Tell Me a Riddle (61 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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the writer's way of solving one form of the conflict between role and vocation, between the mutual costs, in Jane Flax's terms, of maternal nurturance and filial autonomy. The nar- rative death is a cold-blooded if necessary enabling act, which distinguishes the useful from the damaging in the maternal heritage. The useful partempathy and symbiosisis placed in the daughter's art work; the damaging partenvelopment and paralysislies buried in the grave.
36
The doubled story in Tillie Olsen's ''Tell Me a Riddle" is based on the complementary characters of artists who are thwarted and emergent, mother and daughter, dying and living. One major riddle"How was it that soft reaching tendrils also became blows that knocked?"refers in general to the ceaseless dialogue between possibility and betrayal that is carried on over a woman's lifetime, and in specific to the conflict between motherhood and Eva's political and artistic vocations.
37
The lifelong impoverishment of Eva's complex spirit, a narrowing carried out in the private realm of family life as well as in the public, historical realm, with its failure of revolutionary hopes, has made her a rancorous old lady. Eva is deaf, deliberately, bitterly silent, and filled with hostility and resentment: a paradigmatically muted figure.
During the story, she and her husband leave their house, site of many contentions and thematic issues about the meaning of home and family, and visit three "daughters." The first returns to the past, with her ghettoized emphasis on Jewish particularism; the second lives a life like her mother's, with its ever-present claims and pressures of children "intensely and now." The third figure, the grandchild Jeannie, completes the pattern, offering future promise. Resembling the revolutionary woman who taught Eva to read more than fifty years before, Jeannie expresses a continuity between the battered ideals of the century's struggles and the unknown future in which these revolutionary possibilities might be realized.
At the last stage of her journey, with her death from cancer imminent, Eva becomes the point upon which past, present, and future converge. She recovers her long-repressed identity as "First mother, singing mother," beginning her "incessant words," which resemble the
Sprechstimme
of modernist musical style.
38
Her suffering and her memories crack her
 
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open; her voicing makes a broken, poetic song-speech with a pedal-point of unanswerable riddles: ''So strong for what? To rot not grow": "Man . . . we'll destroy ourselves?" Like the pageant music in Woolf's
Between the Acts,
Eva's song is a communal one, and her individual person is like a conduit through which a collectivity chants: "night and day, asleep or awake... the songs and the phrases leaping." In Eva's cantata of voices, memories, stories, bits of speeches and books, Olsen makes a manifesto of long-muted voices, a political and aesthetic statement of power from the apparently powerless, who sometimes can hear the music of human struggle and destiny.
The granddaughter Jeannie, a Visiting Nurse, only gradually emerges as an artist in the course of the story. For if Jeannie is a muse for Eva, the reverse is also true: the grandmother's vision will reorient the younger woman. In the sketch of her grandmother "coiled ... like an ear," Jeannie shows she has understood Eva's essence: sensitivity to the music of struggling humanity. Another of Jeannie's sketches, of her grandparents lying, hands "clasped, feeding each other," makes the grandfather forgive Eva for her bitterness. Jeannie "remarries" them at their last moments together. So, like Eva's, her art is a moral and didactic act.
Human creativity in its boldest and broadest senses inspires Eva's cantata. The collective strength and "zest" of voices at a community chorale break through her defenses. The stories of Chekhov and Balzac are high cultural sources; a Pan del Muertofolk-art cookie for a dead childcomes from popular culture. "Like art," this decorated cookie recalls the songs of Anon in
Between the Acts,
the moment "almost like a work of art" in
To the Lighthouse,
and "my mother's art" of the garden for Alice Walker. Like Woolf and Walker, Olsen obliterates the distinction between high culture and folk art in the array of Eva's sources.
39
Yet while immersion in the human condition compels artistic expression, such an immersion also prevents it. Olsen's own career is a negotiation with this contradiction. She chooses to look for the unsaid, absent, or missing elements, constructing a literary and political stance "dark with silences" of the unspoken.
40
Olsen has testified to the thematic and moral center provided by her recognition, like Woolf's in
A Room of One's Own,
of the social,
 
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material, and emotional circumstances that prevent, or give a certain twisted cast to, fruition and achievement.
If, in these women writers, the function of the artist with the tools of dominant culture is to embody muted experiences, then the figure of the female artist counters the modernist tradition of exile, alienation, and refusal of social rolesthe
non serviam
of the classic artist hero, Stephen Dedalus. The woman writer creates the ethical role of the artist by making her imaginatively depict and try to change the life in which she is also immersed. This differentiates the figure in the female
Künstlerromane
from the fantasies of social untouchability or superiority that are prevalent in modernist depictions. These issues of change and stasis emerge in Doris Lessing's
The Golden Notebook
(1962).
41
A published writer of a book that she now regards with contempt, Anna Wulf can no longer ''write," but keeps four notebooks, separated explanations for the political and sexual strains that caused her professional stalemate. The major formal project of Lessing's book is to explore and surpass meretricious, abandoned, or incomplete stories, sometimes love plots, but also a whole novel called
Free Women,
in order to arrive at some precious dialectical "golden" amalgam, through which a more dynamic statement about history, politics, and personal relations can be articulated. . . .
Anna had argued endlessly that it is impossible to create art, since the only wholeness people exhibit occurs by virtue of pastiche and ersatz imitations of order. She learns that it is not art that should be rejected but a limiting conception of artistic order. Thus another kind of narrative must be inventedthe multivocal, palimpsestic, personal, autobiographical, documentary, analytic, essayistic diary-novel. This is not the encyclopedic form of the authoritative
summa
but something that has switched the poles of authorityan encyclopedia with its categories unformed, its indices unmade, its alphabets unorganized, without fixed grids of judgment, exclusion, concision, or categorization. Anna has found that to write fiction as it was once written would constitute a premature resolution of conflict, confining contradictions rather than releasing them the length and breadth of the work. Narrative based on nostalgia, on manipulative transpositions, on
 
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small-minded, riskless reaches into the expressive are obsessively set forth and rejected. Thus the novel is an encyclopedia of the critique of narrative and hegemonic orders . . .
The fictional art work, distinctively described in these works, has a poetics of domestic values-nurturance, community building, inclusiveness, empathetic care.
42
The poetics of the fictional art work begins with its ethics, not its aesthetics; it has its source in human ties and its end in human change. The work is described as having a clear ethical function and is not severed from the personal or social needs that are its source-for example, the mourning or rage expressed by the characters. This art work can only be made with an immersion in personal vulnerability, a breakdown, or a breakthrough, as in Gilman, Lessing, and Atwood, or as an articulation of long-repressed grief or love, usually the experiences of a daughter in relation to parents, as in Woolf and Olsen.
43
This saturation in buried, even taboo emotions, first resisted, then sought, and finally claimed, is the preferred process by which the fictional artist comes into her own. Since this art work annuls aesthetic distance and is based on vulnerability and need, it is very like ''life."
44
But the work is not exclusively expressive in its poetics. While often begun in situations of psychic desperation, these works are not satisfied simply to confess this fact, or to transform the fictional artist through her knowledge. In contradistinction to purely expressive theories of art, here sincerity is valued because it clarifies the ethical and social bases of the experience. Expression, in the fictional art works, is informed with critical purpose. Anna Wulf's breakdown, the subject of her most dramatic and fructifying notebook, is a decisive rupture with the paradigms of intellectual and emotional order in which she once believed. Eva's cantata begins in hostile anger and ends with a vision of social and revolutionary hope. The hero of "The Yellow Wallpaper" resists the definitional grids that imprison her double in the wallpaper.
The depicted art work is charged with the conditions of its own creation. Maintaining self-reflexive emphasis on the process of creation, this art work is not presented as an artifact free from the stresses and limits of the time in which it was formed. Instead, it is both fabricated from and immersed in
 
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the temporal, social, and psychic conditions of muted female life that we are compelled to understand in reading the work: interruptions, blockage, long censorship, derision, self-hatred, internalized repression. Nor does the art work seek the status of a masterpiece or great work, which will be severed from its everyday connections, stored in a museum or gallery, published or sold. The imaginary art work takes its cue from the artisanal experience, in which the object is made for use and has its existence in the realm of necessity, as an expression of ties or needs. Art defined in this fashion is not a property dependent upon its market price and the level of rarity or specialness that it has attained. The fictional art work, drawing on the artisanal, not only expresses its connection with the parental or maternal handicrafter but also registers a protest against art as a salable commodity. The thing precious only because it is hoarded, saved, unconsumed is rejected. Instead, craft (gardening, cooking, storytelling, singing, quilting) and art (painting, sculpting, writing) are viewed as varient parts of one spectrum of human production. This pointed fusion of craft and high art makes a critical assessment of the value placed on activities elevated above the material and conflictual realm.
45
The division between high and decorative arts is a historical construct, not a universal, and it can be linked to the view of the artist as a separated, isolated genius. By inserting the artist in a social group, the familybut a family reconceptualized so that parental and especially maternal ties are a nurturing source, not an impedimentand by structuring an ethics of emotional service, the idea of the artist as social outcast is contested.
So the fictional art works are carefully built to end what Theodor Adorno calls ''the pure autonomy of mind" in the relation of art to culture. Culturehigh bourgeois culture"originates in the radical separation of mental and physical work. It is from this separation, the original sin, as it were, that culture draws its strength."
46
William Morris also points to the historical specificity of the moment when "the great and lesser arts" separate, the one to become "ingenious toys" for the rich, the other to become trivial and unintelligent.
47
It is clear that the fusion of the artisanal and high art has been
 
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an analytic dream for radical thinkers. The ideological importance of this fusion for solving the narrative dilemma of role and vocation is apparent when one remembers the completely binary alternatives of the nineteenth-century textseither domestic life or artistic life. The twentieth-century female
Künstlerromane
solve that binary opposition between work and domesticity by having the fictional art work function as a labor of love, a continuation of the artisanal impulse of a thwarted parent, an emotional gift for family, child, self, or others. This may or may not be realistic, but it is a compelling narrative solution to a prime contradiction. In their artist novels, women writers present a radical oppositional aesthetics criticizing dominance.
Notes
1. There are two parallel discussions of the
Künstlerroman.
Grace Stewart discusses mother-daughter ties as ''often central to the novel of the artist as heroine," but focuses on their negative character.
A New Mythos: The Novel of the Artist as Heroine, 1877-1977
(St. Alban's, Vt.: Eden Press Women's Publications, Inc., 1979), p. 41. In another consideration of this topic, Susan Gubar argues that two scripts felt to have been absolute alternativesartistic production and biological reproductionare joined in twentieth-century women's
Künstlerromane,
allowing female images of creativity to dominate the works. "The Birth of the Artist as Heroine: (Re)production, the
Künstlerroman
Tradition, and the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield," in
The Representation of Women in Fiction,
ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1983): pp. 19-59.
2. A note on terminology. "Female artist" will refer only to the fictional figure; the person who invented the narrative is a woman writer. "Art work" will mean the imaginary text, painting, or performance described, the production of the female artist.
3. Janet Wolff,
The Social Production of Art
(London: Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1981), p. 27.
4. Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Aurora Leigh and Other Poems,
introduced by Cora Kaplan (London: The Woman's Press, Ltd., 1978).

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