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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 271
CONSTANCE COINER
''No One's Private Ground":
A Bakhtinian Reading of Tillie
Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle
"Commitment" is more than just a matter of presenting
correct political opinions in one's art; it reveals itself in
how far the artist reconstructs the artistic forms at his
[/her] disposal, turning authors, readers and spectators
into collaborators.
TERRY EAGLETON,
referring in his Marxism and Literary Criticism to
Walter Benjamin's
"The Author as Producer"
In the stories collected in
Tell Me a Riddle
Tillie Olsen examines the marginalization and potential empowering of various groups of oppressed people, particularly women, by experimenting with potentially democratizing modes of discourse. Deborah Rosenfelt has rightly placed Olsen in
. . . a line of women writers, associated with the American Left, who unite a class consciousness and a feminist consciousness in their lives and creative work, who are concerned with the material circumstances of people's lives, who articulate the experiences and grievances of women and of other oppressed groupsworkers, national minorities, the colonized and the exploitedand who speak out of a defining commitment to social change. ("Thirties" 374)
Reprinted (with revisions) from
Feminist Studies
18, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 257-81.
 
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Although
Tell Me a Riddle
shows a range of marginalized lives, Olsen is far from content with merely portraying this multiplicity in American society. As Rosenfelt observes, Olsen writes out of a ''commitment to social change," and I will discuss some of Olsen's narrative/political strategies that exemplify that commitment.
The modes of discourse with which Olsen experiments in developing her narrative strategies are those she has derived and recreated from long and careful listening to the voices of marginalized people. The cacophany of their voices, Olsen recognizes, comprises a potentially democratizing force. Noting some of Olsen's uses of empowering discursive forms in
Silences,
Elizabeth A. Meese writes that "by means of a polyvocal chorus she [Olsen] questions silence and allows others to participate in the same process. . . . She then calls upon the reader to write the textno longer her text, but occasioned by it and by the voices speaking through it" (110). The experiments noted by Meese as well as several other experiments pervade
Tell Me a Riddle.
Some of Olsen's specific uses of discursive modes and the political/social changes they work to bring about are prefigured in Mikhail Bakhtin's general concept of "heteroglossia." For Bakhtin there are two competing forces in language use: "Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear"
(Dialogic
272). The "centripetal" or "monologic" force presses toward unity, singularity of meaning; it attempts to assert its dominance by silencing uses of language that deviate from it. On the other hand, the "centrifugal" or "heteroglossic" force resists the dominance of monologism by fragmenting and disrupting it. The myriad heteroglossic voices of the marginalized comprise a social and political force against the tyranny of dominant discursive modes in any language community. Those such as Olsen who observe, record, and honor the multiple heteroglossic voices engage in the democratizing enterprise of amplifying dominated and marginalized voices.
Bakhtin's metaphor of "carnival" displays the nexus of heteroglossia and political/social power. Carnival, with its various simultaneous activities, is a site in which many of the
 
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usual societal impositions of class and order are suspended while the populace participates in multiple ways of parodying or mimicking the dominant culture's behavior. Terry Eagleton has described Bakhtin's notion of carnival in these terms: ''The 'gay relativity' of popular carnival, 'opposed to all that [is] ready-made and completed, to all pretence at immutability,' is the political materialization of Bakhtin's poetics, as the blasphemous, 'familiarizing' language of plebeian laughter destroys monologic authoritarianism with its satirical estrangements"
(Against
117). In
Tell Me a Riddle,
in several instances of carnival-like atmosphere, heteroglossia is unleashed to engage in a powerful, playful satirizing of the dominant culture.
The nurturing and recording of heteroglossia has democratizing potential, but heteroglossia itself and the recording of it also contain hazards both for the multiplicity of speakers and for those who listen to their voices. The collection of stories in
Tell Me a Riddle
presents a wide range of individual, marginalized voices competing for our attention. Unless readers/listeners make connections among a variety of voices, many of which are foreign to their own, the potential for genuine democracy latent within the cacophony of heteroglossia is lost. If they remain unconnected from each other, the competing voices lapse into a white-noise excess of sound that becomes unintelligible. Rejecting many traditional modes of authorial control, Olsen refuses opportunities to make connections for us and presses us to make connections among those voices ourselves. The social/political act of connecting otherwise isolated and marginalized voices realizes the democratizing potential of heteroglossia, and Olsen demands that we participate in such action.
To participate properly, we must be permeable to multiple voices, and in some characters in
Tell Me a Riddle,
Olsen shows us both the benefits and risks of receptivity to heteroglossia. Multiple voices often compete within a single character, displaying that character's complex web of ties to others and to the past. Heteroglossia on this level often operates in
Tell Me a Riddle
and other works by Olsen to undermine and offer alternatives to bourgeois individualism. But Olsen does not idealize the individual permeable to heteroglossia; she
 
Page 274
shows us hazards that exist in individual manifestations of heteroglossia (e.g., Whitey's isolation in ''Hey Sailor, What Ship?" and the multiple voices that threaten to overwhelm the narrator of "I Stand Here Ironing").
Tell Me a Riddle
asks us to be cognizant of the dangers we face as we assume the role Olsen insists we assumethat of active readers alert to the connections among a multiplicity of marginalized voices.
Throughout the stories in
Tell Me a Riddle
Olsen pits heteroglossic modes of discourse she associates with the oppressed against oppressors' monolingual/monological modes of discourse. In the title story, Jeannie's sketch of Eva "coiled, convoluted like an ear" suggests Olsen's narrative/political strategies. Olsen's writing, like an ear "intense in listening," is permeable to the heteroglossic differences constitutive of a complex social field. The stories collected in
Tell Me a Riddle
strain away from the prevailing narrative and social order by "hearing" and incorporating the suppressed voices of mothers, those of the working class, and the dialects of immigrants and African-Americans; by deconstructing the opposition between personal and political; and, in the title story, by honoring the communal polyphony of a dying visionary.
A second and related narrative/political strategy is a reworking of traditional relationships among writer, text, and reader. The stories collected in
Tell Me a Riddle
subvert the concept of textual ownership, affirming the reader not as an object but, reciprocally, as another subject. Many dominant discursive practices still take for granted that the act of reading will be a subjection to a fixed meaning, a passive receiving of what Bakhtin terms "monologue." In Bakhtin's view of monological discourse, the writer directly addresses the readers, attempting to anticipate their responses and deflect their objections; meanings are seen as delivered, unchanged, from source to recipient. In Bakhtin's terms, monologue is "deaf to the other's response; it does not await it and does not grant it any
decisive
force" (cited in Todorov 107).
Heteroglossic discourse, on the other hand, acknowledges "that there exists outside of it another consciousness, with the same rights, and capable of responding on an equal footing, another and equal
1"
(107).
Tell Me a Riddle's
heteroglossia acknowledges the other consciousnesses that exist out-

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