side the text. As Meese indicates about similar strategies in Silences, Tell Me a Riddle activates its reader-subjects while subverting authorial domination; in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht's theater and Jean-Luc Godard's cinematic montage, it turns writer and readers into collaborators.
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The two categories of Olsen's narrative/political strategy I have identified-her recording of heteroglossia and her reworking of relationships among writer, text, and readerconstitute this essay's two major divisions.
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In Tell Me a Riddle's first story, ''I Stand Here Ironing," Olsen begins her recording of heteroglossia by exploring problems that fragment lives and discourse and by experimenting with narrative forms that display that fragmentation. Emily, the daughter of the unnamed narrator, had been born into "the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression," and her father, no longer able to "endure . . . sharing want" with the 19-yearold mother and child, had left them when Emily was eight months old (10). The infant "was a miracle to me," the narrator recalls, but when she had to work, she had no choice but to leave Emily with "the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all" (10). This arrangement grieved both mother and child: "I would start running as soon as I got off the streetcar, running up the stairs," the narrator remembers, and "when she saw me she would break into a clogged weeping that could not be comforted, a weeping I can hear yet" (10-11). Then came months of complete separation, while the child lived with relatives. The price for reunion was Emily's spending days at "the kinds of nurseries that [were] only parking places for children. . . . It was the only place there was. It was the only way we could be together, the only way I could hold a job" (11). Their situation improved with the presence of "a new daddy" (12). Although the narrator still worked at wage-earning jobs, she was more relaxed with her younger children than she had been with Emily: "it was the face of joy, and not of care or tightness or worry I turned to them." But, the narrator adds, by then it was "too late for Emily" (12).
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The narrative is laced with references to the pressure of circumstance, the limits on choice: "when is there time?";
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