Tell Me a Riddle (49 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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before she can die meaningfully. Her method will be to undo, to reverse in some ways, and to balance the style by which she has lived thus far. That is, she will fill in some of the gaps in space and time that have prevented her from having a solid self. She will attempt to connect the prose of her life as a beleaguered mother and wife with the poetry that somehow still fuels her.
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At her core there is solitude. But it is not, she discovers, the same thing as emptiness. In fact, at this stage of her life, she relishes it, refusing to give it up by moving to a communal life, even creating it artificially, if necessary, by turning off her hearing aid. She senses that from the silence will come the identity she needs: ''in the reconciled solitude, to journey to herself." Eva moves, instinctively Olsen seems to suggest, to the ocean's edge, there to look "toward the shore that nurtured life as it first crawled toward consciousness the millions of years ago." Eva is herself engaged in seeking her beginnings.
Soon the necessary data come. Though they come in scraps, they also come in torrents-words from beloved books and speeches, music from her idealistic youth. Her husband is shocked; she has not spoken of these things for decades. Hiding in the body of this frail, embittered, and normally silent woman is the young girl with noble dreams for humankind. She has survived all this time in the memory cells. At this point, Olsen introduces a poetic image for a scientific truth: it seems to Eva's husband that "for seventy years she had hidden a tape recorder, infinitely microscopic, within her, that it had coiled infinite mile on mile, trapping every song, every melody, every word read, heard, and spoken." The memories are so intense that they are almost real presences for Eva in her deteriorating but (or therefore?) receptive state. She is reunited in this sense with her girlhood friend and mentor, the aristocratic rebel Lisa, for whom, because she is a follower of Tolstoy, knowledge is holy and to be shared among all classes.
If times and spaces have thereby been reconnected for Eva, the achievement has been bought at a terrible price. This woman, whose hands were always busy with a child, now can scarcely bear to touch one. In Sylvia Plath's memorable image from "Three Women," a baby's cries are "hooks that catch and grate like cats." Eva's grandchildren are vessels of vitality,
 
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from which she knows she must detach herself. The full context of a phrase already quoted is: ''Somewhere coherence, transport, meaning. If they would but leave her in the air now stilled of clamor, in the reconciled solitude, to journey to herself." One grandchild entreats her to tell him a riddle, but she is not playful. She has not time for life's inherent ambiguities. Her task requires that she leave even her husband. As he listens to the "tape recorder" of her past, he hears nothing of their springtime love or their joyful hours as a family. For him, it is the moment of bitterest grief. By her last day, Eva has left present time entirely. She is now ready to enter the final turnstile, as she must, alone.
It would be wrong to conclude that Ivan Ilych has the simpler task just because for most of his life he has a more secure sense of self. I am inclined to think, as a matter of fact, that constructing an identity from scraps is easier than dismantling a rigid one. But the latter is precisely what Ivan Ilych must do if he is to die in peace.
His problem has its origins, as Eva's did, in the literary choices made by the author. It is almost as if a certain style of dying is irrevocably linked with certain aesthetic conventions. Olsen's organization and rhythms are basically lyrical;
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her point of view, essentially a post-Jamesian center of consciousness, wherein the world is only as real as an individual's perception of it. The poetic subjectivity extends to her title, which begs for multiple interpretations. Tolstoy works within a very different mode. He has the advantages, and the limitations, of a linear, realistic style. From the bluntly explicit title on, he and his readers assume some truthful correspondence between what he describes and the world as we agree to see it. His voice is the one long known in narrative theory as
omniscient.
Because Tolstoy's talent and insight persuade readers that he deserves to declare such a perspective on human events, the narrator speaks with great authority. This powerful presence has philosophical consequences for Ivan Ilych. Consider, for instance, the finality that sounds in this famous sentence: "Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Like realists before and after him, Tolstoy takes the nature of society as his arena. He also practices satire as an extension of both his social interests
 
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and his omniscient stance. That is, the satire results from his looking closely at institutions such as the family, law, and medicine, and judging them wittily on the basis of firmly held values. A story that will end as powerfully as any in literature begins hilariously as a satirical look at the behavior of self-centered ''mourners," who see Ivan Ilych's death solely in terms of its interruption of their own affairs.
Ivan Ilych's life style partakes of Tolstoy's literary stances, and, with one necessary exception,
10
might even be seen as a parody of them. True, Ivan Ilych is not a purveyor of satire among his friends (at least so far as we know), but he has the satirist's smug certainty that his or her values are the proper ones from which others depart at their peril. He thus tells himself the story of his own life omnisciently without ever questioning his assumptions. Furthermore, he is firmly anchored in society's abundant details, and this too is a parallel with Tolstoy's style. If Eva is an outsider, Ivan Ilych is clearly an insider, living in the public world of power. "Think: If Tolstoy had been born a woman," muses Olsen in
Silences.
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Socially created realities are for Ivan Ilych the only realities. He derives his identity from the opinions of others of his rank and time.
Ivan Ilych has not so much lived his life as built a résumé. His professional credentials are impeccable. He has accepted the ladder as a metaphor for success, and he has moved up it at regular intervals, ending pleasantly above the midpoint of the judicial bureaucracy. He is, in Willy Loman's pitiful phrase from
Death of a Salesman,
not only liked, but well liked, chiefly because he conducts his relationships with propriety and decorum (two terms that are very important to him). When he furnishes a house, he chooses those items that will make him appear to be rich; it has nothing whatever of the personal about it. But neither has his personal life. In his youth, his sexual relationships were conducted "with clean hands, in clean linen, with French phrases." When it is time to marry, he chooses a woman whose background will look good, as it were, on his résumé under the biographical details section. That the marriage turns hostile distresses him chiefly because of his wife's "coarse" demands for attention. He has had a few setbacks, but in his opinion everything has gone on
 
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the whole very satisfactorily indeed, and the evidence indicates that the second half of his life should be even better.
He has allowed no space for major contingencies. His illness nearly breaks him in two, so rigid has he become. In contrast, Eva bends like a bamboo tree in the wind. She accepts her coming death far more easily and sets to work on what must be done. For Ivan Ilych, disease is a gross impropriety against which he rages ineffectually for much of the story.
At the same time, his anger serves as a powerful corrosive that begins little by little to weaken the false girders of his life. I need not repeat the phases of his torment and terror. They have in fact been given a kind of renewed fame among medical educators by virtue of their being a nearly perfect example of Kübler-Ross's stages of dying.
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But it is important to my argument to note that the process involves the tearing down of almost all his previously held tenets. That moving
up
and
on,
for instance, is the only criterion for success. Is he now a failure, and his life meaningless, because he is horizontal? That cleanliness in bodily functions somehow mysteriously insures the social order. Now that he must be helped with his excretions, has all turned to shameful chaos? That professional people ought always to affect indifference to their clients. Since the doctors he consults do not listen to him, what does that say about his years in the law? That a certain aloofness in human relationships, even in marriage, maintains decorum. Why will not his friends and his family comfort him? That a gentleman does not ask too many questions about life. Do gentlemen, then, live in basic and mutually supportive deceit, especially as regards the absolute fact of one's death? Perhaps most insidious of all: that he is a man, when inside he is a little boy crying out to be pitied. Ivan Ilych has ''to live thus all alone on the brink of an abyss."
Of course, there is the pain. The pain is ghastly and ought not to be paraphrased, even if that were possible. But just as
Ivan Ilych
prefigured Kübler-Ross, so does the story demonstrate what many clinically experienced philosophers and theologians have said about the distinction between physical agony (pain) and mental agony (suffering). Suffering is the worse torture. If suffering can be reduced, pain can be
 
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endured. If life has been meaningful, death can be likewise.
As part of his attempt to understand, Ivan Ilych takes a journey that is at one point similar to Eva's. Both return to their youth for substanceEva to connect with what she already feels to be good and true, Ivan Ilych to understand his child self for the first time. To be sure, his early venture into childhood memories elicits one of the most poignant passages in the story. Thinking of the well-known syllogism that ends ''therefore Caius is mortal," Ivan Ilych refuses to accept that
he
is mortal. Caius is abstract logic. But he, Ivan Ilych, had once been a little boy called Vanya with a mamma and a papa and a beloved striped ball. Little Vanya cannot die!
Near the end, he returns more often to his childhood, savoring what we would now call Proustian sensations. Life, he concludes, was better and more vital then. In fact, the closer he comes to his beginnings, and the farther he gets from death, the more real he feels. That may be fear speaking, but it leads to another conclusion that carries more conviction: his entire life has been lived in false rectitude except for those "scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people." They alone had been real. This awareness is hardly freeing. In fact, with this insight, he has reached the bottom of his despair. Immediately, his pain multiplies tenfold. Ivan Ilych had come as far as he can alone.
But why is he so isolated? Where, in particular, are the doctors and the nurses? Part of the answer is that in both
Ivan Ilych
and "Tell Me a Riddle" doctors are portrayed as scarcely necessary to the dying people. Olsen is not negative about them;
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they simply do their jobs at the periphery of the central drama. Tolstoy goes farther. His physicians make themselves irrelevant by virtue of their self-importance. They deceive their patient and themselves. After putting on an inappropriately cheerful, "there now" face in the mornings, they cannot take it off. Ivan Ilych eventually consults several doctors, each of whom disagrees pompously with the others. If their characterizations were not set into the midst of an otherwise tragic tale, their essential natureswhich are straight out of a Molière comedywould be clearer.
The nurses are another matter altogether. The servant
 
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Gerasim performs nursing functions for Ivan Ilych, and, in ''Riddle" Eva's granddaughter Jeannie, who is in fact a professional nurse, does the nursing alongside Eva's husband. Neither Gerasim nor Jeannie accomplishes very much in terms of a conventional plot. Gerasim has very few sentences to himself, and Jeannie does nothing overtly dramatic. Oddly, that is good news for everyone who attends a dying person. It seems to demonstrate that in these two situations, at least, a great deal can be accomplished with the simple means available to most of us. On the plot level that I have been developing, the nurses are really midwives who assist in the paradox of the eleventh-hour birthing.
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Gerasim exemplifies Tolstoy's well-known view of the peasant as a kind and simple type. Innocent of the supercilious posturing of Ivan Ilych's family, friends, and doctors, Gerasim alone acknowledges directly that Ivan Ilych is going to die: "Only Gerasim recognized it and pitied him." The young servant finds caring for Ivan Ilych's body neither distasteful nor burdensome, but a natural, democratic act that he hopes will one day be done for him. He thereby helps Ivan Ilych in his central task of breaking down his rigid ideas about propriety. With Gerasim, Ivan Ilych is able to practice intimacy, never a valued part of his identity until now. Jeannie is more sophisticated than Gerasim, but her reactions to dying are, like his, direct, kind, and nonjudgmental. With perfect tact, she brings Eva a Mexican cookie, the "Bread of the Dead," made by a mother in the likeness of the little girl she has just lost. The cookie becomes the occasion for a conversation about grief in which Eva participates comfortably. She says that Jeannie is like the Russian Lisa, that mentor-midwife from long ago.
Eva is an atheist. I am not sure whether or not she is to be taken for a good person. But there is something deeply spiritual about how, in the face of physical agony, she yet makes a last-minute search for meaning among the shards of humankind's attempts to connect. Jeannie senses this. She is nearly incoherent in expressing itbut when has transcendent experience ever been easy to verbalize? To explain her "radiant" face of love to her grandfather, she replies "'my darling escape' . . .'my darling Granny."' Olsen expands the

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