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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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side the text. As Meese indicates about similar strategies in
Silences, Tell Me a Riddle
activates its reader-subjects while subverting authorial domination; in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht's theater and Jean-Luc Godard's cinematic montage, it turns writer and readers into collaborators.
The two categories of Olsen's narrative/political strategy I have identified-her recording of heteroglossia and her reworking of relationships among writer, text, and readerconstitute this essay's two major divisions.
In
Tell Me a Riddle's
first story, ''I Stand Here Ironing," Olsen begins her recording of heteroglossia by exploring problems that fragment lives and discourse and by experimenting with narrative forms that display that fragmentation. Emily, the daughter of the unnamed narrator, had been born into "the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression," and her father, no longer able to "endure . . . sharing want" with the 19-yearold mother and child, had left them when Emily was eight months old (10). The infant "was a miracle to me," the narrator recalls, but when she had to work, she had no choice but to leave Emily with "the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all" (10). This arrangement grieved both mother and child: "I would start running as soon as I got off the streetcar, running up the stairs," the narrator remembers, and "when she saw me she would break into a clogged weeping that could not be comforted, a weeping I can hear yet" (10-11). Then came months of complete separation, while the child lived with relatives. The price for reunion was Emily's spending days at "the kinds of nurseries that [were] only parking places for children. . . . It was the only place there was. It was the only way we could be together, the only way I could hold a job" (11). Their situation improved with the presence of "a new daddy" (12). Although the narrator still worked at wage-earning jobs, she was more relaxed with her younger children than she had been with Emily: "it was the face of joy, and not of care or tightness or worry I turned to them." But, the narrator adds, by then it was "too late for Emily" (12).
The narrative is laced with references to the pressure of circumstance, the limits on choice: "when is there time?";
 
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''what cannot be helped" (9); "it was the only way" (11); "We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth" (20); "She is the child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear" (20). Both mother and daughter have been damaged: While Emily expresses fear and despair casually ("we'll all be atom-dead"), her mother suffers because "all that is in her [Emily] will not bloom" (20). All the narrator asks for Emily is "enough left to live by" and the consciousness that "she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron" (21).
The story includes two major discursive forms. The form that appears through most of the story is indirect, circling, uncertain; it is heteroglossic. The other form, which Olsen points out and discards in one paragraph near the story's end, is direct, clipped, and assertive.
1
It is a version of the reductive dominant discourse contributing to the pressure of the circumstances in which Emily and her mother struggle to survive. With these two forms of discourse Olsen introduces issues that concern her in all the stories in
Tell Me a Riddle:
language as power; dominant versus subversive modes of discourse; heteroglossia.
The second major discursive form, the direct, is introduced by the narrator of "I Stand Here Ironing" in this way: "I will never total it all. I will never come in to say: She was a child seldom smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six years when there was work, or I sent her home and to his relatives. There were years she had care she hated" (20). What the narrator offers here is what she will not say and what she will not do. She will not "total"sum upEmily's life in a direct, linear, cause-and-effect way.
The other major discursive form-with its many modes of indirectness, false starts, and uncertainties-is signalled in the form of address at the beginning of the story. The narrator says, "I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron" (9). This "you" (never clearly identified, but likely one of Emily's high school teachers, a guidance counselor, or a social worker) is the ostensible audience to whom the narrator's discourse is directed. However, in this most indirect form of address, the entire story takes place in the mind of the narrator, who is speaking to
 
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herself as though rehearsing her discourse for the ''you." We do not know whether this discourse ever passes from the silence of the mother's mind to the hearing of the audience (the teacher or counselor) for whom it is being rehearsed.
The narrator's discourse is persistently marked by indirectness, false starts, and uncertaintiesthe forms on which the narrator must rely as she looks back over her life with Emily: "Why do I put that first? I do not even know if it matters, or if it explains anything" (10); "In this and other ways she leaves her seal, I say aloud. And startle at my saying it. What do I mean? What did I start to gather together, to try and make coherent?" (18). These fitful "digressions" typify the movement of the story's first major discursive form. The user of that form, far from reducing her subjects to linear, cause-and-effect patterns, displays in multifaceted discourse her own complicated and ultimately irreducible forms of interdependence with her subjects. The form is heteroglossic; it is a "voice" made of many voices: Caught in the memory of conflicts between Emily and her sister, Susan, "each one human, needing, demanding, hurting, taking," the mother says, "Susan telling jokes and riddles to company for applause while Emily sat silent (to say to me later; that was
my
riddle, Mother, I told it to Susan)" (16-17). As employed in this and other stories in the collection, heteroglossia is not solely a matter of multiple voices within or among cultures or subcultures; it is often the multiple and conflicting voices that make up one person. Olsen's displays of individual heteroglossia, the fragmenting of voices constituting a self and that self's interdependence with others, become one means by which her work offers alternatives to bourgeois individualism.
At the beginning of the story, the words of the unidentified teacher or counselor and the mother's reaction to those words create a complex intermingling of voices. The mother has been asked to assist in helping Emily: "'I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I'm sure you can help me understand her. She's a youngster who needs help and whom I'm deeply interested in helping."' The next line of the story is "'Who needs help.' . . ." (9; ellipsis Olsen's). Who indeed? This entangling of the helpers and the helped, including the suggestion that the mother
 
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is being asked for the very aid she herself may need in order to assist Emily, is indicative of the ways in which the narrator's thinking and discourse proceed. She cannot, in language, fully demarcate herself from Emily or from those whose lives became entangled with Emily's in the past, such as an unsympathetic nursery school teacher: ''And even without knowing, I knew. I knew the teacher that was evil because all these years it has curdled into my memory, the little boy hunched in the corner, her rasp, 'why aren't you outside, because Alvin hits you? that's no reason, go out, scaredy"' (11). Facing the incessant pressure of time and circumstances"And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?"the narrator recognizes that multiple voices and memories constantly threaten to engulf her (9).
The nonlinear mode of discourse is so often replete with complexity of meaning that it risks falling into meaninglessness and the equivalent of silence. In this story that risk is most acute at moments when the mother cannot find the language to respond to Emily. While looking back over her life with Emily, the mother returns to times when she could respond to her daughter with nothing more than silence.
There was a boy she loved painfully through two school semesters. Months later she told me how she had taken pennies from my purse to buy him candy. "Licorice was his favorite and I bought him some every day, but he still liked Jennifer better'n me. Why, Mommy?" The kind of question for which there is no answer. (15-16)
On the night in which this story takes place the mother is remembering such details of Emily's life and instances of failed communication between mother and daughter. The cumulative details from the various stages of Emily's life and the crowding of voices force the narrator to say near the story's end: "because I have been dredging the past, and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I cannot bear it tonight" (20). A richness of meaning approximating meaninglessness and the equivalent of silence weighs on the mother when she says of Emily, "This is one of her communicative nights and she tells me everything and no-
 
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thing as she fixes herself a plate of food'' (19). Yet for the narrator a reliance on nonlinear discourse with its attendant hazards is not only a matter of what her circumstances have forced upon her. It is also a matter of choice.
The narrator must use nonlinear heteroglossic modes if her goal in telling Emily's story is, as she says it is, to "Let her [Emily] be." The complicated, conflicting stuff of which human beings are made can be discussed only nonreductively in nonlinear discourse, in a manner that has some chance of "letting them be." To adopt the dominant, linear, reductive mode of discourse is to usurp and control Emily, and it is to abandon the hope with which the story ends: the narrator's hope that Emily will know "that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron" (20).
The two major discursive forms in "I Stand Here Ironing"the indirect, uncertain, circling form, and the direct, clipped, assertive formappear again in "Tell Me a Riddle," and, again, Olsen uses them to explore language as power; dominant versus subversive modes of discourse; and heteroglossia. The story begins with a battle between Eva and David, who have been married for forty-seven years, most of them spent in poverty. In the dialect of Russian-Jewish immigrants, they bitterly dispute whether to sell their home and move to a retirement cooperative operated by David's union. He craves company while Eva, after raising seven children, will not "exchange her solitude for anything.
Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others."
David and Eva use a notalways-direct, but relentlessly assertive, and minimal form of discourse in their perpetual quarreling. We find that mode of discourse in their opening fray:
"What do we need all this for?" he would ask loudly, for her hearing aid was turned down and the vacuum was shrilling. "Five rooms" (pushing the sofa so she could get into the corner) "furniture" (smoothing down the rug) "floors and surfaces to make work. Tell me why do we need it?" And he was glad he could ask in a scream. "Because I'm use't." "Because you're use't. This is a reason, Mrs. Word Miser? Used to can get unused !"
BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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