Tell Me a Riddle (65 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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They poke at each other with as few words as possible, using words not as instruments of communication but as weapons of combat and control. Further, each uses any available means to suppress the other's minimal discourse. She turns down her hearing aid and turns on the vacuum cleaner. He turns on the television ''loud so he need not hear."
The text only gradually reveals Eva's long-ago status as a revolutionary orator; only through fragments of dialogue and interior monologue do we learn that this obdurate, rancorous woman, who now wields power only by turning down her hearing aid, was once an orator in the 1905 Russian revolution. Models for Eva's revolutionary commitment included that of Olsen's own mother, Ida Lerner. Another was Seevya Dinkin, who shares "Riddle"'s dedication with Genya Gorelick.
2
"Tell Me a Riddle" illuminates, as no polemic could, the terrible cost of a sexual division of labor. David, who has worked outside the home, has sustained a vitality and sociability. But he has lost the "holiest dreams" he and Eva shared in their radical youth, seems to accept American "progress," and would rather consume TV's version of "This Is Your Life" than reflect on his own. Insulated at home, Eva has felt less pressure to assimilate, to compromise her values, and has preserved those dreams. But the many years of 18-hour days, of performing domestic tasks "with the desperate ingenuity of poverty" (years in which David "never scraped a carrot") have transformed her youthful capacity for engagement into a terrible need for solitude (Rosenfelt, "Divided" 19).
As Eva is dying she slips into the indirect discursive mode. After years of bitter silence, she begins to speak, sing, and recite incessantly. Fragments of memories and voices, suppressed during her years of marriage and motherhood, emerge as the old woman nears death. Eva, like the mother in "I Stand Here Ironing," becomes an individual embodiment of heteroglossia. Eva had announced her desire for solitude, but ironically she returns in her reverie to the time when she was engaged with others in a revolutionary movement. She sings revolutionary songs from her youth and in a "gossamer" voice whispers fragments of speeches she had delivered in "a girl's
 
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voice of eloquence'' half a century before. Her babble is a communal one; she becomes a vehicle for many voices.
Eva's experiences while dying may have been partly modelled on those of Ida Lerner. "In the winter of 1955," Olsen reports in
Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother,
"in her last weeks of life, my motherso much of whose waking life had been a nightmare, that common everyday nightmare of hardship, limitation, longing; of baffling struggle to raise six children in a world hostile to human unfoldingmy mother, dying of cancer, had beautiful dream-visionsin color." She dreamed/envisioned three wise men, "magnificent in jewelled robes" of crimson, gold, and royal blue. The wise men ask to talk to her "of whys, of wisdom," but as they began to talk,
"she saw that they were not men, but women: That they were not dressed in jewelled robes, but in the coarse everyday shifts and shawls of the old country women of her childhood, their feet wrapped round and round with rags for lack of boots. . . . And now it was many women, a babble"
(261, 262). Together, the women sing a lullaby.
Like Ida Lerner, on her deathbed Eva becomes the human equivalent of a heteroglossic carnival site.
One by one they
[the thousand various faces of age]
streamed by and imprinted on herand though the savage zest of their singing came voicelessly soft and distant, the faces still roaredthe faces densened the airchorded into
children-chants, mother-croons, singing of the chained love serenades, Beethoven storms, mad Lucia's scream, drunken joy-songs, keens for the dead, working-singing....
Olsen blurs the distinction between high and popular culture in the diversity of cultural forms that sustain Eva; her beloved Chekhov, Balzac, Victor Hugo; Russian love songs; revolutionary songs; a "community sing" for elderly immigrants; and
Pan del Muerto,
a folk-art cookie for a dead child.
The barrage of voices and references that constitute Eva at her death return us to the danger I referred to in discussing "I Stand Here Ironing"that multivocal, hetero-
 
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glossic discourse may result in the equivalent of silence. Despite the danger, heteroglossia's cacophony is preferable to the dominant discourse's reductive forms. As for Emily in ''I Stand Here Ironing," what will "let Eva be" is heteroglossia. After years of living in silence and near silence, Eva emerges in heteroglossia. Yet in both stories the richness of meaning released in Emily's and Eva's heteroglossic utterances threaten to result in the equivalent of silence.
In
Tell Me a Riddle
mimicry provides examples of subversive, indirect modes of discourse jousting with dominant monolithic modes; however, in mimicry Olsen finds the occasion to examine hazards in marginalized discourse's competing with the dominant discourse. Like other forms of parody, mimicry comprises a powerful form of heteroglossia. Aimed against an official or monologic language, mimicry divides that system against itself. However, mimicry's ability to oppress the oppressor may be a snare for the mimic. To make her mother laugh, or out of the despair she felt about her isolation in the world, Emily, in "I Stand Here Ironing," imitates people and incidents from her school day. Eventually her gift for mimicry, pantomime, and comedy lead to first prize in her high school amateur show and requests to perform at other schools, colleges, and city- and state-wide competitions. However, her talent and achievement do not remedy her isolation: "Now suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as she had been in anonymity" (19). By exercising her parodic talent, Emily unwittingly exchanges one form of marginalization for another.
Like Emily, Whitey in "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" has a knack for mimicry, which he exhibits, for example, when telling Lennie about the union official who fined him: "(His [Whitey's] old fine talent for mimicry jutting through the blurred-together words.)" (44). Whitey, a seaman being destroyed by alcoholism, is no less isolated than Emily in "I Stand Here Ironing." Lennie and Helen, who have been Whitey's friends and political comrades for years (Whitey saved Lennie's life during the 1934 Maritime Strike), and their three daughters are his only friendsindeed, the only people he can "be around . . . without having to pay" (43).
3
Mimicry deals Whitey a fate similar to Emily's. How-
 
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ever, an irony of ''Hey Sailor, What Ship?" is that it is mimicry of the mimic, Whitey, that contributes to Whitey's fate. The family engages in an affectionate mimicking of the salty language that sets Whitey apart from their other acquaintances:
Watch the language, Whitey, there's a gentleman present,
says Helen. Finish your plate, Allie.
[Whitey:] Thass right. Know who the gen'lmum is? I'm
the gen'lmum. The world, says Marx, is divided into two
classes. . . . [ellipsis Olsen's]
Seafaring gen'lmum and shoreside bastards, choruses
Lennie with him.
Why, Daddy! says Jeannie.
You're a mean ole bassard father, says Allie.
Thass right, tell him off, urges Whitey. Hell with waitin'
for glasses. Down the ol' hatch.
My
class is divided by marks, says Carol, giggling help-
lessly at her own joke, and anyway what about ladies? Where's
my
drink? Down the hatch. (35)

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