Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives by Jacqueline Taylor (review)

Book Reviews123 (1988), which gives a reading ofDrum-Taps significantly different from Sweet's. Although Sweet convincingly shows that much of Drum-Taps reveals Whitman's hope that a national consensus could be restored, Larson's analysis also convinces in showing that "Whitman hints not so much at a final defeat of his vision of consensus as its grim perversion, one that builds altars to the unreal majesty of a phantom republic which commands all and is commanded by no one" (213). However one reads Whitman and Melville, one wonders why Sweet decided to prove his thesis about ideology and the state by analyzing poetry read by relatively few Americans and probably none of their leaders. Until the recent PBS special on the Civil War, even Brady's photographs were seen by comparatively few. Surely, newspaper reports and illustrations reflected and shaped the popular mind more powerfully and directly than did Whitman's poetry. Sweet's choice of subject matter may stem from his confusion over the causal connection between the war and the crisis in representation. By quoting Emerson, he implies that the crisis caused the war. Yet his focus on the poetry and photography ofthe war suggests that understanding representation ofthe war is necessary to an understanding of the crisis in representation. The flaws in Traces of War are balanced by its considerable merits. Sweet's interdisciplinary approach yields valuable insights about representations of the Civil War. He demonstrates that photography, even in its infancy, was an art form shaped by aesthetic and ideological forces pervasive in all the arts. Along with the work of Shurr, Larson, and other critics, Sweet's book also makes compelling the case for the central importance of Whitman's and Melville's Civil War poetry. Most importantly, Traces of War forces us to think critically about a crisis of representation that has repeatedly permitted the American state to send thousands of our young off to slaughter. As Melville warns: All may go well for many a year, But who can think without a fear Of horrors that happen so? ("The Apparition" lines 13-15) JAMES H. MAGUIRE Boise State University JACQUELINE TAYLOR. Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. 153 p. An unexamined and all too familiar critical commonplace seems in charge of Jacqueline Taylor's Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives. This alreadymuch -written conclusion threatens to obscure Paley—and Taylor's attention to Paley. Taylor's argument depends on proving Paley new and revolutionary—"a boldly original voice . . . telling stories about women unlike any we had heard" (10). Any qualification to such claims of originality comes from placing her 124Rocky Mountain Review among other women who have become similarly innovative. "This coming to free and woman-centered speech, this beginning the process of taking back everything, marks a new era in women's language and literature," writes Taylor. This is the framework then for Paley's "unique" accomplishments: "Grace Paley is one of a growing number of women who through some sort of liberating leap of consciousness have found the means to write the unwritable. By attending to her bold voice, we can learn what a free woman might sound like. . . . Refusing mutedness and the denials and distortions of dominant language, Paley claims the power to repossess language and subvert conventional forms" (8-9). Taylor repeatedly quotes from Rachel Blau DuPlessis' book, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985). This is no accident, since DuPlessis' influential book claims for twentieth-century women writers in general what Taylor specifies for Paley: female modernists have found ways of "writing beyond the ending" ofconventional narratives; they destabilize the old plots, break them open, give voice and visibility to stories previously muted or unwritten, get beyond the endings of marriage or death, break out of isolation, and find social connectedness and community—often among women. DuPlessis and Taylor could themselves be added to a long list oftwentieth-century critics whose critical claims depend on a radical gulf between old and new, closed and open, conservative and innovative, repressive and progressive. The list could include Virginia Woolf writing in the 1920s; Alan...