Tell Me a Riddle (67 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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tensifies, it threatens to overpower heteroglossia by reducing it to the near monological assertion/affirmation exchanges between a leader and followers. Much of that drama takes place in the sermon delivered at Parialee's baptismal service. The narrator tells us that the subject of the sermon is ''the Nature of God. How God is long-suffering. Oh, how long he has suffered" (51). The narrator has shown us a version of the classic Christian mystery of incarnation: God as the maker of human beings who suffer and God as the human victim of suffering. This dual role of perpetrator and victim becomes central to the sermon-response's dialogic structure. Early in the sermon the preacher chants, "And God is Powerful," to which the congregation responds
"O Yes"
(52). Here, again, we find an assertion/affirmation structure in which the preacher assumes the lead in the dialogue by making assertions that the congregation, in its role as follower, responds to by affirming.
Other dimensions of the dialogue quickly emerge. The preacher, working the theme of the great judgment day, blows an imaginary trumpet and announces: "And the horn wakes up Adam, and Adam runs to wake up Eve, and Eve moans; Just one more minute, let me sleep, and Adam yells, Great Day, woman, don't you know it's the Great Day?" (53). The basic assertion/affirmation structure is still operating, but within that structure the preacher in godlike fashion now creates characters who in turn engage in their own dialogues. The scene becomes increasingly heteroglossic. Immediately after the created Adam's rousing call to a sleeping Eve ("Great Day, woman, don't you know it's the Great Day?"), one of the choirs responds,
"Great Day, Great Day"
(53). Is the choir responding to the voice of the created Adam or to the preacher? The answer is of little consequence. What is important here is that the structure of the assertion/affirmation dialogue has dictated conditions that the congregation follows. Whichever "leader," real or imaginary, they respond to in the course of the sermon, they persistently replicate their role as affirmers of the leader's assertion. Thus what emerges from this heteroglossic scene is a powerful counter to heteroglossia, a discursive structure that imposes unity and control by locking participants into predetermined traditional roles.
The force for unity within heteroglossia intensifies
 
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as the imaginary dimension of the dialogue escalates. The preacher moves from assertions about God and the creation of characters such as Adam and Eve to assuming the role of God, and with that move the form of his discourse shifts from assertion/affirmation to promise/affirmation. Having just asserted the multiple roles of God in relation to human beings (friend, father, way maker, door opener), the preacher proclaims: ''I will put my Word in you and it is power. I will put my Truth in you and it is power." The response is "O
Yes"
(55). Soon after, the narrator says, "Powerful throbbing voices. Calling and answering to each other" (56). The narrator captures the vibrant force of the unity within the heteroglossia when she says, "A single exultant lunge of shriek" (56).
What are we to make of this univocalizing of heteroglossia? The sexual implications that have been accumulating in this scene and that culminate in the orgasmic "single exultant lunge of shriek" invite an instructive digression into Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's discussion of an orgasmic "howl" in Toni Morrison's
Sula.
Henderson, who skillfully employs Bakhtinian analysis, observes of Sula's orgasmic cry: "The howl, signifying a prediscursive mode, thus becomes an act of self-reconstitution as well as an act of subversion or resistance to the 'network of signification' represented by the symbolic order. The 'high silence of orgasm' and the howl allow temporary retreats from or breaks in the dominant discourse" (33). The "single exultant lunge of shriek" has very similar functions in the church scene in "O Yes." The parishioners have repeatedly experienced the intense repetition of the constraining assertion/affirmation and promise/affirmation structures that mimic the dominant discourse of power to which the congregation members are subjected outside the church. The shriek becomes an act of "self-reconstitution" and, at the same time, a "subversion or resistance to the 'network of signification"' that constrains the parishioners.
Henderson argues persuasively that Sula's orgasmic howl occurs at the moment at which she is located "outside of the dominant discursive order" but also when she is poised to re-enter and disrupt the discursive order. For Henderson, Sula's howl becomes a primary metaphor for African-American women writers whose objective is not "to move from margin
 
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to center, but to remain on the borders of discourse, speaking from the vantage point of the insider/outsider'' (33, 36). This point of difficult balance is, I suggest, where Olsen places the African-American congregation at the moment of the "single exultant lunge of shriek."
But what more is there in the story to justify such a reading of this univocalizing of heteroglossia? Alva, Parialee's mother, will give us some indications. After Carol's near-faint, Alva blames herself for not having been more attentive to Carol's being brought into a situation she had no basis for understanding. Attempting to explain the situation to Carol after the fact, Alva says, "You not used to people letting go that way.... You not used to hearing what people keeps inside, Carol. You know how music can make you feel things? Glad or sad or like you can't sit still? That was religion music, Carol." Speaking of the congregation Alva says, "'And they're home Carol, church is home. Maybe the only place they can feel how they feel and maybe let it come out. So they can go on. And it's all right"' (59-60). So we seem to have our answer. The univocalizing of heteroglossia is a shared singular escape of people who are trapped in multiple ways. They seem to choose to surrender the heteroglossia of their suffering to the univocal escape of the church/home. But is it "all right"?
The story's first section ends with an italicized rendering of what Alva did not say to Carol. This reveriewhich remains silent, unspoken to Carolstands as a response (like the earlier italicized responses of the congregation and the choirs) to an earlier series of the preacher's assertions. Earlier in the sermon the preacher proclaims: "He was your mother's rock. Your father's mighty tower. And he gave us a little baby. A little baby to love." The congregation responds:
"I am so glad"
(54). Alva's silent reverie begins:
When I was carrying Parry and her father left me, and I fifteen years old, one thousand miles away from home, sin-sick and never really believing, as still I don't believe all, scorning, for what have it done to help, waiting there in the clinic and maybe sleeping, a voice called: Alva, Alva. So mournful and so sweet: Alva. Fear not, I have loved you from the foundation of the universe. (61)
 
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Alva follows the voice
''into a world of light, multitudes singing,"
and the reverie ends:
"Free, free, I am so glad"
(61). The reverie's mixture of dream and reality parallels the mixture of the imaginary and the real in the sermon situation and seems to stand as Alva's singular response (not an affirmation) to the preacher's assertions in the sermon. But this is not a completely singular response, and it is not totally devoid of affirmation. When Alva acknowledges, "still I don't believe all," she locates herself, like Henderson's African-American female writer, both within and outside the church, inside yet resisting the univocality, outside yet resisting the conflation of the imaginary and the real. But we must remember that this is what Alva does
not
say to Carol, or to Helen, or as far as we know to anyone other than us. What is the force that creates this silence? Is it the circumstances of Alva's daily life? Is it the church?
We cannot begin to answer these questions without looking at the structure of the second part of the story. Just as Alva's reverie functions as a response to the sermon, the second part of the story stands as a response to the first part. In the second part, which takes place in the world of Helen and Len (or Lennie) and their daughters, Carol and Jeannie, a univocalizing force parallels that of the church in part one. In the second part the force against heteroglossia is the junior high school, which officially and unofficially attempts to separate Carol and Parialee, univocalizing Carol and other white students while shutting out Parialee and other African-American students. Because she is African-American, Parialee will not be tracked into Carol's accelerated classes; and even if she were initially admitted to them, the necessity to care for younger siblings while her mother works the four-to-twelve-thirty night shift would quickly put her behind in her studies. Carol is "college prep," whereas Parialee will likely not finish junior high, predicts Jeannie, a 17-year-old veteran of the public school system. According to Jeannie, "you have to watch everything, what you wear and how you wear it and who you eat lunch with and how much homework you do and how you act to the teacher and what you laugh at. . . . [ellipsis Olsen's] And run with your crowd" (63). Peer pressure is tremendous, and Carol and Parialee would be ostracized for
 
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attempting to be friends. Jeannie contrasts their ''for real" working-class school with one in a nearby affluent neighborhood where it is fashionable for whites and African-Americans to be "buddies": ". . . three coloured kids and their father's a doctor or judge or something big wheel and one always gets elected President or head song girl or something to prove oh how we're democratic" (65).
The junior high school has its parallel to the preacherthe teacher, Miss Campbell (nicknamed "Rockface")and in this parallel Olsen further suggests dangers in the monologic impulses within the church's heteroglossia. Godlike in the junior high school kingdom, the bigoted teacher has the power to decide whether Parialee can be trusted to take Carol's homework assignments to her when Carol has the mumps: "Does your mother work for Carol's mother?" Rockface asks Parialee. "Oh, you're neighbors! Very well, I'll send along a monitor to open Carol's locker but you're only to take these things I'm writing down, nothing else" (67). Like the preacher, Rockface has the power to make Parialee respond. In drill master fashion, Rockface insists: "Now say after me: Miss Campbell is trusting me to be a good responsible girl. And go right to Carol's house.... Not stop anywhere on the way. Not lose anything. And only take. What's written on the list" (67). However, we know of this not because Parialee told Carol. The account of Rockface appears in a passage that parallels Alva's reveriewhat she did not say to Carol. The passage in which Parialee accounts for Rockface appears in a section in which she has been talking to Carol, but the Rockface passage begins:
"But did not tell."
The knowledge we have of Rockface from Parialee is, like the knowledge we have of Alva's inner world, one more silence in Carol's world.
What are we to make of this chilling structural parallel between the worlds of the dominant and the marginalized, the oppressor and the oppressed? Certainly we must hear Olsen's warning that the marginalized imperil their identities by replicating, even through mimicry, structures of the dominant discourse. The African-American congregation risks imposing on itself the dominant culture's reductive and oppressive structures. But has the congregation yet succumbed? Perhaps not. Perhaps they as a collective, unlike the individuals Emily

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