Reparative Telling by Male Narrators

The question is not whether Grace Paley wrote social change but how she wrote it. Most critics answer this question by pointing to Paley's groundbreaking exploration of female perspectives – her concern with “illuminating the dark lives of women” (Taylor 1). In particular, we celebrate Paley's extensive use of female narrators, especially the character of Faith Darwin, who appears in and narrates a majority of Paley's stories. But this celebration of women's voices, deserved though it is, obscures an important technique in Paley's toolkit for writing social change, which is her strategic use of male narrators. In this essay, I will first discuss Paley's use of Faith as narrator to illustrate how her manipulation of aesthetic distance functions in her subtle presentation of political issues, and then consider two very different male narrators and the social interventions – the “reparative telling” – their stories offer.1 In response to criticism that Paley's writing turns leftist radicalism into little more than “story,” critic Judie Newman asks, “is it possible to be a storyteller and yet remain politically and morally responsible? Or does Paley turn politics into story and, more worryingly for the literary critic, story into politics?” (3). Reiterating what Paley declared many times in interviews, Newman concludes that the two are inseparable. She demonstrates this through a nuanced discussion of Paley's manipulation of aesthetic distance in the keystone story of emerging political commitment, “Faith in a Tree,” from the 1975 collection Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. It is one of the stories frequently cited as an example of Paley's groundbreaking feminist politics for its extensive exploration of female perspectives. Analyzing the complex and often ironic expansion and contraction of Faith's internal meditations as she gazes down on her familiar world from a perch in a playground tree, Newman teases out Paley's often subtle commentary on the personal, gendered, local, and global politics of the early 1970s. As Faith lurches from concern over her son's lost skate key and her own erotic longings to questions of good and evil, her seemingly random internal monologue is constantly challenged and finally modified by the presence, needs, and views of others

Aesthetics · Art · Criticism · Epistemology · Faith · Left-wing politics · Literature · Political science · Politics · Romance · Sociology · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics · Law · Philosophy