Tell Me a Riddle (70 page)

BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle

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David also realizes that Eva's revolutionary faith did not die with his:
''Still she believed?
'Eva!' he whispered. 'Still you believed? You lived by it? These Things Shall Be?"' (123). This story's epigraph, "These Things Shall Be," is the title of an old socialist hymn expressing hope for a future just society. Another riddle, then, is the puzzle of revolutionary consciousness: Under what circumstances does it develop, dissipate? How does it sustain itself when confronted by "monstrous shapes"the rise of fascism, two world wars, the extermination of nine million Jews, the threat of global extinction?

The second aid Olsen provides us in valuing Eva's ties to all humankind is Eva's granddaughter, Jeannie (the same Jeannie of "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" and "O Yes," now in her twenties) to whom the legacy of resistance is passed on. Jeannie, who works as a visiting nurse and has a special political and artistic sensibility, cares for Eva in the last weeks of her life. "Like Lisa she is, your Jeannie," Eva whispers to Lennie and Helen, referring to the revolutionary who taught Eva to read more than 50 years before. It is at the end of the passage in which Eva compares Jeannie to Lisa that Eva says, "All that happens, one must try to understand"' (112, 113).

These words comprise Eva's hope for Jeannie and O1sen's most basic demand on us as active readers. Recognizing the persistent threat of being so flooded with meaning that we may be faced with meaninglessness and the equivalent of silence, we must persist in the attempt to understand. In that attempt we must recognize the dangers of the bourgeois individualism into which we, like David, are constantly tempted to retreat. Olsen provides structures, such as the command audience structure I have discussed, to force us out of our passive individualistic roles as readers and to invite us into a web of interconnected, heteroglossic roles.
⁴If we accept the invitation, we must do more than value Eva's identification with all humankind: We must remember if we have forgotten (the model of David) or learn if we have never known (the model of Jeannie) the complicated histories of worlds like those in which Eva lived and struggled. At the least, we are required to do our part in keeping alive the historical circumstances of oppressive czarist Russia and the connections among all oppressed groups. Eva and Olsen require us to learn the very

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histories to which America's ''apolitical" mainstream would have us remain oblivious. With Jeannie, we are challenged to carry on Eva's legacy of resistance.

Olsen provides one further aid in valuing Eva's links to all humankind, an aid not limited to the collection's final story. The subject of motherhood so prominent in "I Stand Here Ironing," "O Yes," and "Tell Me a Riddle" provides a crucial reference point for our accepting a heteroglossia linking all humankind. Olsen has rightly referred to motherhood "as an almost taboo area; the last refuge of sexism ... the least understood" and "last explored, tormentingly complex
core
of women's oppression." At the same time, Olsen believes that motherhood is, potentially, a source of "transport" for women, moving them beyond some of the constraints of individualism.
⁵Responsible for what Olsen terms "the maintenance of life," mothers are often exposed to forms of heteroglossia, with their attendant benefits and hazards
(Silences
34). In exploring the complexity of motherhood, Olsen renders versions of it that are "coiled, convoluted like an ear"versions that may serve as models for the necessary hearing of heteroglossia.

I return to Helen's silence at the end of "O Yes." We can read Helen's silence as one of several textual comments on the limits of authority; indeed, it may have been through the experience of parenting that Olsen learned the limits of authorial control, which her texts so willingly concede. As an involved parent, one is forced to live intensely "in relation to," as the boundary between self and other is constantly negotiated. Such negotiating provides a model in which the ability to listen to constantly changing, heteroglossic voices is prized. When Carol asks, "why do I have to care?", the narrator tells us the following about Helen:


Caressing, quieting.


Thinking: caring asks doing. It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.... [ellipsis Olsen's] Yet how will you sustain?