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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 191
song. The passage reminds us of the Holbrooks' intertwined voices as they journeyed to the farm. In ''O Yes," the young protagonist ponders: "If it were a record she would play it over and over,. . . to untwine the intertwined voices, to search how the many rhythms rock apart and yet are one glad rhythm" (50). Twining is an action of lapping and turning, yet it brings separate, even disparate, pieces together and suggests the intention of combining. The pieces intertwined may be characteristically the same, as a rope or chain, or they may, as voices, be different. What is pieced together in "O Yes," through song, sermon, and scripture, is a message, a plea by the black community for ultimate justice on earth as well as in heaven.
The "spinning" preacher's voice elicits in Carol's mind a tapestry of childhood games: "Tag. Thump of the volleyball. Ecstasy of the jump rope" (52). In Carol's thought, words and images are combined that will in the end remind her of her allegiances and responsibilities. The twining voices, singing of justice and humanity, metaphorize Carol's moral situation: she must choose from the past what will direct her future. Similarly, Alva's dream is drawn from pieces or fragments of experience: her own pregnancy, loneliness and poverty; the diminutive guide who leads her to paradise with parade stick and motorcycle; the convey line and the damned souls. Furthermore, in an interview Olsen has remarked that her writing of the passage came about as a combination of stories she had heard from black women.
21
Thus, the writer's method reflects her characters', and vice versa: choosing images and thoughts from the past and weaving them into a coherent, if also paradoxical, narrative for understanding life.
In "Tell Me a Riddle," we are told of Eva's "one social duty . . . the boxes of old clothes left with her, as with the lifepracticed eye for finding what is still wearable within the worn . . . she scans and sortsthis for rag or rummage, that for mending and cleaning, and this for sending away." Eva's sorting is reminiscent of Anna's piecing, looking for what can be remade or used again. Looking through the old clothes, Eva's sorting reflects not only the artistry of Anna's novel use of an older object, but also a sense of human interconnectedness. When she looks through the clothes for what can still be
 
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used, she reflects the human moral choice to bring need into alignment with resource. From this perspective, we conclude politically and religiously that an imbalance or nonalignment of goods and people is evil, and that in regaining the original holiness/wholeness and promise of the universe, we are responsible to right such imbalance.
Stevie's rebirth is elicited by sustained use of piecing imagery. Acts leading to wholenessbringing parts together, teaching a skill, meeting human needsare the seeds of holiness. Because individual human wholeness cannot be fully and timelessly achieved, the human community must impart wholeness, offering the individual a place in the pattern of life. Moving from the domestic sphere to the contexts of industry and technological waste, Olsen universalizes the metaphor, making clear her vision of redemption as the historical and material reconstruction of beauty and health out of waste and brokenness.
The metaphor of piecing contributes to the moral vision Olsen describes in her interviews and talks. Her first sentence is structurally parallel with Anna's thought (what can be saved, what cannot) in these remarks: ''Our situation . . . is: what do we keep, what do we discard. What is going backward, what narrows us, limits us, makes us too liable to hatreds, bigotries, closing off, not recognizing what the central enemy is, where our allies lie, where our common humanity lies."
22
Olsen's view of intergenerational responsibility may also be interpreted in terms of"piecing." She understands that the dreams and struggles of revolutionaries form the basis, indeed are the beginnings, of our present struggle, knowledge, and hope.
23
Like Will's coat converted from Mazie's, such an attitude suggests that we inherit possibilities and hopes from the previous generation. Our task is to sort, discard, and piece, to find what is fitting for a life of commitment to human unfolding, and out of our inheritance, to weave a garment for today.
Women have long been needleworkers. They have designed their art for beauty and warmth. Piecing images, Olsen is a word worker, a designer of life in fiction, poetry, and report. Like earlier women workers, she starts with what is
 
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needed. Her vision of truth and beauty begins with the essentials: voice, place, affirmation, warmth, light, way.
A MOSAIC OF MEANINGS
Journeying, blossoming, and piecing together suggest the vision evoked by Olsen's writing. Each elicits a matrix of meanings that can be used effectively as an interpretive grid for reading Olsen's stories. Viewed together, their meanings offer a way of understanding three central and interwoven concepts in Olsen's writing, and ''lead us somewhere" in religious ponderings: journeying suggests the struggle for place, identity, and community engaging all humanity, while blossoming reflects the hope for each individualand for the whole earthto attain fulfillment and to become whole. The piecing metaphor points to a new spirituality wherein individual and community gain grace and freedom through patterns of life that are mutually enhancing. Faithfully sorting from the past what is usable for a new earth, a new humanity, and a new sense of divinity, we gain the transcendence of Spirit as the miraculous power that makes things new.
Together, the metaphors evoke a set of meanings. All point to human desires for coherence, pattern, continuity, fullness, and connection. All suggest a sense of intergenerational responsibility. The roots of future generations are planted today, and the direction and resources of the present generation were yielded from the past. Human responsibility flows both waystoward root and blossompast and future. The dead are not lost as long as we struggle in their name, and bondage to time is overcome in faithful telling of the dreams that inspirit us.
The metaphors imply moving, direction, and purpose. They are historical images connecting resource and yield, nature and creativity. Earth and human, ancestor and grandchild, material and intellect, male and female are bound in imagistic visions. And in each, the desire for "more" compels human action. Olsen's metaphors reflect her own representative hope for her characters and suggest the ultimate vision inspiring her fiction: a universe in which we act as though human quests are the very matter of truth and where no person, no hope, is ultimately lost.
 
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Wholeness is holiness, the words describe an existence in which no part is broken, impaired, injured, or useless. Rather, every element, resource, action, decision, person is remembered and integrated.
The vision offered by the metaphors sustains the actual and often despairing struggles of the characters and thus is a lens for a liberation theology, which begins where people today struggle for bread, civil rights, and freedom of expression. To integrate the seeming conflict between vision and historical reality, Olsen draws her images as a paradox: beauty is created from seeming ugliness, the hope for a new life is born out of degradation and despair, the ''pieces" that may mold a better world come from fragmented lives of hurt and disease, even from the graves of our ancestors.
Conclusion
The miraculous is not, for Olsen, the extraordinary, but the ordinary: birth, small acts of kindness forged in darkness and loss, learning, art, songs of faith, moments of meditation, creativity in all of its forms. Everyday life is the miracle she limns and celebrates.
The morality her writing elicits transcends all human-made divisions and depends upon the possibility that people can become essentially caring. Olsen's stories and prose offer an understanding of what is right as what enhances human growth and potential. Thus, her vision points to experience and need as the legislators of morality. In our reading, we have called the powers of life and sustenance (in traditional language, God) the encouraging presence of love evolving with humanity in the quest for fulfillment and beauty. Human responsibility, then, is for nothing less than the co-creation of the world. In such a vision of possibility, all actions have ultimate potential because they make us who we are; they give us identity and purpose.
It is only a step from Olsen's moral understanding to her prophetic vision. Mutual love and care will not only make possible more abundant living individually but will redeem the struggles of generations before who have striven for a more humane and beneficent universe, transforming all human
 
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losses into an expansive pattern of living, which we continue with our own lives. Thus are we participants in the ongoing struggle of humanity
and of God
to be free and committed, independent and yet bound in relation to those things that concern Being most deeply.
Critical to the religious awareness Olsen's writing offers are the characters, settings, dilemmas, themes, and metaphors drawn from and reflecting historical female experience in domestic spheres. For example, while socialist Jewish men often broke radically with traditional religious practice and the sacred spaces and texts of orthodox religious understanding, Jewish women were never full participants in that religious life. Like most American women of the same period, turn-ofthe-century Jewish women attracted to new ideologies still largely maintained their life activities in the spheres of action and with the values they had traditionally inhabited and sustained. The sacred space of Olsen's foremothers, like the stories they wrote with their lives, were primarily, though never exclusively, domestic.
Bringing to light the essential values and ethics of women's caretaking as well as the hindrances, encumbrances, and silences of mothering, Olsen's fictioninsofar as we interpret its implications for understanding the depth dimension of human lifegives critical voice to a religious consciousness arising out of women's historical experience. Its criticism of religion is a criticism of traditional, male-dominated religions, and its prophetic vision of blossoming life reveals a spiritual understanding that has long undergirded and empowered women: the belief that making life possible is a holy activity. The feminist bent of Olsen's world attitude simply extends that belief to women's own lives. It is also holy to nurture oneself and to ask for encouragement from others that one may experience one's own fulfillment.
We may, as Olsen's writing imagines, hear the voices of truth, like Mazie, in the wind, or, as Alva does, receive a divine message from a child. Some still need another to speak for them because they cannot yet speak for themselves. But Tillie Olsen's vision is for a world in which we ourselvesmen and womenare born in our own voices, as we search for truths that may redeem us in our own stories of faith.
 
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Olsen is one writer who has told her truth. Other women writersvoices out of Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and elsewhereare telling their stories. We have much to learn from them of truth, journey, spirit, and way. In the past we have feared this plenitude, preferring instead one text, one truth, one way (all male authored in our Western Jewish and Christian traditions). It is time to read new stories and old stories newly told. It is time for the truth in women's lives to find hearing and voice. Why do we fear expansiveness, Tillie Olsen's literature asks. What small God binds our hands and mouths, fearing human talents? Mysteries remain; O1sen's world offers no new idols. Instead her vision frees us to imagine our lives as if our living mattered, as if our care leads to care and our hope to hope. Every life is a potential text for understanding the depths of human longing and possibility, and human actions undertaken in the Spirit of Holiness are the hope of our salvation.
Notes
1. Dorothee Soelle,
The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist Identity,
trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Press, 1984), p. 91.
2. Page references to Olsen's books given in the remainder of the chapter are to the editions noted in the bibliography. The Olsen entries in this casebook's bibliography correspond to the editions Orr uses.
3. The phrase is the title of Morton's recent book.
4. Olsen's phrase.
5
. Myths and Motifs in Literature,
ed. David J. Burrows, Frederick R. Lapides, and John T. Showcross (New York: The Free Press, 1973), p. 135.
6. Christ does not suggest a monolithic understanding of women's questing but carefully asserts that she is describing
''a
common pattern" in women's literature. Christ,
Diving Deep and Surfacing
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1980).
7. Houston A. Baker,
The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 1.
BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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