Table of Contents
1. A Conversation with My Father:
Introduction
2. A Conversation with My Father: Grace
Paley Biography
3. A Conversation with My Father: Summary
4. A Conversation with My Father:
Characters
5. A Conversation with My Father: Themes
6. A Conversation with My Father: Style
7. A Conversation with My Father:
Historical Context
8. A Conversation with My Father: Critical
Overview
9. A Conversation with My Father: Essays
and Criticism
♦ Relationship Between Life and Fiction
♦ A Different Responsibility Form and
Technique in G Paley's A Conversation with My Father
♦ Mrs Hegel-Shtein's Tears
♦ Storytelling and Feminism
10. A Conversation with My Father: Compare
and Contrast
11. A Conversation with My Father: Topics for
Further Study
12. A Conversation with My Father: Media
Adaptations
13. A Conversation with My Father: What Do I
Read Next?
14. A Conversation with My Father:
Bibliography and Further Reading
15. A Conversation with My Father: Pictures
16. Copyright
A
Conversation with My Father: Introduction
Grace
Paley's "A Conversation with My Father" was originally published in
the New American Review in 1972. It was subsequently included in Paley's second
collection of short stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, published in 1974.
On one level, the story is about women's relationships with then-fathers and
sons. Paley recounts a visit between a middle-aged woman and her elderly,
bedridden father, who suffers from heart disease. The father reproaches his
daughter, a writer, for not constructing straightforward narratives. He
encourages her to emulate the nineteenth-century writers Anton Chekhov and Guy
de Maupassant, who wrote sparsely realistic tragedies. The daughter attempts to
do so, telling him a story about some neighbors, a drug-addicted mother and
son. She does not write a tragic ending, but ultimately both mother and son
overcome their addictions. Her father rejects her ending, stating that she is
unable to face tragedy in life and in fiction. On another level, the story is
about storytelling. Within the larger story of the father and daughter, Paley
includes two versions of another story, the story about the drug-addicted
family. The presence of two stories, the portrayal of a writer writing a story,
and the conversation about fiction between the narrator and her father make
"A Conversation with My Father" a metafictional work, a story about
stories and story-writing.
One
of Paley's most critically acclaimed stories, "A Conversation with My
Father" exemplifies Paley's efforts to combine realism with
experimentation. The similarities between Paley and her protagonist highlight
the story's self-reflexive commentary on the author's own narrative techniques.
A further connection between Paley's own life and writing and her fiction is
found in the disclaimer included m the beginning of Enormous Changes at the
Last Minute: "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.—G. P." "A Conversation with My
Father" not only deals with the possibilities of fiction, but it also
explains Paley's own fictional processes and aims.
Grace
Paley was born in New York City in 1922. Her parents, Isaac and Mary Goodside,
were Russian Jewish immigrants who supported socialist and Zionist causes.
Paley credits her parents' intellectual interests and political activism for
encouraging her own feminist and leftist beliefs. The predominately Jewish area
of the Bronx in which she grew up and the immigrant experiences of her parents
also influenced Paley's concern with Jewish protagonists and Jewish-American
life.
Paley
attended Hunter College in New York City but dropped out without receiving a
degree. In 1942, at the age of twenty, she married a photographer and
cameraman, Jess Paley, with whom she had two children, a son and a daughter.
Paley separated from Jess three years later and subsequently married the poet
and playwright Robert Nichols. In 1942, Paley studied poetry with W. H. Auden
at the New School for Social Research. During her early career as a writer,
Paley wrote only poetry. At age thirty-three, she turned to writing short
stories. Many of her short stories can be found in her collections The Little
Disturbances of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), Later
the Same Day (1985), and The Collected Stories (1995).
Today,
Paley is known for her innovative short stories that combine realism with
experimentation and reflect her political commitments. Her stories often deal
with feminist and political themes, such as the oppression of women, the
working-class lives of New Yorkers, and relationships between generations.
These same issues motivate her public activism: Paley has been an outspoken
supporter of the feminist movement, and during the 1960s and 1970s was arrested
for her involvement in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. A mother of two, an
activist, and a professor of creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College,
Paley's full life has limited her literary output. Of her relatively small body
of work and her decision not to write a novel, Paley has commented: "Art
is too long and life is too short. There is a lot more to do in life than just
writing."
Paley
told SSfS,"I don't like to write about my stories. On the other hand, I am
glad to demystify their sources and meanings." She further commented on
the story "A Conversation with My Father": "My father and I
often talked about books, not so frequently about my stories. We also argued
about my life, my ideas about my friends' lives. The truth is that I had said
good night to my father, kissed him, placed his pills by his bedside, saw him
insert the oxygen tubes into his nostrils, closed the apartment door, settled
into the long subway trip from the north Bronx to my home downtown in Greenwich
Village and began, in my head, a paragraph, 'My father is 86 and in bed....'
When I reached home (my kitchen table), I wrote much of the rest of what is now
the first page of that story, maybe the second as well. So you see, I had no
grand theme in mind, in fact no story—only a dreamed and imagined conversation
with my father that is true but not a fact.
A
Conversation with My Father: Summary
"A
Conversation with My Father" recounts a discussion between the narrator
and her bedridden father, who is eighty-six years old and dying. He asks his
daughter to write a "simple story," the kind that Maupassant or
Chekhov wrote, "Just recognizable people and then write down what happened
to them next." The daughter says yes because she wants to make him happy.
She does not like stories that follow a plot line from start to finish because
they remove all hope—there is no room for something different to happen.
She
tells her father this story: A woman had a son. The son became a junkie, and to
preserve their relationship, the woman became a junkie, too. After awhile, the
son gave up heroin and broke with his mother, who now disgusted him. The woman
missed her son.
Her
father is not happy with the story. He claims that she left out all the
important details, such as descriptions, occupations, and family. The daughter
tells the story a second time, adding more details. But the father is still
unhappy with the story, but he is pleased that she put the words The End in it,
because, he says, it is the end of the woman as a person. The daughter
protests, saying that her protagonist is only forty and still has lots of things
she could do with her life. Her father disagrees, saying that his daughter
simply chooses not to recognize the tragedy of her protagonist's life. "No
hope," he says. "The end." The daughter has promised her family
to let her father have the last word, so she only revises the end of the story:
The woman's son never comes home again, but the woman finds a job as a
receptionist in a clinic in a neighborhood with a lot of drug users. The
doctors tell her that her experiences are a great asset for this job.
The
father does not believe this new ending and insists that the woman will slide
back to her bad habits since she has no character. The daughter then says that
her new ending is the end, that the woman will stay working as a receptionist.
The story ends with the father wondering out loud how long the woman will last
in her job and how long it will take his daughter to accept that life is
inherently tragic.
A
Conversation with My Father: Characters
Daughter
See
Narrator
Father
As
the title makes clear, the story recounts a conversation between the
protagonist, the daughter, and the antagonist, her father. The father is
described in the story's opening as an eighty-six year old man who is confined
to his bed. Despite his health problems, he is mentally alert. A former doctor
who became an artist in retirement, he is still interested in "details,
crafts, [and] technique." He asks his daughter to write a "simple
story" about "recognizable people," like the stories written by
Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov, nineteenth-century European writers whose
stories were realistic and often tragic. The narrator tries to comply, but her
father is critical of both versions of the story she made up for him. In the
story's final line, he asks his daughter how long it will be before she faces
up to the tragedy in life. According to a note included in Enormous Changes at
the Last Minute, a collection in which this story appeared, the father in the
story represents Paley's real-life father, Isaac Goodside.
Narrator
The
narrator is a writer who is visiting her elderly, bedridden father. She talks
with him about fiction and attempts to create a simple, direct story of the
sort her father admires. While the narrator wants to please her father, she cannot
fulfill his request to compose a straightforward, tragic story. The narrator
believes that in both literature and life, a plot that follows "the
absolute line between two points ... takes all hope away." In the story
she recounts to her father, she leaves open a possibility for change at the
end. Her dying father wonders when she will face up to the tragic realities of
fiction and life.
Pa
See
Father
A
Conversation with My Father: Themes
Art
and Experience
The
substance of the conversation between the daughter and her father concerns the
way real life should be represented in fiction. The major conflict between the
two resides in their different experiences of life and, therefore, different
expectations for fiction. The father wishes his daughter would write stories
like those of Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov, nineteenth-century European
writers whose works reflect more structured societies and whose characters
struggle within those societies' limited opportunities. The father, as Paley
explains in a note accompanying Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, represents
her real father, a Russian who immigrated to the United States at the age of
twenty. His experience leads him to desire and appropriate stories about the
tragic events of "recognizable people." In an interview with Joan
Lidoff published in Shenandoah, Paley states that her father "came from a
world where there was no choice, where you couldn't really decide to change
careers when you were forty-one years old." The father is expressing his
"own time in history."
The
narrator, though, comes from another historical era, and thus her fiction
differs from that of Maupassant and Chekhov. As Paley says in the same
interview, "she really lives at a time when things have more open
possibility." The narrator believes that the drug-addicted mother m her
story might change. She refuses to ''leave her there in that house
crying." So the narrator has her character get off drugs and become a
receptionist in a clinic for drug addicts. For the narrator, a child of
post-World War II America, fiction should reflect the opportunities of life not
available to previous generations.
Limitations
and Opportunities
Closely
related to the theme of art and experience is the theme of opportunity. The
daughter abhors the kind of story her father wants because it is limiting. For
this reason, she hates "plot, the absolute line between two points."
Her hatred of plot stems not from'' literary reasons, but because it takes all
hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.''
While her father believes that the woman has no "character" and is
destined to a tragic end, the daughter believes that a happy ending might very
well ensue. She says of her invention: "She's only about forty. She could
be a hundred different things in this world as time goes on." The
different attitudes of the two towards the possibility of opportunities and
change, fictional or real, stem from their different world views and experiences.
As Paley says in the Shenandoah interview, the story is "about
generational attitudes towards life, and it's about history.... [The narrator]
was really speaking for people who had more open chances. And so she brought
that into literature, because we just don't hop out of our time so easy."
A
Conversation with My Father: Style
There
are two stories contained within "A Conversation with My Father." One
story is about a visit between a middle-aged woman and her sick, elderly
father. Together, they discuss fiction and the daughter's attitude toward
tragedy in literature and, by implication, in life. The second story is the
narrative the daughter tells her father. This story is about a mother who, to
be close to her drug-addicted son, becomes a drug-addict herself, only to be
abandoned by the son when he overcomes the habit.
Metafiction
"A
Conversation with My Father" is a metafictional story; that is, a fiction
about fiction. The inclusion of a story within a story, the descriptions of the
narrator writing that story, and the narrator and her father's conversation
about fiction are all elements of metafiction. Metafictional stones prompt the
reader to think about how stories are structured, why writers develop their
stories as they do, and what expectations readers might bring to stones. These
issues make up the content of the discussion between the narrator and her
father. Why, the father asks, does the narrator not write simple narratives
about people who are familiar to us, rather than writing about "people
sitting in trees talking senselessly, voices from who knows where?"—a
reference to one of the narrator's (and Paley's) earlier stories. But to the
narrator, fiction should reflect one's experience in life, and the two versions
of the story she writes reflect her less conventional views both of narrative
and of life experience. The overall narrative of "A Conversation with My
Father' 'also invites a consideration of these two viewpoints. Is it itself a
simple, tragic story, as her father would like it to be, or an open-ended story
without a straightforward plot, as the narrator prefers? Paley's metafictional
technique causes readers to reflect not only on the story's theme and
structure, but also on the themes and structures of all fiction—and, by
extension, on the themes and the structure that people perceive in their own
lives.
Plot
One
of the major elements of metafiction in ''A Conversation with My Father"
is the way Paley plays with the concept of plot Near the beginning of the
story, the narrator states her opinion about plot. Although she wants to please
her father, she feels passionately about the constraints of 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." The two plots in Paley's story, then,
are open-ended. The story of the drug-addicted mother and son is left hanging.
After finishing one version with the words "The End," the narrator
revises the story to extend the ending, and ellipses, three dots signifying
uncertain continuation, ambiguously conclude the story. The story of the
conversation between the narrator and her father is also incomplete, ending with
a question. Finally, taken together, the two stones which comprise "A
Conversation with My Father" frustrate attempts to identify with certainty
specific plot elements of the story, such as the rising action, the climax, or
the denouement.
A
Conversation with My Father: Historical Context
Political
Upheaval Leads to Generation Gap
The
early 1970s followed a time of great social upheaval in the United States. In
the 1960s, the country was divided over issues that affected nearly everyone in
some capacity, civil rights, the Vietnam War and the women's movement were
among the most important. The broad-based civil rights movement of the early
1960s gave way, in the wake of the deaths of Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X
in 1965 and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, to the more
radical politics of a younger generation of activists epitomized by the Black
Power movement associated with Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, and others.
Likewise, protests over the United States's role in Vietnam (Paley was arrested
in several antiwar demonstrations) became more acrimonious as the war
continued. In 1970, four students were killed by the National Guard on the
campus of Kent State University in Ohio during a peaceful protest. During this
period of protest, many women assumed public roles of leadership. As a
consequence, the women's movement revived a century-long attempt to gain an
Equal Rights Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. Consciousness-raising groups,
the legalization of birth control and abortion, and affirmative action laws
fueled their progress, though the Equal Rights Amendment, passed by Congress,
eventually failed to be ratified.
In
many ways, these conflicts were played out within families as a struggle
between generations. Children fought with their more conservative,
Depression-era parents over issues of race, politics, and morality. Throughout
this period, college campuses became centers of protest and spawned what Paley
and others called "youth culture." In "A Conversation with My
Father," the mother and son become addicted to drugs and their kitchen
becomes a center for "intellectual addicts," many of whom follow the
teachings of Timothy Leary, a psychology professor who advocated the use of the
hallucinogenic drug LSD. The mother and son in the daughter's story reflect the
widespread experimentation with drugs during the 1960s and 1970s, which was
often seen as part of a social revolution involving the development of a new
consciousness and freedom from the constraints of tradition.
A
Conversation with My Father: Critical Overview
"A
Conversation with My Father" is Paley's most critically discussed work,
perhaps because it is also her most overtly metafictional one. When it was
first published in 1972, critics hailed it as one of the best stones about
storytelling ever, since it is a story which reflects the complexities of life
through the complexities of fiction.
It
has also been commended for its articulation of feminist themes.
The
question of Paley's relationship to her characters has been a matter of
critical debate. The disclaimer at the beginning of Enormous Changes at the
Last Minute states that "Everyone in diis 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." This statement leads one to
assume that the unnamed narrator is Paley herself. Further proof is Paley's
discussion elsewhere about visiting her father when he was terminally ill, and
the reference within the story to Paley's other fiction, namely the comment her
father makes about people talking in trees which refers to the short story,
"Faith in the Trees." But, as Neil Isaacs notes in a study of Paley's
short fiction, readers should refer to the narrator as Paley only "as long
as we understand that we are talking about a Grace imagined into life as the
Paley storytelling persona." According to Isaacs, critics such as Rose
Kamel, who refer to the narrator as Faith (a central character in many of
Paley's stories) are mistaken. Marianne DeKoven, writing in the Partisan
Review, distinguishes between the narrator and Paley. She argues that Paley the
writer is committed to a political and moral role for the storyteller, in
"not only ... a nonlinear vision of life's events, but also, ultimately,
in a profound commitment to freedom as a primary value."
In
an essay published in Delta, Nicholas Peter Humy agrees that responsibility for
one's creative writing is a central theme of the story. For Humy, the
conversation is a struggle over patriarchal demands upon language. The
narrator, by refusing to tell the story her father wants to hear, refuses to
alter "the lives of her inventions to his given end and meaning, to his
law." D. S. Neff, writing in Literature and Medicine, offers a very
different reading of the story. For him, the physician-father is struggling to
make his daughter accept his impending death. He wants her to write, as a sort
of therapy, a traditional tragedy with an unambiguous conclusion. The narrator,
by refusing to end her stories, is trying to overcome death.
In
Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives, Jacqueline Taylor argues that one
reason critics misread Paley is due to their failure to recognize her
"boldly female" voice. Paley, Taylor argues, "manifests a
willingness to speak the unspeakable, she is irreverent, comic, compassionate
and wise." Taylor argues that "A Conversation with My Father"
might be titled "A Conversation with the (Literary) Patriarchs,"
because it serves as a meditation on Paley's subversion of male narrative
conventions. The narrator's decision to write a new, hopeful ending to the
drug-addicted mother's story reveals her "recognition of the fluidity of
life and her resistance to narrative resolutions." While the father might
protest, the narrator-daughter has, nonetheless, written her own story.
A
Conversation with My Father: Essays and Criticism Relationship Between Life and
Fiction
Known
as an innovative, "one-of-a-kind" writer, Grace Paley writes stories
that are deceptively simple. At first they seem uncomplicated, but a closer
reading reveals Paley's careful craftsmanship. She began her writing life as a
poet but came to find that she could not express in poetry the ideas that she
and her women friends were discussing, so she turned to fiction. Many of her
stones center on the specific concerns of women and the roles society places
upon them. Paley's stories, while relating everyday matters, always have social
or political motives, yet they never moralize. Paley simply presents a world
filled with people who, like herself, are aware of the world around them.
"A
Conversation with My Father" is one of Paley's best-known and most
critically discussed stones. It is trademark Paley, not only in its concern for
issues of female identity, but in its use of a narrative technique that has
strong elements of postmodernism. The narrator in "A Conversation with My
Father" is also a writer. She relates the story of a conversation with her
father during which she tells him two versions of another story. She is a
self-aware, self-referential narrator, placing herself in the story she tells
her father, continually commenting on her relationship with the stories she has
created. The narrator presents her own—and Paley's—view of what constitutes a
story. The story itself defies traditional literary conventions such as a
linear plot; there is no "end,'' just the assertion that life will
continue with unknown twists and turns. Because the story so clearly merges
Paley's beliefs with those of her narrator, some critics have pointed to the
narrator's dismissal of a linear plot in "A Conversation with My Father''
as evidence that nothing happens in Paley's fiction. Paley, however, maintains,
"Plot is nothing. Plot is only movement in time. If you move in time, you
have a plot."
In
many ways, "A Conversation with My Father" is a comment on both the
open-endedness of life and the freedom a writer has in narration. The story
relates a conversation between a middle-aged woman and her father, who,
breathing from an oxygen tank and giving "last minute advice,"
presumably is dying. The father wants his daughter to tell him a "simple
story... the kind de Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov." Though the woman wants
to please her father, she finds it impossible to tell him what he wants to
hear. Paley's narrator has "always despised'' stories in which there is an
"absolute line between two points," for such a fixed line "takes
all hope away." When the narrator vocalizes these beliefs to her father,
however, he asserts that by maintaining a belief in hope, she is simply trying
to deny the tragedy that exists in life—the tragedy of the character she
creates for him and, by implication, the tragedy of his own imminent death.
Paley
has acknowledged the autobiographical slant of much of her fiction—her narrator
shares many similarities with Paley—so it is no surprise to find that the
narrator also echoes many of Paley's own beliefs about writing. The narrator of
the story, like Paley's authorial voice, constantly merges fact and fiction. In
keeping with this, the narrator chooses to tell a story that "had been
happening for a couple of years right across the street," of a woman who
became a junkie to keep her teenage son company. The son kicked his habit and
left his mother alone and grieving. The narrator's father accuses his daughter
of having "left everything out" and asks for such details as the
mother's appearance, her family background, and her marital status. In her book
Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives, Jacqueline Taylor notes, "The
questions are notable for their preoccupation with defining the woman of the
story according to key patriarchal categories for women: looks, social status,
and marital status." In an article published in Delta, Nicholas Humy
points out that the father's choices "happen to be the traditional ones,
those that are usually made inadvertently by writers of fiction, and so seem
not to be choices at all, but necessary to the form which will convey what the
work is about." Though these critics differ in their reasons why the
father needs the answers to these questions, their positions are not in reality
contradictory, their insights show how questions of what defines a woman are
intertwined with traditional viewpoints, even on seemingly unrelated matters.
The
narrator's response to her father also high lights this connection. Her
protest—"Oh, Pa, this is a simple story about a smart woman who came to
N.Y.C. full of interest love trust excitement very up to date. Married or not,
it's of small consequence"—shows that what is important to the narrator is
the woman's life, not her definition through appearance or relationships. The
narrator does answer her father's questions but makes sure that any inclusion
of these details in the revised story does not enrich it. The woman in the
story changes from being simply "a woman" to being a "fine
handsome woman,'' yet neither her behavior nor her outcome changes. The
narrator is determined to appease her father because he is ill, but still not
give up her own set of beliefs, both about women and about writing. She remains
true to her own artistic vision. It is interesting to note, as well, that in
her fiction Paley does not generally provide details of appearances or
relationships. So in "A Conversation with My Father" there is another
connection: one between author and narrator. Paley's narrator asserts Paley's
own social and literary beliefs.
In
the revised story, the narrator keeps the same sequence of events but fleshes
them out with details. These details border on the absurd, however— "[The
woman] had a son whom she loved because she'd known him since birth (in
helpless chubby infancy, and in the wrestling, hugging ages, seven to ten, as
well as earlier and later)." Her father knows that these details are added
only for the sake of his ideas of what should be included in a story—they are
not sincere—and only comments that his daughter has "a nice sense of
humor." The narrator allows her own character to intrude further,
mentioning neighbors who also witness the woman's fall into drug addiction and
grief; the opening "Once in my time" becomes "Once, across the
street from us." Through inclusion of the neighbors, the narrator subtly
reminds the listener that the story of this woman is, in fact, based on a real
one, thus admonishing against adding extra or glamorous details simply to make
a story more exciting or fulfilling. The ending of the revised story also
alludes to another falsity—it finishes with those dramatic words that really
only signify that the telling of the story is over, The End. Her father, while
expressing his continuing dissatisfaction that his daughter has failed to tell
a "plain story," approves at least of one thing: "The end. The
end You were right to put that down. The end," he says.
Thus
the daughter and father embark on another debate, not on what constitutes good
writing but, by implication, on how she is or is not accepting the fact that he
is going to die soon. They continue to couch their dialogue in a discussion of
the life of the woman m the story. When her father declares that his daughter
has depicted a tragedy, or "the end of a person," she protests,
'"No, Pa,' I begged him. 'It doesn't have to be She's only about forty.
She could be a hundred different things in this world as time goes on.'"
The woman feels it is her duty to interact with her story. After all she has a
responsibility because "that woman lives across the street," and she
changes the story again, giving the woman a job in a community clinic in the
drug-ridden East Village where her experience as a junkie makes her invaluable.
The daughter fully believes that her feelings should influence her creation,
which is really an extension of her beliefs. She does not acknowledge, however,
that her father also allows his own feelings to influence his interpretation of
the creation, and that at eighty-six, it makes utter sense that his feelings
may differ from her own. Her father believes some things already to be fixed,
like the fact of his death. He asks his daughter, "Tragedy! You too. When
will you look it in the face?'' He is not referring only to what becomes of the
woman in the story, crying her "terrible, face-scarring, time-consuming
tears"—he is referring to his own death.
Victoria
Aarons has noted, in an article in Studies in Short Fiction, that "the
line between fiction and reality is precarious [in Paley's prose]... for her
characters, identity is a continual process." Aarons also states that
dialogues in Paley's fiction are a source of power because they give the
characters possibilities for the future by preventing any one resolution. Her
analysis could very well have been written for "A Conversation with My
Father." The line, always difficult to draw, becomes invisible by the end
as the two stories merge into one. The narrator's story blends into the story
of her dialogue with her father. The revised ending is not set apart from the
rest of the text as were the two previous versions of the story, and the woman
works at the clinic in the present tense; in fact "right now, she's the
receptionist." The narrator, in her retelling of the life of her neighbor,
shows the infinite number of things that can happen in a life, the choices and
the opportunities; instead of working at the community clinic, she could have
been a "teacher or a social worker. An ex-junkie' Sometimes it's better
than having a master's in education!" The narrator also implies that the
meaning of a life is not simply to be summed up at its end, for every person
will indeed die. She refuses to accept her father's belief that what is most
important in his future is his death. By changing the woman's story at the end,
she asserts a powerful statement—that most important is the living, and in the
mere fact of living rests renewed hope for a future.
Source:
Rena Korb,"Overview of 'A Conversation with My Father'," in Short
Stories for Students, Gale, 1998.
A
Different Responsibility Form and Technique in G Paley's A Conversation with My
Father
"I
would like you to write a simple story just once more "
It
seems a straightforward request to the narrator's aging father, although he
does ask specific qualities of his story: "the kind de Maupassant wrote,
or Chekhov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write
down what happened to them next."
This
request is made in the second paragraph of "A Conversation with My
Father," but we are already aware of the difference between the sort of
story the father wants to hear and that which the narrator is in the process of
telling. The father, like all aging fathers, is concerned with the past. His
request is for a story like those of the past, like those the narrator
"used to write." His story is to be peopled with
"recognizable" characters, those he is familiar with, and is to tell
"what happened to them next." The narrator's story, "A
Conversation with My Father," [exists] not in the past, but in the
present. Its events and characters do not exist prior to the writing of their
story.
My
father is eighty-six years old and in bed His heart, that bloody motor, is
equally old and will not do certain jobs any more It still floods his head with
brainy light But it won't carry the weight of his body around the house.
Despite my metaphors, this muscle failure is not due to his old heart, he says,
but to a potassium shortage
In
these first five sentences we are shown how the narrator wishes to tell her
father's story. He and his condition are not described with language, but
created in it. The metaphors which the narrator uses do not help to make her
father "recognizable" to the reader, rather, they call attention to
the language and testify that the act of writing will intrude upon the tale.
The father protests. It is a description of him, after all, and, "despite
[her] metaphors," he and his "potassium shortage," would like to
be found within it. It would seem to the father that his daughter has forgotten
the responsibilities of the writer.
These
responsibilities seem to be derived from Aristotle's theory of tragedy as it
appears in Poetics, which is to say that, whether or not the father has read
Poetics, he is one of those who have been made to expect, by the various
wrappings which are used to package art in our culture, that literature will
provide a purgative arousal of fear and pity brought about by the description
or imitation of an action, culminating in the demise of the flawed hero. The
father also asks that the story be neatly contained within its bounds
consisting of beginning, middle, and end, and, in order to ensure its status as
bearer of truth, that the protagonist be faceless enough to be universal
("recognizable"), while maintaining consistent enough character to go
from one action to the next according to the laws of probable cause.
When
she agrees to tell her father his story, one "that begins: 'There was a
woman...' followed by plot, the absolute line between two points," the
narrator agrees to repress those intrusions which her writing makes on the
tale, to take "all hope away," denying her own beliefs that "everyone,
real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.'' At this point, as though
to close the lid on the matter, "A Conversation with My Father"
switches from the present to the past tense.
But
the lid is not quite closed, for the narrator has "misunderstood [her
father] on purpose." She chooses as the center figure of her story a
woman, who cannot properly be a "tragic" character, and, while
claiming to simply write down the story she has thought of, implying that the
roles of writer and writing are no more than the chroniclers of the action, she
"lays bare" the arbitrary nature of the elements of a causal
progression in any fiction.
Her
"unadorned and miserable tale" does seem to move in "an absolute
line between two points," and yet the narrator demonstrates that the line
exists only as her creation, and that, as William Gass points out, "its
telling is a record of the choices, inadvertent or deliberate, the author has
made from all possibilities of language'' [Fiction and the Figures of Life,
(1971)]
It
is precisely those choices to which she makes her father attend. By maintaining
her claim on the tale ("Once in my time..."), by failing to give it a
proper end, allowing it to seep into the present ("We all visit her''), by
describing neither compelling causes ("which is not unusual,'' "for a
number of reasons"), nor "recognizable" characters, she forces
her father to ask her to fill in what he feels is absent. "You know
there's a lot more to it. You know that. You left everything out."
His
main concern is for a more complete knowledge of the woman's character, for he
knows, as do all Aristotelians, that character is the servant of dramatic
action, that without it the action will not reveal the moral purpose of its
agents, and hence, the meaning of the tale.
The
greater part of any character in a given fiction is always left unstated. The
reader of "A Conversation with My Father" is comfortable in
attributing to the character of the father a certain life-in-words, though he
has almost none of the necessary organs for life-on-earth, as it were, with
only his legs, heart/motor, and brain somewhat resembling a lightbulb. What of
his bowels'? to say nothing of his nose, throat and ears In the narrator's
"unadorned and miserable tale'' the mother and her son are not described
physically, historically, or emotionally at all. When the father asks for
details of the woman's hair and heritage, he is making choices, his choices, of
what is "of consequence.'' His choices happen to be the traditional ones,
those that are usually made inadvertently by waters of fiction, and so seem to
him not to be choices at all, but necessary to the form which will convey what
the work is about.
Harold
Bloom, in "The Breaking of Form," reminds us that the word
"about'' means "to be on the outside of something. "All that a
poem can be about, or what a poem is other than trope, is the skill or faculty
of invention or discovery, the heuristic gift." The narrator shares this
sense of her work, and does not see herself as relating to her father his
story, history, but as telling a story. She wants him 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.
What
the father sees as unmotivated events in the narrator's first attempt are
unmotivated only in the referential sense of what the story is about. They are
perfectly motivated in the technical sense of calling attention to the telling
of the tale.
But
the telling of the tale is not of primary interest to the father, for the
creation of "telling'' subverts the disclosure of "told." The
daughter is aware that a story is no more and no less than the language in
which it is created, and the desire by which it is formed. The father's demands
for disclosure of what went before the telling of the tale are attempts to halt
the free flow of desire, to reentangle his daughter in the incestuous net of
Oedipus, where her telling would become told, would become the law of the
father. And the narrator's father invokes law when he demands disclosure of
what was not spoken of the woman:
"For
Godsakes, 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?"
"No,''
I said "In real life, yes. But in my stories, no."
"Why
do you answer me like that?"
In
order to explain her choices the narrator, in exasperation, steps outside of
the tale and tells her father what her fiction is "about,'' and in so
doing, undercuts to a certain extent, the very freedom, the very hope and
desire, she had maintained in its telling.
"Oh,
Pa, this is a simple story about a smart woman who came to N.Y C. full of
interest love trust excitement very up to date, and about her son, what a hard
time she had in this world.
Married
or not, if s of small consequence."
But
to the father, it is "of great consequence," for he senses the woman
in the story as though she were flesh, as though he has somehow reached through
the artifice of fiction to shake the hand of this person "with heavy
braids, as though she were a girl or a foreigner," and wants better to
understand her, understand the character, not the artifice: "... but
listen. I believe you that she's good-looking, but I don't think she was so
smart." Character and action do not correspond as the rules state they should.
Intelligence would have prevented her from acting as she did.
And,
in a sense, the narrator agrees with her father that the woman she has created
has a life, though not one of flesh. As an invention in language the woman is
alive and responsive to language, to its intrusions, to its metaphors. The
narrator has already expressed her dislike for any portion of a fiction which
is predetermined, outside of language, for such predetermination "takes
all hope away," and, in agreeing with her father that her explanation of what
the story was "about'' may have precluded a portion of her character's
"life," she reiterates her sense of the relation between character
and language in fiction.
Actually
that's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic.
You
think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're
just average with a good education. Sometimes the other way around, the
person's a kind of dumb innocent, but he outwits you and you can't even think
of an ending good enough.
The
father, "still interested in details, craft and technique," accuses
his daughter of "talking silly" when she explains that sometimes the
end is not predetermined by traits attributed to the character and wholly
controlled by the author. She suggests that sometimes it is reached in
"some agreement" between the writer and the invention, mediated by
the language.
In
the second attempt to please her father, the narrator begins her story as
though to include her father. Instead of "Once in my time..." the new
story opens, "Once, across the street from us...." She has also kept
the story entirely in the past tense and given it an end ("The End"),
in capital letters, closing the tale from any reverberation into the present.
It is at this point that we are presented with the most marked contrast between
written text and speech. It is here that we see the tension in the concessions
the narrator makes in this text within a conversation. The narrator has
provided her father with an end, has filled out the causal relationships between
one event and the next, has even given her character a hint of a tragic flaw
("She would rather be with the young, it was an honor, than with her own
generation"), and yet her father is not entirely satisfied. He has three
comments.
"Number
One: You have a nice sense of humor." Here he is referring to the way in
which his daughter chose to explain the juxtaposition of various events. The
story exposes probable cause for what it is—a convention—by using irony to
systematically undo our understanding and belief in causality. The mother
becomes a junkie like her son "in order to keep him from feeling
guilty." She wants to prevent him from feeling guilty "because guilt
is the stony heart of nine tenths of all clinically diagnosed cancers in America
today." And in double irony, she explains that the mother loved her son
"because she'd known him since birth (in helpless chubby infancy and in
the wrestling, hugging ages, seven to ten, as well as earlier and later).
"The father, by insisting on determining factors for all events in the
fiction, is given an explanation for drug addiction and mother love which seems
to Mm to be a joke.
"Number
Two: I see you can't tell a plain story. So don't waste time." This
comment echoes the conclusion of the second story, ("she would cry out, My
baby! My baby! and burst into terrible face-scarring, time-consuming
tears"), and comments upon the different demands father and daughter make
on a story. The daughter wishes her father to hear her story. Instead he
discounts the tale as unrecognizable, unwilling to listen to that which is new.
The narrator shares with Shklovsky the belief that "the purpose of art is
to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are
known" ["Art as Technique," in Russian Formalist Criticism,
edited by Paul A. Olson, (1965)]. She does not feel that failure to arrive at
an anticipated end is a waste of time, but that it is rather an exercise in the
process of perception, which "is an aesthetic end in itself and must be
prolonged."
But
the father still desires an end to the story, both in the sense of conclusion
and purpose. A "plain story" would provide this but his daughter's
tale, while seeming to come to a proper end, has already undermined, through
irony, the means she has used to arrive there. Nonetheless, the father will try
to salvage that which he so desires.
"Number
Three. I suppose that means she was left like that, his mother. Alone. Probably
sick"
I
said, "Yes."
"Poor
woman Poor girl, to be born m a time of fools, to h ve among fools The end. The
end.
You
were right to put that down The end"
But
the narrator knows that the telling of a story is the creating of a story is
the creating of a form, and she will not let her father impose the end which
the tragic form dictates.
"I
didn't want to argue, but I had to say, "Well, it is not necessarily the
end, Pa"
Her
father is insistent. "You don't want to recognize it. Tragedy! Plain
tragedy! Historical tragedy! No hope. The end." He feels that the form of
tragedy is a given truth, just as he feels his eventual death to be. He urges
his daughter to face the dictates of form just as we are told to brave death.
His daughter's life, like his, will teach the lesson of death. "In your
own life, too, you have to look it in the face.'' And, in speaking those words,
he demonstrates his own desire to delay that end, while still entrenching
himself m the conviction of its meaning.
He
took a couple of nitroglycerin. "Turn to five," he said, pointing to
the dial on the oxygen
tank.
He inserted the tubes into his nostrils and breathed deep He closed his eyes
and said,
"No."
Though
the narrator "had promised the family to always let him have the last word
when arguing,'' she recognizes "a different responsibility" towards
him. She will demonstrate to him that it is not in the end that meaning is
found by changing the ending of the woman's story. Believing that form dictates
the limits of perception, the father is convinced that meaning resides in the
end, in death, in the summing up of life. His daughter, believing that
perception gives rise to the possibilities of form, and knowing that all
stories and lives must eventually come to an end of some kind, at some point,
plays Scheherazade to her father, dislocating the end from the tale, trying to
save her father's death from meaning. Life might have no pity; it does not
commute the sentence of death, but that sentence is only the last of the tale,
and its connection to the body of the story is no more secure than that between
the creation and its conception. The woman in the story exists for the telling,
fathers for the living. The daughter knows this, and, as she moves her tale out
of the stasis of the end, as she shifts the story of the woman out of the past
and into the present tense, she reminds us that she has also played Scheherazade
to the reader. She begins her new ending as she did the second version of the
story, with a colon. But the addition has the same spacing as the body of
"A Conversation with My Father" has had and is not indented. The
father has closed his eyes; the narrator is addressing the reader. The doctor's
speech is presented in quotation marks, which have appeared before only in
dialogue between the father and his daughter, so that the two stories merge
into one. When the father breaks in, "The doctor said that?" we are
made aware of the play between past and present tense, made aware of the
weaving together of the two stones. The intrusion of the father's voice at this
point lays bare the device of the contrasting forms of the stories within a
story, and transfers our perception of the father's story "into the sphere
of a new perception," where, ironically, written text becomes speech,
speech a written text. This piece is the story of a conversation and it traces
for us the struggle that we all encounter when we acquire language, the tool of
the father, and use it with, for, or against him. Grace Paley is perfectly
aware of the relationship she is entering into with the father when she is
telling a story. On the page facing the table of contents of the collection in
which the story appears, she informs us: "Everyone in this book is
imagined into life except the father." The father cannot be imagined into
life in words for he dwells in them already. The narrator, by telling the
stones within the father's story, has demonstrated what the responsibility of
the storyteller is not. She has not formed the lives of her inventions to his
given end and meaning, to his law. And, in the telling of her father's story,
she has commuted the sentence, and, like the narrator of "Debts,"
fulfilled her true responsibility: "That is, to tell their stories as
simply as possible in order, you might say, to save a few lives."...
Source:
Nicholas Peter Humy, "A Different Responsibility Form and Technique in G
Paley's 'A Conversation with My Father'," in Delta, May, 1982, pp. 87-92.
Mrs
Hegel-Shtein's Tears
Though
Paley has published only two collections of stories, The Little Disturbances of
Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, she is nonetheless an important
writer—important in the significance of the fictional possibilities she
realizes rather than in the uniform merit of her published work. She is not
always at her best. But when she is, 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.
"A
Conversation with My Father," in Enormous Changes, makes of this seeming
incompatibility an argument between father and daughter, from which emerges the
statement, crucial to Paley's work, that traditional themes can no longer be
treated truthfully by formally traditional fiction: formal inventiveness and
structural open-endedness not only make fiction interesting, they make it
"true-to-life." Paley's concern is not mimesis or verisimilitude, but
rather the problem of creating a literary form which does not strike one as
artificial; which is adequate to the complexity of what we know. Her narrator
in "A Conversation with My Father," calls traditional plot "the
absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary
reasons, but because it takes away all hope. Everyone, real or invented,
deserves the open destiny of life." Her father, arguing that plot is the
truth of tragedy, wants her to write like Chekhov or Maupassant: "Tragedy!
Plain tragedy! Historical tragedy! No hope. The end." Paley's
narrator-surrogate, arguing for open-ended hope and change, clearly bests her
father in the conversation. But in the story, Paley gives him the last word:
the setting is his hospital room, and he speaks from what we may assume is his
deathbed. His lecture on writing is "last-minute advice," and the
closing speech, from father's pain to daughter's guilt, is his:'' 'How long
will it be?' he asked. 'Tragedy! You too. When will you look it in the face?'''
The
assertion of hope through change and open-endedness is therefore neither easy
nor unambiguous. As the literary father sees, an inevitable component of
optimistic belief in saving the situation through "enormous changes at the
last minute" is evasion of genuine and unavoidable horror, the father's
tragedy. As Faith herself says in "Living'' (Enormous Changes), "You
have to be cockeyed to love, and blind in order to look out the window at your
own ice-cold street."...
The
people Paley's narrator in "A Conversation with My Father," would
accuse of having merely "literary reasons" for rejecting traditional
plot might explain the "enormous change" as an interesting substitute
for outworn, tedious literary convention (linear plots are stale and boring),
infusing new life into fiction. But Paley's structures are more than that. They
are rooted not only in an assertion of open-endedness and possibility, and in a
nonlinear vision of life's events, but also, ultimately, in a profound
commitment to freedom as a primary value (nonlinearity is not as alien to
Paley's politics as it might appear). For many postmodernists, that freedom is
problematic; tangled with fear of chaos on one hand and of authority on the
other... But the freedom implied for Paley by "enormous changes," the
freedom from inevitability or plot, is synonymous with hope; hence her larger
assertion that open-endedness in fiction is the locus of "the open destiny
of life," to which everyone is "entitled."—a strongly political
statement.... Tentatively and comically, Paley offers fiction's "enormous
changes" as a warbling counter-note to the tragic gong, even in twentieth
century political life, that notoriously unredeemed domain.
The
tragic subject matter of Paley's work reaches the reader emotionally as pathos,
a tricky entity because it so easily becomes sentimental. However, pathos
remains pathos in Paley's work: she jerks no tears but neither does she freeze
them. Instead, she distracts the reader from pathos at dangerous moments, when
sentimentality threatens, by calling attention to her wildly inventive, comic
language and imagery. In those moments when her language takes on the burden of
simultaneously communicating and distracting from pathos, Paley creates a
unique and fascinating literary object....
At
the heart of Paley's engagement with everyday life is her deep empathy with her
characters. Even the deserters and betrayers she allows their
"reasons," as she might say, and the rest she actively likes—a stance
even more unusual in serious postmodern fiction than her assertions of hope in
the face of our despair. It is not surprising that this uncommon empathy, which
is really the condition of adherence to subjects of everyday life, is the
province of a woman. Empathy and compassion are legacies of sexism that women
do well to assert as privileged values rather than reject as stigmata of
oppression. Uncomfortable as it makes her to write in such a predominantly male
tradition, as a woman in the avant-garde, Paley is m an especially propitious
position to unite interesting forms with important themes. She uses innovative
form much as she uses innovative activism, to make new the endlessly dreary and
shameful moral-political world we inhabit...
Source:
Mananne DeKoven, "Mrs Hegel-Shtein's Tears," in Partisan Review, Vol.
XLVHI, No 2,1981, pp. 217-23.
Storytelling
and Feminism
[Lidoff]:
At your reading last night, you said that all story tellers are story hearers.
Would you tell us some more about that?
[Paley]:
If you're a person who doesn't pay attention, and who isn't listening, you
won't be a writer, you won't even be a story teller. Those of you who are
writers from the very beginning of your lives were probably unusually attentive
children. You heard things that the other kids on the block really weren't
listening to. You may not have known it; you didn't go around when you were six
years old saying "Oh, what l heard today!" but you probably did tend
to come home from school with more stories for your mother or for whoever your
afternoon-listener was. If they were there, if there were people to listen, you
tended to be a very talkative child. You were an extremely good listener also,
which everybody doubted, always saying to you, "Will you listen?'' when
you knew that you heard four times as much as anybody. If there was no one to
listen to you, you probably heard anyway. You were a listener and you felt
crummy because you were storing up all this information all the time. There's
an example in that really wonderful story in Chekhov where the son dies and the
father is a coachman and he keeps going around looking for people to tell
"My son, my boy died" to, to tell them what happened. And nobody is
listening to him at all. Finally he just takes his horse and tells the story to
the horse. I think there are a lot of story hearers that nobody listens to. I
think the world is full of people that nobody listens to who have a lot to say.
And then I think there are people who aren't saying anything, who are storing
it all up for some moment.
Is
there anyone in particular in your family who was a story teller who influenced
you?
When
I say a story hearer, that doesn't mean that you just listen to people tell
stones Sometimes you really are extracting them from people. You say,
"Well, what happened?" And they say "Nothing." That happens
in a lot of families. And it takes you years sometimes to extract stories from people
in your family. But no, my father was a very good talker. And my mother as a
result was somewhat more quiet. But he really was a good talker, and he spoke
well about lots of things. A lot of people told stories: my grandmother, aunts,
mother, sister. I don't think they thought of themselves as storytellers, but
neither do most people. But almost everybody in this room, in this school, is a
story teller. You tell stories all the time. So it's really one of the things
that almost anybody can do. It's something that's natural. I have a little
grandchild and I just know that from the first time she can put half a sentence
together she's going to tell me some little story. She's already telling jokes.
People tell stories everywhere in the world. When you and I were sitting around
having coffee we must have told each other fourteen stories....
In
your story "A Conversation with My Father, " the characters discuss
the problem of plot. People are sometimes critical of your stories, and say
nothing happens in them, there is no plot. I wonder if perhaps that's a
peculiarly woman's form of story, where a lot happens, but it's not always
what's called plot.
Well,
I think by writing that story I sort of screwed myself up, because people
really don't read. I mean, a great deal happens in almost any one of those
stories, really sometimes more than in lots of other peoples', enough to make a
novel or something. When people say, well, she really doesn't care much about
plot, all they're doing is repeating what I said in my story. Plot is nothing.
Plot is only movement in time. If you move in time you have a plot, if you
don't move in time, you don't have a plot, you just have a stand-still, a
painting maybe, or you have something else. But if you move in time you have a
plot.
Your
stories move around in time—almost Einsteinian time; there's long time and
short time. Do you intentionally compress time and spread it out?
That's
the way I think. I say it has to move in time but that doesn't mean it moves
dead ahead in time. It 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....
Going
back to "A Conversation with My Father,"...
Well,
actually the story's about a couple of things. It's about story telling, but
it's also real ly about generational attitudes towards life, and it's about
history. I tend not to look at things psychologically so much, but
historically, I think, And for him, he was quite right, from his point of view.
He came from a world where there was no choice, where you couldn't really
decide to change careers when you were forty-one years old, you know. You
couldn't decide to do things like that. Once you were a junkie, that was the
end of every thing. Once you were anything, that was it. Who you were was what
you were. And she was speaking really from her own particular historical
moment, and in another country besides, where things were more open. So it
wasn't that she was giving some philosophical attitude, or some attitude close
to her own optimistic disposition, although both of those things were true.
That's also true, but she was also really (although neither of them knew it,
only the writer knew this), they were really speaking from their own latitude
and longitude, and from their own time in history when they spoke about these
things. So that's really, I think, what was happening there. And her feeling
which she talked about in terms of stones was pretty much exactly the same.
I
mean she really lives at a time when things have more open possibility, and for
a group or a class that had more possibilities and a generation in that line,
because he was an immigrant and he just about got here and did all right by the
skin of his teeth So she was really speaking for people who had more open
chances. And so she brought that into literature, because we just don't hop out
of our tune so easy
Did
you ever look for women writers, in particular, or look to find your own
experience in your reading?
No,
not when I was very young. It's not so much that I looked for women writers,
but I had sense enough to know that, like Henry Miller, he wasn't writing for
me. That's as far as I went. I knew that these guys, even the Beats—I thought
they were nice, nice to see all those boys, and nice to see all the sexual
feelings, but I knew it really wasn't written for me at all. It's not so much
that I looked for women writers, as that I understood certain much admired
writers, like Burroughs, weren't talking to me. There was nothing to get from
them. Though at the same time I did get stuff from Proust. That talked to me,
but all those ballsy American heroes had nothing to say to me, though my
friends thought they were just hot shit, excuse me
Do
you consider yourself a feminist writer?
I'm
a feminist and a writer. Whatever is in here comes from the facts of my life.
To leave them out would be false. I do write a lot about women and the men they
know. That's who the people are and what they think about
Source:
Grace Paley with Joan Lidoff, in an interview in Shenandoah, Vol. XXXII, No.
3,1981, pp 3-26.
A
Conversation with My Father: Compare and Contrast
1970s:
The Equal Rights Amendment, a proposal to change the constitution to guarantee
women's rights, particularly equal pay for equal work, becomes a central issue
of political debate.
1990s:
Although efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment failed in 1982, women
have earned greater political, social and cultural authority in the United
States. In 1988, more than 56 percent of women held jobs. On the other hand,
government guarantees of equal access and treatment to public and private
occupations have increasingly been challenged in an era of shrinking government.
For instance, in 1996, the largest university system in the country, the
University of California, ended an affirmative action program for student
admissions and faculty hiring.
1970s:
The broadly based civil rights movement of the early 1960s gives way to the
more radical politics of a younger generation of activists. The militant Black
Power organizations fade from prominence when it is revealed that government
agencies infiltrated and pursued the leaders of these groups.
1990s:
The Nation of Islam claims millions of followers, and its leader, Louis
Farrakhan, despite his controversial views, speaks to a gathering of hundreds
of thousands of men at the Million Man March in Washington, DC, in 1995.
1970s:
A full range of government guaranteed services to the poor, known as
entitlements, are instituted to guarantee a minimum standard of living for all
U. S. citizens, continuing reforms of the 1960s.
1996:
President Clinton signs the Welfare Reform Bill, limiting recipients to five
years of benefits and ending a federal guarantee of a sustainable income
through the use of food stamps, medical assistance and cash grants.
1970s:
Judges begin interpreting Civil Rights legislation as requiring full racial
integration of public school systems. Many efforts to integrate schools result
in violence.
1990s:
Debates over the quality and equity of education continue. Many school
districts remain segregated, despite twenty years of efforts at integration.
New proposals for education reform include school choice, school vouchers, home
schooling, charter schools, and a federal guarantee of access to higher
education.
A
Conversation with My Father: Topics for Further Study
The
narrator's attitudes and the events in her story-within-a-story reflect the
mood of the early 1970s in the United States, particularly the issue of
generational differences and the "generation gap." For example, the
mother in the story wants to be part of "youth culture." Research
youth culture in the 1960s and 1970s and compare your findings with the
attitudes expressed by the narrator and the events recounted in her story.
Paley
calls herself "a feminist and a writer " How are her feminist beliefs
and concerns evident in this story?
Compare
both stones within ''A Conversation with My Father" with a short story by
Anton Chekhov or Guy de Maupassant. How do the differences between their
stories and Paley's relate to the different attitudes towards fiction expressed
by the daughter and her father?
One
topic of conversation within the story is tragedy Do you think' 'A Conversation
with My Father" is a tragic story?
A
Conversation with My Father: Media Adaptations
Enormous
Changes at the Last Minute is a 1983 film based on the short story collection
in which "A Conversation with My Father" appeared. The film was
directed by Mirra Bank and stars Kevin Bacon, Ellen Barkin, and Maria Tucci.
The script was written by John Sayles and Susan Rice.
An
audiocassette from American Audio Prose Library, Grace Paley Reads "A
Conversation with My Father" and "Friends," was released in
1987.
A
Conversation with My Father: What Do I Read Next?
The
themes of "A Conversation with My Father" also figure in the other
pieces of short fiction in the collection in which the story was first
published in 1974, Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.
Metafiction,
or fiction about writing fiction, was an innovative form in the 1970s, and Paley's
fiction is part of this interest in experimentation. Another metafictional
collection of short stories is Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants (1969).
Another
feminist writer who published during the 1970s, Marge Piercy explores women's
lives, patriarchal structures, and the Jewish-American experience in her novels
and poetry. Small Changes (1973) and Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) offer
illuminating comparisons with Grace Paley's works.
Todd
Gitlin's The Sixties is a cultural history written by a participant in the
social upheavals of the decade.
A
Conversation with My Father: Bibliography and Further Reading
Sources
Isaacs,
Neil. Grace Paley A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne, 1990.
Kamel,
Rose."To Aggravate the Conscience: Grace Paley's Loud Voice," in
Journal of Ethnic Studies, Fall, 1983, pp. 29-49.
Neff,
D. S. '"Extraordinary Means'. Healers and Healing in 'A Conversation with
My Father,'" in Literature and Medicine, Vol. 2,1983, pp 118-24.
Taylor,
Jacqueline. Grace Paley Illuminating the Dark Lives University of Texas Press,
1990.
Further
Reading
Aarons,
Victoria, "A Perfect Marginality Public and Private Telling in the Stones
of Grace Paley," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol 27, No. 1, Winter, 1990,
pp. 35-43.
Aarons
explores the development of identity and the precarious line between fiction
and reality in Paley's stones.
Arcana,
Judith. Grace Paley's Life Stories A Literary Biography, University of Illinois
Press, 1993.
Arcana's
work is a study of Paley's life and art. She argues that "much of what
Grace Paley asserts m her stones, as in political action, is the strength and
force of individual character embodied in human presence.''
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