Tell Me a Riddle (39 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 156
who could tell the experiences of her people, her mother especially living in her memory. In Mazie's achievement, political consciousness and personal creativity were to coalesce.
The original design for the novel would have incorporated most of the major themes of radical fiction at that time. Walter Rideout's study,
The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954,
classifies proletarian novels of the thirties into four types: the strike novel, the novel of conversion to communism, the bottom dog novel, and the novel documenting the decay of the middle class. He also mentions certain typical subthemes: anti-Semitism, black-and-white relationships, episodes in American history, and the life of the communist organizer.
25
Yonnondio
would have been both a strike novel and a novel of political conversion, and it would have touched on relationships between whites and people of color and on the life of the communist organizer. It would have fulfilled also a major tenet of proletarian realismthat proletarian fiction should demonstrate revolutionary optimism, including elements predicting the inevitable fall of capitalism and the rise of the working class to power.
Proletarian fiction, in other words, was supposed to show not only the sufferings of working-class people, but also their triumphs. When Meridel Le Sueur, for example, published an account of the helpless sufferings of poor women in 1932, she was attacked by Whittaker Chambers in the
New Masses,
in a note appended to Le Sueur's article, for her ''defeatist attitude" and "non-revolutionary spirit."
26
"There
is
horror and drabness in the Worker's life, and we will portray it," wrote Mike Gold in the
New Masses
in 1930, in an article defining proletarian realism, "but we know this is not the last word; we know ... that not pessimism, but revolutionary elan will sweep this mess out of the world forever."
27
Olsen, too, wanted to incorporate this optimism, indeed, it was central to her initial conception of the novel.
Characters [she writes in her journal when she was beginning
Yonnondio].
Wonderful characters. Hard, bitter, & strong. O communismhow you come to those of whom I will write is more incredible beautiful than manna. You wipe
 
Page 157
the sweat from us, you fill our bellies, you let us walk and think like humans.
She immediately cautions herself, ''Not to be so rhetorical or figurative or whatever it is"a struggle against didactic rhetoric that would characterize her work on the novel itself. Olsen maintained throughout her work on
Yonnondio
in the thirties her commitment to show the transformative power of Communismher commitment, that is, to "revolutionary optimism," but as her craft developed she felt less and less satisfied with
telling
about the coming revolutionand more and more concerned with
showing
how people come to class consciousness in "an earned way, a bone way." She gradually rejected the political explicitness that alone was enough to win praise for literary work in the more sectarian Left criticism, but she had a hard time incorporating the essential vision of systematic social change in other ways.
The "revolutionary elan" in the opening chapters of
Yonnondio
still partakes of the didacticism she ultimately rejected. It comes less through the events or characterizations than from the voice of the omniscient narrator, who in the first five chapters provides both political analysis and revolutionary prophecy. In the first chapter, this voice comments on the life of thirteen-year-old Andy Kvaternick, on his first day in the mines:
Breathe and lift your face to the night, Andy Kvaternick. Trying so vainly ... to purge your bosom of the coal dust. Your father had dreams. You too, like all boys, had dreamsvague dreams of freedom and light. . . . The earth will take those too....
Someday the bowels will grow monstrous and swollen with these old tired dreams, swell and break, and strong fists batter the fat bellies, and skeletons of starved children batter them. . . . (14)
In the second chapter, the voice becomes ironic as it comments on a scene where women wait at the mouth of a mine
 
Page 158
for word of their men after an accident. Like ''I Want the Women up North To Know," this passage attacks the modernist aesthetic, which elevates a concern for form over a concern for subject, yet it also argues that Olsen's subject itself is worthy of the transformations of enduring art.
And could you not make a cameo of this and pin it onto your aesthetic hearts? So sharp it is, so clear, so classic. The shattered dusk, the mountain of culm, the tipple; clean line, bare beauty....
Surely it is classical enough for youthe Greek marble of the women, the simple, flowing lines of sorrow, carved so rigid and eternal. (30)
And the voice goes on to prophesy revolution against the companies and the system they represent: "Please issue a statement: quick, or they start to batter through with the fists of strike, with the pickax of revolution" (31).
In chapter 5, we hear the voice of the revolutionary prophet twice. The first passage comments on the life of young Jim Tracy, Jim Holbrook's codigger in a sewer, who quits when the contractor insists that two men must do the amount of digging previously done by several. Here, the voice is at first scathingly satiric, pointing out how Tracy will be victimized by his own naive belief in the shibboleths of American culture-"the bull about freedomofopportunity," and predicting Tracy's inevitable descent into the hell of unemployment, hunger, cold, vagrancy, prison, death; damned forever for his apostasy to "God Job." The passage concludes with an apology to Jim, in which the narrator speaks with the collective "we" of the revolutionists:
I'm sorry, Jim Tracy, sorry as hell we weren't stronger and could get to you in time and show you that kind of individual revolt was no good, kid, no good at all, you had to bide your time and take it till there were enough of you to fight it all together on the job, and bide your time, and take it till the day millions of fists clamped in yours, and you could wipe out the

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