Tell Me a Riddle (46 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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Page 187
Bang!
Bess who has been fingering a fruit-jar lidabsently, heedlessly drops itaimlessly groping across the table, reclaims it again. Lightning in her brain. She releases, grabs, releases, grabs. I can do. Bang! I did that. I can do. I! . . . That noise! In triumphant, astounded joy she clashes the lid down. Bang, slam, whack. . . . . human ecstasy of achievement; . . .
I can do. I use my powers. I! I!
Wilder, madder, happier the bangs [153].
Against the family's poverty and the story's preoccupation with losses and limitations, the brief episode of unfolding human potential is a reminder of the latent powers in human life. Like the unfolding of one petal, the first lesson is only the beginning of the blossom. But in her environment, will Bess continue to flower? Coming back to the story from Olsen's later fiction and the probing question of the unnamed mother in ''I Stand Here Ironing," the reader is undoubtedly led to ask the question.
When in later addresses or talks, Olsen refers to "fullness of life," "thwarting of the human," or "the sense of one's
unused powers,"
the blossoming metaphor from her first fiction is evoked.
16
Expression, creativity, and purposeful action are the human values to which Olsen gives imagistic expression in terms of the flower's full maturation and glory. In "Tell Me a Riddle," Eva's speech evokes the metaphor when she, dying, pleads with David: "So strong for what? To rot not grow?"
Olsen gives interpretation to her metaphors in many of her unpublished texts. In personal notes, she writes of "[t]he irrepressible little ones in whom all the art qualities are ... germinal." But experience has taught her that often family circumstances, more than potential, determine what one will become. In children, she sees "the passion for language, for imitation, make-believe acting, deft use of the body, love of rhythm, music."
17
As a seed whose germination and growth depend almost entirely on favorable conditions, the child whose potential is miraculously given at birth, depends on a
 
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world of encouragement and means if he or she is to grow in health. The ''word" of the human infant spoken into the world is an act of divine faith. Our faithfulness or unfaithfulness lies in our human response to that word.
In language reflective of Eva's, Olsen uses the organic image for cosmic questioning: "Has it always been this: this world of winter, only breaking on the new life toward the longer light, the warmth, the blossoming"?
18
If the world is a great seed, the light is the morality of valuing each human being, and warmth, the sustenance of human caring.
The miraculous rebirth of dead objects in "Requa" makes it possible to believe in the resurrection of human potentials. Even dirt has a life wish, and junk desires the holiness of being made useful. Through Stevie's eyes, we see beauty in rust patterns and the mystery of decay. All about are living clues to the cycles of death and rebirth that turn the universe. Seeing his own worth reflected in his uncle's face, Steve learns a central lesson of life: others need caring for, too. Reciprocating Wes's attention reflects Stevie's most difficult journey into another's presence; his blossoming is intimated by his unfolding from isolation and reaching out to others. Thus his story expands our sense of the religious dimension of human flowering, since the moral principles of shared responsibility and mutual enhancement are the truths that elicit Stevie's own resurrection.
In portraits of human struggle, Olsen shows some, like Eva and Whitey, who know the feelings of waste and untapped potential. Others, like Emily, Carol, Jeannie, and Steve, seem to span our lives and pose a question that waits for the reader's reply. How might those whose lives are still before them bring their gifts to bear on the world and find their paths of righteousness?
PIECING
Repairing, patching, and sewing, work that women have traditionally performed in the home, are all piecing activities. Piece goods are materials purchased by the yard to be patterned, cut, and sewn, especially into garments. But any creativity that combines parts into a whole may be understood metaphorically as piecing. Olsen's use of the image brings a
 
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historically female sphere of work to consciousness as a perspective for viewing human activity and values. The metaphor implies reconstruction, since in Olsen's world, the characters seldom piece new goods but rather sort through discards and make something new from something old.
The quilt is a most salient work of piecing. Colorful and patterned, it symbolizes not only the human ingenuity that creates something of use out of something old, but as a finished product, it suggests an eye for the beauty and harmonious design that characterize human creativity. While all of these meanings are suggested in Olsen's employment of the metaphor, more dramatically, she suggests a morality of reappropriation: choosing from the past usable patterns for life in the modern present.
Miriam Schapiro, a contemporary artist, expresses a similar morality and evokes the imagery of piecing in describing her own movement to feminist consciousness in her work: ''The new work was different from anything I had done before. I worked on canvas, using fabric. I wanted to explore and express a part of my life which I had always dismissedmy homemaking, my nesting. I wanted to validate the traditional activities of women, to connect myself with the unknown women artists who made quilts, who had done the invisible 'women's work' of civilization."
19
Schapiro's collage style is drawn from the historical work of foremothers (including their quilting) and seeks to integrate the values of their traditional lives with her current feminist perspectives. Using more than one medium and fabrics and objects out of women's traditional contexts, Schapiro's "piecing" on canvas is like Olsen's in word.
Olsen warns against the danger of glorifying one aspect of women's work (homemaking) or overemphasizing one creative expression of women (like needlework), while not encouraging women in different ways of making art. Schapiro's use of a piecing style seems important, however, in that it gives her a female tradition and allows her to claim a part of herself that she had not expressed before (the caring angel). Olsen's use of the metaphor in word and image appears, as it does with Schapiro, to grow out of her experience in female contexts, though she expands it in her universal vision.
 
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In the second chapter of
Yonnondio,
as the family works desperately to gain the necessary money for moving, we are given this narrative depiction of Anna's participation: ''Somehow to skimp off of everything that had long ago been skimped on, somehow to find more necessities the body can do easiest without. The old quilt will make coats for Mazie and Ben, Will can wear Mazie's old one. This poverty's arithmetic for Anna" (26). The gift Anna brings to a limited situation is her ability to create something of use out of what she has, to divide and multiply fragments. The quilt, already something made of fragments and leftovers, can be remade as two coats, a girl's coat can be converted into a boy's.
Children, like their parents, learn the art of making something out of scraps and leftovers:
On the dump there is Jinella's tent, Jinella's mansion, Jinella's roadhouse, Jinella's pagan island, Jinella's palace, whatever Jinella wills it to be that day. Flattened tin cans, the labels torn off to show the flashing silver, are strung between beads and buttons to make the shimmering, showy entrance curtains. Here sometimes, . . . Mazie is admittedif she brings something for the gunny sack. The gunny sack . . . stuffed with "properties": blond wood-shaving curls, moldering hats, raggy teddies, torn lace curtains (for trains and wedding dresses), fringes, tassels, stubs of lipstick, wrecks of high-heeled shoes and boots, lavish jewelry. (127)
Like an artist or a "bricoleur," Jinella determines the name of what she creates, as she strings tin cans, beads, and buttons to form a chain curtain, brings together the worn old toy and lady's lipstick stub to form her treasure, or turns a bit of lace into a bride's veil.
20
She is a namer of her worldmansion, palace, roadhouseand by naming creates her reality. Through Jinella's cunning, if desperate, imagining, Olsen points to the unique human ability to make and create. Furthermore, the writer uses the girl's piecing to reflect the value of cast-off junk, still recognizable to the discerning eye.
The piecing imagery of the
Yonnondio
passages is evoked in "O Yes" by a description of voices raised together in

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