Tell Me a Riddle (66 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Thus mimicry functions in "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" as one form that entices Whitey out of isolation and into the family, while simultaneously diminishing the importance of Whitey as "other." The behavior of the family in relation to Whitey, despite what seems to be their shared political beliefs and practice, becomes a microcosm for the dominant culture's behavior in relation to much marginalized discourse. Charmed by difference (the history of music in U.S. popular culture exemplifies the point), the mainstream culture co-opts the marginalized discourse, stripping it of its power as "difference," and diminishes its force in a process of homogenization. O1sen's references to mimicry in these stories comprise part of her running commentary on the power of dominant and subversive modes of discourse and the complications of identity that marginalized people and their discourses face.
In addition to mimicry, "Hey Sailor, What Ship?", like other stories collected in
Tell Me a Riddle,
manifests heteroglossia by incorporating genres that "further intensify its speech diversity in fresh ways" (Bakhtin,
Dialogic
321). Although this strategy is not uncommon among fiction writ-
 
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ers, Olsen employs it more than many. In ''Hey Sailor, What Ship?" Olsen has inserted a valediction (because the story is a farewell to Whitey, this insertion becomes a valediction within a valediction). Whitey learned it as a boy from his first shipmate, and one of the children asks him to recite it. Originally delivered in 1896 by the Phillipine hero Jose Rizal before he was executed, it concludes:
Little will matter, my country,
That thou shouldst forget me.
I shall be speech in thy ears, fragrance and color,
Light and shout and loved song....
Where I go are no tyrants....
(42)
Jose Rizal would have been an insurgent against both Spanish and American domination of the Philippines, and the recitation implicitly condemns American imperialism and the Cold War, at its height when Olsen wrote "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" Whitey's recitation also eulogizes his (and Olsen's) youthful hopes for a socialist America, which have been snuffed out by Cold War strategists:
Land I adore, farewell....
Our forfeited garden of Eden. . . .
Vision I followed from afar,
Desire that spurred on and consumed me,
Beautiful it is to fall,
That the vision may rise to fulfillment.
(41)
Moreover, the valediction associates Whitey, who has been destroyed as much by
"the death of the brotherhood"
as by alcoholism, with political martyrdom. Whitey, who has attempted to keep thirties militancy alive in a period of political reaction, feels estranged from the complacent younger seamen. "These kids," he complains to Lennie, "don't realize how we got what we got. Beginnin' to lose it, too." One "kid," who had overtime coming to him, "didn't even wanta beef about it" (44). As the
 
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ship's delegate, Whitey nevertheless took the grievance to the union, which had become a conservative, alien bureaucracy, and was fined for ''not taking it [the grievance] up through proper channels" (44). The younger seamen also lack the sense of solidarity Whitey and Lennie experienced during the thirties: "'Think anybody backed me up, Len?'. . .
Once, once an injury to one is an injury to all. Once, once they had to live for each other. And whoever came off the ship fat shared, because that was the only way of survival for all of them ... Now it was a dwindling few . .
." (45). And, finally, because Whitey's efforts to stay sober have consistently failed and his health is rapidly deteriorating, Jose Rizal's valediction also functions as his own farewell address.
Yet there is a dimension to Whitey that cannot be explained in political or economic terms. Even in his youth, when both he and the Left were robust, Whitey was tormented by an emotional disorder that manifested itself in an inability to have sexual relations except when
"high with drink."
Many years later, at "the drunken end of his eightmonths-sober try," Lennie and Helen hear a "torn-out-of-him confession" that the psychosexual problem persists, and likely, it will remain a riddle (44, 46). The story ends with its plaintive refrain"Hey Sailor, what ship?"which mourns the tragic waste of Whitey's life as well as suggests the disorientation, diminished options, and uncertainty of radicals in a period of right-wing ascendancy.
Both Whitey and Emily exemplify dangers in heteroglossic, subversive modes of discourse. Emily's and Whitey's individual talent allows each of them to joust with the dominant discourse. However, those individual talents, unlinked to other heteroglossic voices also intent upon jabbing at the dominant discourse, leave both Emily and Whitey without the supporting network of similar subversive voices. Without that support, they experience the dominant discourse's subsuming power and are returned to marginalized positions and forms of silence.
Mimicry and the two major forms of discoursethe direct and the indirect, and the risk that the cacophony of multivocal discourse may result in the equivalent of silenceplay major roles in "O Yes." Helen, Lennie, and their daughters
 
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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-

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