People require strengthening before the acts of life.

Grace Paley, “Living”

I digressed and was free.

Grace Paley, “Faith in a Tree”

“When I was a little girl, I was a boy,”¹ Grace Paley told the audience of a recent symposium, a remark that ironically pays tribute to the power critics with a good many different axes to grind have come to find in the so-called “discourse of the Father.”² Insidiously formative (Paley went on to suggest), it shaped “a lot of little girls who like to get into things and want to be where the action is, which is up the corner someplace, where the boys are. And I understand this very well, because that was what really interested me a lot. I could hardly wait to continue being a boy so that I could go to war and do all the other exciting boys’ things” (PWW, p. 247). The point of the reminiscence, which is central to Paley’s feminist ethic, is made elsewhere and more obliquely in the opening section of “Ruthy and Edie,” where the two characters enact different but congruous responses to “the real world of boys”³—a phrase sardonically intended to suggest the prevailing ideological atmosphere of the girls’ working- and middle-class Bronx neighborhood. Ruthy, recalling the young Paley, dreams of war and bravery, of fighting for her country, of joining the boys who “ran around the block a lot, had races, and played war on the corner” (p. 115), while Edie, more passive and “feminine,” clings to her vision of “that nice family life” (p. 117) she derives from her reading of books like The Bobbsey Twins. The ironic turn of the episode comes when both girls panic at the approach of “an ordinary middle-sized dog” (p. 117) and, more dramatically still, when Ruthy, fleeter of foot or quicker of mind, runs into her apartment house, holding the door shut not only against the dog but against the terrified Edie. So much, then, for Ruthy’s all too theoretical notions of chivalry, as she betrays both her friend and herself. But we read partially at best if we stop there. Paley means to imply not that either Ruthy’s fear or her reaction is implausible but, rather, that reading about Roland’s Horn at Roncevaux has hardly prepared her to face the more commonplace dangers of her ordinary life. Consequently, if the irony is partly at Ruthy’s expense, it is aimed far more directly at the ideas she has ingested in her emulation of “the real world of boys,” the shadow and precursor, as the remainder of the story makes clear, of the equally false and more pernicious world of men.

I’ll come back to “Ruthy and Edie” shortly, but it will be useful first to pursue some of the larger implications, literary as well as political, of its brief prolegomenon. To begin with, and as virtually all of Paley’s critics have noted in their obligatory discussions of her best-known story, “A Conversation with My Father,” patriarchal discourse complacently assumes a number of fundamental and determinative values—those, for example, in Joyce Meier’s words, of “abstraction, linearity, possession, cause-and-effect progression.”⁴ In short, the paternal world—encoded in the father’s request that his daughter compose “a simple story … Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next”⁵—bases itself on unexamined and peremptory powers of discernment and identification. Defensively but still smugly, it prescribes an impossibly “simple,” stable, and objective mirror to reflect what it takes to be the inevitable, sequential trajectory of life’s beginnings, middles, and ends. Paley’s own discourse, as critics have also recognized, is predicated instead on the belief that, as the narrator of “A Conversation” puts it (she is commenting on “plot, the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away”): “Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life” (p. 167).

The possibility of change, which the story-telling daughter confers on her character in defiance of the father’s cynical insistence (understandable given his life and times) that she recognize “Tragedy! Plain tragedy! Historical tragedy! No hope. The end” (p. 173), relates, in turn, to Paley’s belief that art’s beginnings, like its endings, rest on what is not already known. Thus, in “Of Poetry and Women and the World,” Paley, echoing Barthelme’s formulation, speaks, though in terms of her own interests and career, of not knowing and, by extension, of learning to know the world:

When I came to really thinking as a writer, it was because I began to live among women. Now the great thing is that I didn’t know them, I didn’t know who they were. Which I should have known, since I had all these aunts, right? But I didn’t know them, and that, I think, is really where lots of literature, in a sense, comes from. It really comes, not from knowing so much, but from not knowing. It comes from what you’re curious about. It comes from what obsesses you. It comes from what you want to know. (p. 249)⁶

The passage underlies what Paley has several times said, that her aim as an artist is to provide “the illumination of what isn’t known, the lighting up of what is under a rock, of what has been hidden” (PWW, p. 250).⁷ To a degree, however, the credo, as expressed here, threatens to mislead. Paley’s stories make abundantly clear that the issue is not one of discovering or revealing what is already there, available to the scrutiny of anyone and everyone willing to turn the rock over, but, rather and as in Barthelme’s case, that it has to do with “inventing.”

To be sure, one needs, just as when dealing with Barthelme’s “Not-Knowing,” to be gingerly in establishing the meaning of a word currently so overdetermined, especially since it is a good deal more common in Paley’s work and, I will argue, central to an understanding of her aesthetic. Briefly, it can be said for now that in reading Paley we are dealing with invention as a function not of the free-floating, unanchored imagination—what Larry McCaffery refers to when he says that metafictionists “insist that the reader accept the work as an invented, purely made-up entity”⁸—but of imagination inextricably entangled with a world that, at the very least, provides the foundation for whatever it is that invention intends and accomplishes. In short, imagination of the metafictional kind is, for Paley, closer to “fantasy” (PWW, p. 251), whereas writers like her, she says, “write about things, not just words, about a certain subject matter.”⁹

On the other hand, it is just as clear that the world, according to Paley, is variously perceived and construed, that, partly because of temperament and partly because of historical circumstance, human beings inevitably grasp their common world differently.¹⁰ Thus, the narrator of “The Immigrant Story,” insists to her old friend Jack: “I believe I see the world as clearly as you do … Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world”,¹¹ while Paley herself, commenting on her characters in “A Conversation with My Father,” says of them that “they were really speaking from their own latitude and longitude, and from their own time in history.”¹² Obviously, the suggestion is that at least to some degree our modes of seeing are, and must be, perspectival; and if there is, from story to story, some variation in the degree of determination Paley attributes to her characters’ responses, there is no question but that she asserts, everywhere and always, the individual, subjective basis of experience.

That insistence constitutes, one might argue, the most persuasive reason for excluding Paley from the ranks of realistic writers: those who, to invoke J. P. Stern’s definition one last time, “take reality for granted.” I’ve indicated already that for Paley perception is limited, partial, and, in phenomenological terms, “situated.” But there is more to it than that. In “Faith in a Tree,” Paley attributes to her protagonist what is obviously in some sense her belief as well: “Despite no education,” Faith says, “Mrs. Finn always is more in charge of word meanings 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.”¹³ Of course Paley’s stories are precisely about “an active moral life,” but the subject is approached over and again by way of fluid interrogation rather than definitive statement: like Alexandra in “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,” Paley is “an enemy of generalization.”¹⁴

And an enemy, too, of the kind of circumstantial detail that Apple calls “description-centered realism.” It is worth stressing—since in this respect, as in others, she is paradigmatic of other writers discussed in this book—that, for all her concern with the ordinary, the everyday, the commonplace, Paley is not given to highly sensuous textures. The things of the world matter, certainly, but they are not the primary object of her attention; and it is therefore hardly surprising that Paley’s descriptions tend to be vivid but sketchy. We hear, for example, of “the most admirable mountain or … the handsomest forest or hay-blown field,” of “the tan deserts and the blue Van Allen belt and the green mountains of New England,” or of a “sunny front room that was full of the light and shadow of windy courtyard trees.”¹⁵ Like Selena in “Friends,” who is described as speaking “very matter-of-factly—just offering a few informative sentences” (p. 76), Paley favors the laconic. But only up to a point. In some ways a remarkably conceptual writer, she offers us images and conceits (“Living as I do on a turnpike of discouragement”; “my lumpen time and my bourgeois feelings”¹⁶) that are as witty and unexpected as Barthelme’s, as eccentric as Apple’s. And even that does not tell the whole story, for the tropological aspects of her storytelling are, like Barthelme’s in “Basil from Her Garden,” deployed so as to render the forms of feeling. The weight of Paley’s stories is, above all, the weight of intersubjective acts and encounters; their density, partly the result of the repeated presence of children, friends, lovers, and husbands and, still more importantly, of the ways in which these people impinge on one another through their feelings and ideas, their needs and desires. In short, it is not the empirical world that is rendered in the universe of Paley’s fiction—not first and foremost, at any rate—but the feelings that derive from being in the world and from the need, somehow, to make sense of what is not transparent to either heart or mind.

Given the fact that by now most of Paley’s critics are in agreement that she is not a realist, it may seem supererogatory to labor the point. Nevertheless, old habits die hard, not to say old labels; and it is revealing that some of her most perceptive commentators, even as they reject the idea of realism, sneak it in by the back door. Kathleen Hulley, for example, having asserted that Paley’s “style is neither realistic nor naturalistic,” later on in her essay describes one of the “tracks” her stories run along as, precisely, “realistic.”¹⁷ Marianne DeKoven, for her part, argues that “Paley reconciles the demands of avant-garde or postmodern form for structural openness and the primacy of the surface with the seemingly incompatible demands of traditional realist material for orchestrated meaning and cathartic emotion.”¹⁸ And, most revealingly of all, Jerome Klinkowitz maintains that Paley “practices her own storytelling art with a more experimental sense of realism.”¹⁹

My intention, however, is not to catch Paley’s critics in contradictions but to confront the far more dubious and, as it seems to me, misleading assumption that, if Paley is not a realist, she is therefore, and as a result, not only a postmodernist but a metafictionist. Of those who make this argument, probably the most thoroughgoing—although he never actually uses the word metafiction—is Nicholas Peter Humy, who, in a discussion of “A Conversation with My Father,” contends that the protagonist wants her father “to see the process of storytelling anew, to see how, in the telling, the story becomes defamiliarized, becomes, not what it is about, but what it is. And what it is is a form which, according to Shklovsky, reveals the experience of its making.”²⁰ Humy is right, of course, that the story “reveals the experience of its making.” It does not follow, however, that that is all it is “about.” In fact, “A Conversation” is preeminently about different ways of apprehending life and art, and what the story denies is not the world but the world’s transparency and self-evidence before language. As I indicated earlier, what is in doubt is our ability to grasp the world objectively, to apprehend it in a way that is not at once mediated and contingent. But for Paley, at least, contingency is a two-way street, an emblem of dependence on what we perceive as much as on the categories through which we perceive. To say, therefore, as another critic does, that “the voice of Paley’s fiction … assumes its freedom to create its own laws and logic through play”²¹ is to exaggerate the autonomy Paley claims for herself and her work and to confuse the always partly determined possibilities of midfictional invention with the theoretically absolute freedom (linguistic, at least) of poststructuralist jeu and jouissance.

Klinkowitz in his brief essay does neither of these things, but it is worth attending to his argument nevertheless. “For Grace Paley,” he writes, “metafiction … is a peculiarly social matter, filled with the stuff of realism other metafictionists have discarded. … Only Grace Paley finds them [realistic conventions] to be the materials of metafiction itself.”²² But precisely because this argument is ostensibly more subtle and persuasive, it makes clear how inadequate to our understanding of contemporary literature is the draconian choice of either realism or metafiction—or, as with Klinkowitz’s “experimental realism,” of some combination of the two. No doubt, and to his credit, Klinkowitz senses something operative in Paley’s fiction that cannot be subsumed to the notion of metafiction. But, unable to find a name and an identity for such work, he and other critics I’ve cited choose instead to pursue and, more, to reify what, for them, continues to be its constituent and still separable elements. It needs to be emphasized, therefore, that, by modifying and adulterating the idea of realism, by failing to take adequate account of those ontological and ideological features that must enter into its definition, these critics effectively undermine their arguments, just as they also, and more importantly, fail to recognize the integrity of what is in fact another form and vision altogether, one that is not part realism and part metafiction but uniquely and indivisibly itself. As I’ve been contending throughout this book, and as Paley demonstrates perhaps more than anyone else discussed in it, the binaryism of our current categories betrays the very diversity that gives to postmodern fiction in particular its vitality and richness. Which is also to argue, once again, that in order to do justice to Paley, as to the writers already considered, we require a descriptive middle ground capable of encompassing assumptions and strategies that give primacy to neither language nor the world but that seek—in ways and with means that are entirely their own—to recognize and negotiate the claims of each and both.

At issue, then, is the artist, in this case Paley, as the site where invention and receptivity join, and, by way of confronting head-on the claims of metafictionally disposed critics, it will be useful to focus on two of her more deliberately reflexive stories. What needs to be determined, most of all, is whether reflexivity implies only (and merely) a story’s concern with its own fictional processes—a concern which is, furthermore, generally taken to imply a disbelief in literature’s referential function—or whether, in Robert Alter’s words, what we witness as we read is “the dialectic between fiction and ‘reality’ … a play of competing ontologies.”²³ The remaining and longer section of “Ruthy and Edie,” to which I want to return now, begins, at least, to make clear that for Paley reflexivity is to be seen not as the antithesis of referentiality but as its complement.²⁴

First, however, what always matters more to Paley than such generalizations: the particulars of individual lives. Gathered together to celebrate Ruthy’s fiftieth birthday, the women in the story wander among their memories and their concerns (as usual, very little “happens” by way of traditional action or plot); and it is not long before the reader recognizes as the background of these the continuity between, indeed the identity of, “the real world of boys” and the equally “real” world of men. The women find themselves, as much as when they were girls, the unwilling victims not only of specific situations and problems (international relations, war, urban blight, capitalism²⁵) but more importantly, of a series of mind sets, categories, and received ideas seen, by men at any rate, as essential and eternal truths. Their task, then, is to set against this bogus essentialism an ever-renewing, existential awareness of the world, which is, as it happens, more in accord with their feelings and which is the unstated, perhaps not fully recognized agenda of their discursive talk.

This is not to suggest that Ruthy, Edie, Faith, and Ann speak with one voice or form a kind of seamlessly unified feminist collective. Edie, for example, manifestly an adult version of her younger self, is in some sense the odd woman out, the not fully awakened woman. (“Sometimes,” Faith says, “I think you’re half asleep” [RE, p. 123]). Tearful and intermittently hopeless, for all her idealism, Edie tells the others: “You know you three lead such adversarial lives. I hate it. What good does it do?” (p. 123). Yet, as the narrator comments, “They were all, even Edie, ideologically, spiritually, and on puritanical principle against despair” (p. 123), and it is Edie who, though “softly,” says “bravo” to Ann’s birthday resolution: “Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world” (p. 124). In a larger sense, therefore, the friends are at one, united, not necessarily in their advocacy of this or that issue, nor yet in their special ways of responding, but in their women’s way of seeing, which is, most fundamentally, their impulse to save the world from the assumptions of boys and men, and from their mirroring shape: the relentless, forward-moving, sequential prison of time.

We are back, in other words, to the kinds of problems broached by Paley in “A Conversation with My Father,” and it is, in fact, at this more general, almost parabolic, level that “Ruthy and Edie” operates, even as it continues to root itself in the concrete and specific: Ruth’s joyous and doting response to the arrival of her young grandchild, Letty, which is shadowed by the unexplained absence of another of her daughters. As that absence betrays its effect in Ruthy’s repeated hugging of Letty, the story ends:

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. (p. 126)

The metaphor of the fall as used here is neither theological nor, except incidentally, Wordsworthian. Whereas one cannot avoid altogether an awareness of “shades of the prison-house” closing upon Letty, the narrator’s phrase is intended to focus on time not as an emblem of some general human condition but as something molded specifically in the image of Man, or, more accurately, of men. Consequently, Letty’s soft “world-inventing words” sum up more than the child’s way of coming to terms with what surrounds her; they are Paley’s and her characters’ weapon against the mediations of those man-made categories that present themselves as adequate, necessary, and self-evident representations of reality itself.

But if this celebration of creativity, of “the open destiny of life” is central to “Ruthy and Edie,” it is not all that the story has to say on the subject. Earlier, Ruth, meditating on Letty’s movement from a “present full of milk and looking” (p. 121) to her first experiments with language, concludes: “In this simple way the lifelong past is invented, which, as we know, thickens the present and gives all kinds of advice to the future” (p. 121). No doubt the passage, like the one that closes the story, privileges the freedom of invention, but, as the context it provides makes clear, that freedom depends upon an altogether concrete and irreducible experience of the world language brings into being—but does not, as in some metafictional and poststructuralist models, simply “make up.” As John R. Boly argues in a recent critique of Derrida, “no human mind can ever totally escape a perspective field with its horizon of enabling limits”;²⁶ and if part of what Paley is after is a revelation of how paternal discourse coerces, or attempts to coerce, perception according to its own unacknowledged preconceptions, it is no less her aim to demonstrate the extent to which consciousness is anchored in the world it invents. Surely that is the burden of the narrator’s comment in “A Conversation with My Father,” when, arguing for the possibility of change in the character she has created, she says of her: “She’s my knowledge and my invention” (p. 173). Denying the claims that either phrase, taken by itself, would seem to make—in the first case, for realism; in the second, for metafiction—the two together acknowledge as twin sources of the narrator’s (and, it seems fair to say, of Paley’s) inspiration: consciousness and the world. The phenomenological axiom according to which “the world gives itself to consciousness which confers on it its meaning” comes to hand here again. But one might as well give the last word to Paley herself. “When I was writing stories,” she said in her interview with Joan Lidoff, “it was really me getting the world to speak to me.”²⁷ In short, if “the hard floor of man-made time” awaits those who fail to keep vital the generative impulses of “world-inventing words,” something more barren still attends those others for whom invention, endlessly mirroring the self-enclosed universe of poststructuralist language, floats free of the world, and of reference, altogether.

In the course of “Friends,” Faith Darwin, Paley’s most ubiquitous character and the narrator of the story, expresses her irritation over an allusion to the dead daughter of Selena (one of the four women to whom the title refers) as “the kid.” “I didn’t like to hear ‘the kid,’” Faith says to herself. “I wanted to say ‘Abby’ the way I’ve said ‘Selena’—so those names can take thickness and strength and fall back into the world with their weight” (Fr, p. 79). Thickness and strength are what characterize Paley’s best work as well, and nowhere more so than in “Friends,” which, of all the stories in Later the Same Day, most fully and skillfully realizes the possibilities, strategic and axiological, defended in “A Conversation with My Father.” My emphasis on the facticity, the affective weight, of Paley’s enterprise, is not, however, meant to indicate that either her conception of reality or the techniques she uses to render it assume the consistency, still less the “readability,” of the world, the text, or, as some would have it, the world as text. On the contrary, and as Faith’s remark makes clear, all of these are implicated in a creative, reciprocal, and ongoing relation with consciousness. “The fact of the world” (Fr, p. 88), as Faith later calls it, is no more (but also no less) than the fluid and unstable boundary of perception, the horizon of signification as act.

Given all this, it is hardly surprising that Paley’s stories are, at their most successful, amazingly free-form. One might, for example, note that “Friends” focuses first on the visit that Faith, along with Susan and Ann, pays to the dying Selena and then on the visitors’ return trip to New York. One might add too that both occasions spark memories, discussions, disagreements, revaluations, all of which disrupt and subvert the linear movement of Faith’s account. But this summary hardly conveys what is most striking about “Friends,” namely, the fact that its structure is so radically, if unobtrusively, associative and discursive. “Plot,” Paley has said, “is only movement in time … but that doesn’t mean it moves dead ahead in time,”²⁸ a remark that Virginia Woolf would have endorsed, and for similar reasons. For what both women share is the belief that the writer’s obligation is not to re-present a fixed and stable reality but to suggest the ways in which an elusive “otherness” modifies, even as it is modified by, the constitutive activity of consciousness. Thus, although “Friends” is in some sense about death and dying (and, as we shall see, about their opposites), it is more immediately, or at least more fundamentally, attentive to the problem of coming to terms with experience, of sorting out perceptions and feelings that are not as simple or single as they are for, say, the characters of Carver and Beattie. In other words, like Barthelme—although her work is generally without the calculated extravagance and playfulness of fictions like “Overnight to Many Distant Cities” or “Basil from Her Garden”—Paley presents a world that is a more supple, sinuous, and mysterious place than it is for the realists; and to the degree that past and present, memory and interpretation, self and other, intermingle in the narrative to-and-fro of “Friends,” what the story registers is precisely the difficulty of knowing the world, along with the still more urgent need to know it.

As the difficulty manifests itself in the fabric of the storytelling, in the low-keyed and subtle ways “Friends” keeps the reader off-balance, so the urgency makes itself felt in the affirmations the story wrests from the jumble of recollected encounters and events that Faith relives in the process of narrating them. For if, according to both Paley and Barthelme, knowledge, far from being merely a passive reception of the world’s pre-existing being, is instead a response elicited by the pressures of the not-known, then it follows that knowledge is to be found only in and through the activity involved in generating it. Or, as Faith puts it, more concretely: “Though the world cannot be changed by talking to one child at a time, it may at least be known” (Fr, p. 78). In fact, a good deal of value-laden knowledge is generated and affirmed in “Friends,” though, as its technique dictates, always hesitantly, tentatively, and, as its subject requires, with due consideration of the story’s background of egoism, death, and loss.

Even without Faith’s confirming remark, it is easy enough to conclude that the story dwells repeatedly on the value of act and effort. Moreover, like many other midfictional works, it does so in a way that is characteristically modest and tempered. Speaking, for example, of “our coming eviction, first from liveliness, then from life” (p. 83). Faith comments:

Luckily, I learned recently how to get out of that deep well of melancholy. Anyone can do it. You grab at roots of the littlest future, sometimes just stubs of conversation. Though some believe you miss a great deal of depth by not sinking down down down. (pp. 83–84)

Recalling Virginia Woolf again (“I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts”²⁹), this time, however, by way of contrast, the passage orients itself toward the open or uncharted and, accepting life’s inevitable disunities, it opts for a distinctively human rather than a quasi-metaphysical depth. The same ethos informs the story’s midfictional confirmations of the ordinary and the daily as mysterious and extraordinary³⁰—most notably in its treatment of the relationships, however flawed or difficult, to which the title refers. More generally, it ratifies the world as the necessary site and foundation of whatever creative gestures both “the little disturbances” and the genuine sorrows of women and men allow.

“Creative” is the key word here and becomes, if anything, still more central as “Friends” draws to its close, since in its final paragraphs the story turns reflexively on itself and reveals that, whatever else it may be, it is a meditation on art, both as a specifically literary enterprise and as an emblem of all human responses to “the fact of the world.” Reacting to her son’s solicitude for her, his irritation at what he takes to be her unwarranted hopefulness, and his own inconsistent vitality and gloom, Faith sums up the digressive tale she has told about herself and her friends as follows:

Meanwhile, Anthony’s world—poor, dense, defenseless thing—rolls round and round. Living and dying are fastened to its surface and stuffed into its softer parts.

He was right to call my attention to its suffering and danger. He was right to harass my responsible nature. But I was right to invent for my friends and our children a report on these private deaths and the condition of our lifelong attachments. (p. 89)

Again, the crucial concept has to do with the idea of invention, and, by way of bringing together the various threads of my argument, it may be useful one last time to explore how exactly, in its use of the term, Paley’s aesthetic compares with other twentieth-century beliefs about the autotelic, mimetic, tautological, or mediative functions and powers of art. Obviously, her position is at once less magical than the modernists’ and more interrogative than the realists’. Art, that is, presents itself for Paley neither as a self-sufficient counterpoint to the unsatisfactoriness of life (art being only one value among many) nor as an instrument that simply records and comments upon a shared and common world (the world being more plastic and interpretable than this view suggests). Which is not, however, as some of her critics would have it and as Raymond Federman insists, to maintain “that reality as such does not exist.”³¹ To be sure, Paley’s work, including the passage just quoted, acknowledges the ambiguities both of consciousness and the world; but it needs to be emphasized that art represents for her, as it does not for the metafictionists, a way of reaching out to the world, of doing justice to it by calling into question the very substantiality it also affirms.

For Paley, then, invention is a way of being in the world, the self’s means of conferring significative value on what inchoately solicits and surrounds it. And it is also, in “Friends,” the middle ground on which she stages the contest between living and dying and urges, in the face of rampant mortality, the claims of friendship and love. To put matters this way is. I recognize, to risk making Paley sound sentimental, but the effect of the story is neither to resolve nor to transcend, as sentimental literature does, life’s fractures and disjunctions. The “report” that Faith “invents” encompasses “private deaths” as well as “lifelong attachments,” so 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. Nor is it, one must add, only the story’s ending that justifies its suspensiveness and its assent. Throughout, it is the narrator’s voice to which we attend, as it threads its way among the bits and pieces of past and present, giving to them a consistency that is, at best, only potentially theirs. Often defensive, at once concealing and defending its vulnerability, sometimes even a bit hard in its jokiness, generally understated but ready, as in the description of “Anthony’s world,” to move into other registers, the story’s various but ultimately compassionate voice is what earns “Friends” the right to its final affirmation.

Words like “compassionate” and “affirmation” threaten once again to rattle the bones of sentimentality; and so it is probably worth insisting that not only “Friends” but Paley’s work as a whole articulates what can most accurately be called an economy of gain and loss. “All of life is tragic,” she has said, sounding for the moment very much like the father in “A Conversation.” “Sorrow is just natural.”³² And indeed, as it defines itself in her three volumes of stories, life is often disappointing and frustrating, the cause, for women especially, of considerable desperation and bitterness. Displaying from the beginning signs of “man’s inhumanity.”³³ it is filled, in her most recent and gloomiest collection particularly, with the certain and unmistakable odor of mortality. But although all of this is true enough, it represents only part of what Paley has to say. Against (but never in place of) the experience of inevitable and not so inevitable disillusionments and defeats she sets a sense of hope and possibility, embodied in characters who, like Aunt Rose in “Goodbye and Good Luck,” consider life more their creation than their fate or who, like Virginia in another story, conclude that “all that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad, or peculiar.”³⁴ Paley’s survivors exhibit, above all, pluck and determination, a capacity to enjoy what they can and to distinguish the little disturbances of man from the “catastrophes of God.”³⁵ When all is said and done, and whatever may be urged to the contrary, it continues to be for Paley “the interesting world,”³⁶ as open and unpredictable as the digressive techniques she characteristically uses to express it.

Her stories, then, as compared, for example, with Beattie’s more limited and lapidary efforts, aim not for a state of grace, stylistic or otherwise, but for the riskier, more human condition of world-invention: the continual and continually imperiled creation of the self in act and in time. In this sense, as in her privileging of the ordinary. Paley, for all the uniqueness of her talent, recalls the other writers discussed in this book, who would, I think, agree with the spirit of one of her recent remarks: “When I’m asked—Is she a heroine?—I’m not really interested in that, I’m not interested in that extraordinary person to that extent, except to the degree that all those people are extraordinary to me.”³⁷ We are, in other words, dealing once again with the extraordinariness of the ordinary. This focus—as well as its attendant belief that change, in the nature of things, is as partial as it is slow—may, I recognize, seem in its deliberately un- or antiheroic stance to impugn the capacity of human beings definitively to shape their world and their fates. It can only be said therefore that the need for heroism of this kind, la recherche de l’absolu, is something less than self-evident in an age when literary, no less than political, rhetoric, whether of the right or the left, has become increasingly missionary, strident, and self-assured.

Or, perhaps, what we witness as we follow the fortunes of midfictional characters like Mad Moll, Oedipa Maas, or Faith Darwin, to choose radically different incarnations of the same impulse, is a redefinition of what it means to be heroic. Along with Paley, the novelists and short-story writers I’ve concentrated on seek neither, like the modernists, to substitute for the disorder of life the less assailable order of art nor, like the metafictionists in their own radically world-denying maneuvers, to gambol on the playing fields of language. To be sure, though less absolute in their hopes and beliefs, they acknowledge, along with the world’s indeterminacies and imperfections, a more personal sense of loss: in Apple’s case, the loss of an earlier and simpler America; in Barthelme’s, of a perhaps mythic single-mindedness; in Pynchon’s, of a time before men and the depredations of consciousness; in Elkin’s of the integrated self; and in Berger’s, of the natural and normal, the prelapsarian ease of being in the world. Obviously, such unrealizable dreams have their effect in shaping the works of these writers, but final, all-resolving unities are not, in fact, what they are after. On the other hand, they reject as well the limits and constraints assumed by realists: the assumption of a world at once immutable and independent of creative intervention. Instead, and with a more chastened sense of the heroic, midfiction presumes, in small and modest ways, to bring about change in a world it knows it cannot ever fully control or understand. Barthelme’s “wine of possibility,” Elkin’s manic celebration of energy, Mooney’s confirmation of the human, Apple’s notions of sufficiency and assent, Berger’s acts of definition. Paley’s “open destiny,” and, most especially, Pynchon’s hectic, labyrinthine pursuit of diversity, all speak to this attempt.

But in different ways. As I’ve been arguing from the beginning of this study, contemporary fiction has fallen victim to a too partial and exclusive sense of what it proposes, not to say, achieves. If the concept of midfiction can be seen to provide an alternative to the mutually exclusive choices of realism and metafiction, it needs itself to be thought of not as one more monolithic category but as a capacious middle ground on which broadly like-minded writers raise the most varied and heterogeneous structures. Nevertheless, even terms like midfiction and middle grounds project their own borders and boundaries, and so as to keep these as flexible as possible, it is probably wise to end by minimizing rather than stressing the constitutive powers such taxonomic categories possess. At the last, there is something to be said for focusing not only on what such works represent collectively (whether in formal or in ideological terms) but on what each of them specifically and distinctively intends.³⁸ In short, what joins the writers studied in this book is also, paradoxically, what distinguishes them from one another: the still lively (but no longer imperial) humanistic impulse that seeks to do justice to the world’s irreducible particularity by inventing it into always unique and individual being. To what end? Partly, no doubt, to defend and confirm in acts of creation the validity of the now thoroughly beleaguered self, but also, as another of Paley’s reflexive narrators says, conceding her “debts” to the immediate world around her, “in order, you might say, to save a few lives.”³⁹

Notes

1. Grace Paley, “Of Poetry and Women and the World,” TriQuarterly, 65 (Winter 1986), 247. The essay will be referred to hereafter as PWW. The symposium, sponsored by TriQuarterly, was called “The Writer in Our World.”

2. Joyce Meier, “The Subversion of the Father in the Tales of Grace Paley,” Delta, 14 (1982), 122.

3. Grace Paley, “Ruthy and Edie,” Later the Same Day (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985), p. 115. The story will be referred to hereafter as RE.

4. Meier, p. 122. See also Nicholas Peter Humy, “A Different Responsibility: From and Technique in Grace Paley’s ‘A Conversation with [My] Father,’” Delta, 14 (1982), 87–95. For Humy, the father’s conception of literature and life is basically Aristotelian.

5. Grace Paley, “A Conversation with My Father,” Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974: rpt. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1975), p. 167. The story will be referred to hereafter as CF.

6. On Paley’s friendship with Barthelme, see Kathleen Hulley, “Interview with Grace Paley,” Delta, 14 (1982), 38–39. On the back cover of Enormous Changes, Barthelme is quoted as saying: “There’s no writer in our country whose work exceeds in beauty and truth that of Grace Paley.” And on the back of the other two collections he describes her as “a wonderful writer and troublemaker. We are fortunate to have her in our country.”

7. See Paley’s remark in her interview with Hulley: “Writing does not help me deal with anything! … I mean if I wrote a poem, it doesn’t help me to deal with it, [it] helps me to think about it” (p. 38). And see also, Joan Lidoff, “Clearing Her Throat: An Interview with Grace Paley,” Shenandoah, 32, 3 (1981), 23.

8. Larry McCaffery, The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), p. 5. For such a metafictional approach to invention, see Coover’s “The Magic Poker,” Pricksongs & Descants (1969; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1970). The story opens: “I wander the island, inventing it” (p. 20), and the word recurs throughout, most notably on p. 33: “At times, I forget that this arrangement is my own invention. I begin to think of the island as somehow real, its objects solid and intractable, its condition of ruin not so much an aesthetic design as an historical denouement” (my italics).

9. The remark appears in an interview with Nina Darnton, “Taking Risks: The Writer as Effective Teacher,” New York Times (“Education Life,” Section 12), 13 April 1986, p. 66.

10. None of which, however, rules out for Paley the possibility of change. See, for example, the poem that ends “Of Poetry and Women and the World” (pp. 252–53), which makes as clear as anything she has written her personal, social, political, and feminist agenda.

11. Grace Paley, “The Immigrant Story,” Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, p. 180.

12. Lidoff, p. 19.

13. Grace Paley, “Faith in a Tree,” Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, p. 91.

14. Grace Paley, “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,” Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, p. 130.

15. The quotations come from three different stories by Paley: “Midrash on Happiness,” TriQuarterly, 65 (Winter 1986), 151: “Faith in a Tree,” p. 95; “Friends,” Later the Same Day, p. 85. “Friends” will be referred to hereafter as Fr.

16. The first quotation is from “A Woman, Young and Old,” The Little Disturbances of Man (1959; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1973), p. 40, the second from “Faith in a Tree,” p. 86. On Paley’s imagery, see Marianne DeKoven’s fine essay, “Mrs. Hegel-Shtein’s Tears,” Partisan Review, 48, 2 (1981), 217–23. DeKoven speaks, rightly, of Paley’s “startling, comic-bizarre language and imagery” (p. 221).

17. Kathleen Hulley, “Grace Paley’s Resistant Form,” Delta, 14 (1982), 3, 4.

18. DeKoven, p. 217.

19. Jerome Klinkowitz, “Grace Paley: The Sociology of Metafiction,” Delta, 14 (1982), 82. Klinkowitz develops his notion of “experimental realism” in The Self-Apparent Word: Fiction as Language/Language as Fiction (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), chapter 6.

20. Humy, p. 90.

21. Diane Cousineau, “The Desires of Women, the Presence of Men,” Delta, 14 (1982), 64.

22. Klinkowitz, p. 81.

23. Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (1975; rpt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), p. 182.

24. McCaffery, in The Metafictional Muse, distinguishes between two kinds of metafiction. The first, he writes, “either directly examines its own construction as it proceeds or … comments or speculates about the forms and language of previous fictions” (p. 16). The second seeks “to examine how all fictional systems operate, their methodology, the sources of their appeal, and the dangers of their being dogmatized” (p. 17). This useful distinction will serve to discriminate between different sorts of non-metafictional but still reflexive stories as well; and, as will become apparent. “Ruthy and Edie” especially belongs in the second of these groups.

25. In “Of Poetry and Women and the World,” Paley asserts that “war is man-made. It’s made by men. It’s their thing, it’s their world, and they’re terribly injured in it. They suffer terribly in it, but it’s made by men” (p. 247).

26. John R. Boly, “Nihilism Aside: Derrida’s Debate over Intentional Models,” Philosophy and Literature, 9 (October 1985), 163.

27. Lidoff, p. 7.

28. Lidoff, p. 18.

29. Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall,” A Haunted House and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949), p. 39.

30. In her interview with Hulley, Paley said: “I’m anti-mystic too. … What I think is mysterious is life. What I’m trying to do is to show how mysterious ordinary life is” (p. 35).

31. Raymond Federman, “Fiction Today or the Pursuit of Non-Knowledge,” Humanities in Society, 1 (Spring 1978), 122.

32. Hulley, “Interview,” p. 30.

33. Grace Paley, “In Time Which Made a Monkey of Us All,” The Little Disturbances of Man, p. 149.

34. Grace Paley, “An Interest in Life.” The Little Disturbances of Man, p. 98.

35. Grace Paley, “An Interest in Life,” p. 99.

36. Grace Paley, “Faith in a Tree,” p. 89.

37. Lidoff, pp. 12–13.

38. By “each of them” I mean to suggest both an individual story or novel and, more comprehensively, the body of a particular author’s work.

39. Grace Paley, “Debts,” Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, p. 18.