appear again in this story about the difficulty of sustaining a friendship across racial lines. Lennie and Helen's 12-year-old, Carol, is white; Parialee, her neighbor and closest friend from their earliest years, is African-American. ''O Yes," which begins with Helen and Carol's attending Parialee's baptismal service, is permeable to the speech of "others"songs by three church choirs; parishioners' shouts; Parialee's newlylearned jivetalk; and Alva's African-American dialect. Carol, who has never before experienced the intense emotionalism that erupts during the service (chanting, shrieking, fainting), is a stranger in the world of an all-African-American congregation. Trapped in heteroglossia's cacophony, Carol falls into the silence of a near faint, and once again, an abundance of meaning approaches silence.
|
Yet, in the first of the story's two parts, a far more reductive and controlling mode of discoursean assertion/affirmation form of "dialogue"presents itself as a counter to heteroglossia. In the dialogue's highly structured environment, the preacher takes the lead by making assertions that the congregation affirms. The dialogue includes the preacher's words, such as "And God is Powerful," and the congregation's response, "O Yes" and "I am so glad" (52, 54). The reductive and controlling mode of discourse in which the assertions are assigned to the figure of power, the preacher, and the affirmations to his followers, the congregation, replicates the structure of society outside the church. Exercising their role in the dialogue, the parishioners seem to be playing out the subservient parts African-Americans have so often been assigned within the society. Yet, within the church, heteroglossia persistently strains against the constraining mode of discourse. In "O Yes," as throughout Tell Me a Riddle, two major discursive formsheteroglossia and, in this case, the countering assertion/affirmation dialoguevie for power.
|
A complicated version of mimicry is prominent in "O Yes." What I identified earlier as a conventional assertion/affirmation structure placed in the midst of a swirling heteroglossia contains complex elements of a form of mimicry in which the preacher and congregation wittingly or unwittingly dramatize the roles of dominant and marginalized people, oppressor and oppressed. As the drama of the dialogue in-
|
|