Tell Me a Riddle (55 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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rock collection, the first a trilobite fossil, the second a piece of obsidian, shiny and impervious as glass. It is as if Eva is pondering which kind she is, seeing the risks of being stone rather than bread. In her pondering, the meanings of stone shift, reach back into myth and history, and take on a dizzying ambiguity. Eva wants to become, and somehow leave for the world, something that will last, outliving her body and keeping her beliefs alive, green and burning in its heart. She knows that bread spoils or is devoured, leaving children always hungry for more. She wants instead to be the kind of rock that is shaped by history or the kind that holds ''the fossil memory," to be cherished by a future generation of children collecting the wisdom of the past.
The line, "And you, David, who with a stone slew, screaming: Lord, take my heart of stone and give me flesh," is puzzling at first. David is of course the biblical David who killed Goliath with a stone from his slingshot, but from there on, the scriptural reference will lead us astray if we follow it too closely. (The David story is from the first Book of Samuel [17:36-58], while the second half of the quotation comes from the Book of Ezekiel, where it is reported as the word of God spoken to the people of Israel through the prophet [36: 26-27].) By this time Olsen has made it clear that Eva is not an observant Jew, having rejected her religion as a young girl. What she knows of Scripture is probably meant to be a mixture of early memories and gleanings that are simply a part of Judaeo-Christian culture. Olsen frequently shifts the meanings of biblical passages, sometimes slightly, sometimes radically, often with ironical results. Here David is not the heroic savior of his people but a slayer in a world where death breeds death. He might represent David her husband, whose imperviousness to her needs has been in some way deadly to both of them; he might be her son Davy, who killed and was killed in World War II; he might be her gentle friend Lisa, who killed an informer with her teeth; he might be humankind, all of us implicated in death even as we pray for the ability to love. David might be Eva herself, hardening her heart, and in so doing betraying herself and others. For Eva faces the danger that she will simply be "frozen to black glass," closed to love or pity, a stone on which no seed can grow. (In another kaleidoscopic
 
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shifting of images, seed comes to mean life itself, the grain made into bread, children, and the word.) Eva continues her pondering, ''(stone will perish, but the word remain.)" She is no doubt thinking of her beloved authors and orators and, with despair, of all her own unspoken words, which, if she could only say them, would outlive her.
In creating a character like Eva, a woman and a mother who has somehow kept all these supposed opposites alive within her, Olsen shows that even in the patriarchy mothering bears fruit. In the scene from the end of the story that I described earlier, day-old bread and inedible stone are transformed into a feast, as Eva and her granddaughter Jeannie teach each other the intricate relationships between life and death and together teach David. Jeannie gives Eva the easeful knowledge that at last someone has heard and understood the lessons her life taught her.
I have said that in describing Eva's swollen body, Olsen superimposes the images of fatal illness, starvation, and pregnancy in order to show the terrible cost exacted by poverty and patriarchal motherhood. For Olsen, even this nightmare image suggests possibilities that for me were completely unexpected. In this scene David finally comes to understand the breadth and fidelity of Eva's life. For the first time in years, perhaps for the first time in their marriage, he sees her in her full humanity, "dear, personal, fleshed," and instead of coining one more ironic epithet, he calls her by name. He sees Jeannie's sketch of himself and Eva, their hands clasped, "feeding each other"; obeying the images, he lies down, "holding the sketch (as if it could shield against the monstrous shapes of loss, of betrayal, of death) and with his free hand [takes] hers back into his." In this scene, David and Eva feed each others' starvation (the "ravening" each feels) and in some way give birth to each other, their hands umbilical cords, and Jeannie the midwife. The tragedy here is that it is her life as mother, as bread and bread giver, that made Eva's perceptions possible and at the same time commanded her silence. For Eva the birth and the saving nourishment come too late. But Olsen gives the wisdom of Eva's life to her readers through the words of this story, this imperishable stone.
Although Olsen is convinced that even "circumstanced
 
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motherhood'' is the source of marvels in life and in literature, her writing always urges her readers to look beyond the circumstances, beyond marvels that can be enjoyed by future generations but never by mothers themselves and rarely by their own children. Her radical subtextthe possibility beneath her proseinsists that mothering in its literal meaning and in all the extended meanings she gives it in her fiction and nonfiction is meant to be tender, ecstatic, explosively creative, and revolutionary, not in some yet-to-be-created utopia, but in this world. This may seem at first like a rash misreading, since Olsen continues to argue as she has throughout her writing career that the circumstances in which mothers and children live make full human development impossible. Almost fifteen years ago, she wrote in
Silences:
Except for a privileged few who escape, who benefit from its effects, it remains a maiming sex-class-race world for ourselves, for those we love. The changes that will enable us to live together without harm ... are as yet only in the making (and we are not only beings seeking to change; changing; we are also that which our past has made us). In such circumstances, taking for one's best achievement means almost inevitably at the cost of others' needs. (And where there are children. . . . And where there are children . . . .) (258)
One might expect her view to have changed to match the changes that have occurred in women's lives in the intervening years. But while Olsen acknowledges gratefully that at least in some places technology and the women's movement have combined to broaden mothers' horizons and lessen the drudgery of their lives, she insists rightly that mothers still bear "the major responsibility for the maintenance of life, for seeing the food gets there, the clothing, the shelter, the order, the cleanliness, the
quality
of life, the binding up of wounds, the attention to what is happening, roof after roof." She also asserts that societal structures in the United States still make it impossible for mothers to raise their children except "at the cost of [their] . . . best, other work." 16 Finally, she continues to point out to anyone who will listen that for many mothers, in
 
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the United States and throughout the world, even the meager gains of the past few decades are out of reach.
On the other hand, since the beginning of Olsen's writing career, she has implied that things do not need to be the way they are for mothers.
Silences,
for example, is filled with statements like these: ''No one's development would any longer be at the cost of another" (222n); the silencing of mother-writers is "(unnecessarily happening, for it need not, must not continue to be)" (39); and of the mother-artist Käthe Kollwitz, she marvels at what might be "ifneeded time
and
strength were available simultaneously with 'the blessing,' the 'living as a human being must live'. . . (as, with changes, now could be)" (212). "Could be," "not yet," "so far"these persistently hopeful phrases, scattered like seed in
Silences
and in her talks and interviews, are the explicit counterparts of the hopeful subtext of her fiction.
I do not believe that Olsen's sketching of the creative possibilities of mothering falls into the "current infatuation with motherhood" Valerie Miner deplores. In her fiction, Olsen never suggests that mothering should take the place that romantic love, or more recently, sexual experience, has held in literature as the one and only route to maturity and selfhood available to women. On the contrary, in suggesting the possible, Olsen deflates many overblown features of the motherhood mystique. That deflation is an important strategy in making the possible real. Once again, the imagery of hunger, eating, and feeding shows us how she accomplishes this multilayered task.
In Olsen's fiction, the language of hunger almost always holds two elements of her basic paradigm folded within one image: starvation, greed, and something close to cannibalism on the one hand, and a passionate give-and-take that replenishes the body and spirit on the other. This imagery suggests that when hunger of any kind is not distorted by inequality and injustice, it is healthy, generous, curious, and eager for connections. It leads to equality rather than domination. Even on the most literal level, hunger expresses a desire to stay alive; and giving food both sustains life and expresses a faith that life is worth sustaining. On the figurative level, her imagery acknowledges that, consciously or unconsciously, each
 
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generation feeds on the wisdom and work of ancestors and contemporaries as well as on the promise of children. In the face of no matter what betrayal or hypocrisy, meals in Olsen's work are communal, the flat-out denial of individualism.
A few examples will serve to show that, for Olsen, being healthily hungry is almost synonymous with being healthily human, not just for mothers and children but for everyone. In a fine passage from
Silences,
she quotes Whitman's belief that ''American bards . . . shall be Kosmos, without monopoly or secrecy, glad to pass anything to anyonehungry for equals by night and by day." Olsen adds her impassioned interpretation of what this hunger for equality means:
O yes.
The truth under the spume and corrosion. Literature is a place for generosity and affection and hunger for equalsnot a prizefight ring. We are increased, confirmed in our medium, roused to do our best, by every good writer, every fine achievement. Would we want one good writer or fine book less? . . .
Hungry for equals. The sustenance some writers are to each other personally, besides the help of doing their best work.
Hungry for equals. The spirit of those writers who have worked longer years, solved more, are more established; reaching out to the newer, the ones who must carry on the loved medium. (174)
Given favorable conditions, creation and relation feed each other. Again from
Silences,
"So long they fed each othermy life, the writing;the writing or hope of it, my life" (20). Even the conscious and subconscious levels of the human person feed each other: "Subterranean forces can make you wait, but they are very finicky about the kind of waiting it has to be. Before they will feed the creator back, they must be fed, passionately fed, what needs to be worked on" (13). In Olsen's fiction, everything is meant to be tasted and chewed. David urges Eva to taste the beauty of the California seacoast, and in "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" Lennie and Whitey share the pleasure of "chewing over . . . the happenings of the time or

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