8/3/2019 TillieOlsensTellMeaRiddleThoughtPiece

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On the Boundaries of Nascence and Death 

Tillie Olsen’s “Tell Me a Riddle”  is a harrowing tale of divine and fragile proportions. It

reckons with connubial estrangement, whilst also flirting us irony in the form of dark amusement. From an early stage, we gain a prescience of the grandmother’s terminal fate; how every iota of what she does is essential, since, as far as her kin knows, it may be her very last. A caliginous past is referred to a plethora of times, often intertwined with cultural references fromher motherland, Russia (96). Hints of faint, Russian allegories that seem so distant anddisconnected from the present present themselves on occasion (examine Chekhov on p.66-67).

Though the foreseeable discord between the espoused husband and wife seems to be themost intriguing relation to dig deeper into, it is the grandmother’s undermined interactions withher emergent grandchild that speak volumes about the duality of life and death in times of strainand vexation.

The delicate, silent dialogue begins on p.82. Oddly, the narrator ushers the grandmotherto visit the baby as if the task were a joint venture (“To Vivi’s we have to go”) and then, without

a formal transition of any sort, plops the baby in the scenario as if it were mistakenly droppedfrom a stork, or so the tale goes. The babies are decried as “warm, seductive” (82). Again, twoadjectives that could be frowned upon when attributed to tykes, especially the latter. Though themoment seems everlasting, the baby is soon seized from grandma as Vivi’s under the impressionthat, as a wily old figure, she must be weary. A mental note is given off by the grandmother inher instantaneous reflection of the scenario that beckoned before her: “( A long travel from, to,what the feel of a baby evokes)”.

Could the above signify that the direct offspring of the grandmother were subpar in

familial satisfaction, and for that muted moment with the baby, the sought after, wistful door to

the ultimate materfamilias rapport was opened? Or perhaps the interaction is summarised as

one that is a long travel from and to as the grandmother has been awaiting this blissful

realisation for the most part of a lifetime. Else, if analysed from the naïve baby’s point of view,

it’s the opposite-in its introductory stage of life; a short travel, it’s already had a communicative

session with a being it may not see for much longer.

The grandmother proceeds to register how she is an “Unnatural grandmother, not able

to make herself embrace a baby.” (83) Olsen’s rationale for this fallacy involves a surplus of 

passion that ultimately goes to waste, portrayed as adjacent to “like a torrent drowned and 

immolated all else”(83). How sorrowful it must be, in the conclusive stages of one’s life, to come

to the burning realisation that one’s influence doesn’t resound in anyone around her “but could 

no longer hold nor help” (83). Her days are numbered and efforts futile.

Though I confess that I wasn’t particularly enlightened by Olsen’s work, I did find that

her methodology in subtly contrasting the usually powerful, clichéd themes of life in the

constant struggle against the portentious face of death was effective. Its manifestation, inserted via the grandmother’s fateful encounter with the baby, signals a beginning of an end (for the

grandmother) and the end of a beginning (for relations between the two), though the

invaluability of the flawed embrace is endless, and it is now that the grandmother, whom

 bordered on death, may die in peace, having touched upon the stark opposite-the warmth of life.