Tell Me a Riddle Read Free Page B

reveals the dimensions of that legacy only gradually; only gradually do we realize that this grouchy, sick grandmother, this silent bitter woman who wants only solitude, was once an orator in the 1905 revolution, that she and her husband met in the prison camps of Siberia, that she had once publicly articulated a passionate vision of human possibility and human liberty. Through this narrative strategy, Olsen suggests the tragic dimensions of social silencings: those imposed upon working class people by physical and intellectual deprivation, isolation, and routinized work; and those imposed upon women by role-related demands and patriarchal ideologies antagonistic to the act of creative articulation. Read this way, Eva's final utterances in "Tell Me a Riddle," her coming to speech again at last, become an act of resistance and creation, both cathartic and political.

 

Page 15
Eva's deathbed oration forces Davidand the readerto acknowledge not only what has been lost and destroyed in her, but what has been lost and destroyed in the complacent yet troubled American society of the 1950s, with its grasping for material well-being, its atomic nightmares, its repression of the radical culture of the past. The narrative form of ''Riddle" itself is secretive, riddling; unfolding in the present, the narrative is continuously disrupted by intimations of the past, a past only divulged in brief revelations and fragments of conversation and memory, as though it is too complex, too different, for the present to contain, but too important to utterly repress. As the past becomes ever more intrusive, embracing revolutionary vision and experience and the "monstrous shapes" of history that intervened between the thirties and the fiftiesthe holocaust, the war, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasakithis narrative counterpoint reveals that Eva's withdrawal, though grounded in her personal circumstances, has deeper causes still: a terrible anguish over the course of modern history, and an overpowering sense of the disparity between the revolutionary idealism that inspired her youthful activism and the complacency of contemporary life. One of the resonant words of "Riddle" is "betrayal," and David's changed consciousness at the novella's conclusion must encompass "the bereavement and betrayal he had shelteredcompounded through the yearshidden even from himself." His final reconciliation with his dying wife must take place within a historical context that she has forced him to acknowledge, to remember. In dying, Eva awakens David (and the community of readers who share his acceptance of things as they are) from a numb accommodation into potential opposition. Her rage at contemporary waste and injustice exemplified by the pollution of Los Angeles and the confinement of her friend Mrs. Mays to a single, inadequate room emerges finally not as odd but as appropriate, as necessary.
"Riddle" addresses profound issues of consciousness, asking how the passionately humanistic vision of a progressive moment in history can survive and be transmitted to a new generation in a different historical moment. While the motif of illness is grounded in the literal and autobiographicalOlsen had watched her own mother die a similar deathit also func-

 

Page 16
tions as an emblem of this radical humanist's profound alienation from the post-war order. Richard Ohmann argues that a certain ''structure of feeling" characterized American fiction from the end of World War II through the mid-seventies, inscribed in narrative patterns in which "social contradictions were easily displaced into images of personal illness" (390). He notes a pattern in which illness becomes an alternative to an acceptance of distorted social relationsmale supremacy, class domination, competitiveness, individualism. For Ohmann, the basic story on which fiction of the era plays variations is "the movement into illness and toward recovery." 11 Eva's cancer, the source of her physical