Tell Me a Riddle (69 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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of silence. Olsen has given us a difficult kind of central character, one whose fierce desire for the silences she believes she has earned resists the telling of her story. We as audience are caught in the uncomfortable position of hearing the story of someone who wants her story left in silence. We are interlopers. We, like David, violate Eva's solitude and silence, and the narrator, seemingly torn between telling the story and honoring Eva's longing for silence, contributes to our discomfort.
The story's title and the presence of the phrase ''tell me a riddle" in the story itself indicate sources of our uneasiness. In the story, the phrase "tell me a riddle" appears in the context of the "command performance." On the visit to daughter Vivi's, a visit Eva felt forced to make when she really wanted to go home, the narrator tells us very nearly from Eva's own perspective: "Attentive with the older children; sat through their performances (command performance; we command you to be the audience). . . ." Here the traditional notion of "command performance" is reversed. It is not the performer who enacts her role by command; it is the audience who performs its role by command. Eva is trapped. She is once again at the mercy of others' needs and desires.
In her role as command audience, Eva "watched the children whoop after their grandfather who knew how to tickle, chuck, lift, toss, do tricks, tell secrets, make jokes, match riddle for riddle." She watched David interact with the grandchildren in the expected ways, in all the ways in which she would not: "(Tell me a riddle, Grammy. I know no riddles, child)." Eva, the command audience, plays her attentive role up to a point, but she does not fully meet expectations. To the command "Tell me a riddle" she responds with a form of her prized silence, thwarting conventional expectations about grandparent-grandchild interactions.
Conventional expectations about interactions between us as audience and Eva and her story are also thwarted. We cannot be merely passive listeners to Eva's story. Whereas monologic discourse is, again, as Bakhtin asserts, "deaf to the other's response," even the title "Tell Me a Riddle" signals the necessity of our response. From the moment we read the title, we are told to act: "Tell Me a Riddle." We expect to hear a
 
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story, but we are told to tell a riddle. We, like Eva, are a command audience, and we, like Eva, find ourselves responding with our own versions of silence. We, the command audience, have been identified with Eva, the command audience, and with her desire for silence. Again, we are put in the uncomfortable situation of wanting to be silent listeners to the story of someone who wants her story left in silence.
Why should we be submitted to this discomfort? On one level we are put in this position because of the narrator's sympathy with Eva's desires. Eva's is a story that needs to be told, yet the narrator sympathizes with Eva's hunger for silence. The compromise for the narrator is to disrupt our complacency as audience. We will hear the story, but not on our terms: We will hear the story as a command audience. What better way to force us to realize the complexity of Eva's situation than to force us into a position resembling Eva's experience as command audience? But there is another reason for our discomfort. As in
Yonnondio
and
Silences,
Olsen disrupts our passivity, demanding that we as readers share responsibility for completing Eva's story.
But how do we exercise our responsibility? We have some clues in David's response to Eva. To David it seemed that for seventy years she had hidden an ''infinitely microscopic" tape recorder within her, "trapping every song, every melody, every word read, heard, and spoken." She had caught and was now releasing all the discourse around her: "you who called others babbler and cunningly saved your words." But the harsh realization for David was that "she was playing back only what said nothing of him, of the children, of their intimate life together." For David, the air is now filled with sound; yet that sound is the equivalent of silence. To him the danger referred to in my discussion of "I Stand Here Ironing"that multivocal, heteroglossic discourse may result in the equivalent of silencehas become reality.
However, here we have a new perspective on the danger. The danger lies not in the discourse but in the audience. Because David hears nothing of Eva's life with him, the sounds become meaningless. His is an individualistic, self-centered response. But, crucially, what are these sounds to us as command audience? We have experienced the discomfort
 
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of being listeners to the story of one who does not want her story told, but now, at the end of her life, she speaks. If we identify with David's individualistic perspective, we will not understand Eva; her sounds will be the equivalent of silence. However, if we value Eva's identification with all humankind, we are an audience for whom Eva's last words have meaning.
Olsen aids us in valuing Eva's links to all humankind. One of those aids is a resuscitated David with whom we are invited to identify once he has remembered what he had long forgotten. Finally, David comes to a partial understanding of Eva's last words. When she brokenly repeats part of a favorite quotation from Victor Hugo, David remembers it, too, reciting scornfully: '''in the twentieth century ignorance will be dead, dogma will be dead, war will be dead, and for all humankind one countryof fulfillment'? Hah!" (120). But Eva's feverish cantata finally awakens in the old man memories of his own youthful visions:
Without warning, the bereavement and betrayal he had shel-
teredcompounded through the yearshidden even from
himselfrevealed itself,
uncoiled,
released,
sprung
and with it the monstrous shapes of what had actually hap-
pened in the century. (120)
David realizes with sudden clarity the full price of his assimilation into America's "apolitical" mainstream: "'Lost, how much I lost."' (121). He and Eva "had believed so beautifully, so . . . falsely?" (ellipsis Olsen's):
"Aaah, children," he said out loud, "how we believed, how we belonged." And he yearned to package for each of the children, the grandchildren, for everyone,
that joyous certainty, that sense of mattering, of moving and being moved, of being one and indivisible with the great of the past, with all that freed, ennobled.
Package it, stand on corners, in front of stadiums and on crowded beaches, knock on doors, give it as a fabled gift.

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