After Long Silence: Tillie Olsen's "Requa"

AFTER LONG SILENCE: TILLIE OLSEN'S "REQUA" Blanche H. Gelfant* No one has written so eloquently about silences as Tillie Olsen,1 or shown as poignantly that a writer can recover her voice.2 In her most recent fiction, a long story called "Requa," she reclaims once more a power of speech that has proved at times extremely difficult to exercise. Silence followed the publication, almost fifty years ago, ofsections from her early and still unfinished novel Yonnondio.3 Then came Tell Me a Riddle,4 bringing Olsen fame but not the sustained power to write she needed, and for another long period her voice was stilled. In 1970 "Requa" appeared, an impressive work which received immediate recognition and was reprinted as one ofthe year's best stories. 5 For apparently fortuitous reasons, it is now little known, though as Olsen's most innovative and complex work of fiction , it deserves critical attention it has yet to receive. Complete but unfinished , "Requa" is a still-to-be-continued story that develops the theme of human continuity in ways which seem almost subversive. Its form is discontinuous , as though to challenge its theme, and the text is broken visibly into fragments separated from each other by conspicuous blank spaces, gaps the eye must jump over and the mind fill with meaning. However, the story repudiates the meanings that might be inferred from its disintegrated form and from its imagery and setting, both influenced by literary traditions of the past that Olsen continues only to subvert. She draws obviously upon poetry of the twenties for her waste land motifs, and upon novels of the thirties for her realistic portrayal ofAmerica's great Depression. Waste and depression are Olsen's subjects in "Requa," but Olsen's voice, resonant after long silence, is attuned to her vision of recovery. In his poem "After Long Silence," Yeats had defined the "supreme theme" of recovered speech as "Art and Song." Patently, these are not the themes of Olsen's story. "Requa" is about uneducated, unsung working people struggling against depression, both the economic collapse ofthe thirties and the emotional depression of its protagonist, fourteen-year-old Stevie. The story begins with Stevie traumatized by his mother's death and the loss of everything familiar. Alone and estranged from the world, he is being taken by his Uncle Wes from his home in San Francisco to a small California town set by the Klamath River. Here men fish for salmon, hunt deer, and lead a life alien to a city boy. Stevie arrives at this town, named by 'Blanche H. Gelfant is Robert E. Maxwell Professor of Arts and Sciences at Dartmouth College. She has published widely on all aspects of American literature but is perhaps best known for her book The American City Novel. She is now working on a complementary volume on women in American fiction ofthe city. 62Blanche H. Gelfant the Urac tribe Rek-woi, or Requa, broken in body and spirit. A wreck of a child, still dizzy from the long bumpy truck ride, heaving until he "can't have 'ary a shred left to bring up," he seems utterly defeated, unable "to hold up." From the beginning, his obsessive deathwish leads to Stevie's withdrawal : "Allhewantedwasto liedown"(p. 54). Herefusesto speak; hesees human facesdimly ornot at all; he huddles in bed, hidingunderhis quilt and rocking. A "ghostboy" with dazed eyes and clammy green skin, he seems ready to lie down forever. But the story turns aside from death to describe a miraculous recovery, nothing less than Stevie's resurrection, for at the end the silent boy springs spectacularly to life. In the "newly tall, awkward body"he hasgrown into, heruns,"rassles,""frisks" aboutlike apuppy; and when at last Stevie does lie down, he falls into a sweet sleep from which, it seems, he will awaken rested and restored. Given the time and place, that recovery should become the pervasive action ofthe story seems as miraculous as a boy's resurrection. The time is 1932, and the setting a junkyard, the natural stopping-place for dispossessed people on the move during America's great Depression. "Half the grown men in the county's...