"The nameless FrankLloydWrights of the proletariat"
Analyzing chapters 5 and 6 of Yonnondio and getting to the end of this story
Welcome to the Closely Reading book club: a space where we closely read classic literature together and discuss assigned chapters each week.
As a reminder, here’s our reading schedule for Yonnondio:
Week 1: April 14-April 20 (complete, read the post here)
Read chapter 1
Week 2: April 21-April 27 (complete, read the post here)
Read chapters 2, 3, and 4
Week 3: April 28-May 4 (today’s post is about these chapters!)
Read chapters 5 and 6
Week 4: May 5-May 11 (read these chapters this week)
Read chapters 7 and 8 (end of the novella)
a content warning: Yonnondio deals with themes of child abuse, spousal abuse, alcoholism, and other forms of violence. The style of the story sometimes obscures, and in many ways amplifies, these themes. Please take care of yourself, as needed, while engaging with this text.
Let’s talk chapters 5 and 6
This week’s chapters start with Jim’s and Anna’s “childhood[s], rearranged” as their children make art from the trash that fills their town’s landscape. If you were reminded of Life in the Iron-Mills and the way Hugh creates the Korl Woman from the refuse of his coal work, you’re onto something. Because in these chapters, Tillie Olsen directly takes up the same questions asked by Rebecca Harding Davis’s story—while making it her own, and making it “new,” the modernist sense.
What I mean by that is Olsen takes up the modernist artistic motto to “make it new,” by creating a new version of Davis’s tale. She takes the basic “form” of working-class people creating art from the waste of their labor and lives, and she brings it into a new shape and a new form—both in her modernist writing style, and in the implication that Jim and Anna, as they view their own children’s attempts to make beauty from what is called waste, their own “childhood, rearranged.”
This, in other words, is a spinning wheel of a pattern. History is repeating itself, despite Anna’s desperation to get her daughter an “edjication.” On this backdrop of hopes and dreams and human striving, we’re reminded of other works of working-class art:
I couldn’t help but be reminded of one of the most famous novels in working-class literature as we got deeper into the Holbrook family’s story today: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
Not for the faint of heart (is any working-class lit, really?), The Jungle is about a young man who struggles — much like Jim Holbrook — to find his place in the rotting social and economic system in which he lives.
While Sinclair’s novel centers the immigrant experience of the working-class system more overtly, these two stories share such similar themes: a husband working to provide for his wife and family, the agonies of working in machine labor, and the dangers of existing in a world that sees you as little more than a means to an end.
“They were trying to save their souls—and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?”
― from The Jungle
Despite all this pain, however, both The Jungle and Yonnondio also traffic in the tension of human dreaming. This idea that—no matter how harshly the world treats them, human beings have a consistent knack for hoping against the odds and dreaming of a better (more comfortable, safe, and livable) life where freedom, joy, and discovery are possible.
“The old wanderlust had gotten into his blood, the joy of the unbound life, the joy of seeking, of hoping without limit.”
― from The Jungle
This tension is perhaps most effectively—and succinctly—explored in Langston Hughes’ famous poem, “Harlem.” The poem does what the whole of working-class literature does in a single poem, evoking those themes of the genre we’ve been discussing over the last three weeks.
Let’s closely read it, shall we?
The poet assumes a questioning stance—he is wondering about the consequences of human hope being stamped out by circumstance.
What happens, he asks, when your dreams are “deferred” — or put off, made to wait, left unfulfilled.
Do those dreams dry to waste? Like a rotting pumpkin in your yard, or a raisin in the sun, do they become smaller and smaller until they eventually disappear?
Do they rot, like an open wound? Becoming infected and sicker, until they crust over — not healed, but no longer weeping?
Do they become heavier and heavier as you carry them on that unfulfilled road? Sagging? Weighing you down?
Or, the poet asks with final succinct emphasis, with the tone of the unanswerable, do those dreams explode?
The poet frames these questions with wonderment:
Is the crisis one of diminishment? Festering? Heaviness? Or of explosion?
Who does the deferral impact?
In the case of the first three examples, all consequences happen within and only to the one who has their dreams deferred — that individual becomes withered, sick, or heavy.
In the final example, however, the consequences breach the boundaries of the individual. They rumble and explode outward, a critical change from the other examples. With italics for emphasis, the poet implies that this is the provocative question and it is the provocative answer.
A dream deferred may sit unresolved, hurting only the one denied their hope.
But eventually, eventually.
Something will light the fuse that incites an explosion.
It will go from being a single individual’s problem to having systemic impact.
Be it a revolution. A grand awakening. Or, in the case of working-class literature, a strike that demands the deferral come to an end. That the conditions of ceaseless un-fulfillment are finally addressed.
Today, these strikes continue; if you read Olsen thinking this is a time gone by, it may be worth considering who considers this book history. And for whom it feels current.
Race in the working class
In Life in the Iron-Mills, Yonnondio, and in The Jungle, we experience the pain of the working class via white authors who write about white members of the working-class. But above, I’ve brought Langston Hughes into the conversation — a Black writer from Harlem whose voice forms perhaps some of the best-known work within the Harlem Renaissance, which included so many other Black authors.
Zora Neale Hurston
Louis Armstrong
Augusta Savage
Aaron Douglass
James Weldon Johnson
Angelina Weld Grimké
And hundreds more
I’d be remiss to bring you into discussion of the world of working-class literature without gesturing to the centrality of race, and the specific context of Black emancipation following the Civil War, as key to the tensions that are peaking in these novels.
Working-class literature is rife with questions about who deserves a good life? Who deserves wages for their labor? Who requires a wage in order to survive? Whose labor was, from the forming of the United States as a nation, presumed to be free and mandated the violent enslavement of an entire population? And whose labor was, then as a result, implicitly elevated as more valuable than the labor of the “free” (read: enslaved) laborers?
Recommended readings
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain by Langston Hughes | The Poetry Foundation
The Work Songs of Enslaved Africans Have Shaped American Culture by Jaimeo Brown | Vice
All of this brings us back to Yonnondio
Chapter five opens with musicality—another rather explicit call toward the racial underpinnings of working-class literature. Jazz, as many scholars have explored, is born from the tradition of Work Songs, or songs sung by working-class laborers as they labor.
Olsen picks up on this tradition of musicality, creating a kind of tonal jazz in the fragmented, modernist tone through which she writes Yonnondio. In earlier chapters, we heard ominous whistles. In chapters five and six, we hear the rattling rumbling music of “uneven rhythms” and ceaseless movement. It’s a cacophony of labor and life, the unrelenting noise of Mazie’s world. It is “the human noise” of so much pain and work and toil—punctured by laughter that, as chapter five states, “can scarcely be called human.”
Why is that?
It’s worth wondering how, and not just why, Olsen invokes such a clear message about musicality in these chapters.
“One after another they sang old songs, some Jim or sometimes Anna had sung in old times of happiness; some the children had never heard before. “Red River Valley,” “Sweet Genevieve,” “When It’s Lamplighting Time,” “In the Gloaming,” “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” “The Wreck of the Old ‘91,” “Down in the Valley,” “Roamin’ So Far,” “Shenandoah,” “Nelly Gray,” Foster songs, “I Saw a Ship A-Sailing.” From the opened window, the sweet intoxicating smell of spring floated in; the lamplight made soft lakes of light, shadows bending over, gentle.”
Notice how the music flows—memories of happier times—and seems to conjure the “gentle” arrival of spring, making a brief respite of light and ease on the larger backdrop of pain in the novel.
“They sang and sang, and a longing, a want undefined, for something lost, for something never known, troubled them all.”
These are the dreams deferred. The potential of those “FrankLloydWrights of the proletariat,” a brilliant, crammed-up modernist phrase that invites us to believe in the artistic abilities of the working class—the dreams deferred for the individual, and the potential artistry and thinking denied to the whole of the system.
Hugh, of Life in the Iron-Mills, was one of these denied architects of a better future. A man who could see potential in the waste; who carved beauty from pain.
In these working songs, Jim and Anna sing—and invite their children to experience the sound of happier memories, to learn the lyrics themselves, and to yearn for the feelings and potentials those songs evoke.
But the “terrible discordant music” of their lives haunts Mazie, who experiences a “voiceless dream” that wears her down, must be “endured.”
Olsen takes these ideas of musicality and working-class history, and weaves them together into a new form. She teaches us to see new tensions within these histories. To grapple with the silences that befall those whose dreams have been so long deferred that they struggle now to make any sound at all. They have lost their voice, even in their dreams.
[Next week, I’ll tell you about Olsen’s book of nonfiction, Silences, which is precisely about what is lost to history by those who lose their voice.]
Chapter 6 ends with musicality, too:
“No, he could speak no more. Watching the flame catch and sputter and die and leap up again. Covering up Anna and the baby. No, he could speak no more. And as he sat there in the kitchen with Mazie against his heart, and dawn beat up like a drum, the things in his mind so vast and formless, so terrible and bitter, cannot be spoken, will never be spoken—till the day that hands will find a way to speak this; hands.”
What do you make of this passage?
I have the entire thing highlighted and yet, I find myself “wordless,” with its implications. Olsen is so talented at writing about what’s inherently non-linguistic. That is: Olsen is good at writing silences.
Dawn “beat up like a drum,” that never ceasing music of labor that calls Jim to and from his home each day. His mind is filled with “things…so vast and formless” that they cannot be uttered.
Except, Olsen suggests, they might be uttered if we could find a way to speak “hands.”
What does this mean? About labor? About physicality? About hopes and dreams? About Jim? About Hugh and the Korl Woman?
What are you noticing?
As you get deeper into the story, what are you noticing?
What are you annotating?
What are you wondering about?
More to read
A look at the art of Harry Sternberg // The Met on art from the Great Depression // Public art from the Great Depression // Social Realism and Art during the Great Depression //
You can review and shop all my working-class literature recommendations through my bookshop.org page. Please note: if you decide to make a purchase via this link, a portion of your sale goes to me.
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I was struck by the centring of Anna's physicality and the impact of her miscarriage. Often it is male labour that is the focus. Here it is female-in both senses. Or a woman dies in childbirth 'off stage'. The impact of lack of food on the chance of survival of mother and daughter. The injustice when I remembered this is the 1930s not 1800s and contraception was known and available but not to all women. Its hard to read but the writing is so powerful. Thank you for introducing me to Tillie Olsen. I also appreciate that unlike the Iron Mills story this isn't an outside middle class view of working class experience.
I'm glad you pointed out the role of music in these chapters. To me, it is not just the beauty of the songs that is comforting but also the agency: the way they feel entitled to sing their songs. This is one thing they can do. These days, most people feel singing together is something only professionals should do,* but in the period of this book people did make their own music, at home and socially.
* The exception is folks in the traditional music world. We have many pub sings near us in New England, and my son and his friends sing together all the time.