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"Extraordinary means": healers and healing in "A Conversation with My Father" D. S. Neff In The Patient as Person, Paul Ramsey writes that "attending and companying with the patient in his dying is, in fact, the oldest medical ethics there is," despite the possibility that such relatively passive measures can become eclipsed by a tempting, but ultimately fruitless, desire to use "extraordinary means" to preserve life.1 Even though doctors confronted with terminal illness can take a profoundly active role in forestalling the advance of death, they must eventually allow the process of dying to progress to its ultimate conclusion, gradually abandoning meaningful intervention in life's entropie design until hope dissipates, and all they can provide is solace for a patient drifting into final darkness. In other words, death compels healers to maintain the proper moral balance between what they perceive to be action and inaction in an all-encompassing effort to treat patients at the thresholds of life. Literature also brings comfort by attempting to reconcile human consciousness with feelings of powerlessness in the face of death, but because literature employs wish-fulfilling and distancing strategies, it tends to create expressive paradigms that evade or embrace mortality. For example , Michel Foucault isolates narrative patterns that either keep "death outside the circle of life" (the Scheherazade motif) or portray a life so "consecrated and magnified by death" that the work of art can "perpetuate the immortality of the hero" (The Iliad, Chanson de Roland).1 Such traditional plot models are very satisfying, but they reduce anxiety because they remain mutually exclusive, leading separate existences in the logic-tight compartments art is so adept at building and maintaining. Storytellers, then, sometimes forcefully sustain antitheses (life and death) that doctors D. S. Neff 119 must eventually synthesize, and yet both professions operate under the aegis of healing. In "A Conversation with My Father," Grace Paley, the daughter of a physician, seeks to establish a new dialectical balance between medical and literary efforts to cope with mortality; she fabricates metafiction (fiction that explicitly comments on its fictive nature) that simultaneously reinforces and undermines the aesthetic integrity of fictional remedies for death's sting, forcing art to wrestle with its artifice as it investigates ethical complexities of healing. The story concerns a writer and her dying father (a physician) who argue about the relative merits of opposing narrative techniques. The debate is rendered hauntingly comic by Paley's making the clash of narrative philosophies symbolize an even deeper struggle between healers using active and passive methods of easing traumas associated with death and dying. The writer uses "extraordinary means," open-ended stories which magically negate death by celebrating the openness of life, to deny her father's failing health, while her father calls for traditional tragic plot structures with "closed" endings, as he tries to heal his daughter's psychic wounds resulting from his impending demise. Active and passive healing, comedy and tragedy, and life and death commingle during moments of insight in what has been called "just about the best short story about writing a story" in contemporary American literature.3 Conflicts between opposing strategies of healing begin very subtly in "A Conversation with My Father"; mere phrases become seeds which blossom into opposing narrative strategies, almost as if the participants are using narrative patterns as metaphors expressing their antithetical feelings about death. Neither character communicates ideas with complete success; the daughter retreats to the comforting realm of metaphor while the father strives to demystify her evasions in an attempt to help her accept his imminent death. The opening paragraph from the story deserves to be quoted in its entirety because it skillfully establishes aesthetic hostilities that gradually escalate into full-scale wars of expression: 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 let his legs 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. Sitting on one pillow, leaning on three...

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