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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 299
While in her, her own need leapt and plunged for the place of strength that was not-where one could scream or sorrow while all knew and accepted, and gloved and loving hands waited to support and understand. (71)
Although we risk being flooded by a multiplicity of meaning that approaches meaninglessness and the equivalent of silence, we as readers must submit to the ''immersion," the "long baptism" that allows us to be the proper "ear" for the complexity of heteroglossia.
We have similar models at the end of "I Stand Here Ironing" and "Tell Me a Riddle." The mother listens to Emily on "one of her communicative nights . . . [when] she tells me everything and nothing" (19). The mother does not respond to Emily, but says to herself, to the teacher or counselor, and to us, "Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloombut in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by" (20-21). In "Tell Me a Riddle" Jeannie, who has listened carefully to Eva's dying heteroglossia, is not actually a mother; but, like a mother, she is a caretaker, a nurturer, a listener.
However, Olsen asks more of us than listening. As Helen says to herself,
"caring asks doing."
In none of these models in
Tell Me a Riddle
is the mother figure a passive listener; rather, she is a listener responsive to heteroglossia. Even when multiple voices so overwhelm her that she is caught in silence (Emily's mother, Helen, Eva), she can sometimes caress or embrace, knowing the communicative power of such actions. As active readers, then, we are provided models of careful listening, leading to action. Olsen does not proscribe the field of political/social action that we as active readers might enter. However, she does demand that we work to understand the many voices of the oppressed. In "I Stand Here Ironing," the mother says of Emily, "Only help her to know," a command the dying Eva echoes: "All that happens, one must try to understand." These words comprise imperatives for us. And these mother figures, who live compassionately and interdependently in a multicultural and heteroglossic dynamic, become models for us readers.
Olsen demands another, related form of action from her readers. In the collection,
Tell Me a Riddle,
we have been ex-
 
Page 300
posed to many moments in which characters sensitive to heteroglossia have been so inundated with complexity of meaning they have lapsed into silence. We have heard what the unnamed mother in ''I Stand Here Ironing," Alva, Helen, and Eva have
not
been able to say to those most immediately connected to them. If the silence is perpetuated, these characters risk, as do Emily and Whitey, being subsumed by the dominant discourse. Olsen requires us, as readers of the complete collection, to hear the various oppressed voices and to make and articulate connections among them, connections the separate characters may not be able to see, or may only partially see. With such actions we become collaborators with Olsen in the democratizing enterprise of amplifying dominated and marginalized voices. We join her in a commitment to social change.
The "riddle" which Olsen's work challenges us to engage requires that we consider political activity not as something confined to a single class, party, gender, ethnic group, or cause but as something undertaken within a kaleidoscopic social field and, simultaneously, within "the fibres of the self and in the hard practical substance of effective and continuing relationships" (Williams 212). Olsen's genuinely democratic content articulates itself in multivocal texts that prefigure postindividual cultural forms. In a sense, Olsen's sociopolitical vision has enabled her to write what cannot be written.
Tell Me a Riddle's
form represents a
"pre-emergence,
active and pressing but not yet fully articulated, rather than the evident emergence which could be more confidently named" (Williams 126). With Virginia Woolf in "The Leaning Tower," Olsen's texts proclaim: "Literature is no one's private ground; literature is common ground" (125).
Notes
1. For discussions of history of reading strategies and earlier defenses of indirect and figurational structures against schemes for linguistic reductionism, see Bartine.
2. In the edition of
Tell Me a Riddle
I have used for this essay, the title story is "for two of that generation, Seevya and Genya." In
 
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the 1989 edition, Olsen also dedicates the story to her parents. Genya Gorelick had been a factory organizer in Mozyr, a famous orator, and the leading woman of the Jewish Workers' Alliance, the Bund of prerevolutionary Russia. Her son, Al Richmond, has written about the role Gorelick played in the 1905 revolution, when she was just nineteen:
The 1905 revolution burst forth like the splendid realization of a dream, shaking the Czarist regime enough to loosen its most repressive restrictions, so that revolutionaries at last could address the public, not any more through the whispered word and the surreptitious leaflet but openly and directly in large assemblies. She discovered her gifts as a public orator. She was good, and in her best moments she was truly great. (8; cited in Rosenfelt, ''Divided" 19)
3. Olsen told me in an interview (11 July 1986, San Francisco) that she modelled Whitey partly on Filipino men she knew "in the movement" who hungered for contact with families at a time when U.S. immigration law kept Filipino women and children from entering the U.S.
4. Patrocinio P. Schweickart outlines a promising model for reading based on a joining of reader-response theory and feminist theory. Her model contains some of the characteristics Olsen's writing demands of readers. Schweickart finds that feminist theory can move "beyond the individualistic models of [Wolfgang] Iser and of most reader-response critics" toward a "collective" model of reading. Describing the goal of that model, Schweickart observes that "the feminist reader hopes that other women will recognize themselves in her story, and join her in her struggle to transform the culture" (50, 51). It must be added that Olsen, like Schweickart, would have women and men "join her in her struggle to transform the culture."
5
. Silences
202. For an enlightening discussion of
Tell Me a Riddle
in relation to other works dealing with motherhood, see Gardiner. Gardiner also suggests Jeannie's function as a model for readers when she notes that "at the end of the story, Jeannie has absorbed her grandmother's consciousness," allowing Eva to be "the agent of a revolutionary and transcendent ideal that can be passed from woman to woman, of a commitment to fully human values" (163).
 
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Works Cited
Bakhtin, M. M.
The Dialogic Imagination.
Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Bartine, David.
Early English Reading Theory: Origins of Current Debates.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989.
Reading, Culture, and Criticism: 1820-1950.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992.
Eagleton, Terry.
Against the Grain, Essays 1975-1985.
London: Verso, 1986.
Marxism and Literary Criticism.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976.
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. ''A Wake for Mother: The Maternal Deathbed in Women's Fiction."
Feminist Studies
4 (June 1978): 146- 165.
Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition."
Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women.
Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
Meese, Elizabeth A.
Crossing the Double-Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Olsen, Tillie.
Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother.
Old Westbury: Feminist Press, 1984.
Silences.
New York: Dell, 1978.
Tell Me a Riddle.
1961. New York: Dell, 1979.
Richmond, Al. A Long View from the Left: Memoirs of an American Revolutionary. New York: Dell, 1972.

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