I have just re-read Grace Paley’s Collected Stories, a wonderful literary indulgence and massive time commitment I justified under the pretext of preparing for my role on a “literary committee” charged with introducing Grace as the guest of honor at a June 7 fundraiser for Brooklyn Parents for Peace. (Pictures of the event are available at http://bicyclist.blogspot.com/2007/06/poetry-people-and-peace-on-east-river.html .) My reading of Grace’s stories was yet another in a series of rewarding experiences of revisiting the “long body” of a familiar writer’s work–the extended creative production of someone well known to me both in person and on the page, a close-up view that usually results in my taking a little too much for granted. Here’s what I said about that work at the benefit:

Grace Paley is a brave and eloquent combatant for peace with justice, bread with roses; a “cultural dreamer” (her own tongue-in-cheek label) who has spent a life in stories working out her role as creative listener. “Two ears,” she says, “one for literature, one for home, are useful for writers.” Grace’s brilliant, gutsy refusal to split off from each other the influence of officially “great” literature and the vernaculars–the “home” languages, in which our first stories are heard and spoken–is deeply connected to her second refusal: she firmly declines to choose between devotion to art that expresses and remakes consciousness and dedication to social action that might give us a human future. A comment she lets one of her characters make, ostensibly about the tyranny of linear plotting, gives profound insight into her view of what that future must contain. “Everyone,” says the speaker of her story “A Conversation with My Father,” “everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”

I hope my comment didn’t come across like a summing-up; surely the writer herself deserves an “open destiny,” and Grace at 83 is still producing important work. On the night of the benefit she read many new short poems and short-short prose pieces, giving me a glimpse of the generative place where her identities as fiction writer and poet converge. Yet I did feel that my re-reading of her stories had given me an overview, a sense, not so much of what the work is “about,” but what the work is working on. I saw (yet again), how a philosophy of writing, a notion of the politics, the psychology–I almost want to say the metaphysics–of form emerges when one reads long and deeply in the work of a single author of substance.

Two big things about the politics of form in Grace’s stories and poems deserve discussion here. The first relates to the notion of “open destiny” mentioned above. To give a little more context, “A Conversation with My Father” opens with a description of the father’s old age and infirmity, and continues like this:

“I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” he says, “the kind Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.”

I say, “Yes, why not? That’s possible.” I want to please him, though I don’t remember writing that way. I would like to try to tell such a story, if he means the kind that begins: “There was a woman…” followed by 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.”

One could spend a long time pondering the implications of this passage. Doesn’t a good plot include an implication of openness? Don’t we writing teachers teach that skillful characterization should include a sense of surprise? But if one reads the story as a fictional and partly playful commentary on an aspect of Grace’s own approach to narrative, perhaps the notion of “absolute line between two points” needs to be understood a little differently. Isn’t it perhaps her sense of complication that is the issue here, a “messiness” of incident, personality, emotion that violates the neat arc, the Aristotelian unity? Even given her habitual brevity, she can’t resist meandering. She won’t limit herself to one or two motives. She isn’t mesmerized by the elegance of plot-as-trajectory, the efficient route more suitable for a missile than a story. (And what, after all, are “enormous changes at the last minute” if not aesthetic disruptions of a sleek arc curving surely toward disaster? If we want to haul the human plot back from the lip of the pit, won’t we have to violate the laws of narrative pacing by injecting some very sudden and dramatic innovations that haven’t been at all adequately prepared for in the outline of our species story to date?)

The implications of what Grace’s fictional speaker has to say about plot deserve to be studied alongside Maxine Hong Kingston’s fascinating musings about the relationship between war and story-telling; the author of The Fifth Book of Peace has suggested that we need to wean ourselves from our addiction to the familiar structural violence of “narrative tension,” the demand for “conflict,” the thrill of an explosive “climax.”

The second big thing that I realized about Grace’s work through my re-reading is the absolutely centrality of listening as both a trope in her writing and a process that she conceives to be basic to imaginative writing in general. Her comment about the writer’s “two ears” is relevant here. A number of the most vital contemporary American writers, Maxine Hong Kingston among them, have stressed the importance of “talk-story,” oral culture, in their own development as writers. (I think of a quote I love from Marilyn Hacker: “Writing is a difficult form of reading”; what if we said, instead, “Writing is a difficult form of reading at the same time that it’s a creative, difficult, and possibly presumptuous form of listening”?) Last Thursday night, Grace read a new poem that juxtaposes the listener and the hearer in a range of roles, imagining scenarios in which the listener is, for example, the mother or the lover, reminding us that the listening activity of the writer is profoundly part of a continuum with the listening activity of the human being in various intimate situations.

Many things interest me about Grace’s stress on listening, among them its tendency to reframe the activity of writing to downplay individualistic notions of artistic production and the fact that her own work literally prioritizes the ear over the eye, relying comparatively little on visual description–an increasing rarity in our age when so many fiction writers try to compete with visual media. But the one thing that concerns me most in relation to my own work right now is the question of what happens when one joins the concept of writing-as-listening to the objection to the tyranny of a streamlined plot.

Listening, whether one listens to friends and lovers and family or to the cultural cacophony we’re born into, or even to the silence that precedes and underlies all of our noise, is–whatever else it is–not a linear procedure. We tell our lives to each other–our personal and collective lives, whether conceived as those of individual, family, nation, or transnational tribe of dissenters–not principally through plot but as fragmented repetition. We tell the story different ways on different days. We start out to tell one story and have to tell the back story, then even more back story. We get interrupted. We forget. A mortar round crashes through the kitchen window. Aunt Alma, keeper of the family’s oral archive, comes down with Alzheimer’s. Father Freud was right: we repress what matters most. What we listen to from the moment of birth on is both excessive and insufficient–a narrative ecosystem in comparison to which “plot” as an elegant line between two points shows up as an impoverished monoculture.

“Madame Nazdarova, our editor from A Bessere Zeit–did you meet her?–she listens like a disease. She’s a natural editor. It goes in her ear one day. In a week you see it without complications, no mistakes, on paper.”–Grace Paley, “Dreamer in a Dead Language”