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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 12
of silencing that befall writersespecially, though not exclusively, women; especially, though not exclusively, those who must struggle for sheer survival.
Tillie Olsen's life and work form a bridge between the activism and culture of the ''red decade" of the thirties and the movements of the sixties and seventies, especially the women's movement, which provided an eager audience for her work. An important influence on the feminist writers, critics, and students of the seventies and eighties, Olsen has also contributed to "the larger tradition of social concern" both as a writer of fiction and a scholar and teacher whose efforts have been crucial to the democratization of the American literary canon.
Tell Me a Riddle and
"Tell Me a Riddle"
"Tell Me a Riddle" is the title story of Olsen's only collection, published in 1962. The other stories are "I Stand Here Ironing," "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" and "O Yes," all written in the 1950s. Originally conceived as sections of a novel, the stories portray the lives of members of an extended family over three generations. David and Eva of "Tell Me a Riddle" are the first generation; their childrenClara, Vivi, Hannah, Sammy, Helen, and Davy, killed in World War IIthe second generation; and Jeannie and Carol, Helen and Lennie's children, representative of the third. All the stories explore the interrelatedness of the "private sphere" and the "public"; set within the home, constructed from the rhythms and language of daily familial life, they constantly expand their scope to illustrate the location of the family within a larger set of social relations. In "I Stand Here Ironing" a mother broods in a sustained monologue on the ways in which growing up in anxious poverty has affected, perhaps limited, her daughter's capacities; at the conclusion her fierce prayer is that her child's will to live is strong enough to transcend the hard soil of her youth: "Only help her to knowhelp make it so there is cause for her to knowthat she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron."
10
In the elegaic "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" an old sailor friend of Lennie's and Helen's comes to shore on leave and collapses of alcoholism and ill-
 
Page 13
ness in their home before disappearing once again; the very intrusiveness of his visit measures the degree of loss the story records, the loss of an earlier time when men and womenincluding Lennie and Whitey, the sailorunited to struggle as progressive union activists for better working conditions and for a better world. In ''O Yes" Helen sadly watches her daughter grow increasingly estranged from her closest friend, who is Black, as the formal and informal tracking system of the American public school system intrudes on the less racially differentiated world of early childhood.
The most sustained and complex of the pieces in the
Riddle
volume, "Tell Me a Riddle" addresses some of the deepest concerns of western culture: the nature of human bonding; the quest for, in Olsen's words, "coherence, transport, meaning"; the aspiration toward justice; the confrontation with death. The ethical and spiritual dimensions of these themes cannot be severed from the social and historical. Like Olsen's other work, the novella celebrates the endurance of human love and of the passion for justice, in spite of the pain inflicted and the capacities wasted by poverty, racism, and a patriarchal social order, and in spite of the horrors of the Holocaust and the war and the new possibilities for nuclear destruction. Its power derives from a distillation of such themes in evocative and precise language that makes poetic and performative use of the specific rhythms and idioms of Yiddishborn English, and from a structure that only gradually reveals the relevance to the lives of one poor aging immigrant Jewish couple of a past embracing the great struggles and great horrors of modern history. In its slow unfolding of that past and in its final revelation of Eva's passionate idealism, the novella invites its readers to recognize how deeply they are embedded in the processes of history, to meditate on the "circumstances" of class, race, and gender as the soil which nurtures or impedes human achievement; and to acknowledge, as David does, the discrepancy between what isincluding perhaps their own complicity with injusticeand what should be.
"Tell Me a Riddle" begins with an argument between an old man and woman, married forty-seven years, a deadly battle of wills over whether or not to sell their home and move to a cooperative run by his lodge. The conflict is shaped by the
 
Page 14
different ways poverty has affected the man and the woman. David longs to be free from responsibility and fretting about money, so that he can use ''the vitality still in him"; Eva, remembering the desperation and humiliation of years of making do with remade clothes and begged meat bones, vows to "let him wrack his head for how they would live," for she "would not exchange her solitude for anything." "Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others" is a refrain echoing through the text. David longs to be surrounded by friends; Eva longs only to be left alone. The years of struggle to keep her family fed and clothed have transformed her capacity for engagement in the lives of others into its obverse: the terrible need for solitude, for "reconciled peace."
When Eva falls ill, and the illness turns out to be terminal cancer, David finds himself compelled to become a caretaker himself. Concealing the seriousness of Eva's condition from her, but fearing to stay home alone with her in her dying, he takes her on a pilgrimage, first to visit a daughter and her family in Ohio, and then to Venice, California, which in those years was home to a community of older, working-class Jews. As her condition deteriorates, Eva becomes delirious, pouring out fragments of poetry and song from her youth. Tended in her illness not only by David but by her granddaughter, Jeannie, a nurse, Eva passes on to Jeannie the legacy of her earlier years. It is crucial to the way "Riddle" works as art that Olsen reveals the dimensions of that legacy only gradually; only gradually do we realize that this grouchy, sick grandmother, this silent bitter woman who wants only solitude, was once an orator in the 1905 revolution, that she and her husband met in the prison camps of Siberia, that she had once publicly articulated a passionate vision of human possibility and human liberty. Through this narrative strategy, Olsen suggests the tragic dimensions of social silencings: those imposed upon working class people by physical and intellectual deprivation, isolation, and routinized work; and those imposed upon women by role-related demands and patriarchal ideologies antagonistic to the act of creative articulation. Read this way, Eva's final utterances in "Tell Me a Riddle," her coming to speech again at last, become an act of resistance and creation, both cathartic and political.
 
Page 15
Eva's deathbed oration forces Davidand the readerto acknowledge not only what has been lost and destroyed in her, but what has been lost and destroyed in the complacent yet troubled American society of the 1950s, with its grasping for material well-being, its atomic nightmares, its repression of the radical culture of the past. The narrative form of ''Riddle" itself is secretive, riddling; unfolding in the present, the narrative is continuously disrupted by intimations of the past, a past only divulged in brief revelations and fragments of conversation and memory, as though it is too complex, too different, for the present to contain, but too important to utterly repress. As the past becomes ever more intrusive, embracing revolutionary vision and experience and the "monstrous shapes" of history that intervened between the thirties and the fiftiesthe holocaust, the war, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasakithis narrative counterpoint reveals that Eva's withdrawal, though grounded in her personal circumstances, has deeper causes still: a terrible anguish over the course of modern history, and an overpowering sense of the disparity between the revolutionary idealism that inspired her youthful activism and the complacency of contemporary life. One of the resonant words of "Riddle" is "betrayal," and David's changed consciousness at the novella's conclusion must encompass "the bereavement and betrayal he had shelteredcompounded through the yearshidden even from himself." His final reconciliation with his dying wife must take place within a historical context that she has forced him to acknowledge, to remember. In dying, Eva awakens David (and the community of readers who share his acceptance of things as they are) from a numb accommodation into potential opposition. Her rage at contemporary waste and injustice exemplified by the pollution of Los Angeles and the confinement of her friend Mrs. Mays to a single, inadequate room emerges finally not as odd but as appropriate, as necessary.
"Riddle" addresses profound issues of consciousness, asking how the passionately humanistic vision of a progressive moment in history can survive and be transmitted to a new generation in a different historical moment. While the motif of illness is grounded in the literal and autobiographicalOlsen had watched her own mother die a similar deathit also func-
 
Page 16
tions as an emblem of this radical humanist's profound alienation from the post-war order. Richard Ohmann argues that a certain ''structure of feeling" characterized American fiction from the end of World War II through the mid-seventies, inscribed in narrative patterns in which "social contradictions were easily displaced into images of personal illness" (390). He notes a pattern in which illness becomes an alternative to an acceptance of distorted social relationsmale supremacy, class domination, competitiveness, individualism. For Ohmann, the basic story on which fiction of the era plays variations is "the movement into illness and toward recovery."
11
Eva's cancer, the source of her physical disintegration and the sign of her refusal to accept fifties America, links her to other postwar heroes whose illness is a response to an apparently untransformable social order; but for her, there is no personal recovery, no accommodation. Like Whitey, the sailor in "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" whose alcoholism dooms him as surely as Eva's cancer dooms her, Eva is tragically anachronistic as the repository of revolutionary consciousness, an actor in a textual order structured by the plot of her expulsion from that order. Yet the narrative that leads to her death is produced by the same narrative act that redeems her life from the silence to which fifties culture had consigned the radical past.
12
Critical Responses and Casebook Materials
The best commentator on Olsen's fiction is Olsen herself; passages from
Silences
provide both a context for the writing of the fiction and a more direct articulation of many of its themes. In the first chapter of
Silences,
"Silences in Literature" (originally published in
Harper's Magazine
in 1965 and included here) Olsen explores the "unnatural silences" that impede human creativity and testifies to the silencings in her own life. Readers may perhaps recognize Eva in its evocation of those among the silenced "whose waking hours are all struggle for existence; the barely educated; the illiterate; women." Also included is Olsen's statement from
First Drafts, Last Drafts: Forty Years of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford,
a compressed discussion of her time at Stanford and
 
Page 17
of the era and events that underlie the writing of ''Tell Me a Riddle."
For a work of such complexity and power, "Tell Me a Riddle" has generated surprisingly little sustained criticism. The
Tell Me a Riddle
volume received excellent reviews, including one by Dorothy Parker in
Esquire
13
and one in the
New York Times Book Review.
14
"Tell Me a Riddle" received the 0. Henry Award for the Best American Short Story of 1961; reprinted in numerous anthologies and translated into many languages, its status as one of the great American short stories of our time remains secure. Yet Robert Coles, another admirer of the
Riddle
stories, is also correct in noting that Olsen has been "spared celebrity."
15
As Mickey Pearlman and Abby H. P. Werlock point out in their book-length study of Olsen,
She is often not a reference point in discussions of American writers of either gender. It is unusual, to say the least, that a writer so admired by a large number of other writers and general readers is missing so completely from scholarly studies by Americans. (xii)
Serious and sustained critical treatment of Olsen has come largely from feminist critics and writers, for whom her work resonates with particular poignancy: she anticipated and indeed helped formulate some of the crucial issues of contemporary feminism, especially the tensions between motherhood and other forms of productive activity. The critical reactions to Olsen's work have been chronicled in Kay Hoyle Nelson's helpful introduction to
The Critical Response to Tillie Olsen.
Nelson suggests that "over the decades the critical response . . . has moved from descriptive to celebratory to analytical."
16
The trajectory of Olsen criticism may not be quite so clear as Nelson implies. The celebratory began in the thirties, as she herself demonstrates, when Robert Cantwell praised the young Tillie Lerner's first published section of
Yonnondio
as "a work of early genius," with "metaphors startling in their brilliance,"
17
and recent work, including theoretically sophisticated analysis, can still be celebratory of Olsen's achievement, as is Constance Coiner's essay in this volume. It is true, though, that
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