Tell Me a Riddle (48 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 197
8. Nelle Morton,
The Journey Is Home
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), p. 227.
9. Bernard Malamud,
The Fixer,
quoted in James Cone,
God of the Oppressed
(New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), p. 147.
10. From Olsen's personal files, written in the seventies or early eighties.
11. Olsen, Silences, p. 6.
12. Olsen's phrases, used in the first chapter of
Silences,
where she speaks of her own experience.
13. Alice Walker,
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
(San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1983), p. 240.
14. Ibid., p. 241.
15. Olsen, ''Dream-Vision," p. 261.
16. These phrases come from notes or transcriptions of talks in Olsen's personal files.
17. From Olsen's personal files.
18. From Olsen's personal files.
19. Miriam Schapiro, "Notes from a Conversation on Art, Feminism, and Work," in
Working It Out,
ed. Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. 296.
20. In French, a "bricoleur" is a Jack of all trades, a professional do-it-yourself person. Claude Levi-Strauss uses the concept of "bricolage" to describe the human process of creativity and coming to knowledge that is practiced by one who, with limited resources, puts things together in novel ways. See "The Science of the Concrete" in
The Savage Mind
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 16-33.
21. Tillie Olsen, telephone interview with the author, July 1984.
22. Tillie Olsen. Quoted by Naomi Rubin, "A Riddle of History for the Future,"
Sojourner
(July 1983): 4.
23. Rubin makes this point in her summary introduction of Olsen in "Riddle of History."
 
Page 199
JOANNE TRAUTMANN BANKS
Death Labors
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. ELIOT,
''Little Gidding"
*
They look so different on the page, these two seemingly similar stories.
1
Tolstoy's paragraphs are long, his sentences complete and declarative, his words richly abundant. His page is filled in. In contrast, Olsen works with empty space as if it were as important an element as language. Many of her sentences are fragments, italicized, parenthetical. These are not only styles of writing for Tolstoy and Olsen; they are also, as I hope to show, styles of living for their main characters. It is the deepest irony that in order to die well, the characters must reconstituteeven repudiatethe very styles that the authors have used so brilliantly.
It is all, finally, a matter of identity. Can these two people, Olsen's old woman
2
and Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych (or can any of us, for that matter), die as they (or we) have lived? Can they carry into the last scene of their lives' dramas the same roles, the same selves, that they have built with such energy in the preceding acts? Tolstoy and Olsen say "no." The people who go to meet death in these stories are not the people who
From Literature and Medicine 9 (1990): 162-171.
* Excerpt from "Little Gidding" in Four Quartets, copyright © 1943 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
 
Page 200
existed before their illnesses intervened. Cancer has challenged every dimension of their lives.
Before her cancer, the old woman in ''Riddle" had largely based her identity on her service to others, rather than on her own primary needs. The field theory psychologists, who believe that one's personhood can be explained as the focus of one's relationships, would probably find her a clear instance of their concepts.
3
As Olsen develops her, however, the elements of her identity are loosely connected. There are significant spaces between them. There is a literal one, for instance, in her geographical identity. The early part of her life was spent in revolutionary Russia; all the rest, in America. Metaphorically, the experience in America is separated by a vast space from her intellectual, political life in Russia. Even apparently intimate spaces are wide. To her daughter's statement that the mother lived all her life
for
people, she replies, "'Not
with'"
(italics mine). The spaces are not precisely voids, any more than the spaces between Olsen's paragraphs mark major hiatuses. Some sort of meaning inheres in them. But, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's play of that name about Hamlet, the old woman has perhaps not been the main character in her own drama. She has had to work out her identity in the parentheses, as it were, between other people's utterances. She has found her self in life's interstices.
The same phenomenon can be described in terms of space's correlative, time. There was never time in the old woman's life to finish a project in the way she would have preferred, seldom time even to finish reading a story by her favorite, Chekhov, let alone live a life of the mind. She believes that all her life she has been
"forced to move to the rhythms of others,"
4
and thus there are major discontinuities in her experience of her self.
"Discontinuity"that's Olsen's term. In her study of the barriers to creativity, she suggests that discontinuity is a pattern imposed on women's lives.
5
In context, it's clear that she means women whose lives are defined for many of their adult years by maternal exigencies and the Sisyphean tasks of daily housekeeping. She cites the old woman in "Riddle" as an instance. In her case, the discontinuities and spaces are the inevitable consequences of having so many children to raise
 
Page 201
in a condition of constant poverty, and with a passionate husband (she grants that his desires are the ''most beguiling" interruption of them all). She is an "outsider" not only because of her gender and her class, but also because of her Jewishness.
6
Even within that tradition, she is an outsider, an atheist who spits on religion's conventions as oppressive. Outsiders prowl the circle of society, taking on such identities as they have in opposition and at great cost to creativity.
Then comes the cancer. When the disease is doing its initial damage, the old woman does not, of course, know about itat least in the usual sense of "knowing." She knows in terms of D. H. Lawrence's fleshly knowing.
7
Her body has a consciousness of sorts, and it immediately begins to communicate with her mind: in concert they prepare to die. For instance, there is good reason to blame the agitation she feels on outside causes, namely, her husband's insistence that they sell the house where she feels comfortable and move to a retirement community. But she wonders "if the tumult was outside, or in her." She "knows" she has cancer. It "knocks" on "the great ear pressed inside." Because of its insistence, she begins to explore her life and to rebuild the identity she will need in the near and urgent future.
But "explore" implies cognitive acuity, and the old woman's disease eventually attacks that function. Early on, as is common in age, her recent memories fade in favor of those from long ago, and finally she expresses herself only in isolated snippets. It would seem that in a grotesque extension of her lifelong habits, her identity in the final days lies scattered around her, as ifin a phrase of Yeats from another context entirely"the centre cannot hold" ("The Second Coming"). And yet she
is
exploring. "'No pills, let me feel what I feel."' Even in neurological disarray, the old woman has the power she needs.
Significantly, her given name is not revealed until now, when the story is nearly over. She has always been "Ma" or one of a series of insulting epithets hurled by her husband in their mutual game of bitterness"Mrs. Unpleasant," "Mrs. Excited Over Nothing," "Mrs. Word Miser." Her name is Eva.
Eva's job, her last one, is to recollect herself. She accepts this position without question. It is what she must do

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