Tell Me a Riddle (45 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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taining work, a living wage, and the other, the desire to begin anew, to find a life of meaning characterized by mutual caring and abundant yields. As the journey for work is described, certain characteristics of the human quest for meaning are suggested. Mazie experiences release, boundlessness, and contentment as they travel. Furthermore, the journey is characterized by solidarity, by human community and interdependence. Mazie helps her father when the wheels are stuck, and Anna shelters the children bodily when it snows.
In the story of Whitey, the journeying metaphor reflects the hopes of the past. The sailor once felt connected to others in his work because they shared ''the brotherhood." What was good for one was good for all. Now that the camaraderie has disintegrated, he struggles to sustain meaning in his life. He is like a wrecked vessel, no longer able to make himself "feel good" because the adventure and community his travels once embodied are no longer intact. Without the community he once knew, the journeying of his present is empty.
The steerage ship of Eva's story connects her past journey for political freedom with her present quest for selfidentity. A former embarkment, made in desperation, now signifies the way Eva must travel to gain a sense of herself and of the belief that has given her life meaning. What she discovers is an unshakable faith in human beings. Though her present journey is singular, it gains its meaning from the movement of thousands toward freedom and dignity. We might understand the journey's conclusion to signify Olsen's own faith. Searching for meaning, Eva finds that the quester (herself) finds meaning by sharing with others the same struggle for freedom. She (and Olsen) embody the truth that the "purpose" of freedom is to create it for others."
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Thus, Eva's spiritual search suggests that to understand the journey of one's life is to see it in the context of movements larger than oneself.
As readers, we journey into Eva's world. Reading fosters journeying into another's presence. In "Tell Me a Riddle," we are invited into Eva's human heart, to learn of her understandings, pains, and hopes. The result is an expansion of our own journeying. Meeting another on her way, we have made
 
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a detour on our own. Thus we might say that reading fictive worlds teaches sympathy born out of interruption. Practicing a willed suspension of our own world, we enter the otherness of a new world, thinking and feeling as another. Journeys are thus intertwined, and we carry in our minds the crossed paths of self and other.
While Eva's personal hope is symbolized by the socialist dream, Stevie's journey begins at the personal level and expands toward a vision of universal quest through imagistic association with animal and plant worlds and the significant relations of this life. The longer light of spring, accompanying the boy's quest for a place and for the knowledge that he is connected with others by love, points to the metaphysical depth of the story. Through the settings of junkyard and cemetery, journeying becomes a metaphor not only for the living but for the hopes of the dead, whose memory sparks the present search for meaning and for a feeling of continuity.
The journeys of Olsen's characters are marked by struggle and community. Employing the quest as a leitmotif of American literature, the writer revitalizes its metaphoric potential by offering an unlikely set of vehicles: the poor, minorities, women, and children. The incoherent chantings of an old Jewish immigrant woman, the vision of an eightyear-old girl or a fourteen-year-old boy, the desires of a povertystricken woman, balancing a baby on her hip, a union sailor, reeling drunk, whose quest he no longer understands: these are the people whose journeying Olsen depicts as the essential human quest for freedom, place, and meaning. She makes us feel the desire ''for mattering" from their perspectives and shows the springs of hope flowing, almost miraculously, from their lives. These questers come in groups, struggling together as family: mother/daughter, husband/wife, friend/ friend. The black church in "O Yes" is emblematic of communal journeying, where everyone is brought along: the old, the sick, the infant.
In her notes, Olsen has written, "In the human being is an irrepressible desire for freedom that breaks out century after century."
10
In her fiction she shows that desire to be not merely for freedom
from
want, hunger, and fear, but freedom
 
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for
fulfillment, expression, and community. Using women's, children's, and working-class perspectives, Olsen transforms the vision of human longing from solitary to community questing. Through the lens of domestic needs, limitations, and promises, Olsen suggests that the movement toward freedom is most genuine and realistically promising as an inclusive journey that begins where people are the weakest and least fortunate.
In
Silences,
Olsen writes of ''the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot" (6), suggesting that the human quest is the journey into Being, into authentic and expressive selfhood. When she writes of the desire for "spaciousness that puts no limit to vision" (102), she evokes for us an image of creativity in geographical terms. Imaginative work needs room without a roof. The journeys inward and outward reflect similar truths. Movement, change, and possibility are core human needs that are also liberations. In the modern world, many take for granted the sense of expansiveness gained in travel. But in sympathy with people who are denied journeying, as today black South Africans (and others) are and as Olsen's people are, we may remember the power of the journey to express the human movement into holiness.
BLOSSOMING
The flowerwitness Emerson's rhodorais a symbol of beauty and fulfillment as well as vulnerability, the time of blossoming the apex of the plant's development and the glory of its existence. To speak of human blossoming is to suggest the natural beauty of our selves, even more, abundance and future fruition. Olsen's use of the image is prophetic, suggesting the condition of life as it should be, not as it is. In the world of her characters, the hope of blossoming is slim; parents witness the atrophy of children's talents because the world garden denies them the nourishment that might help them grow and flourish. For now, "the time is drought or blight or infestation."
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But if the "subterranean forces" are fed, if the "rootlets of reconnaissance" are showered, "the mysterious turn" may occur, and a time of blossoming be ushered in.
12
Like other organic images literarily employed, blossoming suggests
 
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cycles of growth, bounty, and return, pointing to the interrelationships of seed, soil, and flower, of child, environment, and future yield. While the metaphor has often been used, Olsen's employment of it in contexts of depletion, exhaustion, and death offers new insights.
Alice Walker's use of organic imagery may be used as an interpretive grid for Olsen. Writing about art and women, Walker uses the imagery of seed and flower: ''And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see."
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In the next paragraphs she offers her mother's gardens as the source of the imagery:
Whatever she planted grew as if by magic, and her fame as a grower of flowers spread over three counties. Because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms...
I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, . . . involved in work her soul must have.
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The connection Walker makes between her mother's work and her soul, between art and deep human need, suggests an understanding of the organic/spiritual connection as more than a literary device. The connection is rooted in human being. The work of hands feeds the spirit, blending body and soul in radiance.
The singular moment of repose experienced by Mazie and Anna in
Yonnondio
follows their discovery of catalpa blossoms "scattered in the green." The flowers' fragrance and beauty transport Anna back to her childhood, making it possible for her to abandon the worried present and feel for a moment with her daughter the wonder of the universe: "Up from the grasses, from the earth, from the broad tree trunk at their back, latent life streamed and seeded. The air and self shone boundless. Absently, her mother stroked; stroked unfolding, wingedness, boundlessness" (119). The description combines
 
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images drawn from flower and butterfly. Petals and wing ''unfold," flowers "seed," and the butterfly's compass is "boundless." The girl, like the budded flower, contains within the capacity to come to fruition. Here and elsewhere in Olsen's writing, blossoming signifies the potential for wholeness and holiness in human beings.
At the close of the story "I Stand Here Ironing," the blossoming metaphor is the mother's way of expressing her daughter's capacity. Reflecting her hopes and fears, the protagonist pleads, "Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloombut in how many does it?" (20-21). Earlier she thought of the girl's gift for pantomime as too often "clogged and clotted," not "used and growing" (19). In this story, the association of flower and girl yields ambivalent meanings. She may not grow at all, she may grow but never come to fulfillment, or she may blossom fully, like Anna's catalpa.
The mother's fear and her negative expression of the Metaphor"so all that is in her will not bloom"is reflected in Olsen's essay about her mother's death. Describing her mother's life, Olsen writes of "that common everyday nightmare of hardship, limitation, longing; of baffling struggle to raise six children in a world hostile to human unfolding."
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The allusion to the metaphor is slight but recognizable: human unfolding is an image drawn from nature. It is the normal condition in favorable circumstances where, like flowers, children may grow and blossom. But because our world unnaturally limits potential in children by preferring war and destruction to creativity, the blossoms of humanity wither prematurely or never come to flower at all. Some may be skeptical of the seemingly romantic view that most children are born with vast creative potential. From Olsen's perspective, what is unbelievable is the bomb, mass indifference, wholesale destruction. In a deep hearing of her literary voice, we perceive how twisted is the "truth" of greed, competition, and slaughter that directs so much human behavior.
Reading a passage from the last pages of
Yonnondio,
cognizant of Olsen's continued use of the metaphor in later work, we are able to see blossoming and its denial as a metaphorical lens for human potential and what threatens it:

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