Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Postmodern Humanism :: Grace Paley Enormous Last Minute Essays

considerable Changes at the Last Minute Postmodern Humanism in the terse Fiction of Grace Paley(1) On the jacket of her second book of pithy stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Grace Paley, a feminist, postmodernistist, antiwar activist, and writer, identifies herself as a somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist. In 1979, she was arrested on the etiolated House lawn for demonstrating against nuclear weapons, and her rsum is full of such protest-related arrests. Paleys line of solid grounding in a 1998 interview with the online magazine Salon is typical whatsoever your calling is, whether its as a plumber or an artist, you have to contrive sure theres a little more justice in the institution when you leave it than when you found it. Paleys prevarication expresses similar sentiments but in rather subtle ways. Women in her short stories do not get arrested for protesting instead, they ensure their aging fathers in the hospital. (2) Paleys concern for justice appears in her short fiction as a postmodern humanism that toys itself out in the establishment of storytelling, reality-making communities.In Toward a Concept of Postmodernism, Ihab Hassan schematizes postmodernism in opposition to modernism. This consume of the catchwords he identifies gives us a window into the project of postmodern theorists Antiform, Play, Anarchy, Decreation/Deconstruction, Antithesis, Absence, Dispersal, Anti-narrative/ trivial Histoire, Indeterminacy (591-2). Postmodern writers, then, play with language, experiment with narrative fragmentation, introduce antecedently ignored voices, borrow heavily from both popular culture and introductory literature, and generally break boundaries. How can we classify Paley as a postmodern writer if an ethical framework underlies her writing? Shouldnt she be trying to rede reality and expose the meaninglessness of the American experience? Of course, no work or writer fits perfectly into postmodernisms theoretica l agenda. For that matter, the very establishment of an grim definition of postmodernism is antithetical to its self-proclaimed turn away from the rigidity of modernist thought. For students of postmodernism this can be a maddening maze of deconstruction that eventually leads to the extinction of the subject field of literature. If, as radical deconstructionists might argue, our language systems and understandings of reality prove to be valueless, the scholar of literature is left with little to do, as is the social critic. It is for this reason that Hassan writesThus we can not simply rest-as I have sometimes done-on the assumption that postmodernism is antiformal, anarchic, or decreative for though it is indeed all these, and despite its fanatical will to unmaking, it also contains the need to discover a unitary sensibility (Sontag), to cross the border and close the gap (Fiedler).