Yonnondio: From the Thirties, an introduction

Welcome to a 4-week reading experience of a novella you've probably never heard of

Welcome to the Closely Reading book club: a space where we closely read classic literature together and discuss assigned chapters each week.

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Featuring a slice of Harry Sternberg’s 1939 mural “the family, industry and agriculture”

Today, we embark on a new read

This week, it’s time to start reading Tillie Olsen’s novel, Yonnondio: From the Thirties.

This short novel is about a family in the Great Depression, and the many moves and changes they must undergo as they seek stability in an increasingly unstable economic and political world.

The story is told mostly through the perspective or experiences of a young girl named Mazie; it also shifts in perspective often and does so in an experimental way. The text is modernist in both style and voice—and we’ll talk more about what that means as we read.

Here’s your schedule.

Week 1: April 14-April 20 (this week!)
Read chapter 1

Week 2: April 21-April 27
Read chapters 2, 3, and 4

Week 3: April 28-May 4
Read chapters 5 and 6

Week 4: May 5-May 11
Read chapters 7 and 8 (end of the novella)

Toward the end of each week, I will share a reading guide for the week’s assigned chapters. My sincere hope with this reading experience is that you can revel in the interesting choices Tillie Olsen makes, as our author, to craft this unique story.

You may find many familiar themes here (especially if you recently read Life in the Iron-Mills with me!), and you may be reminded of famous works of working-class literature like The Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle. There is also much here that may feel new or perhaps illuminated for you in a new way.

Take it slow and enjoy the reading experience.

I’ll be here later this week to share thoughts on chapter 1.

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So let’s read the first sentence together

The novella actually opens in a few ways:

1. An excerpt from a Walt Whitman poem called “Yonnondio”

2. A setting

3. The first chapter, which opens with a first sentence

The excerpt

Lament for the aborigines. . . the word itself a dirge. . .

No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future:

Yonnondio! Yonnondio!—unlimn’d they disappear;
To-day gives place, and fades—the cities, farms,
factories fade;
A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne
through the air for a moment,
Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost.

This passage comes from a lamenting poem about the “Vanishing Indians,” a historical euphemism for the genocide of Native American people from the United States.

It is, in other words, a sad and longing poem about the disappearance of tribal cultures from the United States nation physically, and from our collective national history, culturally.

The “unlimn’d” or unwritten people—with no evidence to their existence in pictures or poems or statements—become obscured in time. They are a brief “muffled” sound in the air; a “wailing word” that fades away.

Here is a close reading of the poem from The Walt Whitman Archive:

The poem offers us “a kind of magical, momentary reversal of American frontier history, as "cities, farms, factories fade," and a "misty, strange tableaux" appears, populated with "swarms of stalwart chieftains, medicine-men, and warriors." This retro-vision quickly fades, and Whitman fears that the "Race of the woods" is now "utterly lost"—that is, not only erased from the land, but also lost to utterance, erased from American memory. Whitman believed that one job of the poet, then, was to give Native Americans lines in the evolving American poem. That way, they could at least be kept alive via their names, words, and deeds, for otherwise "unlimn'd they disappear."

Learn more about the poem here.

The setting

“The time at the opening of this book is the early 1920’s; the place: a Wyoming mining town.”

We’re given a year and a place—outside of the proper novel text, Olsen grounds us in a specific moment in time. There are perhaps many reasons for this.

For me, this setting statement becomes, like the Whitman poem, a kind of collage detail that layers my entrance into the story. I know where I am; I know there are some general themes about disappearance and being written out of national narratives; I know what year it is. Now, as I begin the story, the burden of that precision is lifted from the prose. It can, instead, focus us into a specific perspective and illuminate those collaged elements through juxtaposition, rather than explicit mention. (This collaging is, in fact, a feature of modernist writing!)

The first sentence

“The whistles always woke Mazie.”

We’re awakened into the text by whistles, like Mazie, who we’ll learn more about in this week’s chapter.

“They pierced into her sleep like some guttural-voiced metal beast, tearing at her; breathing a terror.”

The whistles are not the calm noises of birds; they are the unnatural “piercing” chimes of a “metal beast” that interrupts an otherwise peaceful sleep of a child. They are mechanic and modern; they are not natural or comforting.

What these whistles further signify, and their power to “tear” and “terrorize” Mazie, will become more clear as you read.

Okay. Now it’s your turn. Get started in the novella. We’ll chat more soon.

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Learn more about the art of the Great Depression

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 //

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‘Til next time, happy reading!