity. He is asking, ‘Am I the Messiah?’ (Steed 152).18 Arguably, Ozzie’s frantic question, repeated several times—Is it ME?—lies at the origin of Roth’s various impersonating selves, of the multiple, contradictory identities encapsulated in the epigraph to Operation Shylock: A Confession, which is a quote from Kierkegaard: “the whole content of my being shrieks in contradiction against itself.”

25 Humor, farce and the tragic come together in this climactic episode: even as Ozzie is enjoined by his mother not to “be a martyr,” the kids take up the unknown word as “Be a Martin, be a Martin” (155). Their chant becomes a kind of mantra, much like the prayers mumbled by the janitor, old Yakov Blotnik. Jumping into the firemen’s net,

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Ozzie reenters a world of moral ambiguity—the well-spring of his future reincarnations —, Alexander Portnoy, David Kepesh, and others. In The Counterlife, Ozzie has reached his ultimate “reincarnation” as Nathan Zuckerman, “a Jew among Gentiles and a Gentile among Jews” (370). He is “a Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple” (370).

Concluding Remarks

26 “The Loudest Voice” and “The Conversion of the Jews” portray moments of existential awareness experienced during childhood, acts of compliance or rebellion. Shirley and Ozzie’s attitudes vis-à-vis their authorities, family and community, signal the diverging paths of Paley and Roth’s subsequent writings. In “The Loudest Voice” past and present, here and elsewhere, form an intricate web. The finely-woven tapestry of Paley’s short story is the graphic representation of a community striving to embrace differences, be they religious, ethnic, or social. There are no winners or losers in the pseudo-standoff opposing Jews and Christians in Paley’s short story. The peculiar Christmas pageant foregrounds community concerns rather than theological arguments. “The Conversion of the Jews” on the other hand announces the embattled Weltanschauung of Roth’s fiction, of his characters’ rebellion, of their counter-posture vis-à-vis conformity, imposition, dogmatism.

27 In a rare comment on Paley and Roth’s respective styles, Robert Pinsky considers that Paley’s poetic gift “distinguishes her from even such brilliant writers as Philip Roth, whose writing has every virtue except poetry; in a way, Mr. Roth must write alternate realities for his characters in order to provide a rough equivalent within the bounds of his talent, which is so entirely a prose talent.” There is a good measure of truth in this assessment but also in Roth’s confession on his writing life, via his alter ego Zuckerman: “… the book of my life is a book of voices. When I ask myself how I arrived at where I am the answer surprises me: ‘Listening’” (I Married a Communist 222).

28 All things considered, Shirley and Ozzie’s voices resonate far beyond the pages of these two early short stories, prefiguring the combination of spunk, wisecracking and urbane wisdom we have come to associate with Faith and Zuckerman, Paley and Roth’s household personae.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Brody’, Richard. “God Is a Character.” The New Yorker, 9 August 2011. Web. 22 April 2014.

Dekoven Ezrahi, Sidra. “Jew-ish: Grace Paley’s Prose of the City and Poetry of the Country.” Grace Paley Writing the World. Spec. Issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing 3.2 (2009): 144-52. Print.

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Englander, Nathan. “Celebrating Philip Roth: Nathan Englander on how Portnoy’s Complaint Opened his Eyes.” Critical Mass, May 12, 2011.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Grace Paley Writing the World” Grace Paley Writing the World. Spec. Issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing 3.2 (2009): 121-26. Print.

Lyons, Bonnie. “Grace Paley’s Jewish Miniatures.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 8.1 (Spring 1989): 26-33. Print.

McBride James. The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother. New York: Penguin, 1995. Print.

Malamud, Bernard. The Assistant. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957. Print.

Miller, Nancy. “Starting Out in the Fifties: Grace Paley, Philip Roth, and the Making of a Literary Career.” Grace Paley Writing the World. Spec. Issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing 3.2 (2009): 135-42. Print.

Naqvi Tahira. “Thank God for the Jews.” Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land. Eds. Wesley Brown and Amy Ling. New York: Persea Books, 1991. 222-30. Print.

Paley, Grace. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. London: Virago Press, 1979. Print.

---. Interview with Joan Lidoff. “Clearing her Throat: An Interview with Grace Paley.” Shenandoah 32.3 (1981): 3-26. Print.

---. Just As I Thought. New York: Farrar, Strauss.and Giroux, 1998. Print.

---. The Little Disturbances of Man. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Print.

---. “Midrash on Happiness.” TriQuarterly 65 (1986): 220-223. Print.

Perry. Ruth. “The Morality of Orality: Grace Paley’s Stories.” Grace Paley Writing the World. Spec. Issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing 3.2 (2009): 190-96. Print.

Pinsky, Robert. “Asweat with Dreams.” Review of The Collected Stories by Grace Paley. New York Times, 24 April 1994. Web. 22 April 2014.

Roth, Philip. The Counterlife. New York: Penguin 1986. Print.

---. Good-bye Columbus. New York: Penguin, 1986. Print.

---. I Married a Communist. New York: Vintage, 1999. Print.

---. Interview with Thomas Nissley. “Exit Zuckerman: An Interview with Philip Roth.” Amazon.com. Web. 25 April 25 2014.

---. Operation Shylock: A Confession. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Print.

---. The Plot against America. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Print.

---. Reading Myself and Others. London: Corgi Books, 1977. Print.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Print.

Steed J. P. “The Subversion of the Jews: Post-World War II Anxiety, Humor, and Identity in Woody Allen and Philip Roth.” Philip Roth Studies 1.2 (2005): 145-62. Print.

Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “Language as Homeland in Jewish-American Literature.” Insider/ Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism. Eds. David Biale et al. Oakland: U California Press, 1998: 219-20. Print.

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Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers: A Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New. 1925. New York: Persea Books, 1975. Print.

Zierler, Wendy. “A Dignitary in the Land? Literary Representations of the American Rabbi.” AJS Review 30.2 (2006): 255-75. Print.

NOTES

1. I found only one article discussing the two writers albeit from a literary historical point of view. See Nancy Miller, “Starting Out in the Fifties: Grace Paley, Philip Roth, and the Making of a Literary Career.” 2. “The Loudest Voice” was published in The Little Disturbances of Man; “The Conversion of the Jews” in Good-bye Columbus. The quotations from the two short stories follow the editions cited. 3. For the sake of convenience, this volume will be abbreviated as RMAO. 4. The celebration actually conflates Christmas and Easter. According to Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, this deceptively simple reconciliation of two dire monotheisms is one of the healthiest symptoms of the diasporic imagination. She adds: “In fact, it is the non-Jews in these neighborhoods who merit special attention, because, [...] they are ‘stranger[s]’ (150). 5. Sacvan Bercovitch’s The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (1993) underscores the centripetal power of America’s legal, political and religious institutions, linked by a complex system of symbols, rituals, and beliefs. This phenomenon is visible in the literature of writers belonging to successive waves of immigrants. Jewish American writers from Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska or Henry Roth to Grace Paley and Philip Roth have all been subjected to America’s “Ritual of Consensus;” they have been torn apart between what Werner Sollors has called “consent” and “descent,” i.e. between assent to the American ethos and adherence to their culture of origin. 6. Malamud’s The Assistant comes to mind but also, more recently, Tahira Naqvi’s short story “Thank God for the Jews” (1991) or James McBride’s The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother (1998). 7. The Hebrew term galut (meaning exile in Hebrew) expresses the Jewish conception of the condition and feelings of a nation uprooted, exiled from its homeland and subject to alien rule (Jewish Virtual Library). 8. The well-known line appears in Psalm 22:1 and also figures in Jesus’ lament on the cross. Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34. 9. At a PEN tribute to Paley at the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York in 2007, Michael Cunningham argued that, like only a few other writers, one recognizes Paley’s unmistakable voice from the first few words of any of her stories. To prove his point, he read the beginning of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and of Paley’s “The Loudest Voice” ( Hirsch 124-25). 10. dos kleine menschele (Yiddish): an ordinary, insignificant man. 11. See Paley’s “Midrash on Happiness” in which the writer adopts a form of biblical exegesis that she adapts to the all-American concept of “happiness.” 12. “You can hear it in the titles of Paley’s stories: “Conversation with My Father,” “The Loudest Voice,” “Listening,” “Zagrowsky Tells.” “Although about many different topics, her stories are built on talk, on direct face-to-face conversation between people rather than third-person narration or wordless incident” (Perry 190). 13. “Sharpest in my memory from that collection is my reaction to the story ‘The Conversion of the Jews’ …I can hardly express to you what a revelation it was to find that story already waiting for me in the world. I remember looking at one of my own rabanim and having the exact same

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thought as Ozzie, experiencing the same rush of confused-surety and sincerity and pure intellectual rage. I remember my own deeply felt theological questions asked and then answered with, “Englander, get out!” 14. Roth made no changes to the original version of “The Conversion of the Jews” for the Modern Library edition. 15. The rabbi as dictator resurfaces in a more sinister guise in the figure of Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, a character in Roth’s novel The Plot against America (2004). Zierler argues that Roth shows himself to be even more suspicious and derisive toward American rabbis than he was before (260-61). If we are supposed to laugh at Rabbi Binder, we are meant to loathe the grandiloquent, and dangerously obtuse Bengelsdorf whom Roth captures in these words: “My Uncle Monty, who hated all rabbis but had an especially venomous loathing of Bengelsdorf dating back to his childhood as a charity student in the B’nai Moshe religious school, liked to say of him, ‘The pompous son of a bitch knows everything–it’s too bad he doesn’t know anything else’” (The Plot against America 35). 16. “Ending persecution involves more than stamping out persecutors. It is necessary too to unlearn certain responses to them. All the tolerance of persecution that has seeped into the Jewish character—the adaptability, the patience, the resignation, the silence, the self-denial— must be squeezed out, until the only response here to any restriction of liberties is: ‘No, I refuse’” (RMAO, 149). 17. In many respects Alexander Portnoy, Ozzie’s immediate successor, is “an aged incarnation of claustrophobic little Freedman,” says Roth. Unlike Ozzie, however, Portnoy is not able to escape since “he is imprisoned in his rage against … himself, his most powerful oppressor” (Roth, RMAO 9). 18. This is confirmed in the paragraph that follows Ozzie’s query: “It is the question a thief must ask himself the night he jimmies open his first window, and it is said to be the question with which bridegrooms quiz themselves before the altar” (148). The Bible states that the Messiah will come as a thief in the night (for example, 1 Thess. 5.2) and often is likened to a bridegroom (for example, Matt. 9.15).

ABSTRACTS

Cet article propose une lecture comparée de “The Loudest Voice” et de “The Conversion of the Jews”, deux nouvelles de jeunesse dans lesquelles Grace Paley et Philip Roth traitent gdf gf2016-03-04T16:29:00ggde problématiques similaires : être juif en Amérique, se soumettre ou se rebeller vis-à-vis de la communauté et de la société. Les deux nouvelles donnent la parole à des enfants qui abordent les questions religieuses avec une certaine innocence, non dépourvue de sagesse. L’humour, l’ironie et la subversion qui se dégagent de ces voix préfigurent les thématiques et les aspects formels propres aux ouvrages de gdf gf2016-03-04T16:29:00ggla maturité de Grace Paley et de Philip Roth.

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AUTHOR

ADA SAVIN Ada Savin is Professor Emeritus at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin, France. Her research focuses on questions of migration, exile, memory and nostalgia in contemporary American autobiography and fiction. Her recent publications include L’Amérique par elle-même : Récits autobiographiques d’une Terre promise (Michel Houdiard, 2010) and Migration and Exile: Charting New Literary and Artistic Territories, ed. (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).

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New York Affinities: A Poetics of the City in the Writings of Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme

Claire Fabre

1 Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme were not only contemporary writers who happened to live in New York in the sixties and seventies, they were also close neighbors and friends who shared a sense of political-and poetic-commitment and respected each other’s work, which led Barthelme to declare: “Grace Paley is a wonderful writer and troublemaker. We are fortunate to have her in our country” (qtd in Daugherty 287). While the biographical details of their friendship have already been documented,1 few critics have tried to read their respective fiction and essays in parallel. Though both writers were considered as “experimental” at the time when they were published, their stories have little in common, and there is no denying that Barthelme’s surreal collages starkly differ from Paley’s chronicles of everyday life in New York.

2 This article, however, intends to investigate the ways in which the two authors’ texts and ideas about fiction can be said to resonate with each other in spite of their differences. The starting point will be biographical and will lead us questioning and comparison their conceptions of writing. For both writers, nothing could be worse than fixity and, worst of all, the fixity of language. The mutability of the word, plot line and even character is one of the rules by which they abide. Along the same lines, they both consistently challenge all forms of categorization to give birth to what is admittedly called “hybrid” fictions, in which the mimetic grounding of the story is often likely to veer off into poetic surreality.

3 New York City will be viewed as the stage of an essential encounter between the two writers, as the material of many of their stories and essays and, finally, as an apt metaphor to express their poetic views. As Nathalie Cochoy has shown in her study of the figure of the passer-by in American literature, American writers have always sought to explore the conjunction between textual creativity and New York’s permanent state of flux: “[by] substituting an interrogation on the foundation of words to a description of the city, American writers have inaugurated a new mode of

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presentation of the city, based on the reciprocal impressions of the text in progress and the ever-changing city (Cochoy 17).”2 Both Paley and Barthelme belong to the tradition of city writers for whom text and town are made of the same material.

Voices in the Village

4 One could start with the following anecdote: Paley and Barthelme, who then lived in Greenwich Village, both wrote an essay mentioning the Women’s House of Detention which was destroyed in 1974 and replaced by a garden, in the middle of the Village;3 a few years before, Grace Paley had been arrested and detained in that prison for six days for participating in a mass protest against the Vietnam draft. Before examining the two essays, let us recall their chronology: Grace Paley was arrested and detained in 1966; Donald Barthelme wrote “Here in the Village” in 1974, as the House of Detention was being demolished; Paley’s essay, entitled “Six Days: Some Rememberings,” because it unfolds the details of her stay in prison, was written almost thirty years after her arrest, in 1994. Thus the event in Paley’s life was also a source of inspiration for Barthelme who chose to include it in his own reflections and autobiographical material. A close reading of the texts will give insight into the lineaments of their poetics.

5 Barthelme’s essay is structured like a short diary of a week in the Village. Walking around the Village. The vaguely rectangular vacant lot where the Women’s House of Detention used to be is being made into a little park, and the first bushes, shrubs-whatever-were put in last Monday, and you can now get a dim idea of what the place is going to look like. It’s going to be pretty. I don’t know who the genius responsible for getting this done is, but I take off my hat to her. The Women’s House of Detention was the place where they used to store women arrested for prostitution, mostly. The thing I remember about it best, aside from its social inutility and hideousness, is that one time a pal of mine who was in the anti-war activist business got situated there because she had sat down in front of an Armed Forces Day parade. And stopped it, for a while. Anyhow, she was put in a cell with a woman who was in that other business, and that woman asked her what she was in for and my pal told her. And the other woman immediately rushed to the cell door and yelled at the turnkey, “Get these fucking housewives outta here!” Anyhow, the planting is going in, and it looks mighty good. (“Here in the Village,” Not-Knowing 28)

6 Embedded in Donald Barthelme’s personal chronicle on his neighborhood is a story which was told by a friend of his, his “pal” whom everybody recognizes as Grace Paley. The durability of this little unpretentious and humorous piece comes from the extreme attention paid to the delicate balance of the sentences and, mostly, to their sonorities and rhythm. Thus the beginning (“Walking around the village. The vaguely rectangular vacant lot”) sounds like a poem devoid of conjugated verbs (except for the gerund “walking”), a purely musical designation with its regular alliteration (v) and initial rhyme (“vaguely”/“vacant”). The ironic comment made on the “social inutility” of the prison is detectable in the comically inappropriate use of the expression “to store women” and in the periphrasis “a woman who was in that other business” to designate the prostitute. All in all, Barthelme makes an elliptic yet recognizable allusion to Grace Paley’s arrest and clearly shows his bias in favor of the demolition (“It’s going to be pretty”). Later in the text, he continues his stroll in the Village and evokes the various encounters he made over the week: the salesgirl at the local liquor store (28), his friend Robin who tells him that her daughter has been in hospital after a suicide attempt (29),

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four kids who bluntly ask him if he is straight or gay (29). He also relates his outing to the Jane street festival where he enjoys the music and ends up dancing with a woman he does not know: “Anyhow, when they played ‘Yesterdays,’ tears came to my eyes, which I don’t much like in public, so I asked this girl if she wanted to dance. She wasn’t a girl, really, she was a woman, and all the time we were dancing she had this three- year-old child (wearing glasses) clinging to her right leg. I didn’t get her name, but I sure did enjoy that dance” (30). The rather flippant tone of this chronicle contrasts with the subterranean violence contained in the episodes related: a police arrest in the context of the Vietnam War, the anger of imprisoned women, the distress of parents confronted with their daughter’s desperate move, a gang of young men intimidating homosexuals in the street. Though Barthelme’s text ends on a euphoric note which reasserts the power of music and community cohesion, the Village is shown as a place of unpredictable, albeit banal, violence.

7 Written some forty years later, Paley’s essay inevitably calls to mind the story first told by Barthelme, whether Paley was thinking about it or not when she wrote her own. The text was collected along with other “articles, reports and prefaces” and transcribed talks,4 and not as fiction. Yet Paley’s fictional voice seems to break through this autobiographical essay. First, the remoteness of the episode in time has blurred most of the referential details, as shown in the opening lines: I was in jail. I had been sentenced to six days in the Women’s House of Detention, a fourteen-story prison right in the middle of Greenwich Village, my own neighborhood. This happened during the American war in Vietnam, I have forgotten which important year of the famous sixties. The civil disobedience for which I was paying a small penalty probably consisted of sitting down to impede or slow some military parade. (Just As I Thought 25, my emphasis)

8 The erasure of the specific historical references as well as the use of the simple past (“I was in jail”) make the passage suggestive of the incipit of a novel or a short story, all the more so since a discreet metafictional adjective (“a fourteen-story prison”) makes it clear that the focus of this piece is on the transformation of experience into “story.” Indeed, the text develops as a short, self-contained narrative in which the women encountered in jail (Evelyn, Rita and Helen, among others) briefly appear as characters with their own personalities, desires and conflicts. In other words, the Detention House appears as a place full of life and stories which Paley resented not being able to transcribe on paper at the time: “Then I complained. I had planned not to complain about anything while living among people who’d been here in these clanging cells a long time; it didn’t seem right. But I said, I don’t have anything to read and they took away my pen and I don’t have paper” (Just as I Thought 26). Despite her “paper-and- penlessness” (29), Paley does not feel entirely cut off from normal life for she is still in the midst of Greenwich Village: Also, I must tell you, I could look out the window at the end of our corridor and see my children or their friends on their way to music lessons or Greenwich House pottery. Looking slantwise I could see right into Sutter’s Bakery, then on the corner of Tenth Street. These were my neighbors at coffee and cake. (Just as I Thought 26)

9 Far from being a secluded place, the prison communicates, visually and vocally, with the outside world. Paley remembers its importance as a fixture in the neighborhood, with its voices participating in the general din of the street: For years, going to the park with my children, or simply walking down Sixth Avenue on a summer night past the Women’s House, we would often have to thread our way through families calling up–bellowing, screaming to the third, seventh,

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tenth floor, to figures, shadows behind bars and screened windows, How you feeling? Here’s Glena. She got big. Mami, mami, you like my dress? We getting you out baby. New lawyer come by. (Just as I Thought 29)

10 At the end of the essay, Paley’s stance concerning the demolition of the prison is the opposite of Barthelme’s. As Tracy Daugherty aptly observes, “Grace’s objection to the prison’s removal was ideological; Don’s approval of its absence was aesthetic. Grace did not want people to forget how the world is. Don insisted on considering how the world should be” (374). To Grace Paley the bucolic, pretty garden, “[a] green place, safely fenced in, with protected daffodils and tulips” (Just as I Thought 30), is paradoxically more cut off from the street than the prison used to be. She insists on the necessity to include prisons into the very fabric of the city so that offenders (“a whole huge country of the bad and the unlucky and the self-hurters” [30]) should not feel geographically and symbolically expelled from society. Though no apology for the existence of the prison, her text is reminiscent of the opening paragraph of The Scarlet Letter in which the prison and the rosebush coexist.5

11 Paley’s and Barthelme’s essays highlight the writers’ commitment to their neighborhood, where they like to stroll in quest of unpredictable material. In both cases, the objective grid of the cityscape is covered by a more personal apprehension of geography.

Visions of the city

12 The city of New York is so omnipresent in Grace Paley’s work that it can be perceived as a full-fledged character. It is a place endowed with a life of its own where individual and collective identities seem to coalesce. Whether in her stories or in her essays, Paley often dismisses the typographical markings of dialogues, she delays—or even erases altogether—all information about the identity of the speaker(s), thus providing direct access to the resounding chaos of urban life. The opening lines of “The Loudest Voice,” for instance, clearly echo the description of the voices bursting in and out of the Detention House mentioned in “Six Days: Some Rememberings”: “There is a certain place where dumbwaiters boom, doors slam, dishes crash; every window is a mother’s mouth bidding the street to shut up, go skate somewhere else, come home. My voice is the loudest” (34, my emphasis). The personification of the city through the rapid succession of metaphor (“every window is a mother’s mouth”) and metonymy (“bidding the street to shut up”) is taken up again later in the story when Shirley, the narrator, ironically compares the controversial Christmas tree in her Jewish neighborhood to a Hebrew in exile: On the street corner a tree had been decorated for us by a kind city administration. In order to miss its chilly shadow our neighbors walked three blocks east to buy a loaf of bread. The butcher pulled down black window shades to keep the colored lights from shining on his chickens. Oh, not me. On the way to school, with both my hands, I tossed it a kiss of tolerance. Poor thing, it was a stranger in Egypt. (38)

13 The success of this story lies in the musical rearrangement of all the conflicting clichés and stereotypes that make up the basic material of the town’s constant murmur. The use of clichés introduces a collective presence within the particulars of individuated speech. In her final prayer, Shirley includes “[…] everybody: my talking family, cousins far away, passersby, and all the lonesome Christians” (40). The intimate sphere (“my talking family”) is gradually enlarged (“cousins far away”) to the anonymous city

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around her (“passersby”). This shift from the individual to the collective also creates an impression of randomness, a fundamental feature of Paley’s aesthetics, which is also claimed by Donald Barthelme.

The importance of “not-knowing”

14 Paley’s writing simultaneously asserts the variety and unpredictability of city life and its affective reordering by poetic coherence. An example of this tension is found in “Faith in a Tree,” which opens on the approximate and subjective topography proposed by Faith, the narrator, as she contemplates the city from the improbable vantage point of a tree in Central Park. What a place in democratic time! One God who was King of the Jews, who unravels the stars to this day with little hydrogen explosions, He can look down from His Holy Headquarters and see us all: heads of girl, ponytails riding the springtime luck, short black bobs, and an occasional eminence of golden wedding rings. He sees South into Brooklyn how Prospect Park lies in its sand-rooted trees among Japanese gardens and police, and beyond us north to dangerous Central Park. Far north, the deer-eyed eland and kudu survive, grazing the open pits of the Bronx zoo. (175)

15 New York, viewed from above, is evoked through a succession of synecdoches and by the juxtaposition of motley fragments, thus ironically denying God’s presumed absolute knowledge. Even as it exhibits its haphazard character, this enumeration succeeds in recreating the microcosm of Washington Park, it reveals an underlying coherence in which the main ages of life coexist (girls, young women, married women) and North and South are assigned affective values (respectively danger and harmony). Washington Park—the very quintessence of New York—is a place where anything may happen, a small city within the city, in which hierarchies and rules are temporarily subverted and the possibilities for unexpected bifurcations of plot are therefore increased. As she keeps interrupting her story line with ironic digressions, Faith feigns to attribute her incapacity to conform to a pre-ordained plan to her faulty knowledge of language: Despite no education, Mrs Finn is more in charge of words than I am. She is especially in charge of Good and Bad. My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster’s or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next. (181-82)

16 The expression of Paley’ poetic views is “enacted” in such ironic comments; it is embodied by the fictional character of Faith, who is and is not an avatar of the author. In “Friends,” another story featuring Faith, most of the action takes place on the train taking home three middle-aged women, first from their visit to one of their friends, Selena, who is dying, then from her funeral, the two journeys almost merging into one. Despite the humorous tone, the crossing of New York, and all the surrounding cities, parallels the metaphorical journey through the memories of the bereaved women, as if the town were actively taking part in their experience of death: “While we talked, a number of cities passed us, going in the opposite direction. I had tried to look at New London through the dusk of the windows. Now I was missing New Haven. The conductor explained, smiling: Lady, if the windows were clean, half of you’d be dead. The tracks are lined with sharpshooters” (309, my emphasis). The obscured windows of the train

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symbolize the narrator’s exploration of the unknown, as she is vainly trying to make sense of her friend’s death as well as of the urban space surrounding her. When at the end of the story Susan, one of Faith’s two friends, happens to meet a man with the “sly out-of-town-husband-in-New-York look” (312) on the train, Faith and Ann are pleased to admit that New York is still the city of chance encounters and change, opening up myriad possibilities of renewal: “Then Susan, like a New York hostess, began to tell that man all our private troubles—the mistake of the World Trade Center, Westway, the decay of the South Bronx, the rage in Williamsburg. She rose with him on the escalator, gabbing into evening friendship and, hopefully, a happy night” (313).

17 In Barthelme’s fiction, New York is explicitly mentioned on occasions only (“The Balloon,” “City Life,” “110 West Sixty-First Street,” “Sakrete” [40 Stories 193-96] to quote the main ones); more often than not, the city remains an unnamed American urban entity playing a major part in the story as in “I Bought a Little City” (Sixty Stories 290-291) or “A City of Churches” (Sixty Stories 203-207). Clearly, Barthelme’s stories may occasionally be inspired by his personal experience of the city as related in the previously quoted essays, but, as Stanley Trachtenberg rightly puts it: “It is in fact, the loss of that world or the presumption of its loss, often as a result of equating it with absence or ‘decontextualization,’ that accounts for the satiric tone of much of Barthelme’s writing and serves as its object’” (239). The common point between Barthelme’s cities and Paley’s New York is that they are fundamentally uncontrollable and unknowable. This is shown ab absurdo; the narrator who has “bought a city” (“I Bought a Little City,” Sixty Stories 290-91) and has been redesigning it, is loathe to accept its unpredictability even as he imposes the arbitrariness of his own whims: I was pleased. All the people who lived in the four blocks surrounding the empty block had something they hadn’t had before, a park. They could sit in it and like that. I went and watched them sitting in it. There was already a black man there playing bongo drums. I hate bongo drums. I started to tell him to stop playing those bongo drums but then I said to myself, No, that’s not right. You got to let him play his goddamn bongo drums if he feels like it, it’s part of the misery of democracy, to which I subscribe. Then I started thinking about new housing for the people I had displaced, they couldn’t stay in that fancy hotel forever. But I didn’t have any ideas about new housing, except that it shouldn’t be too imaginative. (290-91)

18 The narrator who wants to ban music (the bongo drums) and imagination—all forms of spontaneous expressions—from the city gradually turns into a violent tyrant; he eventually gives up on the city, however, when he has to admit he cannot force a woman to love him. The paradox of the story lies in the diametrically opposed visions of the narrator and of what the text implicitly suggests: indeed Barthelme manages to produce an unpredictable and fascinating text, dominated by fantasy and imagination, about a man who professes a hatred of all these qualities throughout the story. Thus the city and the text both appear as forces capable of confronting and countering the narrator’s monstrosity. A similar conclusion could be drawn about the description of the dystopian city in “A City of Churches” (Sixty Stories 203-07) from which dreams and sex are banned, but whose local rules and norms are persistently challenged by the character of Cecelia who tries to assert the power of her desire: “‘I can will my dreams,’ Cecelia said. ‘I can dream whatever I want. If I want to dream that I’m having a good time, in Paris or some other city, all I have to do is go to sleep and I will dream that dream. I can dream whatever I want’” (206). Here again, the author ironically pleads for freedom against the rigidity of the totalitarian city. In both stories, the text is itself an

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outlandish object which is made possible by the city, though it counters its negative forces.

19 In his overview of the city in Barthelme’s stories, Francis Gillen interprets the puzzling balloon which suddenly roams the New York sky (“The Balloon,” Sixty Stories 46-51) as a metafictional symbol, its amorphous quality pointing to the seemingly formless nature of the text, which, like the balloon, “offered the possibility, in its randomness, of mislocation of the self, in contradiction to the grid of precise, rectangular pathways under our feet” (41). The tensions at work in Barthelme’s city stories are nowhere more palpable than in “Sakrete,” a hilarious very short story published in the collection 40 Stories (193-96). The narrator starts investigating the disappearance of “fourteen garbage cans” from his street, a trivial incident, which gives rise to a ludicrous succession of descriptions of the garbage cans, their contents and, indirectly, their owners, as he begins to suspect everyone in his neighborhood, including his own wife: If my wife is stealing the garbage cans, in the night, while I am drunk and asleep, what is she doing with them? They are not in the cellar, I’ve looked (although I don’t like going down to the cellar, even to replace a blown fuse, because of the rats). My wife has a yellow Pontiac convertible. No one has these anymore but I can imagine her lifting garbage cans into the back seat of the yellow convertible, at four o’clock in the morning, when I am dreaming of being on stage, dreaming of having to perform a drum concerto with only one drumstick. (194)

20 Throughout this story, specific numbers (of streets or buildings) and statistics impart a strangely mathematical, and poetic, rhythm to the narrative whose intensity increases as the story progresses: On our street, fourteen garbage cans are now missing. The garbage cans from One Seventeen and One Nineteen disappeared last night. (Sixty Stories 193) [...] On our street, twenty-one garbage cans are now missing. New infamies have been announced by the One Thirty-one through One Forty-three-seven in a row, and on the same side of the street. Also depredations at One Sixteen and One Sixty-four. (Sixty Stories 194)

21 The perfect order imposed by the precision of numbers is at odds with the irrationality which progressively invades both the narrative and the diegetic space, as if the geometrical grid of the city had suddenly turned into some improbable maze like those imagined by the Dutch draughtsman Maurits Cornelis Escher.6 This impression is confirmed when the narrator devotes a whole paragraph to the description of a certain family living in the neighborhood, also part of the mystery “If I were ordered to imagine who is stealing our garbage cans, the Louis Escher family might spring to mind, not as culprits but as proximate cause” (Sixty Stories 195). Indeed, as the name Escher makes its appearance, the story slides into an indeterminate space where dreams and reality are now communicated through irrational pathways, and rats have taken control over the city. The present tense used in the last paragraph generates confusion for the reader between dreams and reality: “My wife drives groups of rats here and there in her yellow Pontiac convertible, attending important meetings” (Sixty Stories 196). Just as in the impossible constructions of Escher’s drawings, the mathematical rationale proves to be only superficial, and the void left by the missing garbage cans can be viewed as a metafictional illustration of the discontinuity of the plot line.

22 Despite their differences Paley and Barthelme do seem to agree on the fundamental mutability of urban space, which informs the unpredictability of their texts. Moreover the numerous metaleptic transgressions in Paley’s work as well as the dreamlike

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surreality in Barthelme’s stories point to the fluidity of space and to the interconnections between juxtaposed spatial entities. The text, just like the city, is the place where everything is possible.

23 It is also the locus where the principle of “not-knowing” makes itself tangible. This notion, which is developed at length in one of Barthelme’s essays (“Not Knowing” 71) and which gives its title to his collection of non-fiction writings (Not-Knowing, The Essays and Interviews), is central to his conception of artistic creation: “The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention” (12). This statement finds an echo in a remark made by Grace Paley at the Symposium on Fiction in 1975:7 “I can’t say that I’m presenting a truth when I write. I’m trying to understand something which I don’t understand to begin with. I begin by not understanding, and the tension and excitement for me and the tension that the reader may get also is in that not understanding and that pull away from not knowing to knowing” (qtd. in Not Knowing 71). Discussed in both Paley’s and Barthelme’s non-fictional writings, “Not-knowing,” which could also be called “serendipity,”8 accounts for many of their qualities: non- sequitur, digression or nonsense. The notion is particularly relevant when it comes to the representation of New York because of the city’s permanent state of mutability, which makes verisimilitude and unlikelihood collapse as conceptual categories. In Paley, the notion is mostly illustrated by the profuse interplay of voices. In Barthelme, the lack of logical links disrupts and disorganizes the plot line, thus enabling the leaps into the marvelous and the surreal.

24 Both Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme were particularly wary of theoretical discourse9 and viewed all attempts at formal categorization as potentially reductive. Still, language is at the very heart of their preoccupations and neither of them claims to “represent” the world as such. The city they present (rather then “represent”) is therefore a topographical entity which, in addition to its symbolic function in the story, is also the privileged locus of essential poetic and political transformations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthelme, Donald. 40 Stories. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Print.

---. Not-Knowing, The Essays and Interviews. Ed. Kim Herzinger. New York: Random House, 1997. Print.

---. Sixty Stories. New York: Penguin Books, 1981. Print.

Cochoy, Nathalie. Passante à New York. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2009. Print.

Daugherty, Tracy. Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2009. Print.

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Gillen, Francis. “Donald Barthelme’s City: A Guide.” Twentieth Century Literature 18.1 (1972): 37-44. Print.

Hawthorne Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 1850. New York: Bantam Books, 2003. Print.

The Official M.C. Escher website. M.C. Escher Foundation and The M.C. Escher Company, B.V. Web. 25 July 2015.

Paley, Grace. The Collected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Print.

---. Just As I Thought. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Print.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Broadbridge Mill, Wortley, Wotton-under-Edge: Clarendon Press, 1967. Print.

Trachtenberg, Stanley. Understanding Donald Barthelme. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Print.

NOTES

1. This is how Tracy Daugherty relates their encounter in his biography of Barthelme: “After writing in the mornings, Don took long walks around the neighborhood. Almost every day he’d see–usually on the corner of West Eleventh and Sixth–a short, wild-haired, cheerful but determined woman carrying anti-war signs, or handing out leaflets for political rallies, or wearing a makeshift smock painted with the words ‘Money/Arms/War/Profit.’ This woman turned out to be his across-the-street-neighbor, Grace Paley. Don knew her book The Little Disturbances of Man, published in 1959. […] They’d meet in parks, one another’s apartments, or in church basements, mimeographing flyers. Purple stains covered Grace’s hands. Her politics were never abstract or ideological; they were rooted in motherhood and the activities of her block. Don admired this about her” (287). 2. My translation: “En substituant à la description une interrogation sur le fondement des mots, les écrivains américains inaugurent un nouveau mode de présentation de la ville, basé sur une impression réciproque entre un texte en formation et une ville en mutation.” 3. It was located on 10, Greenwich Avenue. 4. “I’ve called this collection Just As I Thought. I’ve left the articles, reports, and prefaces pretty much as originally written. The transcribed talks are another matter. They’ve required correction, clarification as they came from my indistinct speech on tape to the transcriber” (Introduction, Just As I Thought xi). 5. “Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him” (Hawthorne 45-46). 6. M.C. Escher (1898-1972) was a Dutch graphic artist known for his “impossible constructions” such as “Relativity” (1953) or “Ascending and Descending” (1960) in which the characters can be seen as either endlessly ascending a staircase or endlessly descending it. See his official website. 7. The transcription of this symposium, to which Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley and Walker Percy participated, is found in Barthelme’s collection Not-Knowing, The essays and interviews (58-82).

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8. According to The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the word “serendipity” was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole upon the title of the fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip,” the heroes of which “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” The dictionary defines it as “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries” (1847). 9. Barthelme, however, is considered more of a “metafictionist” than Paley.

ABSTRACTS

Grace Paley et Donald Barthelme, qui entretenaient des liens d’amitié, étaient tous deux intimement convaincus que la vie (tant intime que publique) était indissociable de l’écriture. Leurs engagements politiques n’étaient nullement incompatibles avec leurs recherches formelles et la vie quotidienne était à leurs yeux une source perpétuelle d’émerveillement, d’incongruité et d’amusement. L’espace de la ville occupe dans leurs œuvres respectives une place particulière : pour Paley, New York bruisse de voix et de rumeurs qu’elle capture dans des récits à l’humour indéfectible ; chez Barthelme, le Village (Greenwich Village) offre un terrain d’observation que l’on trouve souvent au cœur d’essais et de chroniques acerbes ou tendres. D’un écrivain à l’autre, la notion de “not-knowing” circule, au point de définir l’un des axes principaux de leur poétique.

AUTHOR

CLAIRE FABRE Claire Fabre is a former student of the “Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud.” She is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University Paris-Est-Créteil. After writing her doctoral dissertation on Raymond Carver, she has published extensively on such contemporary writers as Grace Paley, David Foster Wallace, Mary Caponegro, Patricia Eakins, Christine Schutt and Nicholson Baker. Her research focuses on the aesthetics of the quotidian in contemporary short fiction.

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Grace Paley and Dawn Raffel: Writing on the Edge of Disaster

Brigitte Félix

1 So much has already been written about Grace Paley’s art, her creation of vibrant voices and resonant texts, her energetic storytelling in defiance of traditional forms, her unrelenting dedication to language as the core of her fiction writing, her “passionate commitment to literature [and] working relationship with society,” to apply to herself the description she makes of Christa Wolf in an essay published in Just as I Thought (208). In an attempt to offer a slightly different perspective on Grace Paley’s work, I have chosen to re-read “Mother,” from Later the Same Day, in the light of a story entitled “Steam,” written by contemporary writer Dawn Raffel and published in her latest collection of short fiction Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (2010).1

2 “Mother” and “Steam,” which are both first-person short narratives, share the same theme—the sense of loss generated by the death of each of the narrators’ mothers—and a similar type of narrative development around the investigation of absence. In “Mother,” the narrator juxtaposes memories of her mother in various places around the household with a few snippets of conversations between herself and her mother in the first part, and between her mother and father in the second part. Each part is brought to a close with a paragraph made of the same single sentence repeating the fact of the mother’s death: “Then she died.” In the two-page “Steam”—which is barely longer than “Mother”— the narrator begins with the uncertain news of the mother’s death, followed by the description of how she busied herself by going to the swimming pool, then to the movies, as the explosion of a steam pipe prevented her from going to work in her office, presumably on the same day. In the second half of the story, the narrator describes herself at home, calling her sister, remembering an earlier telephone conversation with her mother a few days before her death, then listing what had to be done after her mother’s death—organizing the funeral, cleaning and selling the mother’s house. In the last lines, the narrator says that she calls her office, that she receives a message from her sons and, finally, that she is called by her sister. The story ends with their brief exchange about the weather (“‘It’s raining,’ she said. / ‘Here, too,’ I said, ‘and I am so far away’” [65]).

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3 The attention to form and language, and the intensity produced by narrative condensation and ellipsis are all strikingly present in the writing of Dawn Raffel, whose “Steam” reverberates with textual echoes of “Mother” while following its own original narrative and poetic path. Both stories’ subject matter calls to mind Maurice Blanchot’s statement about Kafka’s writing in The Space of Literature: “Art is a relation with death” because “death is the extreme” and “[a]rt is mastery of the supreme moment, supreme mastery” (91). While it can be argued that neither Paley nor Raffel aim at the kind of modernist mastery that was Kafka’s pursuit according to Blanchot, “Mother” and “Steam” can be defined by their “relation with death,” which is the central hypothesis of this article. We will see that the texts are not so much “about” that relation as made of and by it: the relation with death is not just thematic and autobiographical, it is a process by which the inseparability of writing and death is asserted.

4 The striking thematic resemblance between the two stories will serve as a starting point to analyze the idea of their kinship. The aesthetic composition of each text will be approached and highlighted by Blanchot’s considerations on death’s space in The Space of Literature and in The Writing of the Disaster.

5 In an interview conducted by Kathleen Hulley in 1982, Grace Paley evoked her mother’s early death from breast cancer in ways that reveal the painfulness of the memory: My mother’s death was really very hard… and very terrible… And it’s hard for me to deal with. I deal with it a little bit in ‘Friends,’ talking about dying… It’s just… that... she could have died! I have an awful lot of feeling about that. It’s pretty hard. I mean she’d been sick since I was about 13. You know, really sick. And I think that’s where a lot of my pain comes from. That long period when I kept trying to think of something else all the time. (37)

6 The “little bit in ‘Friends’” is in fact the starting-point for the story—the dying and death of a woman named Selena, and how her women friends live through that experience. There is a discretely autobiographical hint at the suffering caused by the absence of the mother. It occurs in a single sentence spoken by the narrator, Faith, in a conversation with her friend Ann: “I think Ma sometimes and I lose my breath” (81), after which Faith deliberately switches to another topic, adding: “I decided not to describe my mother’s death” (81)—which Grace Paley actually never did in her fiction. As always in Paley’s stories, the speaking voice comes to life in the text thanks to the use of italics, a typographical convention for emphasis which signals both a special utterance—distinct from the rest of the narrator’s discourse—and a word. The abbreviated word “Ma,” as if it were mimetically interrupted by the loss of breath, carries the affect contained in the memory of the mother, and expresses the impossibility of speaking any further beyond that word. Curiously enough, Grace Paley does not mention “Mother” in her interview with Hulley. It is true that in a very condensed narrative, “Mother” does not deal at all with the mother’s agonizing death per se, but rather recreates in subdued tones—and sometimes deceptively lighthearted notations—the sense of emptiness and devastation left in the wake of the mother’s radical absence.

7 As a matter of fact, “Mother” distinguishes itself from the other stories published by Grace Paley for several reasons. In Grace Paley: Conteuse des destins ordinaires, Noëlle Batt proposes a classification of Paley’s stories and finds only three that she considers as

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“partially autobiographical” stories (39): “A Conversation with My Father” (in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute), “Love” and “Mother” (in Later the Same Day). While acknowledging the autobiographical reference to Paley’s own relationship with her mother, Paule Lévy underlines the poetic achievement of the text, which she considers to be the acme of Paley’s subversive literary aesthetics. For her, “Mother” is unique, as an elegiac tribute to the evanescent figure of the mother, and as an elliptic, stylized narrative whose simplicity and intensity are reminiscent of the quintessential grace of Japanese haikus. Lévy also argues that “Mother” has been rather neglected by criticism, compared with other stories, for instance those “starring” the character-narrator Faith, or the story entitled “A Conversation with My Father,” which attracted commentators’ attention because of its self-conscious metafictional aspects (Lévy, Figures de l’artiste 115; 123-27).

8 Might critics have considered “Mother” to be self-explanatory due to the transparent autobiographical reference? Or, rather, in spite of its deceptive transparency, does Paley’s writing keep opposing a “resistant form” to commentary?2 The first hypothesis points to the types of critical approaches foregrounding referentiality, seeing through the words and sentences of the text to reach for “the world” lying outside. In keeping with Grace Paley’s rejection of the autobiographical as a significant ground for her stories,3 this article will not try to look for “Mother” out there. The second hypothesis implies that the text’s elusiveness should be studied within the field of poetics and textual hermeneutics. Relying on the post-structuralist premise according to which, in Terry Eagleton’s words, “all literature is intertextual,” which means that “[a] specific piece of writing thus has no clearly defined boundaries: it spills over constantly into the works clustered around it” (119), I propose to examine the resistant form of “Mother” from within the small intertextual “cluster” constituted by and with Dawn Raffel’s “Steam” and its own version of resistant form.

9 The recourse to intertextual interpretation deserves some explanation. As a method, it is defended by Monica Manolescu-Oancea in her groundbreaking article on Raffel’s work, “Dawn Raffel—A Family Portrait.” Counter-attacking the criticism leveled by William Irwin, in his article “Against Intertextuality,” at the potential looseness and abusive extension of the notion of intertextuality, Manolescu-Oancea insists that the reader’s subjective, more or less accidental, associations are “commonplace in the process of reading [as] the reader’s literary memory is stimulated by a given text, which is thus related to others” (5). The reader’s intuitive and personal associations between texts are also essential in making sense of a practice of writing by establishing a literary network: “[…] if one wishes to understand where Dawn Raffel comes from and where she stands in the American literary space, one needs to establish interactions between her texts and others, to insert her texts within a larger framework” (3-4).

10 Re-reading Paley’s “Mother,” then, is a way of getting at “Steam,” of making sense of the idiosyncrasies of its textuality, a way of taming the text’s isolated newness and placing it “on the map.” Conversely, the discovery of “Steam” brings the possibility of a new reading of “Mother.” The difference of “Mother” from the rest of Paley’s stories can now be seen as relative. When placed within this new family, “Mother” also becomes less “resistant.”

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Kinship

11 The fact that Dawn Raffel names Grace Paley among her influences does not cancel the methodological and hermeneutic value of the intertextual reading, which is not about “influences”; it simply provides an external validation, which remains rather vague: In terms of influence, I would cite most strongly the playwrights Edward Albee and Harold Pinter; when I started writing, I was immensely taken with their rhythms, pauses, ambiguities, rebuke to tradition. Also Coover, Robinson, Paley, Barthelme, Barth; all of whom animated me to invent, discard, challenge. Flannery O’Connor— that gorgeous desolation! (Raffel, Interview Manolescu-Oancea 3)

12 However, it is easy to list many common points between Grace Paley and Dawn Raffel, as confirmed by the interviews they have given. Like Paley, Raffel does not “write traditional plots” (Raffel, Interview with Manolescu-Oancea 2), and her stories tend to be short, partly for the same reasons given by Grace Paley—being busy with family life, making the best of not enough time. Like “Mother,” “Steam” has a strong autobiographical background corroborated by Dawn Raffel’s explanation that “Further Adventures in the Universe is a response to the death of [her] parents” (Interview Manolescu-Oancea 5), but that remains an external determination. In fact, we can even say that just as Grace Paley switches to fiction when she has to deal with a difficult subject,4 so does Dawn Raffel’s “Steam” propose a series of narrative fragments that deflect the reference to the mother’s death and dissolve the autobiographical within the fictional environment.

13 Many of the stories Paley and Raffel write center around family issues and relationships. Yet, beyond the recognizable features and themes of the family story, the writing in Grace Paley and Dawn Raffel seems to be concentrated on the establishment of all kinds of relations. As Noëlle Batt notes in Grace Paley (16), in order to grasp the significance of Paley’s fictional universe one must rely on a “poetics of relation” that will highlight the variety and density of the dialogic interplay between the characters in the stories, between the narrators and the characters, the readers and the texts, between the fictional and the real world, between spaces, times, the languages embodied in numerous character-voices and the narrators’ discourses.

14 Grace Paley and Dawn Raffel are both deeply attached to the art of storytelling, to voice and rhythm in texts that tend to be concise, elliptical, and more often than not, open- ended. In her own words, Raffel’s “intention is to evoke and suggest and to honor mystery rather than to explain” (Raffel, Interview Manolescu-Oancea 1). In her tribute to Grace Paley (“Hommage” 10), Paule Lévy reminds us of Paley’s playful rejection of determinism in the story “A Conversation with My Father” (where the narrator declares: “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life” [Enormous Changes 162]), which she interprets as a breaking away from referential illusion, also leading to a “defamiliarization” of the storytelling process itself within the story.

15 Moving closer to textual features, the echoes between some titles of each of the writers’ collections strengthen their kinship: “Later the Same Day” and “Further Adventures...” convey the same impulse to continue (later, further), suggesting there is always more to reach out for. The grammatical symmetry of Dawn Raffel’s “Further Adventures in the Restless Universe” (adjective + noun- preposition- adjective + noun) is present in Paley’s “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.” To take one last example, “Disturbances in the Night,” from Raffel’s collection In the Year of Long Division, evokes

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the title of Paley’s first collection, The Little Disturbances of Man. More than just lexical repetitions, the titles are indications of both writers’ views of life and writing as an association and alternation of the ordinary, the everyday, the very small (“at the last minute”), with larger, more abstract perspectives transcending the personal, with the overwhelming sense of possibility and movement (“restless universe,” “enormous changes”). This tension is typical of the short story genre whose ambition, as Steven Millhauser describes it, is to “body forth the whole world,” turning the ancient Homeric ekphrasis into the art of storytelling, conjuring up the world within the word: I take my cue from William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand.”[…] In that single grain of sand lies the beach that contains the grain of sand. In that single grain of sand lies the ocean that dashes against the beach, the ship that sails the ocean, the sun that shines down on the ship, the interstellar winds, a teaspoon in Kansas, the entire universe. And there you have the ambition of the short story […].

16 Grace Paley’s and Dawn Raffel’s grains of sand are also made of the grain of words, the sounds of language and the rhythms of syntax. Grace Paley claims that “language is what the American language is about” and thus she writes about “a coming together of all sorts of languages” (Interview Hulley 19). Dawn Raffel’s subtle manipulations of syntax reveal her extreme attention to rhythm as a means of conveying a form of experience that semantics alone cannot translate. As she tells Manolescu-Oancea, she “studied musical tempos” when she was “learning to write,” and she likes to hear “the sound of language apart from meaning” (4).

17 In Raffel’s “Steam,” alliterations combine with appositions in rhythmic clusters, as in “information irretrievable, the windows blown” followed by “the street, laid bare, save for rubble” in the next sentence, which further join “the burial, bills” and a mysterious “dark bag”(65),5 in which “papers and tissues” are placed. Words become objects upon which the inscription of mourning and death is transferred. Sounds and rhythms trace a line of affect in the text, like the words “door,” “way” and “doorway” in “Mother” (111-112). They can first be read as images for the mother’s death as a symbolical moment of passage, but their alternated repetitions return the reading to their presence as signifiers in the text. They are a form of insistence from within the writing; they intimate that speaking contains the paradoxical expression of the unspoken, as Blanchot argues: It is upon losing what we have to say that we speak—upon imminent and immemorial disaster—just as we say nothing except insofar as we can convey in advance that we take it back, by a sort of prolepsis, not so as finally to say nothing, but so that speaking might not stop at the word—the word which is, or is to be, spoken or taken back. We speak suggesting that something not being said is speaking: the loss of what we were to say; weeping when tears have long since gone dry. (Disaster 21)

18 We can only speak of what we could say if the words were not always already lost. In “Mother” and “Steam,” the “unspoken” speech is not so much the fact of “death”— since the verb “die” is even used twice—but the expression of the loss that the advent of death entails. As Dawn Raffel suggests, speaking of Further Adventures in the Restless Universe: “Not all of the stories are about my family but they are about what we do with loss—in some cases not of people but of our self-concept” (Manolescu-Oancea 5). The idea that the text is about the loss of our “self-concept” is the condition imposed upon the writer according to Blanchot: “I cannot write unless death writes in me, makes of me the void where the impersonal is affirmed” (Space 149). The question of what she

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“do[es] with loss” as a writer, of how she creates a “relation with death” in writing, has been given a literary answer in the form of the poetic genre of the elegy.

19 In Semiotics and Interpretation, Robert Scholes analyzes W.S. Merwin’s one-line poem, “Elegy” (from The Carrier of Ladders), which reads: “Who would I show it to.” The very brevity of the poem makes it resistant to interpretation. The title refers to a well- established poetic tradition, which the reader must know in order to grasp the significance of the text’s elliptic mode, a key to the significance of the text itself. For Scholes, contrary to such classic elegies as Tennyson’s In Memoriam or Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” Merwin’s poem is an “anti-elegy, a refusal not simply to mourn, but to write a sonorous, eloquent, mournful, but finally acquiescent, accepting—in a word ‘elegiac’—poem at all” (38). Focusing on the use of the pronouns “who” and “I” and on the conditional verb phrase “would… show to,” Scholes’ semiotic study of the poem leads him to the following series of deductions: 1) for the speaker/poet, the poem is a form of address, and there is one person worthy of being shown the elegy; 2) if this person did not exist, were absent or dead, which is implied by the rhetorical question, there would be no reason left to write the poem (39). As Scholes reminds us, “the whole elegiac tradition, like its cousin the funeral oration, turns finally away toward acceptance, revival, renewal, a return to the concerns of life, symbolized by the very writing of the poem” (39), so that by contrast “Elegy” is more than a “refusal to mourn,” it is “a refusal to elegize” (39). Assuming that “it” refers to the “elegy” of the title, the poem cannot but be as brief as it is, the paradoxical expression of an impossible poetic utterance, and finally an elegy for elegies.

20 Such a metapoetic reading, which links the refusal to elegize to the demise of a poetic form, is based on the intertextual view of literature for which a text’s ultimate but always deferred meaning lies in its dialogic relationship with other texts in an ever expanding “library of Babel.” Scholes himself suggests a limit to the intertextual play by contending that “meaning is also a function of human experience […] and much of literature is based on attempts to generate equivalents for experiences that seem to defy duplication in mere signs” (35). Although the theoretical hegemony of the semiotic approach to literature in the 1970s had already receded in the early 1980s when Scholes still felt that he had to make the above qualification, the point about taking the “human experience” into account is not to return to the kind of intentional fallacy that consists in probing an author’s personal motives. The human experience referred to in “Elegy” is obviously that of mourning, death and absence, even before or beyond the establishment of intertextual connections. It is not only presupposed by the generic reference in the title; the text itself produces a “figuration”6 of absence which tests the limit of writing: in order to be an elegy, the poem must undo itself as an elegy, flaunting its own impossibility in the form of a single, short, and unpunctuated line. That line’s tension towards silence is a figure for what Blanchot names “the disaster,” one definition of which is “what escapes the very possibility of experience —it is the limit of writing” (Disaster 7).

21 Yet, compared with “Mother” and “Steam,” the text of “Elegy” remains on this side of mourning. The conditional experience embodied in “would” offers the protective distance of imagination; it is a rehearsal in thought, an exercise in anticipation. By contrast, as stories dealing with the absence that comes after the disappearance, Paley’s and Raffel’s texts test the limits of narrative when confronted with “what escapes the

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possibility of experience.” “Mother” and “Steam” are about more than death, which is only a theme. They are “on the edge of the disaster,” which is always out of reach and “disorients the absolute” (Blanchot, Disaster 4). Etymologically, Blanchot explains, the disaster is a “break with the star, break with every form of totality” (75). No wonder the “universe” becomes “restless” in “Steam,” where all kinds of accidents happen and where narrativity under the influence of the disaster, is in a state of “disarray, confusion” (Blanchot, Disaster 7).

22 Let us now see how the notion of “disaster” can be articulated with storytelling and narrative in “Mother” and “Steam,” and more specifically how it can lead to a distinction between two ways of being “on the edge of disaster,” how from loss as narratively embodied experience in “Mother,” “Steam” moves towards a more radical writing of the disaster, which is that of narrative itself.

“Mother”: the temptation of Orpheus

23 The apparent simplicity of the title turns out to be deceptive, for the story it announces presents itself as a succession of elliptic scenes, a narrative montage of fragments of memories. Moreover, the reiterated announcement of the death of the mother (“Then she died” [112]) disturbs the conventions of realistic narration, thus showing the possibilities and the dangers of poetic (re)creation. Turning back a second time upon that which should only happen once is a transgression akin to Orpheus’ gesture, and “[t]hrough Orpheus we are reminded that speaking poetically and disappearing belong to the profundity of a single movement” (Blanchot, Space 156).

24 The opening words, “One day” (111), are those of traditional storytelling, but then the nature of the narrative becomes elusive. The temporal landmarks refer to moments, as in the evocation of the narrator’s late homecoming on a New Year’s Day—a mixture of precision (“4 a.m.”) and vagueness (what year?). The ellipses, accelerations, and manipulations of the chronology and temporal coordinates suggest that the story is not primarily a biographical sketch of the narrator’s life, but a narrative of time, as it passes in lives related to one another, and above all what can be remembered and assembled. About ten lines before the end of the story, the sudden emergence of the grammatical and discursive present (“I wish”— the present of the enunciation) in the sentence (“I wish I could see her in the doorway of the living room” [112]) reinforces the pastness of the past and the sense of loss.

25 The spaces where the mother is present—notably the doorways (111-12)—act as frames for remembrances that are instant and ephemeral pictures, like memory snapshots. The mother’s disappearance is equated with the loss of a series of familiar images, and since images are already only a representation of reality, the mother is doubly absent. The narrative can only recuperate images. The repeated words (“door,” “doorway,” “hallway”) create a network of associations as a way of activating the mechanism of remembrance—each memory has its own place, but the mother is definitely connected with the transitional place of the “various doorways” where the narrator places her flickering presence and scarce words.

26 Textual signifiers generate a space for time and being, as suggested by the visual echoes of “am” in the text: “AM radio” first, then “4 a.m..” The repetition of the two letters turns into an assertion of presence and life that symmetrically counters the double mention of the mother’s death. Becoming a “living room” for the mother, the space of

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the text integrates the lapses, the repetitions, the fragility and fragmentation inherent in the process of remembering and writing about memories. Acute details, such as the “zinnias and marigolds” of the country garden (112), are part of the narrative stylization, but as details, their presence is a token of all that is absent.

27 The repetition of “Then she died” (112) structures the text, which is divided into two halves, each one starting with the lyrical expression of the narrator’s longing to see her mother, but it destabilizes the narrative. It goes against the linearity of realistic representation, but also, metaphorically, against time itself, showing the power of writing: the writer can make death happen twice, and can make the narrative begin anew once death has been pronounced. It seems that the usually singular event of death, which the repetition makes both imminent and immanent, can become the object of narrative mastery. But the sentence occurs both times in a single, isolated paragraph, which enhances the impression of pure consecution, adds to the narrative’s effacement of causality, its compression of time and events, and puts an end to narrative expansion while doubling the sense of closure, as “died” is the last word of the text. The narrator’s grasp cannot be maintained, and the control that she had exerted after hearing the song on the radio at the start—launching the series of reminiscences with the phrase “As a matter of fact”—now escapes and returns the narrator to the passivity of the recording of narrative succession: “Then she died.” The doubling of the sentence, like an impassable boundary, shows the disaster at work, undoing the possibility of narrative continuity and continuation: “This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes” (Blanchot, Disaster 7).

“Steam”: the disaster of the narrative

“The disaster, break with the star, break with every form of totality, never denying, however, the dialectical necessity of a fulfillment; the disaster: prophecy which announces nothing but the refusal of the prophetic as simply an event to come, but which nonetheless opens, nonetheless discovers the patience of vigilant language.” Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (75)

28 Dawn Raffel’s story moves away from the lyricism of “Mother,” first because “Steam” is a rather enigmatic and impersonal title. On the contrary, the title of Grace Paley’s story offers a figuration of the loss in the name “mother,” which can also be heard as a vocative, a calling, an invocation of the subject of and in the text. Nothing remains of the elegiac address in “Steam.” What Blanchot calls “the effacement, the extenuation of the subject” (Disaster 14) in the passivity that he associates with the disaster, is manifested in the narrator’s distance from the events, in the repeated refusal to name places, people or things, as in “I had just come back from a country, from visiting a country where things like this happened,” or “The boys sent a message from somebody’s gadget in digits and type” (65). The narrator’s tone is matter-of-fact, and the narrative can be as flat as the undetermined “surfaces” that the narrator wipes in an undetermined place: “In the morning I went to the swimming pool where I go when I go to swim laps” (64). Blandness prevails in many notations like “I called my office

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voice mail,” which can be paired with “The corporate hotline did not have an update” (65) a little further down.

29 To make sense of “Steam” as a title for the whole text, we have to consider it as a relational principle, as a power source for the narrative machine. Yet, the pressure of the “steam” is as much on the reading as on the text, which gives the impression that some of the relations that can be established between the discrete episodes within the story are inconsequential, fragile, and end up increasing the dissemination of narrative elements.

30 The word “steam” refers to an incident that is detailed in the first half of the text: the explosion of a steam pipe that causes damage to the office building where the narrator works. The narrative motivation is there, but then, somehow, it evaporates… to condense further in another incident involving the leaking roof of the movie theater where the narrator goes after swimming, and where rainwater falls on the floor. The rain (the general weather condition, not the raining in the movie theater) is evoked in the brief telephone conversation between the narrator and her sister at the very end. There is some kind of watery chain from the swimming pool to the steam pipe exploding, to the rain falling into the cinema, like an accumulation of potential “deaths by water.” The underlying presence of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land surfaces in the general “ruin” of the fictional world, from the rubble in the street after the explosion to the wet seats in the theater, the dying actress in the movie, the burnt toast, the possibly unrecorded message, the stepfather who “lay dying” in Faulknerian fashion (another modernist fragment shored against the ruin of the narrative?), and finally the dead mother.

31 Compared with the mother in Grace Paley’s story, the mother in “Steam” is no longer a “central” character, but her marginalization renders her absence more conspicuous in the assemblage of the narrative sequences. She occupies two visibly limited spaces: at the very beginning, in the first two lines, when she calls her daughter, and on the second page where another conversation is quoted and where, as a character, the mother also dissolves into her own death and disappearance. At that very moment, the narrative becomes increasingly elliptic, and the degree of parataxis intensifies, as in the following paragraph: “The call came at work. I was not at my desk. This did not matter. I said they were wrong. My stepfather lay dying himself on his side of the bed, and he was quite hard of hearing. The housekeeper found her” (65). The heavy use of anaphora (“The call,” “they,” “her”) several lines after the last mention of the mother, and uncertain deixis (“This”), as well as the understated logic in the two clauses coordinated by “and,” contribute to disjointing the narrative when the presence of the mother also dissolves.

32 The explosion of the steam pipe can be construed as a diegetic metaphor, an objective correlative for the transfer of some violent affect from the inside to the outside, which cannot be otherwise represented, while the second part of the story shows the exploded fragments. The “explosive” material can be found in the incipit of the story: My mother called to tell me that today was her birthday. “I didn’t think” I said, “that you would be alive.” She wasn’t, of course. In the morning I went to the pool where I go when I go to swim laps. (64)

33 The first thing that is remarkable is the slightly awry interposition of “I said,” which separates the narrator’s utterance, enhancing the negative mode—which is

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predominant throughout the story—on the one hand, and the subject—the death of the mother indirectly presented as “not being alive.” Finally, “of course” introduces an element of logical reasoning whereas nothing in the text explicitly allows the reader to see why the narrator reaches such a conclusion. Since the narrative takes another turn right after that, we have no clue whatsoever until we reach the second, longer telephone conversation between the narrator and her mother. The narrator’s self- declared confusion (“I am off by a day, a week at most” [65]) further unsettles the fuzzy narrative sequence of the first three lines of the story: first, the mother calls her daughter, then the narrator seems surprised that her mother is still alive and, in the next sentence (“She wasn’t, of course”), rectifies what appears to be an illusion, underlined by the ironical obviousness and allusiveness of “of course.” Constructing meaning against the “deconstruction” of continuity by the use of ellipses is always possible. We can assume that the immediate mention of “In the morning” after “of course” (64) suggests that the next day corrects the “disorder” created by the opening conversation, which, in fact, might have been just an imaginary one, with the mother brought back to life in a fantasy or in a dream. However, such rationalizations of the diegesis are also severely limited by the narrator’s self-confessed unreliability (“I have not told the truth” [65]).

34 The limit between the two parts of the text is provided by a sentence that contains an echo of Grace Paley’s “Mother”—unless we should consider that the echo itself is what makes the division become meaningful: “The star of the movie, a world-famous actress was dying and dying, and then she died” (65). Everything in that sentence indicates the disarray of narrative: the anonymity and allusiveness, the mock summary and cause and effect sequence in “was dying and dying, and then she died,” as if borrowed and amplified from Paley’s “Mother.” Another sentence offers a fainter echo of Grace Paley’s “I wish I could see her in the doorway of the living room” in “Mother”: “I wished just a little that I had been there” (64), mainly because of the use of “wish,” and the expression of regret (let us remember, though, that Paley’s “wish” was the more positive expression of a longing). The uncertainty as to what can be made of such connections questions the value of intertextual interpretation. But we can also read in “a little” the trace of some affect in language again, as in the texture of Dawn Raffel’s writing—the slight syntactical disjunction (“It was all of it cordoned” [64]), the nominal sentences, the reliance on rhythm, the slight “stutter” of qualifications (“the building, the high rise, that has my office in it”; “drops, great drops”; “from a country, from visiting a country” [64]). The local disruptions of the narrative come from the dissemination within the text of the unexperienced disaster, of what lies beyond the death of the mother, because the disaster is precisely “that which does not have the ultimate for a limit; it bears the ultimate away in the disaster” (Blanchot, Disaster 28). As a matter of fact, where Paley’s text ends with the semantically charged “died,” Dawn Raffel marks the distance at which the subject—reading and writing—is kept in the separate state of disaster by making “away” the final word of the story: “It’s raining,” she said. “Here too,” I said, “and I am so far away.” (65) ***** The Body of Mother. A foregone conclusion, Mother would say. The heart is a pump. In the end, it quits. I will speak for myself There is no end. I am calling and calling. (“Beyond all Blessing and Song, Praise and Consolation,” Further Adventures 100)

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35 When asked whether “writing help[s] [her] deal with death,” Paley replied that “if you’re a person who can’t deal with life, you’re not going to be able to deal with death.” For her, writing will not help you deal with death, but think about it” (Interview Hulley 38). Both “Mother” and “Steam” are the literary results of such thinking, the poetic enactment of a literary aesthetics which shows an awareness of that “terrible limit against which we are broken” (Blanchot, Space 148).

36 Grace Paley’s storytelling in “Mother” is more about the edge of the disaster, whereas Dawn Raffel’s “Steam” shows an experience with the disaster of the narrative. The notion of “disaster” we have borrowed from Blanchot is complex and paradoxical, but it does highlight the nature of the texts’ “relation with death” which gives them their distinct meaning. Their intransitivity and resistance (to continuity, chronology, traditional narrative) is a function of that relation with death within the space of writing. As writing never ceases to reach an ever receding limit, “Mother” and “Steam” might also offer “an approach towards death under the cover of writing” (Blanchot, Space 91); as if reversing the terms, death could be a relation with art, “beyond all blessing and song, praise and consolation.”7

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. Le Plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Print.

Batt, Noëlle. Grace Paley: Conteuse des destins ordinaires. Paris: Belin, 1998. Print.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1982. Print.

---. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1995. Print.

Dawn Raffel Website. Web. 20 August 2015.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 1983. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Print.

Hulley, Kathleen. “Introduction: Grace Paley’s Resistant Form.” Grace Paley. Ed. Kathleen Hulley. Spec. issue of Delta 14. (1982): 3-18. Print.

Lévy, Paule. Figures de l’artiste: Identité et écriture dans la littérature juive américaine de la deuxième moitié du xxe siècle. Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2006. Print.

---. “Hommage à Grace Paley.” in “Le coup de Grace [Paley],” Noëlle Batt and Paule Lévy. Transatlantica 1 (2009): Web. 18 Dec. 2014.

Manolescu-Oancea, Monica. “Dawn Raffel–A Family Portrait.” Transatlantica 2 (2010). Web. 19 Sept. 2014.

Merwin, W.S. The Carrier of Ladders. New York: Antheneum, 1970. Print.

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Paley, Grace. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. 1975. London: Virago, 1985. Print.

---. Interview with Kathleen Hulley. “Interview with Grace Paley.” Grace Paley. Ed. Kathleen Hulley. Spec. issue of Delta 14. (1982): 19-40. Print.

---. Just as I Thought. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Print.

---. Later the Same Day. 1985. New York: Penguin, 1986. Print.

---. The Little Disturbances of Man. 1970. London: Virago, 1980. Print.

Raffel, Dawn. Carrying the Body. New York: Scribner, 2002. Print.

---. Further Adventures in the Restless Universe. Westland, MI: Dzanc Books, 2010. Print.

---. In the Year of Long Division. New York: Knopf, 1994. Print.

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NOTES

1. Dawn Raffel is the author of another collection of stories, In the Year of Long Division (1994), a novel, Carrying the Body (2002), and a memoir, The Secret Life of Objects (2012). She has taught creative writing in the MFA program at Columbia University as well as in various literary seminars in the United States and abroad. She has also held various editorial positions —notably at O, the Oprah magazine, and at the Center for Fiction. She is currently an editorial consultant. For more information on her activities, see her website. 2. The expression “resistant form” comes from Kathleen Hulley’s introductory article in the special issue of Delta dedicated to Grace Paley. She begins with the following description of the specificity and paradoxical characteristics of the writer’s work: “Grace Paley is one of those writers whose importance one suspects from the first reading, but whose strategies are so resistant to commentary that the value of her artistic achievement dawns slowly. She is not apparently ‘experimental,’ yet her style is neither realistic nor naturalistic. She has no theory of writing; yet she sees the need neither for transition nor plot” (3). 3. In the Hulley interview, Grace Paley neither rejects nor fully endorses the autobiographical component of her stories, which is actually absorbed into a larger perspective—Paley is concerned not with the personal, but with the individual as part of various collective entities existing in the contemporary moment of her writing. In answer to the question: “In general, then, you prefer not to write about yourself?,” she answered: “I don’t not and I don’t do. I write about the lives of women and men of our time” (24). 4. See the incipit of “Upstaging Time” in Just as I Thought: “I must tell you that at the first upsurge of a contentious or merely complicated concern, I’m likely to slip into a fictional mode. This is a way of thinking, a habit of thought” (289). 5. First introduced as “the bag,” the narrator immediately qualifies the object as “a big, dark bag,” a vague description whose interest lies not only in the denotated mystery, but in the undercurrent relations suggested by the tightening of the alliterative pattern (the “b,” and the plosives /g/ and /k/) (65).

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6. “Figuration” as opposed to “representation,” to borrow Roland Barthes’s distinction in Le Plaisir du texte (88). Figuration is intransitive and semiotic, whereas representation relies on the mimetic illusion. 7. The phrase is the title of the final story in Dawn Raffel’s Further Adventures in the Restless Universe. As Raffel explains, “it is an English translation of a line from an ancient prayer written in Aramaic, the Mourner’s Kaddish, which praises God in the face of death” (Interview Manolescu-Oancea 6).

ABSTRACTS

À partir de la notion de « désastre », empruntée à l’œuvre de Maurice Blanchot, cet article propose une relecture de “Mother” de Grace Paley par l’intermédiaire d’une mise en regard avec une nouvelle de Dawn Raffel, “Steam”. La notion de « désastre » peut en effet être articulée avec celles de récit et de narration dans “Mother” et dans “Steam” car elle conduit à distinguer entre deux manières d’être « au bord du désastre » : de la perte comme expérience incarnée dans la narration avec “Mother”, on passe, avec “Steam”, à une écriture plus radicale du désastre, qui est le désastre de la narration elle-même.

AUTHORS

BRIGITTE FÉLIX Brigitte Félix is Professor of American literature at Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. She has published a monograph and several articles as well as a collection of essays on William Gaddis’s novels. She dedicates her research to American fiction (from the second half of the 20th century to the present), to the poetics of innovative forms in contemporary writing, and more specifically to new narrative textures and their relation to images and the visual (Mark Z. Danielewki, Percival Everett, Vanessa Place, Steve Tomasula).

Journal of the Short Story in English, 65 | Autumn 2015